That couldn’t have been Shepherd’s pie because the proper version doesn’t involve a pie crust. It’s just minced meat with mashed potatoes on top.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/shepherdspie_2077.shtml
Does it? I’m not terribly familiar with Polish food outside pierogies, and I don’t know a thing about Czech, Slovak, or Austrian food, but when I think of German food, I think of sausages, beer, dark bread, mustard, sauerkraut, and a lot of proto-American dishes, like frankfurters, hamburgers, strudel, etc. All of that is delicious to me, and most other Americans I know. Mustard and kraut being the only real exceptions.
That wasn’t shepherd’s pie, or even a bastardised version of it. Shepherd’s pie is not actually a pie, and has no crust.
At its most basic, it’s minced lamb with mashed potatoes on top. But generally there will be other ingredients, and often lots of cheese on top of the potatoes. My girfriend likes to spice it up a lot with chillies and the like.
And it’s truly delicious.
Most of the dishes are pretty unimaginative, and I don’t get the peas, but if there’s one thing the British are good at, it’s beef. Some of the best beef dishes I’ve ever had, I’ve had in British restaurants & pubs: roasts, liver, burgers & pies are all usually wonderful.
Personally, I think the main problem with British cooking is the poor use of vegetables. You’re generally lucky if you get anything besides mushy peas, boiled carrots or boiled potatoes. On the other hand, traditional Dutch cooking is worse; it’s much like British cooking, but with worse meat (but no mushy peas).
Sounds like a Cornish Pasty to me, pepperlandgirl.
Heh. Reminds me of my in-laws’ family cookbook, put together about a decade ago. My inlaws are mostly from North Carolina and Texas, and not all the recipes are gourmet (although they’re mostly delicious: you’d be amazed what a great dish you can make out of butter, cheese, flour, rice crispies, and garlic and red pepper).
The recipes are things like:
-Pesto and Cream Cheese Round
-Minty Melody (a mint pesto used as a dressing for citrus salad)
-Curried Winter Squash Soup
-Mesquitte Peach Jalapeno Chicken
-Caribbean Fudge Pie
-Roast Romana Pork
-Risotto Milanese
But one of the inlaws by marriage is from England. Here are a couple of his recipes, verbatim, from the cookbook:
Maybe he was taking the piss.
Yeah, I think he was. 
WWII food rations were mentioned by several posters as a possible cause for British cuisine’s reputation. Although I don’t dispute that they surely didn’t help, my impression was that the bad reputation was in fact somewhat older.
Indeed, after searching a bit I found plenty of cites from the 19th and early 20th century commenting on the negative perception of British fare.
I found an interesting quote from one Alfred Suzanne, who was a French chef who worked in England for 40 years and who wrote in 1894 the first French book on English cuisine. He says:
Indeed, in my experience, the hearty nature of several traditional dishes acts as a great repellent for some people while at the same time it is what makes those dishes endearing to others. Fish and chips have been mentioned as an example of good English food, and yet every single Japanese person I know who has been to London has tried them and found them to be inedible. It’s largely a question of what you’re used to and what you expect from “good” food.
There’s another element that I think deserves mention. If we look at the usual suspects of countries famous for their cuisine, like France, Italy and China, we find that local dishes occupy every echelon, from street vendors, to home cooking, to cheap restaurants, to not-so-cheap restaurants, to holiday cooking, to royal fare and haute cuisine… On the other hand, British cuisine is famous abroad for its popular dishes, while it seems that the more sophisticated cuisines didn’t flourish as much. (It’s important to note that whether a dish is popular or sophisticated has nothing to do with its actual quality. However, it was often the more sophisticated cuisines that tended to get exported.)
One interesting hypothesis about this lack of “high cuisine” I found mentions laws that limited the number of people British nobles could have in their service. This was meant to prevent them from mounting armies that could challenge the king, but it also meant that they could not splurge as lavishly as their continental counterparts.
As a disclaimer, I’ve never visited the UK myself and I can only speak of how the cuisine is perceived.
What he said. I spent my childhood in the UK, in the bad old days (70s-80s) and all I know is that I still to this day beg my mom to make lamb with mint sauce, Lancashire hot pot, beef roast with turnips, potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding… I’ve never found decent chippy fish 'n chips in America, and I miss unwrapping the paper and soaking the chips in vinegar. So quite frankly, one who thinks British food is pants can sod off.
There are all kinds of permutations of British cuisine that I don’t like: faggots, haggis, blood sausage, mushy peas, to name a few. But I first discovered muesli in Britain (granted, I believe it’s from somewhere else, but it was in the UK well before it was here). Shreddies is a healthy, tasty cereal - and I was blown away by the tooth-rotting American kid’s fare in the brekky bowl. I love an English breakfast (sans the fried egg) - bangers are a million times better than American breakfast sausage patties. And every Shrove Tuesday we had pancake races with the British crepe which I find infinitely better than the American pancake.
Let’s talk confectionery. Between Rowntree Mackintosh and Cadbury, I don’t think there’s an American chocolatier that comes close. Fruit and Nut and Kit-Kats are British, even though the latter has become quite popular here. Among snack foods, I would take a Mr Kipling’s cake or pie over a Hostess Twinkee/Wagon Wheel, etc. any day.
Thank God our Fiesta supermarket carries a lot of British/Commonwealth foodstuffs…
This, again, is completely untrue. I’m almost bewildered how some folks in this thread managed to find these obscure places which only serve mushy peas and boiled potatoes.
Any place that is limited to that fare is unacceptably bad. My advice? next time you find yourself in such a place, walk out, because you’ve managed to home in on the worst restaurant in the country somehow! Cross the road and go to another one. 
I haven’t seen mushy peas since I was a kid (although I believe it’s a regional thing in some northern areas), and the “boiled potatoes” bit is just bizarre. Potatoes come in every variety and presentation you can imagine. Heck, the traditional English Sunday dinner is a roast dinner.
While this is mostly true (burgers are horrible the world over), it all goes horribly wrong when it comes to steak (credentials: Brit who has lived half his adult life in America). My advice is always not to eat steak in England or fish and chips in America.
As to the OP, I think there was some justification in the criticism of British food. Certainly 30 years ago much of it was bland and overcooked - and no doubt many people still have their food that way. However, there have been substantial changes for the better and there are many excellent restaurants.
Come to think of it, maybe the old Brits migrated to the southern states of America to continue the tradition of massively overcooked vegetables (and invented a few crimes such as country-fried steak).
I’ve never been to England, but I have to say that the Crown & Anchor here in Vegas, assuming the food is legitimately British, is one of our favorite places to eat. The Guiness beef pie is to die for and I love the curry and chips too. The only thing I had a hard time with was the Stilton soup, but I don’t like very strong cheeses in general, so it might just be me. I just keep missing the nights they have lamb, got to catch that sometime (I raise my own and would love to try the Brittish take on it). Even the peas are good :).
Sorry, I live here! There’s no chance I’m gonna not eat steak ever. Steak is goooooood!
What do you perceive as the difference? I’ve eaten steak a lot in both countries (it being one of my favourite foods), and I haven’t been able to percieve a general difference except that steaks in the US tend to the larger side.
I think a good cook/chef is a good cook/chef, and a bad one is a bad one. You get both types everywhere, and a good cook ain’t gonna go wrong with steak, really.
Huh? They’re on the menu of every chip shop in the land.
This highlights another problem facing British food and its reputation - some of the worst and most overpriced places to eat tend to be those serving the tourist market, which don’t need to cultivate repeat customers.
I just felt compelled to say that anyone interested in British food should read “Taste: The Story of Britain Through it’s Cooking” by Kate Colquhoun. It’s an absolutely fascinating read.
I will also say that I feel Britain had several things against it developing a truly exceptional national cuisine. As has been mentioned, the climate does limit some of the things you can get locally. “Taste” relates that citrus was so scarce in medieval Britain that Eleanor of Castile the wife of Edward I requisitioned all of the fruit carried on a visiting Spanish ship for herself, a total of seven oranges and 15 citrons which was so precious they were made into syrups to stretch them.
Secondly, I believe the protestant reformation dealt a blow to cooking. Making something tasty and not simply filling and nutritious requires that you place some value in sensual pleasures, something that was a concern to puritan reformers. There was also the Catholic church’s strictures requiring a ‘meatless’ diet, which had previously created an artificial demand for fish which varied the national diet. The demand for fish declined markedly after the Reformation to the point where eating fish was regarded as ‘suspicious’ or ‘popery’.
Thirdly, Britain has been mostly peaceful and isolated relative to other regions for much of her history and I don’t believe a stable and homogeneous population is a benefit to developing a dynamic and interesting cuisine. I personally would rate British cuisine about on par with Russia, both have really excellent things they do very well and are known for which tend to be in the category of folk or ‘homestyle’ cooking. You’ll find Russian and British restaurants abroad and they can be excellent but they’re not widely acknowledged as truly exceptional world influences.
I can assure you they’re not! Not round these parts, anyhoo.
Shrug
That’s not a meal, it’s a plate of lettuce and a packet of salad cream. Why didn’t you walk out? I’d be appalled at that; that’s not “bad cuisine”, that’s “fraud”. And it sure as heck ain’t a valid representation of what typically happens when one orders a salad in this country.
Again, Americans with anecdotes about what happened when they visit describe things which don’t match any experience I’ve ever had in the 36 years I’ve been living here. Unless there’s some massive masonic nationwide sub-cult I’ve not been invited into which deliberately rips off American visitors, I’m perplexed and at a loss when folks describe these horrific experiences, which I can assure you are horrific by our standards.
Like I said earlier, there’s a massive range of restaurants, pubs, and the like, at different price ranges, just like there is in the US. You can get exactly the same stuff. There’s no chef-talent-dampening chemicals in the air or anything, and culinary skills in the modern Western world are not exactly masonic secrets; there are world-class chefs here, just like there. The chances of there being such a massively widespread inability to perform a given skill is so remote that I’m really begninning to think that “conspiracy” is the only possible explanation for these bizarre anecdotes.
Then again, in New York I was once served a Big Mac with no meat in it! The bun was there, as was the lettuce and the mayonnaise or whatever it is in a Big Mac, but no patty at all.
In my experiences in both countries, you get what you pay for, and you can get good and bad meals in each. I’ve seen some utterly disgusting stuff in the US; I’ve seen some delicious stuff, too. And the same applies here. My girfriend, for example, is a MUCH better cook than the folks I stayed with in the US a few years back, by an order of magnitude. There’s no national endemic talent gene or anything.
The chips are OK, but I’d agree that the deep fried fish is often disgusting. There are chippies who cook it well, but I would say they’re the exception. If you pick a fish & chip shop at random, chances are you’ll get some almost flavourless white fish in a heavy layer of soggy batter. Euch. So maybe we shouldn’t be putting forward fish & chips as a proud example of British food.
Well cooked fish in a fish and chip shop should have lots of crispy batter. When they get that right it means the fish isn’t fried but gently steamed. This is because it’s not in direct contact with the fat. Then it tastes gorgeous, delicate in flavour and not soggy or fatty.
I’d dispute that. The Catholic Church didn’t try anywhere close to a “meatless diet”, as can be seen by countries that are still Catholic, from Belgium to Italy, that don’t fall back on fish for everything. There was no “artificial demand” for fish. Britain is an island and quite a small one at that, considering the population. Most large population centres sprouted up either on the coast or on major rivers. People ate fish because it was plentiful and easy to get.