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.

I think Sweden eat the most tacos of anywhere in the world.

@AscensionToCheese see you kind of speak to what I said i.e. you make food from home exactly the same as my French and Italian friends. This makes me wonder whether its only the Brits that dont value their own food.

Most of it..but then I'm not a meat eat and 2 veg isn't my type of thing.

How is British food so plain considering they had an empire and transported so many spices out of Asia? You'd think by now there'd be loads of traditionally British dishes with more spices as standard than salt & pepper? And I don't mean CTM etc, those dishes came with immigrants of the late last century. I've always wondered this.

Stews are comfort food.

But I agree with pp I find it too faffy to make- prob as I don’t understand how to get the flavour right.

Spanish and Italians have easy access to brilliant fruit and veg thanks to their climate. Half the time on here people seem to live on some form of mince. It’s not hard to see why their food is better! You can eat well in Mediterranean countries for hardly anything. What have we got? Potatoes and pig? Mince mince mince? Even our fish is prohibitively expensive considering we’re an island 🙄

Its a common opinion that British food isn't considered nice so don't know why people are acting shocked. People often make fun of British food being bland and tasteless I see it all the time being made fun of so no need to act so shocked!

Not a meat eater*

i craved chips egg and ham when I got out of hospital. Thank you Sainsburys cafe.

loads of great restaurants offering modern British fayre. check the aa rosette guide, anything two rosette or above will be awesome. if you go down to London, St John restaurant is meant to offer some of the best British food available . there are also numerous michelin star restaurants showcasing local produce and British cuisine such as Lisa Allen's Northcote.

That's because traditional British cuisine is just not nice, according to me anyway. Bland, stodgy, beige, or greasy comes to mind. Sorry, but given the choice between a lovely Mexican, Italian, Indian, Greek dish and some sad sausages with a lump of mash, or a stodgy casserole with no colour in sight, I know what I'd choose.

Nice puddings though.

Fish and Chips

"Probably because British food isn't very nice?"

I thought this view of British cooking came from rationing in second world war and afterwards well into 50s- when people were cooking with extreme limitations.

I dunno about cheap. Last time we were in Spain our food shop was as expensive as the UK (not a tourist area).

Isn’t pasta a beige carb?

Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, Belgium, North American countries, Australia, New Zealand all eat lots of international foods. And those are just the ones I'm familiar with. If you look at specific ingredients then surely most countries/people eat fairly international food? For example lots of 'traditional'/basic dishes in South America contain rice (chicken & rice, beans & rice).

Traditional British food is often bland if following a traditional recipe. That's because of our climate and what grows here. Swede, cabbage, potatoes and meat. We do have some wonderful chefs who make much tastier recipes with some of these ingredients these days by adding more exotic ingredients to add flavour. I think you don't hear other culture say this because their food is tastier to begin with.

We do make the best desserts though. No one in the world can beat crumble and custard or scones with clotted cream and jam.

Of course not! Or do you think pasta is only eaten in Italy and the UK?

I think being a very multi cultural nation it’s natural to cook different types of cuisine.
I love British food, beef stew, roast dinners 😋 I also love cooking pasta and curry dishes. It’s just whatever suits your tastebuds and pockets at the end of the day.

Yes people in other countries enjoy foreign cuisines, especially the former empires -- couscous is a very popular dish to make at home in France, for example. My Dutch friends love an Indonesian takeaway.

Social media and pop culture help make certain foods globally popular, e.g. tacos or stir fry.

But I think you're right OP that in those countries people still do rate their own cuisine, they just want a bit of variety. Whereas here a lot of people just don't want to eat traditional British food all the time, if ever.

Well if you're British, this just means that YOUR food is shit

I do like variety but at the same time I have a love of veg, but it's mostly seasonal so during the winter I'm far more likely to eat British food.
I also don't really think there's much harm in meat and veg dinners, they are substantial, mainly healthy and provide you with the things you need to maintain a healthy working body. That's the whole point in food isn't it?

https://www.eatecollective.com/journal/spices-in-british-cuisine#:~:text=British%20cuisine%20%E2%80%94%20EateCollective-,Variety%20Is%20The%20Spice%20of%20Life%3A%20Challenging%20The%20Great%20Myth,mound%20of%20anonymous%20boiled%20stodge.

Britain conquered half the world for spices and decided it didn’t like any of them’ is a caption usually accompanied by a photo of a mound of anonymous boiled stodge. The internet is littered with this sort of thing, it’s a joke which recurs with reliable regularity. Certainly, I have my own qualms with the cuisine of my home country: it’s often bland, usually heavy and always beige. However, flicking through Dorothy Hartley’s 1954 Food in England and Elizabeth David’s Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, published some sixteen years later, I find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the meme of British cuisine does not hold up to historical scrutiny.

Though this epithet of the United Kingdom’s cooking is little more than a harmless quip, I did find it interesting how far removed the great joke of British gastronomy is from reality. Spices are found in some of the most unexpected of recipes, and though British palates of the past couldn’t handle the heat, there does seem to have been a national taste for aromatic luxuries from far flung corners of the world.

What would be traditional British dinners?

I'm Irish so I imagine it's similar to ours - bacon and cabbage, roast beef, stews that sort of thing?

Spanish and Italians have easy access to brilliant fruit and veg thanks to their climate

I think climate is a lot to do with it. Our veg tends to be stuff grown in the soil - potatoes, carrots, turnips - and the dishes follow from that.

Whereas the Med climate means things like tomatoes, herbs, salads are easily grown.