I had it once, in a hotel in the UK-delicious! It is probaba;ly an anglicized indian dish-but it is great! I’ve asked my Indian friends here in the US about it-none of them know what it is! (It is made with rice, cooked haddock, egg, and other ingredients).
Of course British food is bad. Just look at that Keira Knightly: seemingly wealthy, yet starving to death…
=d&r=
…of course their’s always traditional British food. Like kebobs… 
It wouldn’t do any good, I’m afraid. A roast beef isn’t cooked until it’s cooked all the way through.
And I’ve seen her eat bacon that’s barely half cooked. I need my bacon cooked to a crisp (microwaving it is best), not still oinking.
I’m not a fan of sausage rolls…I find them a bit on the greasy side. But there’s a tea room in Mount Dora run by English folk and they serve a high tea that would make you want to slap your mama.
just as a reference point for comparison, i **can ** speak about irish food. i was afootloose american girl in ireland for two weeks about five years ago. **loved ** the food – with only two exceptions. 
- scones. the hell is THAT about? i gave up after trying to get just one down. awful!
- beef. i was warned in advance to stay away from it by a previous traveler to ireland. not because of mad cow concerns but because my american palette would in all likelihood not appreciate the european version. that proved to be dead-on. among my little cadre of fellow travelers, two ordered beef dishes during the trip and both regretted it immensely. they didn’t order it again.
(okay and the fact that every freakin’ pub i was in boasted… wait for it… budweiser!
on tap! 'dear god in heaven,’ i asked a bartender one night,* ‘why, when you have the best beer on the planet available, do you stock [SIZE=3]bud???’*
*‘for the tourists, love,’ * he replied with a wink.)
that and ireland boasts some of the best-looking representatives of the male species i’ve ever seen. whatshisface the actor? can’t remember his name. the bad boy? ladies, he’s one of the uglier ones! [/SIZE]
on the other hand, those of us who kept to seafood and non-beef dishes ate ourselves silly. wonderful food!!! having grown up on the east coast of the u.s., i’ve always had a preference for seafood anyway. it was my conviction that the best food WAS in the pubs - hands down. i felt the restaurants were not on a par with irish pub food, even in the high-end tourist traps such as those in kinsale, county cork.
the bed & breakfasts did quite well by us, too. i found i liked tomatoes for breakfast and even like blood pudding and black and white sausage. i have no way of knowing whether or not the cooking was toned down for the american palette as mentioned, but every one of us ate everything on our plates every morning and every morning was a different b&b, so that says something.
i did only travel in southern ireland, so i can’t speak for the north, but two other things - no three - stood out very clearly for me. there is no such thing as margarine and skim milk that i ever saw and i was eating three meals a day every day. there were artificial sweeteners, but that was all.
oh, and… THE BEER. god bless Guinness… need i say more?
I agree. In fact, England (specifically Wolverhampton and Birmingham) is where I discovered my love for Indian food. I also worked for two months as a kitchen porter in a upscale kitchen in a Scottish restaurant (yes, I understand it’s not English.) Food was fantastic. Pub food was fine, if not a bit expensive (as everything else in the UK). Indian food was sublime. Fish and chips were great. Hell, I even loved the steak and kidney pies, and a for a month straight I ate traditional English breakfasts (before realizing that, healthwise, this may not be such a good idea.) Battered sausages, mincemeat and steak and kidney pies, beef Wellington, buttered scones, cottage pie, black pudding, Branston pickle, HP sauce, bring it on! English food is not bad at all.
Reminds me: For Christmas dinner, I made Rump Roast and Yorkshire pudding for my Italian In-laws. It was greeted with much skepticism, until they ate some of the pudding.
I never thought English comfort food would be treated as some sort of unusual delicacy.
Call it whatever you want, but it is thousand island dressing (fry sauce in Utah). It seems to me that Southern Yankee understood the dressing quite well.
I’m not sure I can trust any country that thinks mayo + ketchup = yummy cocktail sauce. With or without the baked potato (though I wouldn’t put it on my baked potato either).
British Indian food IMO is the best anywhere and your basic chicken curry now part of British cuisine.
Heinz make Curried Beans, Sharwoods makes a gazillion curry mixes to chuck in the pot with your poultry and you can travel to the farthest corners of the country, find a pub and a curry will be on the menu along with the fish and chips and shepherds pie.
It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. I recall assembling Onion Bhajees (sp?) from a packet, in my first flat back in the early 80s.
So much depends upon where you are in England. I worked for a US company in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, (about 45 minutes north of Cambridge by car, 6 miles south of Sandringham) for a year. The population is about 34,000, and although it’s a very very old historic town, it’s quite bleak and unemployment is high.
I sent an email to my Sac cow-orkers describing some of the lunch fare in our canteen:
- cottage cheese on white bread. That’s it!
- ask for a ham sandwich and that’s what you’d get. A slice of ham between 2 pieces of white bread. Again, that’s it! No butter, mayo, etc. I learned to ask for ‘salad’ on it in order to get a scrap of lettuce or a tomato slice. Condiments may or may not be available.
- same thing with any other sandwich - cheese sandwich? A slice of cheese between 2 pieces of white bread.
- the famous English breakfast: stuff sopped in grease with an anemic tomato slice and half a withered mushroom.
- beans on toast. Need I say more?
- jacket potatoes (baked potatoes) stuffed with beans!
The Tesco (supermarket) in town was wonderful! Every ingredient for most European and Indian recipes was available. Dairy products can’t be beat. I could never figure out why the restaurants in town or my own company’s canteen didn’t keep up with what was offered right next door in grocery stores.
I was invited to lots of homes for dinner and am sad to say that most often I was fed what is considered typical British food, by both older employees and young’uns. One morning a woman I worked with complained that she’d forgotten to parboil Brussels sprouts the night before. This involves boiling the hell out of them, then leaving them to soak in the same water and repeating the boiling process the following day before serving them for dinner. I swear that I couldn’t differentiate between several vegetables because the boiling process bled all flavor (and nutrients) from them.
We had a plant in Stratford-upon-Avon and fortunately my team went there every other week for three days. A Mexican restaurant opened and I decided that’s where whe’d have dinner when it was my turn to choose. Good gawd, was that awful! (I understand that there’s a new place, Oscar’s Cafe, that has great Mex food.)
I saved my good eats for Cambridge and London. Wonderful, often exotic food, so terrifically expensive! That part I can’t figure out…San Francisco offers some great food as well, at less than half the price even before the fall of the dollar.
Delia does a good one:
Not sure how easily you’ll get smoked haddock in the states though? I’ve made it with hot smoked salmon as well, and that worked ok.
I went to England and Scotland when I was 11 years old- so it was 8 and a half years ago*. Except for the sandwiches at Safeway (I had been warned about that, since I’d been reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy,” but it was still surprising that they were still that bad) and the bubbly lemonade (no one had warned me it wouldn’t be like at home, so I was disappointed), I loved everything I ate there.
My favorite food was ploughman’s lunch. It was my dream meal. Bread! Cheese! A substance that at the time I thought of as “like ketchup that wemt brown with chunky bits!” but I know now is Branston**! Sometimes some green stuff!
There was this squash soup at Stourhead that was amazing. And the Indian food in Guildford was better than even the Indian food that’s made by first-generation Indian immigrants in my hometown. And the sweets. And the porridge- I’ve always been a fan of oats, so the porridge I got in Edinburgh was like a dream. Even the apples tasted better- although they were imported from New Zealand so it doesn’t count.
Even McDonald’s was better. There were lamb burgers. Yay!
So British food is good- it’s just struggling to escape its old reputation.
*That sentence makes me feel both way old and way young at the exact same time.
**Which I buy whenever I can, and will eat with anything. It’s really good on tortilla chips.
You know, I don’t quite follow your logic here. By your own link thousand island sauce is “commonly made of mayonnaise, ketchup, and a mixture of finely chopped vegetables, most often pickles, onions, bell peppers, and/or green olives; chopped hard-boiled egg is also common.”
And I’ve never seen a recipe for Marie Rose sauce that goes like that. I’ve seen bad, faux Marie Rose recipes (ketchup & salad cream for gods sake?) and I’ve seen good recipes more authentic to its french origins. Personally, I like one Gary Rhodes did:
12 tbsp thick, good quality mayonnaise
4 tbsp tomato ketchup
1¼ tsp lemon juice
4 tsp brandy
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Oh, and Delia Smith does a more flamboyant one:
2 rounded tablespoons good-quality mayonnaise
4 tablespoons natural yoghurt or Greek yoghurt, about 5 oz (150 g)
1 tablespoon tomato purée
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 level teaspoons horseradish sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 clove garlic, crushed
cayenne pepper
salt
Speaking from personal experience only of course:
English “Indian” food is not like anything they eat in India. But it is lovely.
You can’t call them “Cornish Pasties” unless they’re from Cornwall! They’re just Pasties.
Proper Cornish pasties are not greasy. They’re full of tasty veg and chunks of tender meat.
Chicken pasties are getting popular now too, as people move away from beef. Ironically Curried chicken pasties are proving very popular.
I think seafood is often seen as expensive or an upper class food so it’s avoided by some who might like it.
And of course the risk of getting ill if you eat seafood in a dodgy pub. In the good pubs it’s fantastic.
Mushy veg is vanishing thankfully. My Gran used to boil everything in manner already described. My mother cooks veg till it crunches when you bite it. Much better. I’ve seen a similar trend among other familes too.
Mildenhall or Lakenheath?
Why? There’s more than one type of pasty. How then are we supposed to differentiate between a Cornish and Lancashire pasty?
It’s obviously common enough in your country, so what do you lot use it for, if not a cocktail sauce?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but you differentiate them by the name like I said. Or the taste.
Isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you said? If I go to a baker in Manchester and ask for a pasty, what’s he going to give me? After all, his Cornish pasties weren’t baked in Cornwall, so I can’t ask for a Cornish pasty, and his Lancashire pasties weren’t baked in Lancashire, so I can’t ask for a Lancashire pasty, just a “pasty” .
Another one predictably chiming in for the cause of British cooking. Well, I say British, I’m not sure we really have much of an indigenous cuisine anymore; when I go out to dinner most of the food I have is foreign or fusion.
For the person who says they miss Wagamama - why? They serve the blandest version of Japanese cooking that I’ve ever had.
Now you got it. You can ask for a “Cornish Pasty” but he won’t have any unless he got them in Cornwall.
I’m not sure where I lost you in this, but you’ve lost me, so I’ll start again.
Cornish Pasties come from Cornwall.
Everything else is just a Pasty.
There’s a difference in name because there’s difference in the product.
Does this mean that Buffalo wings are only available in Buffalo? Or Yorkshire puddings in Yorkshire?