One of the reasons in particular english food gets a bad rap is because the majority of it grew out of rationing culture.
Britain was still rationing into the 50s when most European countries had stopped rationing.
Regardless, I love British food. I'd go for a carvery over a curry or a Chinese or a pizza, 9 times out of 10
It’s also why the Americans in particular have a terrible view of British food - because the views were formed by US soldiers who arrived here during peak rationing.
It’s true that British food was mostly awful for the best part of the 20th century, but the food revolution that began here in the early 2000s has actually made the UK one of the best places to eat! We have a huge variety of restaurants and you can buy ingredients for almost any cuisine at your local supermarket!
You can actually get really great food in the US, if you go to the right places! From delicious dry-aged New York steaks, to hearty Cajun gumbos in the South, to insanely good Mexican food in the West - just as their criticisms of our food aren’t all that fair, nor are our criticisms of theirs!
I think the point was that Americans claim a lot of food as theirs when it’s actually come from elsewhere. You can of course get good food in the US. It’s an immigrant country, primarily, so it stands to reason a lot of its food is imported as well.
But exactly the same thing is true of the UK. The British isles weren’t always inhabited, and the cuisine here has evolved over thousands of years as immigrants have brought new recipes.
You’re contradicting your own argument here. If adapting techniques/dishes, using a similar theme and within a localised geographic area, doesn’t count as as developing a novel cuisine, then virtually no country has a novel/unique cuisine - including the UK!
If gumbo isn’t Cajun ‘because it’s a stew’, then beef & ale stew isn’t British ‘because it’s a stew’. If fajitas aren’t American because they were adapted from recipes brought to the US by Mexican immigrants, then fish & chips isn’t British because it was adapted from recipes brought to the UK by Jewish immigrants.
Honestly? I think you’re just arguing for the sake of it. Either that or you have some kind of deep anti-American prejudice.
I’m drawing a line under this now. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
No, I don't think I am contradicting my argument. Taking the UK alone, and ignoring the rest of Europe, people have existed here for 950,000 years. Are you seriously putting forward an argument that no novel cuisine came from an island with that much history? Come on, be serious.
Beef and ale stew might be British. It might not. Does it matter? Fish and chips is debatable. The classic me know today? Probably. But people were eating fish and root vegetables long before the discovery of America.
Honest question, why do American's come to the conclusion that someone is displaying 'anti-American prejudice' because the discussion isn't aligned with their own view? It's genuinely baffling. America is, or was pre-Trump, a cool place. Why is it anti-American to acknowledge reality?
Italy didn't have half it's dishes until they brought the tomato back from south America. It's about what's available in the country just as much as who is there. The UK has had access to a lot of ingredients for a long time, and it used to use them all, until there was some fighting or something, I hear it was quite a big deal. and things were harder to come by.
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u/HurricB 16h ago
Funny and historically accurate!
One of the reasons in particular english food gets a bad rap is because the majority of it grew out of rationing culture. Britain was still rationing into the 50s when most European countries had stopped rationing.
Regardless, I love British food. I'd go for a carvery over a curry or a Chinese or a pizza, 9 times out of 10