Dinners - are Brits only ones that make international food for dinner

[o9yhke89]

Was chatting with an Italian and Spanish friend about kids dinners - and mostly they just make whatever they grew up with i.e. Italian and Spanish food and really treasure their family recipes. Most of my English friends always try to have food from different cultures and this is seen as much more sophisticated and worldly. I've lived all over but was wondering whether the Brits just don't value their own cuisine especially when it comes to family meals.

Really? @ilovemydogmore I've just eaten grilled welsh lamb loin with charred (English) asparagus in local (Cotswold) butter with (English) with a watercress and tomato salad. It was followed by local strawberries. Not a hint of beige and the quality of the ingredients was world-class.
The myth of universally badly cooked or substandard British food went out after the 2nd world war. I've eaten appalling Italian food in Italy, awful Chinese in China, had awful, supermarket tapas in Spain and very ordinary gyros in Greece etc., etc. In fact, the only countries that have never let me down were India and Malaysia

@Nothingisblackandwhite in fairness, your average carvery probably isn’t the best example of a traditional roast. It’s one of those meals that relies on the talent of the cook so is surprisingly easy to get wrong.

Ditto fried mackerel plus some sort of gooseberry or rhubarb salsa type thingy.

@Itisyourturntowashthebath I need this in my life right now. It’s sounds delicious.

I dont think bread should be king. I think bread is a beige carb that people moan on about. I havent eaten bread for a long time and feel better for it. I didnt eat chorleywood bread either

Good British cooks cook as well as any other good cooks all over the planet. We start with the advantage of high quality ingredients. Seriously among the best in the world. Treated sympathetically, such ingredients ought to put UK food up there in the top 2 or 3, based on climate/growing conditions. But it needs to be cooked well too, and the early industrialisation of the UK's economy took a huge toll and peasant family cooking out of the frame. My ma did a C&G catering qualification as a school meals cook in the early 1970s, and so learned technical chef skills she taught me that I have taught my son, who is a formidably good cook and worked as a chef. We don't eat only English food, because we have travelled so we might eat/cook French, Italian, Chinese, Cypriot, Indian, Japanese or fusion. We understand the cooking techniques that underpin the final results.

'Proper' pasta as you describe it is exactly like that. Great for pre-marathon carb loading though.

My English food isn’t beige carbs, my mother’s wasn’t either

@Endlesssummerof76 do you make your own pasta? Homemade pasta, created from eggs and flour kneaded together, with a little moistening is high quality food and far from stodgy.

You've been doing bread wrong.
I say this as someone that can't now have it, and misses truly great fresh bread - crusty baguette, dark German rye, the tang of sourdough...

Agree.

I eat whole wheat pasta several times a week usually mixed with different kinds of vegetables and homemade sauces and find it less heavy than the standard British fare and it doesn’t make me feel like I need a nap afterwards.

I'm in NZ and I mainly eat fish/chicken/meat based dishes with veg. I'm not a huge fan of Asian cuisine (despite there being a lot of it here), don't particularly like rice, or stir fries, and the only pasta dish I ever have is macaroni cheese. I like well cooked simple food if dining out.

Czech here.
We eat totally different meals than my grandparents and quite different than my parents.

I expect it will be more common in northern half of Europe than southern one.
I suppose the sustainance needs and food variety changed more in colder countries (everywhere is higher availability of international ingredients and lower percentage of heavy manual work, but the temperatures aspect makes both differences bigger).

I could never really think of local British food as bland, probably because my parents and grannies all made use of fresh local ingredients, hood fishmongersand butchers.

Arbroath smokies, salmon, scallops and crab fixed with herbs grown in the garden, haggis with lots of delicious spice running through it, local farmers cheese and tiny home grown strawberries all were part of my diet growing up and still things I love to eat today. Cullen skink is the ultimate comfort meal on a cold day!

The message I get from this thread is that good cooks make fantastic food from their local ingredients wherever they are. And the others just can't cook!

I have honestly given tagines a chance. And they arrive with such promise. I ate quite a few in Tunisia and Morocco and was always disappointed. I am glad to hear that good ones exist though!!

Just to be very clear OP, she is not swaddling your toddler, she is restraining her.

Swaddling is something you do to newborn so they get the comfort of feeling restricted, like they were in the womb. It is to provide comfort to the baby. Your childminder is restraining and blindfolding your toddler to force her into submission over sleep. It isn't for your child's benefit, it's for the childminder's benefit.

I'm not white British but still love British food. There's much to love and it's not all meat and two veg. There's such a breadth of dishes I'm surprised people can generalise. Seems a bit lazy TBH.

People get incredibly stuffy about cuisine but for me, food is about embracing other cultures. Brits are pretty good in this respect; which is something to be proud of as some other cultures can be quite insular.

The problem we have in the UK is that we have the luxury of choice and this can make British food look unexciting. But far from it. I work with a lot of French, German, Italian and Spanish. They're always amazed that they can eat such a broad range of cuisines and also vegan.

Oops wrong thread

In a tagine?

It's because Britain had a less traditional cuisine best & so it was easier to adopt from other cultures. I think we've gained.

My idea of British food is the Sunday roast (nice) but vegetables boiled to death, meat that is not seasoned (have to add salt at the table) and a bit tough, stews and casseroles (heavy). Not easy to cook. Will need an oven, usually and lots of heavy saucepans and casserole dishes and terrible washing up, with dishes soaking in a basin in the sink.

But British desserts are glorious. Brits do a good line in puddings and cakes.

The best one I’ve had was cooked by a Frenchman. So apparently that’s one person from France who cooks ‘foreign’ food for dinner.

That'd be a whole other level of fucked up. 🤣

My goodness, there are some depressing replies on here

So many mumsnetters who are bad at cooking or completely lacking in imagination.

Yes, lumpy mash and flabby sausages are very unappetising @Greengreentea, but top quality butchers sausages with creamy mash made with hot milk, butter and plenty of seasoning is another matter entirely. Served with an onion gravy and fresh vegetables this would make a lovely winter meal.

I think posters are thinking about traditional, old fashioned meals where people didn't have much money, but modern British cuisine is as good as any anywhere in the world. I had the pleasure of eating at the Black Swan in Oldstead last year. All the fresh produce was from the garden, and the meat was locally bred. It was rated the best restaurant in the world by Trip Advisor in 2017.

I agree that the more simple a meal is the higher quality the ingredients have to be. We live rurally, and all the pubs round here that do food source their meat locally.

I like all cuisines. I don't think there are any I dislike, and we do tend to eat all around the world in our house. We also enjoy well made traditional British food made with vegetables from the local farm shop (some of which they grow themselves), and meat from the butcher who sources all of his meat locally.

Oh, and our local pub does a cracking fish and chips made with freshly caught fish brought over from Grimsby and cooked in the lightest, crispiest beer batter. I have never tasted any as good at the seaside.

I will say that the one thing the Brits probably do better than anywhere else is baking.

Oh dear I didn’t check for babies… although the meat was suspiciously tender 🤔

How did this thread turn from Britains are great because we cook and eat all of this worldly food to OMG best cuisine in the world is British 🤣