For dinner tonight I’ve had some reet proper English fodder.
Beef Casserole with onions, swede and carrots.
And floating in the midst of this delicious combo were 2 huge fluffy onion dumplings.
Mopped up the gravy with a hunk of crusty bread
Aye laddie, sticks to yer ribs it does
Corned beef, I am told, is all but unknown in Ireland. The reason it’s traditional for St. Patrick’s Day in America is because… basically, a cheaper substitute for bacon.
Corned beef is traditional for St. Patrick’s Day in America? I didn’t know that!
I’ve got an amusing image in my head of fifth generation British immigrants in the United States eating cold tomatoes out of a can because that’s what they do “back home”.
Yes. Corned beef and cabbage.
In fact, when St Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday during Lent, many Catholic churches (I think the decision gets made somewhere higher in the hierarchy than the individual church level, but IANACatholic and I’m not sure) relax the rules against eating meat on Fridays in Lent so people can have their corned beef and cabbage.
Reasons why British food is the way it is:
The climate. It is not particularly varied, it is not particularly warm. We can grow some surprising things in some areas (wine from Cornwall is delicious), but until the railways, they didn’t travel. By then, it was too late.
People seem very hung up on this whole boiling thing. Yes, things did get boiled. Usually because your only means of cooking was a pot over the fire. Someone mentioned taking meat and bread to the baker because people didn’t have their own ovens. It’s true. Later in our history, when we became more industrialised and everyone in a family was working, sticking everything in a pot and cooking it over time became the non labour-intensive way to do things. Have you never left anything in a slow cooker so it would be cooked when you got home?
Rationing. I know it’s been mentioned, but I don’t think people from places that didn’t have it can really realise the influence it’s had. For years and years, people just could not get enough food. They made do with what they had, but what they had was limited in amount and variety. Also no-one has mentioned, when talking about a limited range of vegetables, that we’re only just starting to recover some almost-lost varieties and traditions which nearly died out during and just after the war. This was because people had to grow *staple *foods. Variety isn’t important when all you have to do is stay alive. “Dig for Victory” wanted people growing sensible vegetables which could be stored and would fill people up, making up for the lack of other foods, not crap to make the plate look pretty.
Working longer hours than a lot of other nations. I’m pretty sure that at least when I was a kid, people in the UK worked longer hours than any other country in Europe. That just doesn’t leave time for cooking, so quick, convenient (or slow, ignore it till it’s done) food was all we had time for. That’s beginning to change as people see cooking as something fun in itself, not a chore before you can eat.
I’m sure there’s a lot more I want to rant about, but this is already more than long enough. Though having shared my vital thoughts, may I just ask what the fuck is up with all of you not even being prepared to try offal? What’s so different about eating one part of an animal over another? I regularly cook steak and kidney pie (delicious), liver (delicious), tongue (delicious when koshered, IMO), haggis, black pudding, and so on. My heart casserole has people begging for the recipe.
Oh, one more thing. Tomatoes, chillies etc which we think of as “the Mediterranean diet” are not native to that area. So all of you who’ve been talking about how marvellous Spanish and Italian food are; are you including those? So we can include them in English food as well, because we’ve had them just as long as they have. If we can talk about potatoes, I think other foods from the new world need to be included too. British cuisine is the most varied in the world!
Finally (no really)… fish and chips is Jewish food. It’s not British any more than the tomatoes are. Yeah, we’ve had it here for hundreds of years, but it came in with the immigrants, just like everything else. Mushy peas here in South London, by the way, but you can’t get really good fish and chips in the capital. In fact southern food in general is crapper than food in the north.
Wow. I’m sorry. That’s incredibly long.
The thing that’s called corned beef in Britian is not necessarily the same foodstuff as is called corned beef in Ireland. And it is not what the Americans serve on St Patrick’s Day.
Corned beef in Britain is a cold, pressed, sandwich meat. It is to be found in the supermarkets in cans, typically from Argentina or on the cold meat counter in slices in a butcher’s shop or supermarket. It’s eaten cold on sandwiches and is very nice with a dollop of chutney or HP sauce.
When Americans talk of Irish corned beef which they serve with cabbage, it is a different beast to British corned beef. It is a hot dish. And its name comes from the fact that it is beef, preserved by salting. Corning was just another name for salting, because lumps of salt were called corns.
Of course, seeing as there is such a big British influence in Ireland, the British type of corned beef is also available in tins and at sandwich counters in ireland. Very nice with a with a dollop of chutney or Chef brown sauce.
And - helpfully - both foodstuffs are called corned beef in Ireland. 
It’s an American food taboo. Every culture has its definitions of what is “food” and what is not, and ours happens to exclude offal.
I find it interesting though; your food traditions by and large come from Europe originally, and there’s no such taboo traditionally in any European country I know of; in fact, the UK is the worst for thinking it’s icky these days, yet we still eat it. (Obviously some people don’t, but there’s no accounting for taste.)
Also, I find it interesting that people interested enough in food to go on about a particular cuisine for four pages would refuse even to try something, just based on it being the muscle that pumped the blood instead of the one that wiggled the toe, or the name of it, or other spurious (to me) reasons. Similarly with the eels; they’re really nice. They don’t taste weird, they have a pleasant texture, they’re good for you, they’re versatile; so why are some people (including some of the Brits on here, it seems) so dead set against trying them? I accept that they’re not part of your staple cuisine, though I personally find it wasteful and disrespectful to the animal to throw away more than you can help; it’s the not even trying I can’t get.
I don’t see what’s so hard to get. I eat offal, absolutely love freshwater eel, and would probably try horse, cat, or dog if it were placed in front of me, though I’d probably not try snake, rat, or any dozens of aquatic species. Most everything I just named is taboo in a large number of Western cultures, and even in those where they’re not, comfort levels vary when it comes to what meat people will eat.
Maybe I’m putting it badly. It’s not that *some *people won’t try it that I don’t get. Fine, some people won’t try a lot of things, for all kinds of reasons. It’s the widespread and apparently baseless (in terms of food history) aversion to offal. And it’s the fact that *these *people won’t try it. “Random punter, try some tripe,” maybe wouldn’t get you very far; but “Foodie person, try some of this local speciality” seems a very different proposition. To me. Clearly I’m in the minority! There’s very little I won’t try. (Maybe those eggs that already have a chick in them.) It’s not that I want people to eat them every day, but it doesn’t seem as - intelligent? - as I get all these people to be to refuse to try them at all.
You’re at the adventurous end of the food spectrum. Adventurous or non-adventurous eating is not perfectly correlated with intelligence. I’ve known smart people who were very picky eaters.
As is East Anglian wine 
Wine? Here? What? I hadn’t heard. Can I get it at Tesco?
The hot salt beefis available in the UK as well.
You can also make a very good corned-beef hash using the UK canned version of the meat:-
http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/4017/oven-baked-corned-beef-hash.aspx
East Anglian wine is truly very good. You probably can’t get it at Tesco, but have a wander to a Suffolk farm shop. To my astonishment, I’ve even had good English reds.
Godstone in Surrey does very nice white, too.
What grape varietals do they grow and use in their wines?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Pinot Noir did well there. It does well in cool climates on the US West Coast.
Irritatingly, many of them don’t seem as bothered as other wine makers about telling you exactly which grapes they’re using. Having checked the bottles I have and looked at the websites, I can find surprisingly little information. Maybe they’re relying on people just being so surprised there’s English wine at all that they won’t care what grape it’s made from!
Shawsgate in Suffolk seem to use some newer hybrids, like Venus, for the reds, and Muller-Thurgau among others for the whites. Camel Valley in Cornwall does indeed grow pinot noir (and others), and sells a sparkling wine I almost prefer to Champagne, as well as a red which they helpfully describe as “a cold climate red”. Godstone’s website refuses to tell me what they grow, and I’m out of their wine. Time for a little drive, I think. Maybe I’ll be able to let you know after the weekend!
No, but this is one vineyard I had in mind, which would appear to be in your neck of the woods 
As for the grapes, they say this: