I noticed a few people mentioning that Brits over-sauce. My experience with cafes and run-of-the-mill restaurants here is that they under-sauce. A burger will come with burger bun, patty, a bit of lettuce and that’s it. Similarly, a side salad will be lettuce, tomato, a few other veggies but no dressing. I am constantly having to ask for sauces and dressings here. I find the food here quite dry.
Compare range of climate and easily available ingredients in those two countries. From temperate maritime to er well temperate maritime in the UK, from Alpine to Mediterranean in Italy. There’s a considerable difference between the cuisine of Sicily and that of Lombardy which reflects the difference in the climate. (It’s a similar situation in France from the north where they make beer and cider moving south where wine takes over.) Now I love Italian food, love it, but as an Italian friend pointed out they are lucky - you can grow rice as well as potatoes, you can cook with butter or local olive oil, you can grow soft fruits (peaches, apricots) and hard fruits (apples), heck not only do they have enough sun to grow tomatoes outdoors there is enough left over to dry them too 
Current tastes / culinary fashions favour Mediterranean ingredients thus the more northern European countries are deemed to have “bad food” - so far in this thread people have not only dissed British food but also Swedish and German. Yes our traditional food is based on meat and root vegetables but that’s what was traditionally available. “Better” ingredients are now available but they do cost more.
installLSC isn’t so far off, compared to France, Italy, Spain we had larger urban centres earlier because of the industrial revolution and thus a high proportion of the population had limited access to a variety of fresh produce. In all these countries a lot of people are sill closer to their rural roots than Brits are - many living in smaller cities and/or having a second home in the country. In northern Italy I’ve eaten sorpressa (not sure if it’s one S or two, a type of sausage) made by someone’s father, attended meals where the meat (inc. songbirds) was from the day’s hunting, homemade limoncello with lemons from the garden; similarly in Barcelona I was presented with a bottle of olive oil from someone’s village. In the UK, well friends might proudly tell you that the vegetables you’re eating are “from the garden” or “locally grown” or “from the farmer’s market”. We’re just one step further away from our food and it’s origins.
scifisam2009 I feel your pain - I had the dubious pleasure of staying with a host family when I was doing my Dip. TEFLA and over the 2 months I ballooned on a diet of fried breakfast and frozen food in the evenings. On the other hand you do get more complaints from students like the Italians who complain they can’t get decent pizza in the UK and young Turks in search of decent kebab …
Ahem, me. When I was growing up (1960s), my dad knew someone at the McVitie’s factory in Willesden, north west London, who used to give him all sorts of goodies, like tinned goods with no labels and mountains of Jaffa Cakes. Having eaten so many previously, I cannot so much as look at a Jaffa Cake today without retching.
I’ll stick up for both postwar british and postwar american foods as being awful by today’s standards.
Look, you have the move from living in small villages and eating local produce to living in cities and the new suburbs and shopping at a grocery store rather than a greengrocer, a baker, a butcher and having a dairyman bring out milk, butter and eggs.
The issue becomes one of supply and demand. We have already covered Britain’s postwar shortages.
In the US, we have that population shift. A grocery store will cater to the most common denomonator. Thusly you end up with limited offerings. Meats tended to be beef, pork, chicken and not really much of the organ meats other than liver. People wanted muscle meat rather than organ meat as it was seen as ‘upper class’. Lamb/mutton was not normally served unless the community had sheep from the wool industry there as the knackers yards were not set up to handle sheep normally. Veggie wise you had the stuff that stored and traveled well, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions, celery, and then canned stuff [this is still fairly pre-freezer] We all can remember how nasty canned peas and spinach were, over cooked, mushy and nasty. Corn and green beans were not too bad, they tended to remain less overprocessed. Fruits - apples, oranges and peaches tended to be fairly common, with bananas as the high end really imported stuff, and grapes as a luxury item. Canned fruits tended to be tolerable, mainly peaches, pears, and fruit mushes like apple pie filling, strawberry filling, cherry filling. Spicing tended to be fairly minimal, in general salt and pepper.
It took soldiers coming back from the atlantic and pacific theaters with wives and a new liking for ‘native’ foods to get stores to start stocking exotic stuff [other than the already exotic neighborhood groceries in little italy, little china, little mexico] and magazines and cookbooks sneaking ‘exotic’ foods in. I know people have posted Lilecks Gallery of Regrettable Foods here before, look at the cookbooks from the 50s, their idea of mexican would be more or less a gallon of essentially beef stew with a teaspoon of chili powder in it to spice it up to be chili … when the 60s hit, and interest in the world and alternative lifestyles hit, the food industry changed drastically. We got spice racks, exotic ingredients, and all sorts of neat little places to eat got popular [ooo I found the most fantastic little kebab place on the lower east side…not thinking that it had been there for about 20 years …]
Yeah, I’ve never noticed habitual over-saucing either to be honest.
Apart from the wild misconceptions (I still can’t believe the canned tomatoes thing) and the generalisations based on a couple of meals in airports, a lot of the stuff popping up here seems to be either poverty food (e.g. the numerous offal-based dishes) or junk food. It’s a bit like thinking Americans subsist on hominy grits and twinkies. The junk food issue’s not so interesting; I think it’s more a matter of familiarity. Let’s face it, snack foods are all pretty crap, and I think what fondness we have for them is based more on association than on experience. But the poverty food question has a bit more meat on it.
Relatively speaking, the ready availability of so-called “prime” cuts of meat, and the tailoring of our intensive farming system to cater to those tastes are very recent developments. Before, you ate offal because it was what you could afford, and you topped your pie with potato because it’s a cheaper way of getting starch in. My grandad absolutely loved tripe, something very few people think about eating these days, because, well, why would you when there are enormous mutant chicken breast fillets on 2for1 at Sainsbury’s? It’s now literally impossible to buy a chicken with giblets in major supermarkets (thus neatly foiling the ambitions of anyone who wants to make proper gravy), and our tastes in general have become sanitised to the point where the very idea of using the weird bits gives people the heebie-jeebies.
I think this is at the core of a lot of complaints about “weird” food like eels and steak and kidney pie; a simple trend of common tastes towards vanilla options, enabled by industrialised farming practices. Combine this with your typical cultural variations (“you eat what?”) and yeah, a lot of traditional dishes are going to seem pretty alien to the modern palate. Whether they’re inherently crap, or indicative of some paucity of culinary culture, however, is a completely different question.
All that said, if anyone else insults twiglets I will end them.
Edit: beaten to the punch by aruvqan! Damn you! 
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Shepherds Pie, bangers and mash, good beans, fish and chips. I generally like the spicy stuff and the stronger flavors, but good is still good. Some of the names are kind of strange (toad in the hole, spotted dick, etc) but it’s still good.
My dad used to say English food was horrible, but that was during WW2, when everything was rationed and people were more concerned with other things (like the Blitz). Then one day by chance, I was channel surfing and the Two Fat Ladies were on. I kept thinking “damn that stuff looks good”.
Which is where Brits are hard done by as two of those (black pudding and tongue) are common throughout the Germanic-influenced areas of Europe and another, eels, is more of a comedy item in a select few regions of the UK. For example, eels are a traditional part of a Swedish smörgåsbord and I’ve been served them every year here at Christmas time, yet in twenty five years living in the UK I have never even seen them eaten.
If the meat was boiled then it simply wasn’t Shepherd’s Pie. Brits boiling their meat is another myth that is somehow taken as fact everywhere. I never been served boiled meat. The closest has been a stew, but if someone can’t tell the difference between a stew and boiling then they have no right to be commenting on food.
Horrid? A basic Shepherd’s Pie is lamb and potatoes. Lamb and potatoes are horrid? Posher ones add vegetables like carrots and maybe cheese somewhere, but still, what on earth was in your Shepherd’s Pie that was so “horrid”?
Boiled ham is one dish regularly produced by my Irish mother. And it’s damn tasty.
Yeah, I’ll give you that one. But then again, where can’t you get boiled ham? The way it has been presented to me in the past is that we somehow boil chicken, beef, turkey and whatnot and then serve it with some sludge for vegetables.
I suppose cheap tinned corned beef might play a part in reinforcing the misconception?
Cheap tinned foods aren’t available in the US?
Their existence, just like with any other foodstuff, does not mean that it’s a national dish. Like anywhere, you can get any food you want, prepared the way you want it.
Certainly boiled meats, cold tinned tomatoes and the other bizarre things I’ve heard about in this thread are myths.
And anyone who doesn’t like Shepherd’s Pie hasn’t really had a Shepherd’s Pie, because it truly is the food of the gods. My mouth is watering just thinking about it…
You’ve illustrated the problem quite well, so thank you. The problem is that you are obviously completely misunderstanding what people say when they British food is bad, and are unable to think critically about the matter.
It makes zero sense for anyone to complain that the food quality in Britain is bad, or that the food variety in Britain is bad. Several posters have commented that there are lots of restaurant choices. This is completely obvious, and holds almost anywhere you go in western Europe. Hell, I was watching a show about a couple of brits opening a BBQ pit in Paris.
The conception the OP asked about was about BRITISH CUISINE. Not “the food available in the UK”. Until fairly recently in history, we didn’t have a lot of international produce trade, and national cuisines were distinct. So when we talk about British food, we’re not talking about the curry you went and murdered after the football match, or the McDonald’s down the street or that nice Italian place with the outdoor seating. We’re talking about the customary dishes that Brits have been cooking for a long time: Shepard’s pie, bangers and mash, beans on toast, Yorkshire puddings, beef Wellington, ploughman’s, fish and chips, etc. It doesn’t matter what brits generally eat; no one is going to start calling vindaloo a British dish. Your experience from living in Britain is worthless, honestly, because you obviously don’t know enough about food to distinguish between a national cuisine and what you ate when you were there, just like the dumbasses who visited the US and saw a lot of burger joints, and think that must be American cuisine.
The theme running through British cuisine is preservation. (BTW, people have talked about turnips in this very thread.) As such, it tends to be blandly spiced, with lots of salt and fat for flavor, because those are the ingredients they had on hand. It’s just like Cat Jones said: national cuisine was made from what they had available. Brits got the short end of the stick because of the climate. Deal with it.
Secondly, you want to know why “that fancy schmancy cooking matters”? Because it’s a demonstration of what a dish can be at it’s best, and because national cuisine isn’t static unless your culture is dead. It’s also because that’s where people take the time to understand what defines national cuisines, as opposed to just glossing over important things like cultural crossover, fusion dishes, and ingredient trends. And unless you are severely out of touch with society, food, unlike fashion, gets adopted by everyday cooks very quickly – we have a whole cable network that beams the high end right into your house and we have Whole Foods stores springing up all over. Who do you think shops there? Hint: it’s not mom cooking the same nice meatloaf and mashed potatoes her mom did, it’s the culinarily adventurous (and maybe snobby) folks who are making Argentinian ceviche.
So I guess the answer to your question is that people who are interested in capturing the essence of various cuisines and who are trying to create dishes that people love give a rat’s ass.
How about curry dishes from 18th and 19th century London? Medieval dishes using all sorts of spices from across the known world? The apologetic suggestion that that British cuisine is proudly bland is simply not born out by the facts. For every one of your examples, I could produce a counter which is rich, deeply flavoured, or even strident - kippers and black pudding have had enough mentions already. Not to mention cheeses…
Yes, how about those? I am not claiming that British food sucks. I am simply providing an explanation of why people think British food sucks. The main things associated with British food are the dishes that everyone thinks of – as evidenced by the number of mentions of various brit dishes in this thread.
(By the way, cheese doesn’t count as cuisine - it’s not really a dish. Brit beer doesn’t have a bad rep either.)
I don’t like the false dichotomy that runs through these dicussions, between"spicy" and “bland”. What about “subtly flavoured”? Bread, for example, only has a very mild flavour. But I think we can all agree that bread can be delicious. There are some fantastic cheeses with very delicate flavours. Are they “bland”? Etc.
If it makes you feel any better, the cuisine of the other Germanic-influenced areas of Europe has if anything an even worse reputation in the US than does British cooking.
That was part of what I was talking about when I mentioned one-note flavors. Good food has a lot going on. Rock candy has very strong flavor, but it’s boring.
Whatever she fed me was not lamb and potatoes. I would have happily killed at that point for some lamb and potatoes. Potatoes were involved, as was the basic pie crust, but whatever was in the middle…shudder. Maybe she made some sort of bastardized version. All I know is that her husband gobbled it up with unmitigated enthusiasm.
Or course, that guy will eat anything that doesn’t eat him first, so maybe I shouldn’t make all Brits pay for his culinary sins.
I was in England about 10 years ago wife my wife; we stayed a few days in London, then drove around the south of England for about 10 days. We had a wonderful time seeing castles and cathedrals and all kinds of historic stuff, and the countryside was just beautiful.
Unfortunately, the native food was at best mediocre, at worst appalling nearly everywhere we ate unless it was an Indian restaurant. We ate at a place where my wife ordered a salad and she was served a plate of iceberg lettuce and a few packets of salad cream.
Maybe things suddenly improved in the last decade, shrug.