To be fair, that joke is about twenty years old. As is the truth behind it.
That’s the problem with stereotypes, they take a long time to update.
Those are school dinners; usually aimed at the under-10s. I used to love that when I was a kid; not so much now!
I’d say the “truth” is centuries old, if it ever was true. Certainly growing up in the eighties (I was born in '74) my Mother rarely gave us boiled anything. Even a basic like potatoes were rarely boiled. Chips, yes, Baked, yes. Roast, yes. Mashed, yes (OK, I know you first have to boil them first). Left on their own boiled, next to never.
I may be hijacking, but the OP started asking about “why did UK food have a bad rap?” and many people are saying it’s very good now.
One of the things that happens with reputations is that they’re about perception. One of my Scottish colleagues mentioned that an interesting aspect to spending three weeks in Bilbao on business in November was “getting to see a side of Spain that’s got nothing to do with the ‘sun and beach’ posters.” Are there no sunny beaches in Spain? No, we have lots of them, and we sell them. For a long time England didn’t try to sell food: it sold history, castles, business, clubbing, but not food. The notions that people abroad get about what you have at home have to do with what and how you sell those things you have. York is beautiful, but you wouldn’t even know it exists by looking at tourist brochures for trips to the UK.
Besides give you books, relevant quotes, historic facts and cites, I am at a loss at what else I can impart to you. I never said fish was Never eaten. That is ridiculous. Yes, Fish and Chips is identified as British. That somebody cannot name an Italian seafood dish is strange but in a way supports my theory about the English speaking aversion to seafood. The Italian dishes popular in the English speaking world do tend to be non seafood, however if you look into Italian cooking in most regions the sea is a HUGE influence. Yes, I am aware you can pull fish out of rivers inland, the fact remains that, with the exception of salmon, Britons mostly did not after the 16th century. Those fish ponds I mentioned? They weren’t for raising or catching fish particularly, they were for holding them so they remained fresh for sale. But let’s get away from the 16th century and look at more recent figures, in the years from 1995 to 1997 England ranked behind Italy, France, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain and Finland in per capita consumption of fish and seafood. Whether you want to believe me or not this is also after a 20 year overall rise in British fish consumption as fish were promoted as part of a healthy diet ( I could find the figures if you insist). Don’t you think it says something culturally that an island nation blessed as you say with many rivers ranks on par with Russia (oddly enough considering my earlier comparison of the two countries) in the consumption of fish and that consumption is (as you alluded) dominated by battered fried fish? In my (very casual) study of the history of food I have found that the cultures with the most varied and interesting cuisine develop those preparations and methods for a reason. Jewish cooking for example is overwhelmingly dominated by kosher dietary laws and the experience of the diaspora. The preponderance of different fish and vegetable preparations in France, Spain and Italy comes from centuries of church edicts prohibiting the consumption of certain foods. It also helps if you have a highly stratified society so there is a greater divide between high and low cuisines, the two will cross pollinate over years ( such as you find in China and Japan IMO).
The same is true for Dutch cookery. During the middle ages the food was much spicier and more adventurous. IIRC the decline of spices coincided with the decline of the Dutch East India Company and the end of the Golden Age.
The stereotype of vegetables boiled to death certainly had an element of truth in it. My Mum was a good cook but nothing would stop her boiling cabbage until it was pale, soggy, limp and stank.
On the ideas in the OP
I think 3, 4, and 5 are the key points. My memories of the sixties and all I’ve read suggest post-war British food was not good - whether home cooked or in most restaurants. (Obviously there have always been exceptions - great individual cooks and fine restaurants.) There was nothing wrong with the basic ingredients - meat, fish, vegatables - supplied by British farmers. The consolidation of land holdings and scientific farming (anyone remember Turnip Townsend?) increased the quantity and quality of food available.
Wartime and post-war rationing can’t have helped - limited supplies of staples and very few imports. I have also seen it suggested this broke the chain of mothers teaching daughters to cook but I’ve no idea if this is true. I think the lack of emphasis on food in British culture - for whatever reason - is probably the most important of these reasons and this has been the case for a long time.
Really?
Are you absolutely certain you aint looking for 'em in the ironmongers, sorry, hardware store.
Believe me brother, it aint a chippie if they don’t sell mushy peas.
I can see it now…couple of Hollands meat pies, big crispy fat fuck off chips and mushy peas.
Couple of rounds of bread and butter and a cuppa char.
Beat that if ya can
Where are you from?
Definitely no mushy peas in the chippies round here (South Coast). I was almost doubting myself, so I looked in a couple as I walked past today just to make sure they hadn’t been hiding in some obscure corner of the menu, but nope.
Strangely, I was under the impression that it was harder to find mushy peas the further south you went, but chippies in East Anglia were serving mushy peas, and those in Edinburgh never seem to do.
They might be not on the menu because it’s generally assumed that they’re available…(and I’m not talking about oop north, either)
Books and quotes aren’t always truths, David Ike had books published after all. I’m disagreeing with the viewpoint and offering an alternative to the explanation as to why historical fish pools were filled in. Cultural change as the Industrial Revolution took hold, including mass movement to cities, is an important one (for example) that you just can’t ignore. To say that this is due to the move away from Catholicism is ridiculous, in my opinion, as it can be easily shown that non-Catholic countries sometimes love fish (see the Nordic countries) and that Catholic countries aren’t always huge about it (see Belgium).
As are kippers, as seen in this thread. Eels apparently so as well, although Brits like me dispute that.
Nice misrepresentation of what I said. “You ask anyone to name an Italian dish and I’d put money on them not saying one with fish in it” is not me saying “people from Britain don’t think the Italians eat fish”, it is me saying “If you ask someone to name an Italian food they would almost certainly come out with something without fish in it”, which is pretty much what I said in the first place. In fact I’ll go out and say it, the first thing 99% of people would mention would be Spaghetti Bolognese. Does that mean all Italian food is like Spaghetti Bolognese? No, but that wasn’t the point I was making either.
Show me the source of that study and I’ll show you a list of countries that the Brits eat a lot more fish than. It would prove just as much as you did. Nothing.
Dominated by battered fried fish in the same way that the American beef industry is dominated by processed patties stuck in a bun. It is cheap, fast food.
I could also go on about EU fishing quotas, declining stocks due to overfishing and disputes over where people can actually fish.
This where we differ. Varied is something (for the most part) factual, but “interesting” is purely subjective and has no place in such a discussion.
Well, I think it’s generally assumed that chips are available, and they’re on the menu! And plenty of other stuff (curry sauce, etc.) which you’d equally assume was available appears on the menu.
Nope, seriously. There ain’t no mushy peas round here.
I believe you misspellt “Pukka”. 
As a Warwickshire-based sixteen year old I worked in a Chippie a couple of nights a week. We sold mushy peas but they really were not popular. That extremely vague looking “curry” sauce was a lot more popular.
I think the cuisine I’ve heard people complain about was distinctly the English, rather than British. I’ve only ever heard one person complain about the food in Ireland and Scotland, and he was Armenian, had never been to either place, and spent considerable time and effort before each meal trying to get “enough” tabasco out of the bottle and onto his food.
That said, I myslf have never been to England. My immediate thoughts of “bad English food” ran to boiled beef, organ meats and baked beans. But when I think of English “cuisine” I think of Gordon Whosefratz the Screamer (I’ve got two of his books, love his cooking, but alas, that will always be his name to me . . . damn Hell’s Kitchen!) and a few older simpler dishes like Yorkshire pudding and Toad in the Hole.
Which brings me to another point: The English seem to like (or have liked, since it’s usually the older dishes) to give their recipes charmingly disgusting names. Who could eat a runny egg after having been forcibly reminded of toads?
The point above about the spice trade is well taken. Although I believe it was primarily black pepper and tea, I’d love to hear an historian’s view. In the few English recipe’s I’ve used, the only herbs have been parsley and sage. Typical example: Lincolnshire_Recipes
I also confess to an American’s aversion to organ meats. I always supposed that they were eaten in England because the muscle meats stood up to transport better, and most meat was grown for the export trade. But it sounds like that’s either an olde or entirely erroneous idea.
Either way, I haven’t really seen here any of the defensive players naming a list of what “English Cuisine” is in their minds, and I’d honestly love to hear it.
Please, fight my ignorance. What is modern English cuisine?
I don’t think it really exists. The UK is a very cosmopolitan place. We don’t have a concept of an “English restaurant”. There’s nothing you would go out and eat at a restaurant here that you wouldn’t everywhere else.
I dunno… here are the menus of a couple of restaurants we go to occasionally nearby. As you can see, there’s nothing unusual about them; they’re not top-of-the-range restaurants by any means, fairly generic:
http://www.theoxfordbrasserie.co.uk/menu_maincourse.html
I guess there is mention of liver on each, which folks have said they consider to be a particularly unpleasant English culinary choice; I don’t actually know anyone who likes it, but I guess some people must, or it wouldn’t be on the menu.
The closest I can think of is the oft-cited fish and chips; but of course, that’s fast food, not “cuisine” any more than McDonalds is; or “pub grub” which, again, is cheap quickly prepared (usually pre-prepared) food designed to be consumed along with a pint of lager.
I guess if I HAD to name a dish I consider quintessentially English, it would be a roast dinner. But that’s hardly unique to this country, so I find it hard to defend my perception of it as “English” other than that I grew up on it every Sunday.
Bascilly, you’d go out for somethig specific (chinese, thai, mexican, italian, a steak house, indian, pizza, or what-have-you) or somewhere more generic like the above
Honestly, I think based on your responses we’re simply going to have to agree to disagree. It is a fact that more fish and more varied kinds of fish were sold prior to the 16th century in Briton to the average person than until the 19th century. It is a fact that British fish consumption slowed dramatically. I cannot believe its not apparent that the Reformation changed British cooking and culture dramatically. I will provide one more cite, a link to Colin Spencer’s “British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History”… in particular read pages 101-108, the eating of fish and in particular the old preparations of fish became associated with Catholicism and France.
Re fish, don’t forget that oysters were eaten in vast quantities a couple of hundred years ago. They were looked on as poor peoples food and there are supposedly vast piles of their shells in the rubbish dumps that surround London.
I’ve been living in East Anglia for about a year and a half. Other than pubs, I’ve found few English restaurants. In my driving around the area, I’ve seen almost every other nationalities’ restaurants, though. Maybe all these tourists are thinkng Little Chef is “authentic” English food?
I don’t mean to offend anyone but Little Chef=Yucko!