Delicious traditional British food?

[Ylfa]

I’m probably scarred by school meals in the 70s and 80s which were always along the lines of potatoes, other vegetables, meat and gravy, all of which tasted unseasoned. Does anyone have any robustly tasty recipes to share?

A lot of the recipes in the book below were out of date when it was first published (1954) but is still makes for very interesting reading:
Dorothy Hartley, Food in England, Piatkus (reprint) 2009

Also on Kindle:
www.amazon.co.uk/Food-England-complete-guide-makes/dp/0749942150?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

More about Dorothy Hartley here:
www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/14/bee-wilson-rereading-food-england-hartley

Properly made, delicous local foods (whichever the country) tend to use local, seasonal ingrediants, be weather appropriate and be nourishing and filling. This is why a lot of UK food tends towards the "stodgy" (but in a good way" combination of meaty gravy and pastry or potatoes etc etc. I think there is some snobbery about this, but understood in the context of coming home soaking wet and freezing and eating a really nice pie whilst rain lashes the windows and your stomach radiates warmth from your food outwards it makes sense. The same thing eaten on a summers day by the blue mediterranean sea would taste wrong. As others have said, what makes it good rather than school dinner slop is both quality of ingrediants and care taken in preparing them (so pastry that is flaky and crisp rather than overworked concrete etc)

And seasoning matters as well. It doesnt have to include spices - but enough (not too much) salt to actually flavour the meat, and pepper, and using a flavoursome stock in gravy, or enough herbs like thyme, rosemary etc

trouble is, if I say sausages and you think or yucky school ones, it doesn't help!

It needs to be good quality ingredients, well cooked and seasoned.

A good pie is AMAZING but a bad pie is grisly and tasteless and bleurgh