British Food: Classic or Dud (S&D too)

British food haters = ill informed.

this isn't true everywhere in the world?

i admit that i am scared of words like treacle and suet and "marrow jam". reminds me of that famous brit offal dude with the famous restaurant. the whole pig dude.

(Bit surprised that Orwell says back there that if you want a good cheap meal you'd go to a Greek or Chinese restaurant; I'd been led to believe you just didn't find such things until at least the 70s. Maybe you only did in London.)

things that are readily available in the US but are completely different in the UK

Saw a webpage recently that was some American kid going "holy crap WTF look at all the weird shit the Brits eat! Here is the British food I have been eating on my holiday" and it was, like, "Coke! In funny-shaped metric bottles! Salt and vinegar crisps, gross! [picture of a tin of Pringles] Curry sauce?! [picture of McDonalds sauce sachets]". Still not sure whether it was a joke.

The Royal Oak in Borough is good for pies as I think I mentioned up thread and i really like the square pie company chain doing take away boxes of pie, peas and mash.

My minging flatmate once bought some, and left half a loaf mouldering in a cupboard - the mould infected the wrapper too, crawled through the wrapper, and spread itself over the inside of her cupboard.

Scottish things and people that I like

It is horrible. My husband loves it and keeps buying it. It doesn't even fit in a toaster!

ALDOTM!

(it's the second of two google results for piece'n'mince)

k-OTM.

There are some brilliant places to eat in Glasgow, but I've found that if a restaurant has a Reputation or chic interior design, it's best avoided.

Ad-Lib's grey prawns and badly-spelled menu to thread!

this isn't true everywhere in the world?

That was my point, hence the Calabria dig. We get weepy eyed about cuisine de terroir, or difference in ham cures from one italian region to the next and yet forget our own.

those restaurants don't all serve British cuisine

The english language evolves constantly, taking on flavours from other cultures, why not the cuisine? An excellent point is made upthread about curry. Also, some of the restaurants listed serve french in the classical style, a style that was developed in part by imported British cooks. There was enormous crossover in the middle ages when the nation-state concepts of modern day "Britain" and "France" were significantly more ambiguous.

OTM! Thank God I'm going back up to Scotland next week! Bring it on!!!

The major chain grocer in Chicago (Jewel) has a multi-ethnic aisle that includes a British section. I wanted to try Spotted Dick, but it was unreasonably expensive, so I picked up another tasty-looking item, a can--I mean tin--of Heinz Curry Beans.

They.

Were.

VILE.

All I can taste now is cloves.

Should have gotten the Kit-Kat Chunky. I hear British mass market chocolate is way better than ours, even items of the same name.

Or maybe I should have shelled out for the Spotted Dick??

search:

full engish brek
yorkshire pudding
marmite
clapshot
bubble+sqk

I must ask that someone defend those indefensible beans.

I don't think that it's disputed that London has some of the best restaurants in the world, but those restaurants don't all serve British cuisine.

OTM. Plus whoever said restaurants in London were prohibitively expensive: wtf? You can eat at a top quality restaurant for around £50 ($100 ish) per head, so ok, not the kind of thing you can afford to do every night, but not what I'd called prohibitive either.

Heinz Curry Beans are pretty good.

Basically, the British tastes said the overly sweet US versions of baked beans should have half as much sugar so there was more tang of the tomato in the sauce. Heinz started mass-marketing this flavour in the UK in the 60s, prior to that baked beans had mainly been available as an 'exotic import' in posh food shops. Beans on toast rapidly became a fairly staple meal in poorer homes, as it was cheap and quick, and eaten extensively by students.

Curry Powder (as a generic garam masala mix) was developed during the days of the Raj for people who wanted to take the flavour of Indian food back to Britain, and reflects a general taste rather than a specific curry. As the boom in Indian food in Britain spread in the 60s, several big manufacturers started producing curry powder and it made its way into an awful lot of homes. And certainly some of them might have been having beans more than once a week, so might have added something like curry powder into one of those times to taste something different (I certainly remember my dad making his own curried beans by this method in the 70s). The mass-produced ones have a more standardised taste, and not really enough curry powder, but they're OK.

(some of the detail here, such as Fortnum & Masons being the first to import baked beans is from Wikipedia)

As to the chocolate, I guess it will depend on your tastes. I find mass-market American chocolate like gargling with vegetable oil (and I note the big manufacturers are trying to get to exactly that stage, with cocoa butter completely removed in favour of vegetable oil), and British mass-market chocolate pretty good, but then I like Curry Beans so YMMV.

Was the spotted dick Heinz in a tin too? If you wanted to try that kind of thing I'd go for something freshly made. It's nice when it's warm and the blends of spices are just right, otherwise it's just stodge. Haven't tried the Heinz one but I have eaten their treacle sponge and sticky toffee pudding tins, which were horribly sweet, synthetic, dry and heavy as lead. If you are going to get any tinned steam pudding you'll probably want some custard or some vanilla icecream to make your way through the sponge parts.

Those curry beans are just baked beans with mild curry powder tipped into the tomato sauce, right? Kind of disgusting on first mouthful but after a few more it becomes somehow charming in its bright orange E-numbers+turmeric rush, like currywurst. I'd take a currywurst, pommes und mayo over curried baked beans any day though. So the chocolate sounds like the best bet, as I would definitely agree that massmarket UK chocolate is a great deal nicer than anything American I've tried, but maybe that's just my British tastes.

And I'd say UK restaurant meals were expensive (can't remember the last time I had a restaurant meal that was less than £35-£45 per head, even the lacklustre chain restaurants charge in that region now) considering in the US and a lot of other European countries you could get a good meal out for half that, or at least when I've been abroad I've found that to be the case.

mention of Porters restaurant upthread. never been but looked them up the other day and found a couple of sites with wall to wall scathing reviews. Browns fared much better however.

i've not tried Heinz curry beans but their normal ones are fin - even better if you add in some Reggae Reggae sauce.

i think you mean 'deck', bro.

I've been to Porters, it was shit.

Ha, I was going to say "oh, I have been there once, to meet a friend who likes it so much that he's tried everything on the menu, and thought it was pretty good" and now I see that the mention upthread was me. Well. I will google myself some scathing reviews out of interest, but I'd still happily go back.

I took the missus there on her first visit to the UK cos she wanted to try some British food. I had a steak & ale pie, which TBH wasn't bad, but not really any better than a steak & ale pie at a Wetherspoon/Hogshead/etc, can't remember what she had but she didn't like it and the service was bloody awful.

Baked beans in general = indefensible. Curry variant even more so.

I bought the book on a whim in a remainder shop (might have been to read on the trip to Brighton?) and found it exceptionally MEH. Almost every recipe started "I used to love it when nanny made..." and it read like an advertising blurb for the restaurant which seems to mainly cater for tourist looking for the 'authetic' British experience (see their website, with packages that can be arranged with the bix box offices to tie in with the London Eye, the Tower, Madame Tussauds, Greenwich or a West End show - currently Blood Brothers or Chicago).

sausage in mug of baked beans = easily defensible

Sorry, that was a Porters-related xpost, not about the baked beans book. Which might well be as good as the Spam and Marmite ones, and is available from 1p on Amazon.

The Marmite one is shite - I was given it as a birthday present by somebody who saw it and thought "This is perfect for Lucy!" She wrote as much on the inside cover too.

Best UK food stuffs:

Cream tea (Ed/Tracer Hand division)
Donner meat and chips (ghetto division)

I never took the plunge with the Marmite one but the Spam one is OK for a deliberately branded item.

Eton Mess fucking rules. The only thing other than sexually attractive posh girls in ballgowns that makes me wish I'd had a public school education.

You forgot the shower rape.