Comment on in all fairness italian cuisine is a relatively recent invention
nialv7@lemmy.world 1 month ago
jokes aside, i’d say british cuisine is definitely taking more flak than what it deserves.
Of course it does. I grew up in the UK and it’s fun taking jabs but then you have a bunch of people who just keep doubling down as if they’re God’s gift to the kitchen.
My favourite take of theirs is always what they exclude from English food but they’ll talk about American food and include everybody else’s cuisine …
In fairness, a lot of people will only experience or know what’s brought out as quintessential English for at holidays or other special occasions, which isn’t always the best thing there is to offer from the cuisine. It’s something else entirely if you actually go there for a couple of weeks and pay attention to all the delicious stuff you’ll eat while there.
Plus, you get plenty of weirdos from every country who seem to have Stockholm syndrome with the most bland/boring aspects of their cuisine and will wholeheartedly recommend their absolute most terrible dish as the pinnacle of their country’s cuisine. I have a coworker from Ireland who won’t touch a spice bag if his life depended on it, but will tell anyone who listens how wonderful beans on buttered brown bread is and that it should be more common everywhere.
lol I actually quite like Irish food. Went to a random pub in Galway and had some stew and it was so good! Irish beef is awesome.
I have friends kinda like what you described though. No spices and they love bland food, lol.
I’m okay with people taking jabs at British food to be honest. Like, my first year back when I was an adult I didn’t know what to eat and I actually cooked more because I didn’t know what to get. It wasn’t until I made some friends that I knew places to check.
What’s crazy is all the trash they talk about American food, and somehow managed to completely forget that Louisiana is in America…
Yeah, you all definitely have… 8 or maybe 9 edible things that aren’t beer or curry.
All the same, I’d rather have a full English breakfast than 90% of French food and 98% of German food. Kidneys in cream, or raw pork crackers, or bread and cheese like they invented it or whatever.
Very ignorant take because everything a full English offers is also very German. This includes the pig blood which isn’t french but you probably didn’t think of that anyway.
Branding and beans for breakfast. That’s why the English get the win here, which is also occasionally called a full Irish breakfast if there’s no Brits looking. Plus, the English hardly have any indigenous culinary variety or spices. Why else colonize with such a passion?
And I’m actually very much ok with black pudding, that’s not the issue. I don’t like northern French cuisine because it’s just “how much butter and cream can we pump into this snail or these poor mushrooms or a potato that was fine all on its own? Can we drown this perfectly mediocre cut of beef in cream and butter to make it seem fancy?” I’m far more partial to living below the butter/olive oil border. Southern France on the sea is tolerable, they’re also below the border.
Snails are not a northern France thing though (unless you have a loose definition of north). It’s mostly central, with a huge correlation with tourist hotspots
French cooking is cheap peasant foods with lipstick applied and loads of makeup to try and cover up that fact.
English are a kind of German
I guess you’re not into bread, because Germans have incredible bread
I left the 5% for pretzels, sausage, and Haribo gummies.
And Italians also make bread, you’ll notice they’re not on the exclusion list.
Yeah, but Italian bread and German bread…
Germans make pasta too, but I’m not talking about maultaschen here
Italians make bread without salt… Bah!
Germans have roughly one kind of bread that they’re very good at.
Germany has tons of Turkish immigrants, but Germans won’t buy pita bread unless they’re getting a doner. They share a massive border with France but mostly ignore delicious French breads like croissants, baguettes, etc. They’re right near Italy but you won’t find much focaccia. Forget about naan, bagels, bao, corn bread, crumpets, injera, etc.
The French have good bread as well. Not as good as what we have in Italy of course, but well, they’re doing their best!
The French have good bread as well
I dunno, the last baguette I ate tasted like pain.
They sure like talking about their bread a lot. No one beyond their borders understands why however.
That’s what I thought until I started working at a German bakery. Now I’m converted (as someone who isn’t from here and grew up with fresh home baked sourdough every day). You should try more of it.
Maybe…
What I don’t understand is how they can be on an island, surrounded by some of the best fish in the world (including the fantastic Scottish salmon) and the only piece of fish you can find in the whole country is freaking cod with four layers of batter applied to it and fried until the only flavor you can perceive is that of mediocre burnt oil.
They make good meat dishes (roasts, meat pies), but then they pair them with the most uninspiring sides… The UK cuisine has a few good things, and they have good ingredients, but more often than not they cook them in boring ways and stop there, calling it “good enough”
I once read that a group of Rotterdam Housewives wrote a collective letter to their fishermen husbands, that they would abide no more then 2 days of salmon dinner a week. Maybe having an abundance of it makes it unbearable after decades. I mean, complaining about salmon dinner seams crazy to me, so who knows what you can get fed up with :)
Fish used to be poor people’s food. It was plentiful around the sea, but it kept for just a few hours without modern refrigeration, so you couldn’t really transport it to the main city market and sell it. It didn’t give you much food security or much money, and it wasn’t as luxurious as meat, which was the food of choice for the higher classes.
The only fish that was eaten by the higher classes were the ones that could be preserved by salting, drying or smoking, and they were eaten mainly during lent, as a “lean” alternative to meat. It was mostly viewed as a sacrifice. During the late Middle Ages and early modern era, the herring trade started to really flourish, with Holland being a major exporter of herrings, while the Nordic countries like Norway and Sweden exported lots of salted cod and Stockfish (dried cod).
So I’m sure it was at a moment where eating fish was seen as a humiliation, rather than a treat, like it is today. In North America lobster was considered as very poor food, cockroaches of the ocean, fed to those who couldn’t afford anything else or to prisoners. Sometimes they were even used as fertilizer for the fields.
In the very early days of the colonial Americas, indentured servants along the eastern seaboard would sometimes go on strike to protest all the lobster they were fed because it was abundant and very cheap.
So yes, people get tired of the same old, same old foods every day.
Tbh, british food is mostly just salt-deficient. Add salt to it and a lot of it tastes really good.
They make good meat dishes (roasts, meat pies), but then they pair them with the most uninspiring sides…
I mean… British were always shafted by their nobility. The land wasn’t known for fruits or sweet veggies, the rent in UK paid to the landlord was relatively high, so most peasants ate pickles, chutneys or different mushed veggies as sides.
Not known for fruits? Strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, apples…
Yes. Historically British Isles had meh climate for fruit production. You could either forage for berries, but fruits were mostly seasonal apples or pears or plums, but the harvest seasons were rather short.
It may not be as nuanced, but it’s pretty damn good.
Yeah their curry is awesome.
Waitasecond…
Yeah, tikka masala is awesome. And yeah fish and chips is amazing too. It’s just that brits also have stuff like boiled roasts
I do believe tikka masala is British but it is funny that it’s the first thing you said because it’s also very clearly Indian
Yes, that was intentional to attempt to be humorous. It was invented by brits returning home attempting to recreate Indian food.
I heard it was created by a South Asian immigrant.
indian the same as pizza is italian. invented elsewhere by emigres to another country who then had family bring back the crazy new fusion food for the people of the homeland to go “oh that’s good.”
I’m not much of a fan of many traditional British dishes, and there are some things many British people seem to enjoy make me wonder about their taste buds. OTOH, Britain once had a worldwide empire, and it brought back a lot of dishes from that empire to the mainland. Indian curries are the obvious example, but there’s also Caribbean food, Chinese food, even other curries from South-East Asia.
idk man. I went to the UK to sample of cuisine thinking it can’t be that bad and I have mixed feeling afterwards. Like the food is edible at least.
What did you have because you can go to a crap pizza place in Italy.
In comedy, timing is everything. This cut down TikTok ruined the joke :(
Food is like music. You can have very strong tastes for a particular genre. But I reckon real lovers will always find something to love wherever they go.
Like, I love scones, and carrot cakes and I fondly remember a simple ham and potatoes I had one Christmas in Ireland. And fantastic fish. That smoked salmon filet with herbs and spices from M&S is still in my mind all those years later.
There is always something to love, if you give it a fair go.
alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
A lot of you still cooking like the Germans are still flying over your heads NGL
DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
We still are, but now it’s Lufthansa, not Luftwaffe. Big difference.
kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
A-tier joke lmao
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Like the Von Saxen-Coburg und Gotha’s became the Windsors
DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 month ago
Well de are, but instead that the English read the dropped recipe books they use it as toiletpapers!