I just came back from Jack of the Wood, a very British pub with an excellent menu. True, I always get a burger there, but that’s because they make the best burgers in town. Their menu has plenty of British dishes on it.
Daniel
Heinz sure seems to sell a lot of products in the UK that they don’t offer at home. That’s an observation, not a complaint.
Canned tomatoes are a staple of the British diet that we don’t much have here. I mean, we have canned tomatoes and related products, but we don’t dump them cold out of the can and eat them like they were peaches or something.
Howard Chaykin, the US comic book impresario, once observed (25 years ago) that airline food was England’s national dish.
I have no cites for this but I was once told that the pub food tradition grew out of the large coaching industry in England and this was in opposition to restaurant industry growth. Coaches would stop at coaching inns (as pubs were then) and the inn would serve a meal.
I second the notion that baked beans etc are bad food. I love eel! It’s the food preparation that’s been inherently bad. English food is easy to do badly. Overcooked meat and veg isn’t ever the most appealing thing but take the same meat and veg and prepare it all correctly and you have a fabulous meal. By contrast, it’s hard to screw up putting cream and butter on something (well, if you’re like me and believe that Butter Fixes Everything).
Cost also seems to be a factor. I wanted to ask the posters currently living in the UK whether the amazing home grown food I see on TV is very expensive? I mean the cheese and meats and so on I see on Rick Stein and Jimmy’s Farm etc.
And I also second the Scottish food thing. It’s essentially the same sort of thing as English food - meat and veg but the quality is out of this world. I once had an incredible meal of mussels and salmon fresh out of the loch all done in a very plain way but who would adulter such quality produce? I’d have built a wall to keep every-one out too. All the salmonz is belongz to me.
I think the person slamming Shepherd’s Pie (which is awesome) meant to slam Steak and Kidney Pie (which should be against the Geneva Convention).
And I’ll concede baked beans for breakfast when you guys concede that peanut butter is delicious.
It’s always been my impression that the stereotype of British food wasn’t that it was bad in the sense of tasting foul or anything but that it was bad in the sense of being bland and heavy. A lot of boiled vegetables and sausages and so on.
There are a few items considered “gross” by many Americans that we associate with British cooking, like kippers at breakfast, eels, black pudding, tongue, and kidneys, but I’ve never had these things so for all I know they’re delicious and just sound disgusting. I also don’t know how common any of those ever were in the UK. I can’t recall seeing them on any menus when I was in England a few years back. (Well, I think kippers were available for breakfast at the hotel.) I’d guess that some dishes made with less expensive kinds of meat would have been more common during and after WWII just because they were cheap and not because the British particularly liked them.
IMO, the problem with traditional British fare is that a lot of it is heavy, salty, and sort of one-note. There are several great dishes in traditional Brit cooking. But most of the traditional foods feature things that store well - salted beef, onions, potatoes, turnips, etc, along with heavy gravies and pickled veggies.
Compare traditional British food to Italian food. Italian has a lot more variety to it; they use more fresh ingredients and a wider range of cooking methods, and the food has a more complicated flavor profile.
I don’t dislike British cuisine, but if I could only have one traditional menu, it wouldn’t be British. I can see how the meme would start, especially when you have a bunch of French 30-odd miles away, and some Italians only a bit further away.
ETA: What Lamia said, as well.
I ntoiced this about British cuisine: It is very, very easy to do badly. Probably even easier than French or whatnot. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can burn everything to coal or turn into a sludgey nightmare. British food takes work, dammit, and the food itself tends to let you know it.
Thus, I’ve had Shepard’s Pie which had no taste. Literally. I could sort of feel the texture move in my mouth, but it had no taste at all, everything inside having been boiled to iwthin an inch of its life. I’ve also had Shepard’s Pie as a fantastically good, rich meal. Since we have some very semi-British* friends who can cook like angels, we get the good side. But I can easily see that someone not paying much attention would just ruin some of their food. They love their garden, too, and use more straight-up vegetable dishes to accompany one medium-difficulty meat dish and a couple complicated bread or dessert items for our feasts.
*Both are ethnically English, but one was born in Africa and carted all over the English-speaking world before settling in the USA.
Going on my students, who come from all over the world, it’s because they’re
a) used to really spicy food. British food is not spicy. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s not what they’re used to.
As a subset of this, perhaps the reputation came about from the British colonising places that were used to spicier food who then thought British food was dreadful, and the reputation spread.
b) Stay at a guest house where they’re served a full English Breakfast every day and think that’s normal. That means they think bacon, fried eggs, cheap sausages, tinned beans, tinned tomatoes and fried bread are what every Brit eats for breakfast.
I’ve had foreign students actually tell me that I’m WRONG when I say that, actually, this is usually a weekend breakfast, and most people only eat it occasionally - most days we eat cereal. But no, their host, trying to be as British as possible on the tiny amount of money being paid to them, served them an English Breakfast every day with the cheapest of ingredients, so that’s what English food is, and I know nothing.
c) Used to people who cook from scratch. In the past couple of generations, this has not been the norm in the UK. I think the US shares this problem - too many ready meals, or, if not ready meals, then ready-made parts of meals, like Findus Crispy Pancakes, fishfingers, and ready-made burgers and sausages - all of low quality.
These visitors see these products in the shops and think that’s tradtional British cooking. Well, maybe if traditional British cooking only started after the home freezer came into existence.
When teaching EFL I always, when possible, do a lesson on food which includes me bringing in some home-cooked British dishes for them to eat. Funnily enough, I always use shepherd’s pie because it’s the kind of dish which only someone really fussy would dislike, and is truly delicious made well. (I do a meat and a veggie - soy - version). I also include bread and butter pudding which is much better than the name makes it sound - generally people think that the name is purely traditional, rather than it actually being made from bread, butter and other ingredients.
So, basically, it’s because there has been a tradition of bad home cooks which has overpowered the really rather good traditional cooking that’s available.
It can’t be because it’s bland or because it’s peasant cooking, because pretty much all of Northern and Eastern Europe is like that too.
Mind you, the ‘peasant cooking’ thing doesn’t help.
The British upper classes tended to eat French cuisine rather than British cuisine (it’s where we got the word cuisine, after all - and the words beef and pork instead of using cow and pig for our meats) unless they were at boarding school. So the people who were, generally, representing Britain around the world thought of British food as comfort food or peasant food, but definitely not as classy food - they weren’t about to defend it.
They are traditional, but traditional in the way that snails are traditional in France. I’ve never actually eaten any of those items at all. Tongue is very Enid Blyton - it probably is on sale in some shops, but I’ve never seen it. Eels are a gourmet speciality these days.
The others are used in other cuisines, especially French - it’s just that they don’t use English words so sound exotic rather than ‘I am eating a lamb’s piss organ’ or ‘I am eating congealed blood.’
Could be. I had dinner on a British Airways flight (coach) and it was the best airplane food I’d ever eaten. Better than food I’ve had in some restaurants.
They gave me free single malt, too.
There’s a theme running through your posts. The rest of the thread is talking about British food as in “what the British generally eat” and you are talking about “trends in the high end”. Who gives a rat’s? It’s like having a thread about “how US people dress” and you dropping in every few posts to talk about what is currently being seen on a catwalk in New York.
The more you post the less I think you know. I lived in the UK for a number of years and the times I had salted beef, turnips or pickled veggies are, well, too few to recall. At all. Ever. OK, I think I had turnips once.
I remember reading about 20 years ago one of those humorous front page pieces in the middle of the Wall Street Journal about British food. They interviewed a university professor who claimed bad British food was a consequence of the country’s early industrialization. Since Great Britain was the world’s first mostly urban society (1851 vs. 1920 for the US and even later for France), people had to cook with less fresh produce than in other countries. Britain’s large amounts of food imports and pioneering of canned foods also made food less fresh. To compensate, people often overcooked to compensate–which is an easy way to make food bland and “heavy”. Anyone buy this?
They get a bit drab when you have them perhaps about 4 times a week, and on the other days it seemed to be green peas. Add boiled potatos , mashed potatos , baked potatos, and your every day diet looks a bit bland.
That was my daily fare for too many years , while I more or less grew up in Canada, my Mom probably learned her culinary skills in the fifties and sixties , and just went with what she knew , until she started experimenting with other dishes.
Something to concider though, the kitchen of the mid industrial age may not have been condusive to too many dishes, every christmas , someone brings up the story of bringing the turkey to the bakers cause the bird simply did not fit the oven or what ever they were using in Belfast at that time.
Declan
I do not have a wide range of experience with British food, and I will happily admit to that. But the experiences I have had have been negative–including Jaffa Cakes, nutella, twiglets (shudder), and wheetabix (I think that’s how it’s spelled. I can’t believe Brits consider that stuff food).
My best friend is married to a Brit, and so occasionally when I visit her, she’ll prepare British food exactly to his specifications, which means exactly the way his (very British!) mother prepares it. The Shepherd’s pie almost made me gag, and that wasn’t because my friend is a bad cook, but because the ingredients chosen for that particular dish are really horrid. I find baked beans particularly perplexing. I like beans quite a bit, and so I happily agreed to beans and toast when she asked if I would like it. But the beans were awful–bland and flavorless and just awful. I had fully expected there to be an added flavor–bacon or pork fat, liquid smoke, brown sugar, hickory. Something. Hell, I would have been thrilled with salt. I think I choked the whole serving down because I did agree to it and her family all loved it.
Ehm, sorry but Ferrá Adriá’s ides on cooking are useless to pretty much anybody. His idea of “simple” is something which requires two dozen ingredients to cook; his published cookbooks are full of gorgeous pictures but there isn’t a single dish that a mother of three would be able to manage in a reasonable time with normal kitchen implements. No workee.
It’s like saying “oh, he got a Nobel Prize so his books must be fun.”
PS: I love British breakfasts.
It’s Weetabix, and it’s Australian, originally. Don’t think it’s produced there anymore though (but still consumed). I think Canadians do the Bix too. It’s filling and good for you, very good to start the day with. I’m guilty of adding sugar though, and they soak up milk like crazy. Nutella is Italian.
But twiglets…hah. 
Hate them personally, but then I’ve never really liked marmite (or vegemite).
Branston Pickle on the other hand is absolutely godly. Shepherds Pie is definitely something I miss about Britain, oh and having an Indian restaurant around every corner. Been living in the country in Australia for a year now and I’m getting curry cravings. Even a lousy Tikka Masala would do. 
Kippers: once the staple breakfast dish, before overfishing decimated herring stocks. Far less commonly eaten now, but stocked by any supermarket.
Eels: there’s confusion in this thread between jellied eels, a particular dish associated with the east end of London, and regular eel, preferably smoked, which is absolutely delicious. Neither are common, though.
Black pudding: common, but not universally loved. (Fantastic when dunked in a runny egg yolk.)
Tongue: uncommon.
Kidney: not uncommon as an ingredient.
It varies hugely. Some things are rare and expensive, others can be surprisingly cheap, because they’re little-known and not in demand. Local seafood can be one example of the latter.
Where did you get the idea that Brits do?
Wow, I missed that one. What on earth? Not only have I never seen someone do that, I have never heard of someone doing it, nor could I envisage anyone I’ve ever met wanting to try it.
What other weird things do you lot think we eat?
Speaking personally, I only use canned tomatoes as a recipe ingredient for such things as sauces and casseroles. But I have never known anyone eat them cold straight out of the can. If you have them for breakfast they are always heated up. And they are certainly not a “staple of British diets”.
I can understand the other things, but you didn’t like Jaffa Cakes? Who doesn’t like them? 
I don’t have a sweet tooth any more, but I’ll happily eat a Jaffa Cake. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose.