Yeah, I get this sentiment. I don’t particularly like cooking, but I like cooking a lot more than what my partner prepares.
Don’t worry, it’s not a trad misogynist belief that women belong in the kitchen. It’s just a widdle bit of cute racism.
Yeah, no, Italians can’t make breakfast for shit.
Coffee and a cake does not breakfast make.
I hate Italian breakfast. My stomach doesn’t fare well with coffee, sugar, or wheat. I skip breakfast when I’m there.
English breakfast might be considered an acceptable meal if it wasn’t served at the time of day it is.
I mean even scrambled eggs is too much for any Italian hotel or breakfast restaurant I’ve been to. Like literally as if they made it mediocre on purpose.
Huh? It’s a passable breakfast, I don’t really see it being much of a lunch or dinner. Okay MAYBE lunch.
Eggs: okay admitting this is a breakfast staple. Sausage and/or beans: instant lunch or dinner category.
That’s better than my Israeli coworker. Coffee and cigarette.
The absolute best breakfast in the world is square sausage and potato scones.
But seriously i had a roast at an English friends house, have you guys ever heard of slow cooking? Braising? Grilling? Marinating? Just throwing a roast in boiling water or in the oven for an hour isnt gonna cut it
I was gonna say hey, that’s what I do and mine turns out fine, then googled to see what braising means and apparently that’s what I do with my roasts.
Do you mean the brits just… Straight up boil roasts, fully submerged and without browning firat?
Not sure but my ex used to serve salt beef boiled with carrots potatoes and cabbage all boiled in one pot. It was fine but also very plain and not very flavourful
Sounds like eighteenth century peasant food.
You’re welcome to come over and try it, but I can’t help you if you end up in the village stocks.
British cuisine is abysmal, but Australia doesn’t even have a cuisine at all.
Australia has wonderful cuisine. I’m not Australian born but now love here. People take food very seriously and there is great Japanese, Thai, Chinese Greek, Italian French cuisine here. Mexican, not so much. Other countries, depends on the area.
Modern Australian cuisine (known as mod Aus here) takes a fusion of one or more of these combined with some local ingredients.
Australians in general take cooking and food quite seriously. It’s a foodie paradise.
Could you provide a link to what you might call a very normal-looking Australian menu? Just any random restaurant.
England had to utilize military force to control India to get the spices, to make the blandest food on the planet.
What’s that old saying?
British women and British food made British sailors the best in the world.
They sold the spices to other nations for major profit to enrich themselves. They never intended to eat said spices.
Never tried English mustard or fresh horseradish sauce then?
I’m italian, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want me in your kitchen
British food is great. Chicken tikka, pizza, Chinese, lasagne… The list goes on.
In all seriousness, there’s some great British food and people get too territorial about what constitutes as what food belongs to whom.
Definitely - foods like British / Scottish / Irish / Ulster fry, pork pies, bangers & mash, fish & chips, Sunday roast (carved meat, roast potatoes, yorkshire puds), shepherd’s pie, beef wellington to name a few. Plenty of deserts too. And ingredients like worcester sauce, English mustard, marmite etc.
A Sunday roast / carvery is basically what Americans get when they order prime rib. The cut of meat is slightly different due to different classifications but for all intents and purposes it’s a Sunday rib roast. For some bizarre reason in the US it’s regarded as fine dining with a price 4x as much as it would be for a better Sunday roast meal / carvery in a British pub. Over two decades ago I went to dine in a Lawry’s Prime Rib in Chicago - big mistake - massively overpriced for what it was.
Out of the food you mentioned only Beef Wellington and English Breakfast/Ulster Fry/ are uniquely British.
Everything else is either not a dish (fried sausage and potatoes definitely is not a dish you philistine :P) or not distinct enough.
Pork pies, fish and chips, roast, shepherds pie - it is eaten in Britain, but is not unique to them, as was historically eaten across the whole Europe (I mean it is fish and chips, it didn’t need “inventing”).
I think we need these smaller distinctions to have a meaningful conversation about food. If not, French crepes would be too similar to Norwegian pancakes, pizza and quiche could be the same if you ignore the yeast and tomato sauce, and if you really want to stretch it you could group Japanese ramen and Polish pasta soup together. In some ways I want to agree with you, for good ideas usually pop up multiple times and places, but I am too fond of traveling and tasting different food traditions to give in.
Fair.
Polish rosół is much more similar to French consomme than to ramen though. The stretch to ramen would be rather significant.
Yes all those other things are distinctly British. Britain didn’t function in a vacuum and I’m sure there are influences to everything. But if you eat a British pork pie you absolutely know what it is. Same for fish and chips. Same for all those things.
Since we’re comparing to Italy where do you think tomatoes came from? Do you think pasta wasn’t independently invented in many places? Do you think olive oil, or bread, ragus, salted pork etc weren’t also done elsewhere?
And if you were to say, for example, that pasta with tomato sauce is an Italian dish, I’d argue it’s not, as pasta was eaten across the whole Europe, and likely first added tomato happened in Britain.
Bolognese sauce with pasta on the other hand would definitely be Italian dish. Do you see the distinction?
British food is actually top tier. The big difference with something like Italian food for example is Italian is quicker and easier to make, so your average person can put together a pasta dish pretty quickly as a weekday evening meal. Whereas youre not going to come home and quickly make a roast dinner or a beef wellington or a proper steak and ale pie, so instead you’ll just bang some fish fingers and chips in the oven and 20 minutes later have some perfectly good scran for while you watch EastEnders.
British food is actually top tier
Stopped reading. Actually, gonna block you right after writing this message. I don’t want to know anything from you ever again lmfao.
Italian is quicker and easier to make
Oh no! No it is not!
If you want a real Bolognese sauce, know it needs to simmer for a looooong time, and if you’ve never had this, you never had a real Bolognese sauce! Nothing you will find pre-made in a jar will ever match the fresh one!
It’s just like pizzas: fresh made are incomparable to frozen ones.
Italian food was made “quick-and-convenient” by the food industry because it is top-tier, not because it was initially quick and convenient.
And industry italian-style food is of a much lower standard than genuine italian cuisine.As a British person myself, I completely disagree that our food is anything you would call top tier.
We have some nice food (as you mentioned) but it’s the exception, rather than the rule.
As a child I was forced to eat a lot of Sunday roasts at the grandparents that were bland and anemic and mushy, with veg boiled within an inch of its life, and where the meat was the only good part. I don’t think my experience was atypical.
British food these days is getting better all the time, but mostly because modern British food is a cultural fusion of tastes and techniques from everywhere in the world, and thanks to the Internet people are actually learning how to cook. Good roasts these days have sweetly caramelised oven-roast veg with olive oil and herbs and seasonings, and are a million miles from the mush I was served as a child.
But has British food historically been good? No, it has not.
But has British food historically been good? No, it has not.
Oh boy. You should Google that, because you couldn’t be more wrong.
Edit:
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury XIV century cookbook. Damn, oldest known recipe for macaroni and cheese comes from it.
XIV - XV century whole Europe was jelly for English cuisine.
XVI you were the capital of pastries and sweets.
As a child I was forced to eat a lot of Sunday roasts at the grandparents that were bland and anemic and mushy, with veg boiled within an inch of its life, and where the meat was the only good part
And I used to date an Indian lass who was the worst cook I’ve ever met in my life, the food she made was truly disgusting. But that doesn’t mean all Indian food is bad.
I know self-flagelation is a time honoured tradition of hours, but the whole “Britain bad” circlejerk is just getting annoying now.
Sure, there are always exceptions.
I’m not being self-deprecating for the sake of it - I’m speaking what I feel from personal experience. And on the basis of that experience I would rank the average state of British food well below the average state of food in a pretty wide spread of other places.
And that’s what I’m basing it on - averages, not exceptions.
Yeah I’m getting a bit tired of it myself. It’s fun to banter but there’s not really much banter left.
This affirms my hypothesis that the problem with British food is that they still have their nobility. France is the textbook example of the process - after they guillotined their nobles the good chefs that once served the elite had to offer their services to the general populace. But Britain? Only the nobles (or otherwise wealthy people) can have their servants at home prepare “a roast dinner or a beef wellington or a proper steak and ale pie”, while the comments have to settle for “some fish fingers and chips in the oven”.
I have several thousands of millions of food intolerances, so I love that British simplicity
Curry is the greatest dish of English cuisine.
What about doner kebab and garlic sauce?
The best German dishes are Döner, Spaghetti and Lasagne.
But käsespätzle…
Fuckin schnitzel doesn’t matter or anything!?
Well Schnitzel is in the top 10. But only the one from Vienna
Sure it does, but the Japanese perfected it.
Somehow I completely believe that, and schnitzel and Sapporo sounds really good
Tonkatsu is amazing.
While I’ve never had the privilege of doing so in-country, it seems straightforward to make and would absolutely pair with Japanese beer*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsudon
* - Also something the Japanese refined from the Germans.
Nah, Germany has the best sausage.
199398500A is the only one popular abroad tbh
More popular than bratwurst? I guess maybe that could be true somewhere, but I’ve never heard of that VW sausage before, and I’ve had bratwurst many, many times outside of Germany.
Nah, the Spanish and Italians have way better sausages.
I don’t like fennel.
France favorite dish is couscous
The best chefs in the world are men.
Your mum is the best sausage handler in the world
Well, turns out that for the past few hundred years men cooks were only the talented ones or those that had interest, while for women it was not a choice.
Nah, they’ve just got better publicity. Gordon Ramsey couldn’t whip up a dish half as delicious as my nonna could.
“Everybody get the fuck out of my way and don’t touch anything”
-Me, in the kitchen
-Me, in the kitchen
correction:
-Me, in MY kitchen
I tell people to “get out of my kitchen” all the time. I keep it neat, I keep it functional, don’t leave your dirty dish there you heathen, get out!
Guest cooks are welcome, at which point I will get out of their way too, but when I’m head chef, I’m the LAW.
-Me, in OUR kitchen
Seriously, you don’t enjoy cooking with a partner or family member or anything?
I actually really enjoy it. Apparently for my friends it’s like real life Overcooked levels of screaming.
Oh I definitely enjoy cooking in the presence of a partner or family member
The cow that made that cheese should sue him for assault.
A classic. For sure that’s a dope sando tho
He’s Scottish though, not English
The Scotts will one up the English at any chance they get out of pure spite if for no other reason.
Yeah and it must have been really hard to on-up them on terrible food. But they did manage to come up with Haggis in the end.
Also deep fried mars bars apparently
There are other reasons?
