A comment on this earlier AskLemmy post inspired me to ask this question. I think there’s lots of delicious British food/it really depends on how you cook it, as with any cuisine.
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Haha, yeah, good joke.
I love a bunch of things listed but I’m into low effort. My friend did a jacket potato with baked beans, cheese, coleslaw and it was awesome
Bake the potato, butter it after cutting an X, add cheese then cover with warmed baked beans (if you’re American, find ones not baked with molasses or brown sugar. You want savory not sweet.) top with coleslaw and enjoy a meal in a dish
Super easy, delicious, the flavors and textures mixed well. Like baked potatoes you can add whatever you want but this was a new combination to me
Baked potato fast-food shops popped up all over the country recently. Haven’t gone to one yet because I actually get enough baked potatoes in my diet. I love the combination of cheese, butter, baked beans and potatoes, though.
This one drew in visitors from other, non neighbouring English counties, when it opened. BBC News Article
People are stunned when I tell them our Christmas dinner is a British recipe. Although it is no classical British household recipe, but comes from Jamie Oliver.
I had a crack at assembling a pie barm after learning what it was. It was way better than it should have been.
What is it? A meat pie served on a bread roll (barm is a specific type I believe) with optional brown sauce (HP for example).
The roll is great for handling reasons and for when the arse falls out of the pie.
Two things definitely stand out for me:
- The fish and chips are Awesome - fillets are delicious, and 3x the size of what I get in the States. The fish and chips are hot, crispy outside, tender inside.
- Baked goods. Pies, cakes, napoleons, etc are universally fantastic, especially anything made with puff pastry. I got sausage rolls for a pound sixty from under the heat lamps at Tesco that were as good as entrees I’ve had in US restaurants.
Does a steamed pud from a container count? Those things actually do kind of slap.
Yes
My grandma’s Yorkshire Puddings
Mine too. She was from Canada.
Haggis and cock a leekie soup. Mince and tatties are a close second.
Tbh haggis was the one thing that disappointed me. But the quality varied hugely from place to place. I brought home a canned one the shopkeeper highly recommended as one of the better brands. Meh.
I don’t have much to add to the actual question asked, I’m generally pro British food done right. I do want to mention that recently I found a British restaurant near my house in the US, and I’ve been watching too much GBBO so I had to get the apple pie, and it was the saddest thing I’ve ever eaten.
The apple pie was essentially an orb of wonder bread with a few slices of limp apple in the middle, and the whole thing was smothered in custard until soggy. Not one bit of sugar or anything resembling flavor to be found anywhere in the three ingredients. The apples were extremely gritty for some reason, it definitely wasn’t cinnamon.
I wanted to go full Karen and call the chef out to apologize for this food crime, but I’m not confident enough in my understanding of British food to say that isn’t authentic. If someone had made that on GBBO I’m sure they would have sent them home without even trying the rest of the food. I can imagine Paul going “Why is it so gritty?!”
Made with wrong kind of apples and kind of not enough thought into it is what i would say. But also i think you went in expecting american pie (xd) American Apple Pie, that is, which i guess holds togehter better than british apple pies.
BUT since it’s a restaurant they maybe should have made it a bit better - i’m sure british patrons would also scoff at that because they could just buy one from a supermarket that is functionally the same.
Your analysis is totally correct, they could have used cinnammon for instance to make it nicer, and i’ll repeat that they either used the wrong type of apples or cooked them wrong entirely.
More specifically, I went in hoping for the kind of pie I saw in Great British Bakeoff. Or, at least, a pastry of some sort. I think what I saw was less of an example of British cooking, and more of a chef who actively disdained humanity as a whole.
I can’t think of any dough that would end up like wonder bread, you should have gone full Karen. Granny smiths stewed with sugar (and optionally spices) in a short crust case is the right way to do it, though they did get the smothered in custard until soggy bit right.
Indan takeout
…served with a cold beer. (chef’s kiss)
I’ve been to London twice … and the best food I’ve ever eaten the whole time there was fish and chippy from a street vendor by tower hill.
Only the Brits would colonize half the world looking for spices and then refuse to use them in their food.
Only the Brits would colonize half the world looking for spices and then refuse to use them in their food.
Oh, do fuck off. It’s such a tired cliché and wrong. Our traditional dishes predate conquering almost the entire fucking world. So, no, they don’t tend to feature spices other than pepper and nutmeg because that was all we had 500 years ago.
But now our national dish is chicken tikka masala. We love our BIR curries, like Madras; Jalfrezi; Vindaloo; Korma; Pathia; and Balti. These were invented here, in the UK, for UK palates. So you can fuck off and shove whatever cuisine your country has up your fucking arse while you’re at it. Cunt.
I love spicy food, and once tried to order vindaloo at a family-run Indian place in Cornwall, but the owner convinced me to have Madras instead. Lucky thing, because the Madras was right at the perfect edge of my heat tolerance. I wouldn’t have been able to eat the vindaloo lol.
“We stole other countries foods and made them ours.”
Pop them in a museum and you’d complete the picture.
TIL: I should have explored more when I was over there … I just went to “pubs” and what I thought were British places … never thought of venturing on that side of the culinary spectrum.
Sounds like I need another trip soon LOL
If you’re going to go to the pubs for British food don’t do it in London. Don’t do it in a city at all, to be honest, all the really good ones are out in tiny villages or the middle of a moor.
I’ve had a lot of good food in Scotland, but one of the most memorable meals was in the Crinan Hotel’s seafood bar - a big plate of langoustines that had been caught that morning, served with perfect chips and aoli. On the menu they were called Loch Crinan jumbo prawns.
That image is playing major perspective tricks on me, lol. They look giant
huel
Honestly fish and chips in terms of a meal.
As part of a meal, Yorkshire pudding is unlike anything I’ve had in America, and nothing like what it evokes in the typical American.
More like popovers almost.
Visited Scotland
Walked into a little mom-n-pop fast restaurant
Wondered wtf is a “deep fried pizza”, ordered one.
Dude took a “frozen” pizza out of the fridge
Dude folded it in half and stuck it in an oil deep fry.
OMFG never tasted such sweet sin… crispy flakey crust on the outside, melty cheesy inside
Totally worth the 10 million calories and arterial hardening
I’m flabbergasted that I’ve never seen that dish in the US. Well done rando Scot!
What, did you think that was the one bit of Americana that didn’t cross an ocean?
Nah, thought Scots like themselves enough to not eat like that.
Oh, this isn’t ‘rando’. Chippies in Scotland will deep fry any fucking thing. Pizza? Standard. Mars bar? Of course! In some chippies you can even take something you’ve bought somewhere else and ask if they’ll batter and fry the fucker for you and they’ll say yes.
Whenever I get home to Scotland, my personal supper of choice is the haggis supper - a sausage of haggis meat, battered and deep fried, and served with beautifully fried chips, of course. The second night I’m home (especially if the wife isn’t with me) is a haddock supper. Fuckin’ grand.
I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I’m told by those who do that the deep fried Bounty is just the wrong side of the acceptable line of deep fried sweet shit.
I used to do a star bar tempura as a dessert.
I’ll never forget passing my local chippy when I lived in Edinburgh and seeing they’d handwritten “almost” on the “WE WILL DEEP FRY ANYTHING” sign.
Behind every sign there’s a story.
