https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ali-ahmed-aslam-chicken-tikka-masala-glasgow/index.html
“Chicken tikka is an Indian dish. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy.”
It may not be authentic. Who cares? It’s awesome, and the best option after late night drinking.
Haven’t felt this sad since the inventor of Hawaiian pizza succumbed.
John Harvey Kellogg died in 1943…or are you talking about Henry Heinz?
I’ve heard it said that Britain conquered an empire just so they could finally get a cuisine.
I find that a tiresome little bit of prejudice.
Alternately, the British conquered half the world for spices and then decided they didn’t like any of them.
From reading Wodehouse I always assumed that the national dish of the United Kingdom (or at least England) was jellied eels.
Stranger
I’ve had cold eels, with enough jelly, I suppose, to count as the dish in question.
And if it’s good enough for Gally Threepwood, in his association in his younger days with bookies, jellied-eel sellers and three-card-trick men, it’s good enough for me.
As long as we’ve drifted, another UK (English in this case) “national dish”–by far, I submit, standing alone in that respect certainly world wide-- is fish-and-chips.
And that, as I never fail to wedge into conversation at the slightest opportunity, was a novelty in the mid- to late 19th century, taken from the Syrian Jews in London.
Documented in any number of contemporary food commentaries as well as English cookbooks both haute-cuisine in their regional chapters and in cookbooks for middle class readers.
I didn’t even know there were Syrian Jews in the East End then.
Unlike Tikka Masala but un-nameable for a founder to live or die like fish-and-chips, another “national dish” in England are donners, the meat-stick from Turkey.
Downers? I could see that, given the English winters…
The döner kebab is more of a (West) German thing (as adapted by Turkish immigrants) that made its way south and west in the ‘Eighties, and you can find a variant of in most of Western Europe today.
Stranger
Trader Joe’s has them frozen, six to a bag. Very convenient.
Where’s the like button? I’ve had some fantastic dishes in the UK. They get the short shrift for no good reason.
Even the ‘boring, bland’ stuff is good. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, bangers and mash, faggots and peas, fish and chips, Scotch eggs, steak & kidney pie, shepherd’s pie… not to mention the curries and kebabs. They’re all good. (Just stay away from Wimpy burgers; at least from the '80s.)
Black pudding, white pudding, haggis, stargazy pie, full English breakfast, toad in the hole, liver and bacon, tripe and onions, mince pies. What’s not to love?
Cute. I’ll eat a full English, mostly. Ditto TitH. The rest is why Britain doesn’t have an Empire anymore.
The idea that obtaining elements of cuisine from elsewhere is somehow uniquely British, and indicative of some sort of failing is a pathetic, ignorant trope and it needs to die.
Curry is a dish that is firmly part of the British cuisine. If you accept that burgers and pizza and hotdogs are American menu items, you have to accept that curry is part of British cuisine. Curry was already on the British menu before the United States of America came into being.
Every food culture adopts things from other places, or inspired by other places; two of the five classic French mother sauces refer to the names of countries that are not France
I would say that a cuisine that fails to experiment with and adapt elements of other people’s foods is a sad thing, and all good cuisines have elements from elsewhere.