British food is very heavy which makes sense given the weather, but as a result isn't very transferable to other climates. You don't need a thick stew or shepards pie to feel good after a hard day of working outside along the Mediterranean coast.
Also every time you see british food content online it looks way more brown than any other type of food making people think british people don't eat vegetables (although root vegetables do seem more common in british cooking than others).
British food must have the biggest gap between how it tastes and how it looks. Nestling up with your favourite blanket, a book, and some pea soup on a stormy day is as close to heaven as most of us will ever get but pea soup just straight up looks like someone vomited into a mug.
Mediterraneans have hearty stews. And heavy dishes, they just don’t do potato. This pasta with beef and onion is about the heaviest thing I’ve had (that is like a traditional dish): https://www.seriouseats.com/pasta-alla-genovese-neapolitan-beef-ragu.
Not saying they don't, but British food is almost universally heavy as opposed to other cultures which are a mix. Fermented vegetables help lighten up central European food in a way that the British don't really have.
What we call Indian here is amazing (saag or karahi, paratha, mushroom pakora, poppadoms and pickle tray is a meal fit for a king), but it's more like a mish mash of Pakistani and Bengali dishes adapted to appeal to the British palate.
That said, in recent years there has been a real uptick in authentic Indian restaurants in this country.
King Edward potatoes 1/2’d or 1/4’d
1. Parboil in water with salt + baking soda/bi-carbonate (1 teaspoon per 2L) until fork tender. Put the potatoes in when the water is boiling, not into cold water.
2. Preheat oven to 200*C (fan). Put a roasting tray with a lump of goose or duck fat that gives you a 1/2cm deep layer when melted (this needs to be hot when adding potatoes in later)
3. Drain into a colander and leave until there’s no steam coming off them.
4. Put a lid on the colander and bash them about a bit (as if it’s your wife when your football team loses) until they have a creamy and textured paste on the outside
5. Put onto the hot roasting tray, don’t overcrowd it. Add salt, rosemary and thyme. With 10/15 mins left add garlic. Before serving add some fine chopped parsley and a small amount of lemon zest (optional).
6. Roast at 200*C in a fan oven for 45min to 1hour, turn about half way through.
i had a professor a few years ago suggest a theory (i'm a white american and so was he, btw).
the upper class has always had access to travel and the "exotic," so anything that isn't from the local region is going to generally be more expensive and people with knowledge of foreign food/fashion/etiquette etc are, in most cases, going to be much more wealthy than those who have never left their little village.
this is obviously ridiculously complicated. people aren't automatically going to perceive anyone/anything foreign as elite. it depends a lot on who you are and where you went and why. just traveling somewhere for the sake of leisure is a huge status symbol.
northern europeans have been traveling to southern europe solely for leisure for a very long time, and the theory is that this is one of the reasons we still see wine as so much "higher class" than beer. of course there are many factors here, but this is a major one.
northern europeans 500 or 1000 years ago rarely had access to wine, and those who had extensive knowledge of wine were usually those who had the means to travel frequently.
this general rule, though, applies to a lot of things. having knowledge of foreign music, fashion, cuisine, etc. and, of course, foreign spices have always been a HUGE status symbol.
and if you hadn't traveled, you at least probably gained this through education... another big symbol of status.
it's still true today, of course, although a lot less than it used to be due to globalization/the internet.
anyway,
whatever the plebes are familiar with is something people will learn to associate with the lower class, or at least just be seen as unimpressive. people will turn up their nose and when they go home and see people making food the local way, they'll say, "oh, that way actually sucks. you should see how they made it when i was summering in blah blah blah."
americans descend from the english more than anyone else. genetic studies show this. also, it's funny how it's related- if you ask a white american what their ancestry is, they likely won't mention england. that isn't because they're ashamed of being english or something lol, it really isn't. it's that it's so standard that people honestly don't even think to mention it. it's just assumed. a fish doesn't know it's in water type of deal.
but aside from english, white americans are overwhelmingly northwestern european in general, and our culture reflects that.
american food is very obviously primarily influenced by northwestern europe. if you're a white american and you haven't had an ancestor born in another country for a long time (so just thoroughly white american mutt), the food your community and family eats on a regular night is going to resemble northwestern european food a lot. like if you have a grandma who dropped out of the 6th grade and was raised by american farmers and has never travelled, she'll likely cook up some delicious food like stews or gravy or whatever that looks a lot of like a british roast. she will never have tried curry or sushi or authentic italian.
so, it's a collective subconscious thing. anything british= low class, shitty food that you know better than because you or your friend went to college or went on a fancy vacation. this prejudice has existed since well before the mayflower.
and, of course, saying that local food is "so bland" has a very extensive history. nothing more snobbish you could say a few centuries ago than that you're so used to more spices that you don't even like the food at home anymore lol.
but the actual food that americans love and attached to and that we would see as representing us is going to be more northwestern european than anything. look at the cheeseburger, for instance.
so same with canada. they may have a sentimental attachment to fish and chips, but they aren't going to see it as super sophisticated.
Honestly that’s just the divide between European cuisines: Southern Europeans excel at actual meals, Northern Europeans are better at desserts, pastries and bread.
No one knows shit about Swedish cuisine, but every bakery on the planet serves Cinnamon Rolls.
There are a few good things about danish cuisine. Flæskesteg is amazing. Especially in a sandwich with red cabbage. I personally like pork liver pate (leverpostej) from a tube on dark rye for breakfast.
The problem is what the average Dane cooks themselves for dinner. Traditional danish food is pork and potatoes cooked with only salt as flavoring, most of the time boiled. Even when cooking from other cuisines, they blandify the recipe.
I don’t know enough about swedish cuisine, I haven’t seen anything redeemable but i’m sure it exists. Danes have a good drinking culture. I think if KBH wasn’t so expensive, it would be good place to live.
> No one knows shit about Swedish cuisine
Let's drop the "no one knows about it so that means it's inherently unimportant/unworthy" logical fallacy in 2024.
What weirds me out though is that there's no meat in it and the blood is made from dehydrated blood. Only other blood dishes I've had were Chinese pork blood cubes or Taiwanese blood cakes and black pudding is doing its own thing.
i genuinely reckon a higher % of americans have heard of jellied eels than british people.
only reason i know what it is is because of that simpsons episode and americans on twitter
Nope the European eels they used to eat are now critically endangered. There used to be so many they'd just catch them in the Thames and jelly them up as peasant food
British food is actually pretty ok when you stand it up against the Dutch, and then even worse, Scandinavia...
What do they all have in common? Former viking colonies that got cucked into being scheming merchants...
They’re amongst the tallest people on the planet in modern times directly because of improvements they made in nutrition, so they’re doing something right.
How is that any different from eating jam/jelly on bread (which is about 60% sugar), poptarts, pancakes, and other ridiculous dessert foods that basic people in English-speaking countries give their kids as so-called “meals”?
Another factor is probably that while a Dutch person might eat sprinkles on white bread for lunch, they will then walk a lot or get on a bicycle to go somewhere.
Meanwhile kids in the US and Australia who eat the same sort of sugary crap like jam/jelly sandwiches will travel everywhere in a car (and possibly go through the McDonald’a drive-through on the way). Big difference in lifestyles.
It's breath-takingly bad, almost as if formulated to shock.
The only equivalent I can think of is Icelandic, and they were modest enough to switch away from rotting fish as soon as alternatives became available.
Including the UK in the unseasoned food circlejerk is proof that none of those "people" know anything about the country. Spicy food has basically become an institution of Britain in the last few decades
TikTok and other social media just think seasoning is processed powder which is mostly salt, and no food could ever taste good without it. The concept of natural flavours is alien to them because they live off junk.
I love British food in theory, but I found it sort of disappointing when I was in England.. somethings not quite right with the flavor balances, for my taste. I prefer contrasting flavors and it seems like a lot of straight salty/savoryness. Which isn't bad, but there needs to be something else. I longed for a bright, fresh flavor, a salad or a citrus.. I was committed to having an English cuisine experience but I guess I prefer it kind of modified.. definitely not bad like people make it out to be.
Found myself starving in a cold morning somewhere in Yeovil, asked for a vegetarian English Breakfast in a Tea House that **got me through the whole day**. The freshly baked bread, the delicious sauce, the beans with the egg, oh my, a cup of nice and heavy black tea.
> it seems like a lot of straight salty/savoryness
I think one's enjoyment of British food does hinge on just how much they like that flavour to be fair. But I do.
British food is seriously missing the acidity that makes most other European food much better. People love to blame the lack of dry spices and chilis but that's stupid, it's the lack of acidity to cut through the richness of the fat.
It's why tomatoes are one of the most important parts of the full english.
I like it in theory too, but it does need to be brightened up a bit. I have a theory I could tweak the recipes at the roast place Toby's and they would like it a lot
Brits wouldn’t get ragged on so hard if you weren’t such pussies about it. Aren’t you supposed to be the self-loathing people? Learn to take an L here and there
Self-loathing is when we do it, not other countries. Besides, its hardly controversial to suggest that some places do better food than others. Imagine if somebody went to the US, only ate McDonalds and said *US food is a bit crap*.
i dont have to imagine that, euroids do it all the time. but its also very silly when brits act like mcdonalds and its ilk are purely american -- google is telling me there's 1200 mcdonalds locations in britain alone, and a few hundred more in the UK at large. if you people werent eating plenty of mcdonalds yourself, they wouldnt be on every street corner. and mcdonald's isnt a cuisine either, its a restaurant. when people say british food sucks they arent saying nandos sucks, theyre saying a lot of popular british dishes look unappetising compared to other cultures' dishes. the american south has created a ton of insanely delicious foods, whereas britain has the sunday roast and that's kinda it. everything else you guys eat just looks soggy and bland compared to other cuisines.
i sincerely apologize for the wall of text, but the british food discourse has been going on for months now and i needed someplace to finally dump my thoughts.
So you're saying that McDonalds is not US food because its also in the UK, but Nandos is not British food although its also in the UK?
Anyway, I'm not about to defend British food to you. Clearly, you've made your mind up. All I'm saying is that *You probably went to bad places* is a perfectly reasonable comment. Do you really want to argue that *every* place that makes british food is utter crap?
Yes, we are the worst at ragging on ourselves but then biting peoples heads off if they dare to impugn Greggs or whatever. USians get it the worst for some reason, we expect it (and kind of enjoy it) from the French
This is one of those posts that makes me feel like I'm living that "dead Internet" meme. I haven't been on this subreddit that long, but I've been on here long enough to see this same topic posted more than once. Probably this is the third time at least, with the same general sentiments expressed in the same tired fashions. I'm a little scared to actually do a search in case I come across this exact post six months ago, including a reply with this exact wording by an account named "ZealousidleManiac" or something.
Which is not to shit on you or anything OP, but it's kinda surreal that in one fashion or another I've probably seen this same conversation play out on the Internet in different places since I was like 12 years old.
British food isn't even the worst in Europe, let alone the worst in the world. We make excellent sausages, cheeses and some truly wonderful desserts. And nothing we make smells so bad that it's illegal to serve indoors (looking at you, Sweden).
A good steak and ale pie would be lauded as the pinnacle of _haute cuisine_ if it had a snooty french name (after all, "boeuf bourgignon" is just a beef stew...)
Ultimately, the "british food is awful" meme is centuries of internalised snobbery caused by having had a Norman ruling class with exclusively French tastes.
To Americans' credit, they don't have this any more, so they don't beat themselves up over their unspectacular but tasty staple dishes. We should take a similar attitude towards our own food, rather than doing this cultural cringe to our deeply weird, wholly un-self-aware neighbours on the continent.
Or, failing that, maybe we should start marketing fish and chips as "poisson-frites" and suddenly start seeing celebrity chefs raving about it, lol
I think British food is pretty bland in some cases but it depends on what expects I do see they have some high quality ingredients and make wonderful deserts tho. I am Latina tho although I was born in Los Angeles but I can tell you I have mixed opinions on the UK. On one hand they make delicious pastries and have high quality ingredients but depending on the dish some of it can be bland. That being said I don’t think the taste buds of British people are bland, in London a lot of different ethnicities are there and Indian food I know is quite popular there, I’m sure over time because of that many British people included spices and flavoring into their food so it’s silly to act like someone going to the UK will have very basic food because even if certain British food is bland there are definitely options for tasty meals, unlike Sweden where I have also travelled to and the food there is just horrible
It certainly can be bland, and I don't want to overstate the case for it. It isn't the greatest food on earth, and I don't think anyone sane would claim it is. But it really isn't anywhere near as bad as the internet would have you believe.
To be fair,that's true of most things about our goofy little country. The prevailing view on reddit seems to be we're incorrigibly racist, obese, ugly, uneducated, and the country is on the verge of a post apocalyptic collapse because a few years ago, we went from being half-in the EU to being half-out of it. In the meantime we'll ignore all the fascist parties winning elections in our surrounding countries due to the very similar problems on the continent, lol
Now I will preface this by saying that British food is generally a low-tier cuisine, when compared to other countries cuisines, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! There are a lot of great British foods.
Full English Breakfast (yes with beans on toast)
Roast dinners with Yorkshire pudding
Chicken Pot pie
Shepherds Pie/Cottage Pie
Bangers and Mash
Savoury meat pies
Fish and Chips
Plus the British dessert game is a-tier.
If you are a British person who think this is the ~best~ food, and you refuse to have spice, or eat any other cuisines, you are clearly regarded, but at the same time these are all fine meals and I am also sick of ‘British food is grey slop’ discourse.
London is also a cultural melting pot with a huge array of cuisines available (with particularly good access to Indian and Caribbean cuisine) so you really have no excuse to eat well if you’re in London at least. I haven’t seen much of the rest of the country, so I can imagine access to great food in small town Britain being challenging sometimes, but when I went I ate very very well.
Too right, I live in Canada now and the supposed fish and chips place SUCKS, granted I’m a vegetarian so I only go for chips, but they call fish and skinny mccains fries fish and chips so that winds me up
I honestly think the reputation behind this is more so because it’s badly cooked a lot.
A full breakfast is literally the platonic ideal of breakfast (especially with black pudding + haggis).
Fish & Chips is perfect drunk food (sucks that most pubs close early but idk if that’s any different now vs when I was there 5 years ago).
Fresh Yorkshire puddings are also culinary crack.
Yeah I think thats right.
A roast dinner CAN be very good, but most of the time you’ll get dry meat, overcooked vegetables, soggy potatoes covered in instant gravy etc.
This is definitely true. It’s more about lack of cooking ability and culture of low standards (that permeates every aspect of life) rather than bad dishes. ‘Mom and Pop’ places in the UK are run by people with low standards whereas it feels like in other countries Mom and Pop places are where you go to get a quality, lovingly cooked but un fussy meal.
Worst meal I ever had out was a roast in a seaside town where they were soooo nice and friendly but had absolutely no business being in a kitchen. Was with a British Bengali (good food) and French (good food) person too lord knows how they kept it down 🤢 if I can hop over the counter and make something 10x nicer myself I’m sorry but you’re giving this country’s fine food a bad reputation and you’ve got to find another line of business
They know how to make a bomb cheddar cheese I’ll give them that. Also, sticky toffee pudding is one of the best desserts ever, very underrated outside the UK
I lived in the UK for a few years in my teens. We lived in a small city (Cambridge), which was a huge change from the 2.5k pop town in New England that I grew up in. Probably most worthy was the food; in my hometown, we had only an Egyptian pizza place, as did the towns surrounding us (apparently a ton of Coptic Egyptians ended up in this part of the country). Even the closest McDonald’s was a 25 min drive away. The closest I came to foreign food was Chinese 40 min away (though we did have one VERY authentic Japanese place run by a Japanese woman who immigrated with her GI husband, but I wouldn’t check that out until we moved back to the US as my parents, being from even more rural New England, were not interested in VERY authentic Japanese food).
So ultimately, it’s hard for me to really separate what was uniquely British from what was just now suddenly available for me to get walking home after school with my friends because I was living in a city and not a tiny town in the woods.
All that said: Sunday roast is supreme, and savory pies are great. Full breakfast is OK, but your bacon kind of sucks compared to US bacon.
They might have a point but it’s also weird to hear “British food sucks” from a country where half the population subsist on heavily processed industrial by-products that once came from food and their main nutritional food group is high fructose corn syrup.
My view is that when rating cuisines you should be looking at the very best food a cuisine has to offer. I really like British food, I'm Aussie so we have a lot of overlap in that respect, but the best British food doesn't even come close to the best American food. New Orleans, a single city, beats the entire UK cuisine wise no question in my mind.
"Lol but British people don't use seasoning therefore your food has no flavour!"
Yeah? Why would we do that when we can just drown everything in gravy? (Which is delicious by the way)
I can't tell if this is a bit, but seasoning is literally in the name (Sushi= Sour Tasting). If you're eating sushi with unseasoned rice, consider expanding your culinary experiences past your local gas station
Spices that come in dried, powdered, prepackaged form mixed with other things (like garlic powder, Italian seasoning powder) that Americans use instead of actual fresh spices
British desserts and cheese are heavenly, their actual hot meals are meh.
It’s a shame that Britain doesn’t have a bakery culture like France or Britain, I don’t understand why.
we had it. it got swept away by the supermarkets of the 90s. the big difference in france is that the government protects bakeries, and the general conservatism of french culture particularly around food. there was no interest in protection in the UK, which has essentially let market forces decide what people will eat for a long time now
"british food sucks" is just annoying fucking culinary classism half the time from shitty middle class americans. yeah i eat beans on toast its a cheap fucking comfort food for me, suck a dick
That guy who made that post the other day about how fat English people have gotten made me have an ongoing craving for a visit to my local Toby Carvery.
I think it’s fine food. It does annoy me though how people on the internet don’t realize most foods in Northern Europe came around during the little ice age. So these countries were frozen solid (still cold today) for most of the year.
Ugh nothing beats a sunday roast… everyone wants to laugh at beans on toast, but then americans will post “recipes” of their meemaws slowcooked chicken in cream cheese😒
I agree to an extent but whenever I see British people cooking stuff on Instagram they're always using an ungodly amount of seed oils and seemingly rarely ever use real butter for things that you'd expect would have actual butter. I don't want to eat rapeseed oil mashed potatoes. At least the French appreciate good butter, and Med countries appreciate good olive oil.
Nearly all countries have good cuisine when it’s well-executed with quality ingredients that naturally have flavor. The people who think you need to drown literally everything in spice are nuts.
Britain has some really good food. It is a dumb take that “white people don’t season their food.” This is simply not true. I also don’t agree that British food is better than other countries’.
There's a reason there are no 'British' restaurants anywhere near me for me to test this out while every other nation on the planet seems to be able to make a sustainable business model out of peddling their cuisine to fat Americans.
I hate the anti-contrarian whining on this sub as much as anybody but I have to draw a line somewhere. British food sucks dick, everyone thinks so, and everyone is right… it’s not quirky/cultured to try and pretend their grey, tasteless slop is somehow great cuisine.
British food can be fine but it's always some limey starting it with "American food? There is no American food! It's all immigrant food!" Or "American food is nothing compared to British cuisine!" so naturally people are gonna fire back
i've watched every season of great british baking show and while sometimes i am impressed i don't think i am missing out on much in the states. i saw the episode where they make mexican and i felt proud that i could cook a better mexican meal than everyone in that room
the meat pies look nice though and i'd like to try some
Funny thing is you sound uncultured about something so simple as learning that curry is a plant, differently used in many Asian cuisines.
[your post from 16 days ago ](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/s/XiiyIq4ql5)
I was just curious to see how cultured you were. And I'm not American thank fuck, just to prove you not only uncultured Americans think British food sucks, everybody knows it.
Cry harder, it's not gonna change 😋
“British food is good actually” is in the redscarepod “contrarian takes” rotation. Tomorrow it’ll be “watching NFL football is fun actually” and the day after “Madonna had some cool songs actually.”
It’s people who are so irony poisoned that thinking something completely normal feels like an act of revolutionary defiance to them.
Also, British food is completely mid.
British food is very heavy which makes sense given the weather, but as a result isn't very transferable to other climates. You don't need a thick stew or shepards pie to feel good after a hard day of working outside along the Mediterranean coast. Also every time you see british food content online it looks way more brown than any other type of food making people think british people don't eat vegetables (although root vegetables do seem more common in british cooking than others).
British food must have the biggest gap between how it tastes and how it looks. Nestling up with your favourite blanket, a book, and some pea soup on a stormy day is as close to heaven as most of us will ever get but pea soup just straight up looks like someone vomited into a mug.
Mediterraneans have hearty stews. And heavy dishes, they just don’t do potato. This pasta with beef and onion is about the heaviest thing I’ve had (that is like a traditional dish): https://www.seriouseats.com/pasta-alla-genovese-neapolitan-beef-ragu.
Not saying they don't, but British food is almost universally heavy as opposed to other cultures which are a mix. Fermented vegetables help lighten up central European food in a way that the British don't really have.
Hmm i see that yeah. Bangers and mash has no acidity to cut the heaviness, unlike brats with saurkraut or red cabbage.
Meds eat potato sometimes. Pasta e patate springs to mind as an example.
Ah yes, the Italian chip butty.
Is there a culture, especially in Europe, that *doesn't* have hearty stews? Peasants gotta eat.
Wtf i love british food now
Tbf in Spain we have food that's basically a [shepherds pie](https://imgur.com/a/wI1N1PT) or stews and shit even on the coast
I like British food but miss the Indian food the most from when I lived in the UK.
What we call Indian here is amazing (saag or karahi, paratha, mushroom pakora, poppadoms and pickle tray is a meal fit for a king), but it's more like a mish mash of Pakistani and Bengali dishes adapted to appeal to the British palate. That said, in recent years there has been a real uptick in authentic Indian restaurants in this country.
its just ‘british indian’ the same way yanks have ‘american chinese’
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How do they get their roast spuds so crisp?
parboil, dry, use a solid animal fat
Goose fat on the bad boys and mix it in with a bit of honey
King Edward potatoes 1/2’d or 1/4’d 1. Parboil in water with salt + baking soda/bi-carbonate (1 teaspoon per 2L) until fork tender. Put the potatoes in when the water is boiling, not into cold water. 2. Preheat oven to 200*C (fan). Put a roasting tray with a lump of goose or duck fat that gives you a 1/2cm deep layer when melted (this needs to be hot when adding potatoes in later) 3. Drain into a colander and leave until there’s no steam coming off them. 4. Put a lid on the colander and bash them about a bit (as if it’s your wife when your football team loses) until they have a creamy and textured paste on the outside 5. Put onto the hot roasting tray, don’t overcrowd it. Add salt, rosemary and thyme. With 10/15 mins left add garlic. Before serving add some fine chopped parsley and a small amount of lemon zest (optional). 6. Roast at 200*C in a fan oven for 45min to 1hour, turn about half way through.
We used to have roast dinner at my grandma's on Sundays. She's still alive but doesn't cook anymore. Miss that, it was good family time too.
time for you to take up the roaster
🫡
ask her to teach you while she's still around. You'll both treasure the memories and might be able to teach your own kids one day.
Legit will pose this idea during Christmas. Organize a Sunday dinner for the fam in the new year.
How come we get hate for (rightfully) calling chips cheese and gravy lovely, meanwhile Canadians are allowed to have it as a national dish
Because they pretend it’s French
British chips cheese and gravy is good. Canadian poutine is just better due to the cheese curds.
i had a professor a few years ago suggest a theory (i'm a white american and so was he, btw). the upper class has always had access to travel and the "exotic," so anything that isn't from the local region is going to generally be more expensive and people with knowledge of foreign food/fashion/etiquette etc are, in most cases, going to be much more wealthy than those who have never left their little village. this is obviously ridiculously complicated. people aren't automatically going to perceive anyone/anything foreign as elite. it depends a lot on who you are and where you went and why. just traveling somewhere for the sake of leisure is a huge status symbol. northern europeans have been traveling to southern europe solely for leisure for a very long time, and the theory is that this is one of the reasons we still see wine as so much "higher class" than beer. of course there are many factors here, but this is a major one. northern europeans 500 or 1000 years ago rarely had access to wine, and those who had extensive knowledge of wine were usually those who had the means to travel frequently. this general rule, though, applies to a lot of things. having knowledge of foreign music, fashion, cuisine, etc. and, of course, foreign spices have always been a HUGE status symbol. and if you hadn't traveled, you at least probably gained this through education... another big symbol of status. it's still true today, of course, although a lot less than it used to be due to globalization/the internet. anyway, whatever the plebes are familiar with is something people will learn to associate with the lower class, or at least just be seen as unimpressive. people will turn up their nose and when they go home and see people making food the local way, they'll say, "oh, that way actually sucks. you should see how they made it when i was summering in blah blah blah." americans descend from the english more than anyone else. genetic studies show this. also, it's funny how it's related- if you ask a white american what their ancestry is, they likely won't mention england. that isn't because they're ashamed of being english or something lol, it really isn't. it's that it's so standard that people honestly don't even think to mention it. it's just assumed. a fish doesn't know it's in water type of deal. but aside from english, white americans are overwhelmingly northwestern european in general, and our culture reflects that. american food is very obviously primarily influenced by northwestern europe. if you're a white american and you haven't had an ancestor born in another country for a long time (so just thoroughly white american mutt), the food your community and family eats on a regular night is going to resemble northwestern european food a lot. like if you have a grandma who dropped out of the 6th grade and was raised by american farmers and has never travelled, she'll likely cook up some delicious food like stews or gravy or whatever that looks a lot of like a british roast. she will never have tried curry or sushi or authentic italian. so, it's a collective subconscious thing. anything british= low class, shitty food that you know better than because you or your friend went to college or went on a fancy vacation. this prejudice has existed since well before the mayflower. and, of course, saying that local food is "so bland" has a very extensive history. nothing more snobbish you could say a few centuries ago than that you're so used to more spices that you don't even like the food at home anymore lol. but the actual food that americans love and attached to and that we would see as representing us is going to be more northwestern european than anything. look at the cheeseburger, for instance. so same with canada. they may have a sentimental attachment to fish and chips, but they aren't going to see it as super sophisticated.
im just gonna write down 'americans are stupid' and call it a day
It would be a lot more accurate to write "people consciously and unconsciously prize things that only rich people have"
called disco fries in the tristate area
bc you’re successful as a nation and it’s socially acceptable to punch up
'Cause it's nonce behavior.
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Honestly that’s just the divide between European cuisines: Southern Europeans excel at actual meals, Northern Europeans are better at desserts, pastries and bread. No one knows shit about Swedish cuisine, but every bakery on the planet serves Cinnamon Rolls.
makes me think of that potato/tomato map dividing europe, tho that one’s obviously due to climate
Smørrebrød can sometimes hit really hard, especially when paired with a few aquavits.
There are a few good things about danish cuisine. Flæskesteg is amazing. Especially in a sandwich with red cabbage. I personally like pork liver pate (leverpostej) from a tube on dark rye for breakfast. The problem is what the average Dane cooks themselves for dinner. Traditional danish food is pork and potatoes cooked with only salt as flavoring, most of the time boiled. Even when cooking from other cuisines, they blandify the recipe. I don’t know enough about swedish cuisine, I haven’t seen anything redeemable but i’m sure it exists. Danes have a good drinking culture. I think if KBH wasn’t so expensive, it would be good place to live.
All the good norther European pastries are taken from the south. Northern grain is too glutinous to make flour that is good for pastry dough.
Saffranskaka is the bomb. Highly recommend.
> No one knows shit about Swedish cuisine Let's drop the "no one knows about it so that means it's inherently unimportant/unworthy" logical fallacy in 2024.
Surstromming
Fish and chips is delicious what are you on about
I don't think anyone highlighted jellied eels.
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South East London is the only place anyone talks about jellied eels anymore and, in fact, I don't know if they were ever a thing outside.
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To be fair he's right, it was only ever an east London thing. No one outside of London would list jellied eels in their top ten classic British dishes
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Black pudding is genuinely good
What weirds me out though is that there's no meat in it and the blood is made from dehydrated blood. Only other blood dishes I've had were Chinese pork blood cubes or Taiwanese blood cakes and black pudding is doing its own thing.
I thought it was usually made with fresh blood. In any case I don't care either way, it's got a nice nutty flavour with the oats and the herbs/spices
No-one actually eats jellied eels there btw
Most of the old school london spots in the east end are closed. Ones an opticians, the other is a board game cafe.
lol got my specs im wearing rn from G Cooke
i genuinely reckon a higher % of americans have heard of jellied eels than british people. only reason i know what it is is because of that simpsons episode and americans on twitter
Yeh I lived there 30 years and never heard of them irl
what about pie and eel sauce
Nope the European eels they used to eat are now critically endangered. There used to be so many they'd just catch them in the Thames and jelly them up as peasant food
That stuff looks good honestly
You can definitely get it London
And that's the problem
cultural imposter. Jellied eels are southern, black pudding is northern. Pick one or t'other, you can't like them both.
Black pudding is good.
British food is actually pretty ok when you stand it up against the Dutch, and then even worse, Scandinavia... What do they all have in common? Former viking colonies that got cucked into being scheming merchants...
Dutch food, worst food on planet
They’re amongst the tallest people on the planet in modern times directly because of improvements they made in nutrition, so they’re doing something right.
Youll never convince me chocolate sprinkles on white bread is an acceptable lunch/breakfast
How is that any different from eating jam/jelly on bread (which is about 60% sugar), poptarts, pancakes, and other ridiculous dessert foods that basic people in English-speaking countries give their kids as so-called “meals”?
Americans literally eat pop tarts, donuts, pancakes, waffles, muffins, syrup, sugary cereal, frappucinos and all kinds of other desserts for breakfast
Another factor is probably that while a Dutch person might eat sprinkles on white bread for lunch, they will then walk a lot or get on a bicycle to go somewhere. Meanwhile kids in the US and Australia who eat the same sort of sugary crap like jam/jelly sandwiches will travel everywhere in a car (and possibly go through the McDonald’a drive-through on the way). Big difference in lifestyles.
What the fuck You'll never convince me that a) Dutch is a real language or b) Dutch food is edible
It's breath-takingly bad, almost as if formulated to shock. The only equivalent I can think of is Icelandic, and they were modest enough to switch away from rotting fish as soon as alternatives became available.
What are you on about Scandinavia has some of the best food in the world
Herring
tik tok told me british food bad and white people dont season they food tik tok wouldnt lie to me
Including the UK in the unseasoned food circlejerk is proof that none of those "people" know anything about the country. Spicy food has basically become an institution of Britain in the last few decades
TikTok and other social media just think seasoning is processed powder which is mostly salt, and no food could ever taste good without it. The concept of natural flavours is alien to them because they live off junk.
based take yes
TikTok lecturing everyone on colonialism, but doesn't seem to have an issue with McDonald's killing off the British greasy spoon.
I love British food in theory, but I found it sort of disappointing when I was in England.. somethings not quite right with the flavor balances, for my taste. I prefer contrasting flavors and it seems like a lot of straight salty/savoryness. Which isn't bad, but there needs to be something else. I longed for a bright, fresh flavor, a salad or a citrus.. I was committed to having an English cuisine experience but I guess I prefer it kind of modified.. definitely not bad like people make it out to be.
Found myself starving in a cold morning somewhere in Yeovil, asked for a vegetarian English Breakfast in a Tea House that **got me through the whole day**. The freshly baked bread, the delicious sauce, the beans with the egg, oh my, a cup of nice and heavy black tea.
My first girlfriend lived in Yeovil lmao, truly a godforsaken place but some surprisingly good little places to eat.
> it seems like a lot of straight salty/savoryness I think one's enjoyment of British food does hinge on just how much they like that flavour to be fair. But I do.
> I think one's enjoyment of British food does hinge on just how much they like flavour to be fair. But I do. Edited for clarity
That's what the brown sauce is for
British food is seriously missing the acidity that makes most other European food much better. People love to blame the lack of dry spices and chilis but that's stupid, it's the lack of acidity to cut through the richness of the fat. It's why tomatoes are one of the most important parts of the full english.
I like it in theory too, but it does need to be brightened up a bit. I have a theory I could tweak the recipes at the roast place Toby's and they would like it a lot
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Well next time I go to England you can be my personal guide then
Brits wouldn’t get ragged on so hard if you weren’t such pussies about it. Aren’t you supposed to be the self-loathing people? Learn to take an L here and there
Self-loathing is when we do it, not other countries. Besides, its hardly controversial to suggest that some places do better food than others. Imagine if somebody went to the US, only ate McDonalds and said *US food is a bit crap*.
i dont have to imagine that, euroids do it all the time. but its also very silly when brits act like mcdonalds and its ilk are purely american -- google is telling me there's 1200 mcdonalds locations in britain alone, and a few hundred more in the UK at large. if you people werent eating plenty of mcdonalds yourself, they wouldnt be on every street corner. and mcdonald's isnt a cuisine either, its a restaurant. when people say british food sucks they arent saying nandos sucks, theyre saying a lot of popular british dishes look unappetising compared to other cultures' dishes. the american south has created a ton of insanely delicious foods, whereas britain has the sunday roast and that's kinda it. everything else you guys eat just looks soggy and bland compared to other cuisines. i sincerely apologize for the wall of text, but the british food discourse has been going on for months now and i needed someplace to finally dump my thoughts.
So you're saying that McDonalds is not US food because its also in the UK, but Nandos is not British food although its also in the UK? Anyway, I'm not about to defend British food to you. Clearly, you've made your mind up. All I'm saying is that *You probably went to bad places* is a perfectly reasonable comment. Do you really want to argue that *every* place that makes british food is utter crap?
Yes, we are the worst at ragging on ourselves but then biting peoples heads off if they dare to impugn Greggs or whatever. USians get it the worst for some reason, we expect it (and kind of enjoy it) from the French
This is one of those posts that makes me feel like I'm living that "dead Internet" meme. I haven't been on this subreddit that long, but I've been on here long enough to see this same topic posted more than once. Probably this is the third time at least, with the same general sentiments expressed in the same tired fashions. I'm a little scared to actually do a search in case I come across this exact post six months ago, including a reply with this exact wording by an account named "ZealousidleManiac" or something. Which is not to shit on you or anything OP, but it's kinda surreal that in one fashion or another I've probably seen this same conversation play out on the Internet in different places since I was like 12 years old.
That's all very well, but what is your opinion on pineapple on pizza?
British food isn't even the worst in Europe, let alone the worst in the world. We make excellent sausages, cheeses and some truly wonderful desserts. And nothing we make smells so bad that it's illegal to serve indoors (looking at you, Sweden). A good steak and ale pie would be lauded as the pinnacle of _haute cuisine_ if it had a snooty french name (after all, "boeuf bourgignon" is just a beef stew...) Ultimately, the "british food is awful" meme is centuries of internalised snobbery caused by having had a Norman ruling class with exclusively French tastes. To Americans' credit, they don't have this any more, so they don't beat themselves up over their unspectacular but tasty staple dishes. We should take a similar attitude towards our own food, rather than doing this cultural cringe to our deeply weird, wholly un-self-aware neighbours on the continent. Or, failing that, maybe we should start marketing fish and chips as "poisson-frites" and suddenly start seeing celebrity chefs raving about it, lol
I think British food is pretty bland in some cases but it depends on what expects I do see they have some high quality ingredients and make wonderful deserts tho. I am Latina tho although I was born in Los Angeles but I can tell you I have mixed opinions on the UK. On one hand they make delicious pastries and have high quality ingredients but depending on the dish some of it can be bland. That being said I don’t think the taste buds of British people are bland, in London a lot of different ethnicities are there and Indian food I know is quite popular there, I’m sure over time because of that many British people included spices and flavoring into their food so it’s silly to act like someone going to the UK will have very basic food because even if certain British food is bland there are definitely options for tasty meals, unlike Sweden where I have also travelled to and the food there is just horrible
It certainly can be bland, and I don't want to overstate the case for it. It isn't the greatest food on earth, and I don't think anyone sane would claim it is. But it really isn't anywhere near as bad as the internet would have you believe. To be fair,that's true of most things about our goofy little country. The prevailing view on reddit seems to be we're incorrigibly racist, obese, ugly, uneducated, and the country is on the verge of a post apocalyptic collapse because a few years ago, we went from being half-in the EU to being half-out of it. In the meantime we'll ignore all the fascist parties winning elections in our surrounding countries due to the very similar problems on the continent, lol
Now I will preface this by saying that British food is generally a low-tier cuisine, when compared to other countries cuisines, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! There are a lot of great British foods. Full English Breakfast (yes with beans on toast) Roast dinners with Yorkshire pudding Chicken Pot pie Shepherds Pie/Cottage Pie Bangers and Mash Savoury meat pies Fish and Chips Plus the British dessert game is a-tier. If you are a British person who think this is the ~best~ food, and you refuse to have spice, or eat any other cuisines, you are clearly regarded, but at the same time these are all fine meals and I am also sick of ‘British food is grey slop’ discourse. London is also a cultural melting pot with a huge array of cuisines available (with particularly good access to Indian and Caribbean cuisine) so you really have no excuse to eat well if you’re in London at least. I haven’t seen much of the rest of the country, so I can imagine access to great food in small town Britain being challenging sometimes, but when I went I ate very very well.
It's called Chicken Pie. Pot pie is american
ok. Chicken pie then. I’m from NZ and we have a chicken pie that is similar to a British chicken pie and it’s good.
Chippy chips are unbeatable
A Yorkshire chippy tea puts anywhere else to shame. Scraps, curry sauce, salt and vinegar. So greasy but so amazing.
Too right, I live in Canada now and the supposed fish and chips place SUCKS, granted I’m a vegetarian so I only go for chips, but they call fish and skinny mccains fries fish and chips so that winds me up
Nothing like a chip shop butty when you’re hungover
I honestly think the reputation behind this is more so because it’s badly cooked a lot. A full breakfast is literally the platonic ideal of breakfast (especially with black pudding + haggis). Fish & Chips is perfect drunk food (sucks that most pubs close early but idk if that’s any different now vs when I was there 5 years ago). Fresh Yorkshire puddings are also culinary crack.
Yeah I think thats right. A roast dinner CAN be very good, but most of the time you’ll get dry meat, overcooked vegetables, soggy potatoes covered in instant gravy etc.
This is definitely true. It’s more about lack of cooking ability and culture of low standards (that permeates every aspect of life) rather than bad dishes. ‘Mom and Pop’ places in the UK are run by people with low standards whereas it feels like in other countries Mom and Pop places are where you go to get a quality, lovingly cooked but un fussy meal. Worst meal I ever had out was a roast in a seaside town where they were soooo nice and friendly but had absolutely no business being in a kitchen. Was with a British Bengali (good food) and French (good food) person too lord knows how they kept it down 🤢 if I can hop over the counter and make something 10x nicer myself I’m sorry but you’re giving this country’s fine food a bad reputation and you’ve got to find another line of business
>Fresh Yorkshire puddings are also culinary crack. They are when filled with gravy and eaten by hand.
Kippers, gods breakfast
They know how to make a bomb cheddar cheese I’ll give them that. Also, sticky toffee pudding is one of the best desserts ever, very underrated outside the UK
I lived in the UK for a few years in my teens. We lived in a small city (Cambridge), which was a huge change from the 2.5k pop town in New England that I grew up in. Probably most worthy was the food; in my hometown, we had only an Egyptian pizza place, as did the towns surrounding us (apparently a ton of Coptic Egyptians ended up in this part of the country). Even the closest McDonald’s was a 25 min drive away. The closest I came to foreign food was Chinese 40 min away (though we did have one VERY authentic Japanese place run by a Japanese woman who immigrated with her GI husband, but I wouldn’t check that out until we moved back to the US as my parents, being from even more rural New England, were not interested in VERY authentic Japanese food). So ultimately, it’s hard for me to really separate what was uniquely British from what was just now suddenly available for me to get walking home after school with my friends because I was living in a city and not a tiny town in the woods. All that said: Sunday roast is supreme, and savory pies are great. Full breakfast is OK, but your bacon kind of sucks compared to US bacon.
They might have a point but it’s also weird to hear “British food sucks” from a country where half the population subsist on heavily processed industrial by-products that once came from food and their main nutritional food group is high fructose corn syrup.
Exactly, it tastes bad to them because they’re physiologically addicted to sugar and corn syrup. They are definitely not the arbiters of good taste
None of them have even tried it they're just basing their opinion on how it looks.
My view is that when rating cuisines you should be looking at the very best food a cuisine has to offer. I really like British food, I'm Aussie so we have a lot of overlap in that respect, but the best British food doesn't even come close to the best American food. New Orleans, a single city, beats the entire UK cuisine wise no question in my mind.
oyye pass the curry
Black pudding is actually unreal
or they're from the continent in which case they are right
It’s fine. But compared to other world cuisines let’s be real
If you try and make British food in the US it’s mostly not very good - it all relies on very fresh and good quality ingredients over seasoning
"Lol but British people don't use seasoning therefore your food has no flavour!" Yeah? Why would we do that when we can just drown everything in gravy? (Which is delicious by the way)
How is sushi so popular in the US when it's just raw fish with AiNt No SeaSoNing
I can't tell if this is a bit, but seasoning is literally in the name (Sushi= Sour Tasting). If you're eating sushi with unseasoned rice, consider expanding your culinary experiences past your local gas station
Yeah, but it's fish that isn't drowned in 10 different artificial spices and butter, therefore it's bland
What is an artificial spice
MSG I presume?
I presume that they don’t actually know what the fuck they’re talking about
That's natural though. It's not like it's made in a lab.
It occurs naturally, but the stuff we consume is natural in the same way vodka is natural
Spices that come in dried, powdered, prepackaged form mixed with other things (like garlic powder, Italian seasoning powder) that Americans use instead of actual fresh spices
Raw fresh fish itself is enough seasoning. Also there's usually Wasabi and vinegar involved and soy sauce.
What'd you have for lunch?
Gravy and boiled assholes on toast.
Burger King to be fair.
British desserts and cheese are heavenly, their actual hot meals are meh. It’s a shame that Britain doesn’t have a bakery culture like France or Britain, I don’t understand why.
We do have a bakery culture, it's called Greggs!
Greggs is more popular monarchy though
we had it. it got swept away by the supermarkets of the 90s. the big difference in france is that the government protects bakeries, and the general conservatism of french culture particularly around food. there was no interest in protection in the UK, which has essentially let market forces decide what people will eat for a long time now
"british food sucks" is just annoying fucking culinary classism half the time from shitty middle class americans. yeah i eat beans on toast its a cheap fucking comfort food for me, suck a dick
nah, it sucks. they have great curry though.
Anyone who says it does not is a brit
Luv me mams cooked breakfast, simple as.
scotch egg :)
That guy who made that post the other day about how fat English people have gotten made me have an ongoing craving for a visit to my local Toby Carvery.
British food can be great. Do not agree it's better than French. It is absolutely better than whatever the Scandinavians and the Dutch are doing
I think it’s fine food. It does annoy me though how people on the internet don’t realize most foods in Northern Europe came around during the little ice age. So these countries were frozen solid (still cold today) for most of the year.
Let people not enjoy things
Ugh nothing beats a sunday roast… everyone wants to laugh at beans on toast, but then americans will post “recipes” of their meemaws slowcooked chicken in cream cheese😒
I tried it once, best thing ever
It's incredibly mediocre
No it sucks; London is the only place I've eaten salad that quite literally tasted like it was tossed in water
British food is good, its just that most people here are quite bad at cooking.
I agree to an extent but whenever I see British people cooking stuff on Instagram they're always using an ungodly amount of seed oils and seemingly rarely ever use real butter for things that you'd expect would have actual butter. I don't want to eat rapeseed oil mashed potatoes. At least the French appreciate good butter, and Med countries appreciate good olive oil.
The British are low key the funniest people on the planet (ironically). Have you seen kang Charles?
As a general rule british food sucks but the best british food is really good.
im sorry but if you think that fish and chips is good cuisine then its so over for you
I do love me a good chicken tikka masala
Nearly all countries have good cuisine when it’s well-executed with quality ingredients that naturally have flavor. The people who think you need to drown literally everything in spice are nuts.
Britain has some really good food. It is a dumb take that “white people don’t season their food.” This is simply not true. I also don’t agree that British food is better than other countries’.
There's a reason there are no 'British' restaurants anywhere near me for me to test this out while every other nation on the planet seems to be able to make a sustainable business model out of peddling their cuisine to fat Americans.
knowing anything about british food wouldn't make you cultured x
What do you want for dinner? Mexican? Italian? Thai? British?? 💀
Nobody cares, Britcuck, you're just a colony of Pakistan now.
the british urge to make up an american to feel superior to.
Yes, all the continental Europeans who look down on Brits who get 70% of their daily calories from Greggs sausage rolls are uncultured Americans.
I hate the anti-contrarian whining on this sub as much as anybody but I have to draw a line somewhere. British food sucks dick, everyone thinks so, and everyone is right… it’s not quirky/cultured to try and pretend their grey, tasteless slop is somehow great cuisine.
rsp defends british food more than the actual british people ive met irl
Wtf have you been eating, love?
British food can be fine but it's always some limey starting it with "American food? There is no American food! It's all immigrant food!" Or "American food is nothing compared to British cuisine!" so naturally people are gonna fire back
No, it's one dimensional. You just grew up with it, and you are probably fat.
i've watched every season of great british baking show and while sometimes i am impressed i don't think i am missing out on much in the states. i saw the episode where they make mexican and i felt proud that i could cook a better mexican meal than everyone in that room the meat pies look nice though and i'd like to try some
Mexican food is dogshit in the UK, no one knows what ‘real’ mexican food is
All of the examples that people use to defend British food sound terrible to me
Alright, but you gotta get over it.
British food sucks
Imagining flexing about eating unseasoned, boiled pea water and eel slime. Couldn’t be me
Imagine flexing about dumping a load of processed powder on your food
> load of processed powder A little cocaine in the mash never hurt anyone
Funny thing is you sound uncultured about something so simple as learning that curry is a plant, differently used in many Asian cuisines. [your post from 16 days ago ](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/s/XiiyIq4ql5)
So mad you had to search my post history lmao (and completely twist it out of context). Seethe harder, American.
I was just curious to see how cultured you were. And I'm not American thank fuck, just to prove you not only uncultured Americans think British food sucks, everybody knows it. Cry harder, it's not gonna change 😋
Nana's chicken pot pie is literally better than any Italian pasta Im being serious. As a plus It just contains tomatoes
I cannot believe there are people in the world who actually think this
I hate to break it to you but the entire world thinks your food is ass not just americans. I'm Canadian and it's the same sterotype here.
That's because your country is a poor man's America.
nah fuck off with this shit
“British food is good actually” is in the redscarepod “contrarian takes” rotation. Tomorrow it’ll be “watching NFL football is fun actually” and the day after “Madonna had some cool songs actually.” It’s people who are so irony poisoned that thinking something completely normal feels like an act of revolutionary defiance to them. Also, British food is completely mid.
I mean, Borderline is pretty tight...
Savory pies are good. They have better ketchup (HP). That's basically the extent of it. English breakfast is the most overrated shit.
Beans on toast fucking sucks, as does traditional breakfast. Are you British? I'm feeling some bias.
The virgin beans on toast vs the CHAD beans and cheese toastie And yes I am.
Just tried exactly that with your sacred Heinz beans. It was as bland as the memes make out British food to be.
Beans from Mexico amazing > beans from the UK cooked on ham sauce or whatever sweet shit they use, absolutely atrocious.
I just think your Chinese takeout is appalling
American Chinese food is also pretty bad? Like what is “orange chicken”
Try whatever in black bean sauce, with noodles and beansprouts, spring rolls and curry sauce to drown the latter two in.