Good British food... does it exists?

[Yopaz]

British cuisine is HORRIBLE. They have, however, made a good sport of cooking other nationalities food well. You should be okay.

Unfortunately we haven't mastered the art of deep frying everything in less then 30 seconds and ramming it between cardboard wedges then topping it off with a slice of flavored textured 'cheez', so you may feel a bit home sick.

You clearly don't know anything about American food. They know deep dry the cardboard too. Also to drink you get a nice glass of fried coke

OT: Get a traditional breakfast, for the rest just explore whatever is nearby when you're feeling hungry. I have had some of my best (and worst) meals when I've followed the instinct to just eat at a random place. In Prague I just walked with my friends and we decided to go into a restaurant that seemed nice. It's on my top 5 meals list. Be spontaneous and explore some rather than follow advice.

 

[Terminal Blue]

To be perfectly honest, your claims of 90% overlap don't wring true with me. See unlike the british isles, America is a big place, with lots and lots of different ethnic groups, So what you consider "American Cuisine" I would consider "A singular aspect of American cuisine"

You've never been to London, have you?

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Americans take the piss out of British food? Ok then.

We have the best pies, ever. And pasties. And cake. 'Indian food' is as much a British invention as it is Indian. Go to a decent pub and you'll find a lot of great food, it does exist.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Saying Uk has no good food is like saying American serves just McDonalds. America jokes about the fact the English have bad teeth, talk posh and drink warm beer. Unfortunately, the English have better teeth hygiene than America, we dont talk posh, most of us are common and we drink beer cold.....apart from ales that are meant to be room temp.

Uk has great food, we also have a huge amount of different nationalities here bringing food from India, China and Europe who bring there meals and restaurants here. Proper fish and chips are awesome....as in proper chunky cut chips and not fries. A good sunday roast or bangers and mash. A hamburger cooked from scratch by hand and not in a fast food restaurant. It depends what your likes and dislikes are in food and there is something for every one, i even found a Mexican food place a few weeks ago which surprised me. Also depends on where you go, some places cook crap food and other places cook amazing food.

But then i say thats down to history. America has no historical dishes, America is fairly new as all they have given the world is McDonalds so it always annoys me when they comment on our food. But, to counter this, when i go Florida i love Lennys subs, only place where the food looks exactly like the picture (dont get that in McDonalds. lol). I love your BBQ, Steaks and malt shakes. Fudpuckers has awesome burgers. An your choice in cinema popcorn is way superior to us....we just have salt or sweet. An Golden Coral is an amazing buffet place.

So, basiclly it depends where you go and what you eat. But part of travelling to other countries is tasting the food and not eating what you know.

 

[The White Hunter]

Traditionally British food has been crappy. Jellied eels? who in their right mind would eat them.

Londoners. I've lived my whole life in Britain and I have never met a single person who ate that crap.

East-Enders, to be more accurate. Plenty of Londoners won't touch jellied eels with a ten foot barge pole, but we cockneys cling to them. They are pretty tasty, it's just the jelly that's rank.

Thanks for clearing that up, I've never met a cockney in real life, which is bizarre I've met people from nearly everywhere else on the damn planet.

I personally avoid most seafood like I would avoid plague rats with the exception of fried scampi or prawns in batter or some kind. So yeah, I'll give the eels a miss. Can't do black pudding or anything either xP and yet I eat my steak still alive.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Hey, just realised.....you will actually be able to drink a proper beer than that watery crap they serve in America.

 

[The White Hunter]

Snip

On talking posh, wasn't there a thing done (some documentary on TV) about british accents (and I mean the whole bloody lot of them, all 250 odd or however many) and how americans interpreted them and when questioning american students they couldn't understand a lot of them fully with the worst offender being the geordie?

Cuz I have american friends who've failed to understand what I'm saying when I descend into my native jargon.

Hey, just realised.....you will actually be able to drink a proper beer than that watery crap they serve in America.

Yeah we serve german beer in the UK : D[sup]Joke[/sup]

Yeah try the local beers, they're good stuff. Look out for things like Dark Lord, Old Tom, and any black sheep ale.

 

[The White Hunter]

To be perfectly honest, your claims of 90% overlap don't wring true with me. See unlike the british isles, America is a big place, with lots and lots of different ethnic groups, So what you consider "American Cuisine" I would consider "A singular aspect of American cuisine"

You've never been to London, have you?

London is the only city I have ever been to where all the signs are in pictures because nobody speaks the same language.

 

[The Funslinger]

British cuisine is HORRIBLE. They have, however, made a good sport of cooking other nationalities food well. You should be okay.

Where the hell have you been eating!?

OP: British food is, objectively, the best food in the world.

There's nothing like a slice of well roasted beef or lamb, soaked in gravy, with some roast potatoes, and a side of Yorksire puddings. These are Yorkshire's contribution to the world, and it dwarfs all others, from penicillin to the Internet.

I also recommend you try Cornish Pasties, some good, fresh haddock and chips, and Irn Bru. Irn Bru is a brilliant soft drink.

The idea of British food being bad is absolutely insane. Sure, it's possible to cook poorly, but the same can be said of any food.

Edit: Not to mention British sweets. If you're American, you need to try our sweets.

 

[Stu35]

Yeah we serve german beer in the UK : D[sup]Joke[/sup]

Yeah try the local beers, they're good stuff. Look out for things like Dark Lord, Old Tom, and any black sheep ale.

On a serious note, German beer is pretty overrated - Having lived there for 3 years, I did enjoy their incredible territorialness over beers - for example, I drank Herforder when I was there, as I lived in Herford - my friend from Detmold would often scold me for this and insist we drank Detmolder together. Whenever I went to Wacken, I would of course bring crates of Herforder with me, and be chided by the various multitudes of Germans I ran into for not drinking THEIR local brew.


It was all rather amusing, because the majority German beer can be broken down into 3 main categories - Highly Carbonated Lager (which to my refined British ale drinking tastes, all tasted the same). Dunkel, and Wheat.

I enjoyed the Lager, far more than I do the pisswater we get here such as Carlsberg, Fosters, and, yes - Becks (which doesn't get to classify itself with the mighty Herforder).

I was a fairly big fan of some of the Dunkelbiers, however I found some of them to be a bit... I dunno, sickly? rich? couldn't have too many.

I was, however a huge, huge, huge fan of Weissbier, however it did cause me to suffer terrible gut rot the following day whenever I had a good session on it. Worth it.

 

[Squidbulb]

Try a Cornish Pasty. They're delicious.
A Full English Breakfast is always nice too.

 

[Jacob Fenton]

We have some of the finest food in the world.

Also, London isn't Britain - it's a horrible cosmopolitan wasteland. You want to come to Britain? Get on a Train and visit Yorkshire.

SNIPPED

Also, for proper historic shit (I know Americans love history, because you don't have any), then York is the best bet - It's got walls, York Minster, The Jorvik viking centre, It's in Yorkshire which automatically makes it better than all cities not in Yorkshire. And so on.

SECONDED! I'm from Yorkshire, it's nicknamed "god's country" for a reason.

Also, the "British food is bad" thing seems to come mostly from countries that are considered the big food lovers (France/Italy etc. Although France has plenty of other reasons to make out that Britain is rubbish, and Vice Versa) The "traditional" food is more designed to fill you and keep you warm rather than the enjoyment of food from places like Italy and France so it seems bland by comparison. But when we aren't trying to fatten ourselves up to survive the long, cruel and harsh summer so we can see the longer harsher winter we make some damn tasty food.

IIRC any food from an Indian takeaway that has meat in is pretty much an invention of the British/invented for the British since meat isn't as popular with Indian people. (could be way off the mark there though).

Unfortunately I won't even be in England when you're around though, currently living in Malta on a work placement.

Interesting aside - Horsemeat is a local delicacy here so the I'm getting to watch the horsemeat scandal and know I'm probably fine.

 

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Is there such a thing as tasty food from England?

I wouldn't expect the country that gave us spray on cheese and fast food to be making food jokes. You probably won't find grease coated shit everywhere so if that's your palette then you're going to hate our food. Get a good pasty, some fish and chips (I swear to God if you ask for fish and fries I'll gut you in your sleep), a Sunday roast from a nice restaurant and revel in the country that gave you life.

EDIT: Apologies if this seems rather angry but I just got done playing Empire Total War and Assassin's Creed 3 and I've been having a bit of trouble with the colonies.

 

[vrbtny]

I'm headed to London with my uni on Saturday and I can't help but wonder just how true or false the jokes about British cooking skills are. Is there such a thing as tasty food from England? does it cost an arm and a leg? will it be served by a gentleman wearing a top hat and monicle?


Also, if anyone is in the area and feels like hanging out with a ~190cm American, I'll more then likely be hanging out at the National Royal Hotel on the 6th at 6:30pm...

Well to be honest the quality of English food doesn't matter Jack if you're actually in England, because all the food shops are foreign anyway. We don't really have cuisine, so we just mask it by having all the other countries cook for us instead.

However if you are planning on Eating English, go for a full english breakfast with extra mushrooms.

When indulging in English cuisine, remember one strict rule : Bacon makes everything better. This is what our entire food industry is based on.

 

[Netrigan]

British cuisine is HORRIBLE. They have, however, made a good sport of cooking other nationalities food well. You should be okay.

Unfortunately we haven't mastered the art of deep frying everything in less then 30 seconds and ramming it between cardboard wedges then topping it off with a slice of flavored textured 'cheez', so you may feel a bit home sick.

This, so so much of this.


I can kinda tolerate Europeans taking the piss out of our food (not so much the french - 'coat it in Garlic' is not the same as having a great culture of food). Americans have no fucking right to criticise though.

As a Louisiana native, I challenge you to a duel. I demand satisfaction.

Of course, it's not unusual for food snobs to criticize our food for being insanely delicious, because somehow that's "unsophisticated".

 

[Frungy]

London is the only city I have ever been to where all the signs are in pictures because nobody speaks the same language.

... and I thought that was just because the East Enders couldn't read?

Jokes aside though, that was one of the things that struck me about London. Walk down a street in London during rush hour and you'll hear at least two dozen languages being spoken. Walk down a street in New York during rush hour and you'll hear maybe three, but normally just one. The U.S. is always on about how "multicultural" it is, but immigrants in the U.S. better learn to fit in, speak English and play basketball or baseball or they'll be universally rejected. When I visited the U.S. last I'd just been to Ireland for 6 months and my brogue was pretty thick. I was treated so amazingly rudely by people in the U.S. who asked me if I could speak English and didn't make the faintest attempt to understand me. It was just for my first day or so, but I was genuinely offended by the rudeness I encountered. The funniest thing? I went to an "Irish" pub in New York... and the owner asked me to repeat myself 3 times before he got my order. I had a Cork accent, which is far from extreme as far as Irish accents go. Oh, and the miserable fecker poured me a Guinness with almost no head and served it to me before it was settled. They don't even know how to draw a pint.

In the U.K. people are free to keep their own culture and language, and the Brits genuinely make an effort to understand someone who's speaking another language, and will ask around for someone who can translate (I saw this in Harrods where a woman in full burqa was trying to find her husband, and the staff were amazingly understanding... and culturally sensitive in trying to ensure that only female staff helped the woman). Sure English is required for business, but on the street and in shops no-one gives you the cold shoulder if you can't speak English very well, mostly they praise you for trying or ask where you're from and are quite interested.

 

[The White Hunter]

Yeah we serve german beer in the UK : D[sup]Joke[/sup]

Yeah try the local beers, they're good stuff. Look out for things like Dark Lord, Old Tom, and any black sheep ale.

On a serious note, German beer is pretty overrated - Having lived there for 3 years, I did enjoy their incredible territorialness over beers - for example, I drank Herforder when I was there, as I lived in Herford - my friend from Detmold would often scold me for this and insist we drank Detmolder together. Whenever I went to Wacken, I would of course bring crates of Herforder with me, and be chided by the various multitudes of Germans I ran into for not drinking THEIR local brew.


It was all rather amusing, because the majority German beer can be broken down into 3 main categories - Highly Carbonated Lager (which to my refined British ale drinking tastes, all tasted the same). Dunkel, and Wheat.

I enjoyed the Lager, far more than I do the pisswater we get here such as Carlsberg, Fosters, and, yes - Becks (which doesn't get to classify itself with the mighty Herforder).

I was a fairly big fan of some of the Dunkelbiers, however I found some of them to be a bit... I dunno, sickly? rich? couldn't have too many.

I was, however a huge, huge, huge fan of Weissbier, however it did cause me to suffer terrible gut rot the following day whenever I had a good session on it. Worth it.

I gotta agree with you german beer is a vastly overated thing, I've never had a bad one but the vast majority are just okay, they do the job and are refreshing and inoffensive but nothing I've had from Germany has ever been spectacular. I've had some poor british beer though, mostly extremely pale ales stuffed full of hops which to me are just sour disgusting things (Wychcraft comes to mind immediately). I prefer darker beers and ales such as Dark Lord, Old Tom, Riggwelter, McEwans Champion, etc. We have a lot of breweries around the lake district and a lot of them make some very nice beer, lots of beer festivals to celebrate it too.

As for lager... meh... I don't mind a nice well iced Carling but I'm no huge supporter of larger. If I must drink canned beer then I must drink the canned beer of champions:

Shame it's a touch expensive in England.

 

[majes]

Bangers and Mash is super delicious. Also, England has take-out Indian food similar to how America has take-out Chinese. And if you don't like curry, well then you must have no soul.

 

[Frungy]

As a Louisiana native, I challenge you to a duel. I demand satisfaction.

Of course, it's not unusual for food snobs to criticize our food for being insanely delicious, because somehow that's "unsophisticated".

Oh, if you want satisfaction then I suggest a good chicken and mushroom pie.

... oh, wait, not that kind of satisfaction?

Louisiana, depending on where you are is either French food or Creole/Cajun food. It certainly isn't "American" by any stretch of the imagination.

Now I have nothing against French food (snails are amazingly delicious!) and Creole/Cajun food is likewise excellent, but what gets my goat is when Americans claim that food in Louisiana is somehow a vindication of American food. It isn't. It just means they could read a recipe.

I didn't get down to Louisiana my last visit to the U.S., but it is on my list of places to visit... but first I need to lose 10 kgs... because thats how much I plan to put on during my visit.

 

[cwmdulais]

The food over here is just awful, the only reason we invaded other countries back in the day was to find better food.
I also hope you like ketchup, since everything will be smothered in either that or second rate gravy that we will insist is "a taste of Britain"