If you asked for your steak well-done in my local steakhouse the Chef would march you out of the building!
Lamb, beef and venison tend to be served pink in most decent restaurants. Home cooking is different - my wife likes her steak cooked through, although I have it pink, and roast leg of lamb won’t be pink in most homes.
There’s a tradition of slow cooking (casseroles, braises, stews etc) but that uses cuts of meat that cannot be served pink, and which benefit from several hours of gentle heat.
This where we (I) move in to huge generalisations, but I’d say that the pre-war generation likes it well done, and us youngsters (I’m 60) prefer rare to medium rare.
In the UK we have these machines called fridges, which can cool a beverage without the use of ice. It might seem like magic to you colonials, but it’s much better than shoving lumps of frozen water in your drinks.
Plus iced tea isn’t really that popular over here, apart from the godawful Liptonice crap which is just sugar water and flavouring.
While I haven’t had Somalian per se, I’ve had Ethiopian and it is definitely my least favorite. The injira bread creeps me out (probably because the first time I had it was on a date with a nurse who remarked how similar the bread felt to the skin of a dead person :eek:)
As for vinegar, Russian cooking can add it perfectly. In fact one of my favorite dishes is from a local Russian restaurant:
American cuisine tends to decrease in quality the more widespread it becomes. A bagel in New York City used to be a pleasure to behold; a bagel in California is pathetic. The same for just about everything: if it’s made in a small, one-location restaurant, it’s nearly always more tasty than when you but it in any chain restaurant.
The good stuff either never leaves its region or it is hopelessly ruined (Barbeque pork vs the McRib).
Ah, speaking of Russian… I’ve never been there, but several friends of my family have and they all complained about the food. The general consensus was the desserts are wonderful, but almost everything else was too bland and rich, and there was sour cream in everything.
I don’t think that’s a phenomenon that’s unique to America though; I’ve had some pretty atrocious versions of foods from elsewhere both in the US and abroad. For example, think of the debased versions of Italian food we get here. Some have made that jump into unique foods of their own (Chicago-style pizza, etc…) but a lot of places are serving crap that they call Italian.
I don’t know if anywhere really has “Bad” cuisine. There are almost certainly good dishes in any cuisine, just like some of the dishes are probably unpalatable to others. Even Italian food, which has a great reputation internationally, has some nasty traditional stuff like tripe, organ meats, etc… that we Americans tend to find gross.
I also think it’s really easy to point fingers at the US and say our cuisine sucks, without considering that we’re not one monolithic, more or less ethnically homogenous country like say…France, Italy or Japan. I realize that they have regional differences, but they’re not on the order of say… Vermont & Louisiana, or Oregon and S. Texas. Anything we’re going to have that’s a “national” cuisine is going to be something generic enough to appeal to just about anyone, which is going to usually be high in starch, meat or fat, and without much in the way of spice or flavoring, like a pot roast, or a hamburger (which is an excellent example of good american cuisine, BTW)
The other thing is that it’s kind of idiotic to say that everything in US cuisine is derivative of something else. Of course it is; we’re a nation of immigrants, and they brought their foods with them and adapted them to local ingredients. The thing is in many cases, we’ve taken a traditional recipe and made it our own- think chicken fried steak, most creole food, New England food, etc…
Having spent a while in the UK, I think the main difference is that most parts of the US are just much hotter. It’s easy to have cool, un-iced beverages in England, where the summer temps usually barely hit 80.
It’s not so great in say… Texas, when the overnight low temps barely get down to 80, and the daytime highs are usually in the mid-upper 90’s and frequently get above 100.
For example, I’m a big fan of English beer, but it definitely lost something in the summer of 2003 when the temps got so high. Cellar temp beer is one thing(good), but actual warm beer is another thing entirely.
Oh… and the trick to getting iced tea in the UK is to ask for a pint glass of ice, and a pot of tea, then combine to your own satisfaction.
This is really hard, actually. My inclination is to say foods from northern countries where the focus is on whale/seal meat and there are few if any natural spices due to the climate are probably the worst. So I’m thinking Finland/Sweden/Iceland/Inuit etc. On the other hand, most of these countries seem to have good dairy and nice pastries. Although I’ve yet to eat any Peruvian food, I’m not impressed by what I’ve read of it (except for the Incan cultivation of quinoa etc.).
So to sum up, this is near impossible for me to decide. Nearly every culture/country seems to have something edible, even if it’s just a favoured fruit that grows in the area. And since I come from a vegetarian culture and am super picky about meat, most cultures chow down on things that gross me out. However, if I had to pick one country, I’d say iceland, excepting skyr, which is wonderful.
Marinating or preserving seafood in vinegar is common to many european cuisines. Much beloved of italians in antipasti and in Scandinavia with herrings.
The worst food I’ve ever personally eaten was British. I was invited to a holiday dinner, where I was served about 12 different kinds of plain boiled vegetables, no salt or seasoning of any kind, and tough pot roast, also bland, and a desert pudding that looked like congealed blood. I won’t condemn the whole national cuisine based on that meal, but it was not an auspicious sampling.
Which most kids under 20 would not recognise as food compared to Doritos…
Anyway, better chip-shops in Britain offer lemon-juice rather than vinegar, particularly the Greeks.
Personally, as English, I’d nominate Indian food, which our politicians exaggerate British fondness for, in order to award themselves multicultural brownie points.
It’s rarely vegetarian here, and virtually *never *vegan. I bought a 1960s vegetarian Indian health-conscious recipe book at a bazaar a few weeks ago, and anything not filled to the brim with ghee and sugar would be rejected as unfood. Plus lots of eggs. Lots and lots of eggs.
For some reason, heart disease is a big problem in India.
Of course beans have been carried around the world, but Phaseolus vulgaris belongs first to the Americas and the Native food that IMO is the starting point for distinctively American cuisine.
With respect to three-bean specifically, the common canned/salad bar versions are about as poor a representative of the dish as McRib is of pork barbecue. Try making it from scratch in late summer with all fresh ingredients, including some American variety of sweet onions and, yes, a homemade vinaigrette. Martha Stamps advocates October beans instead of pintos.
Worst cuisine in the world? Papa New Guinea. Just kidding, I don’t even know wtf they eat over there.
How about the Galapagos? Oh, I got it! That country off Europe that’s like a giant man-made oil-rig Waterworld-esque floating island! The food there must be god awful!
I had Eritrean food once - it’s very, very similar to Ethiopian food, but don’t tell them that. Anyway, it gave me the most wicked case of the runs I’ve ever experienced. Though it didn’t taste too bad.
As said above, barbeque (in its many varieties) forever exempts America from this list. And we’ve done things with a patty of hamburger meat that can be mind-blowing.
I will say that I have Filipino friends who will readily admit that their food is an acquired taste. As a child, I went to the birthday party of a Filipino friend and when I got home, my mom ordered me into the shower because of the smell. Also, none of it looked too good, but that was through the eyes of a 9-year-old.
My wife also doesn’t have much good to say about real Chinese food based on the year she spent there - this was in Kunming in southwest China. Everything was so spicy that it overwhelmed any other flavors, and she often found things like chicken feet in her soup.
In the past climate and economy were major influences on national cuisine, hence Britians’ reputation for bland, overcooked food. Technological advances have made it possible for even the most inhospitable, rural and economically challenged areas to incorporate new non indigenous foods into their cuisine. The idea of a traditional national cuisine is rapidly disappearing.