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'm British living in France.

My DC have grown up on casseroles, stews, meat and 2 veg. As well as pasta dishes, curries and the occasional French dish (though mainly French starters and puddings).

My French friends do cook international cuisine - but don't include British food in that! So Mexican, sushi, Spanish, Italian....

We're going to England for the first time in a year soon and my DC have made a list of all the food they want to eat 😀 includes Yorkshire pudding, sausages, bacon, custard, fish and chips...

British food is great - like most cuisines, it depends on the cook

Nonsense. Properly cooked, with good quality ingredients, it's lovely. A supermarket value ready meal version of a British classic is not likely to be great, which may be why some people who've not had the good luck to eat decent home-cooked British food.

We have some of the best food in the world in this country, produced to much higher welfare standards than many other rich countries. Cheese, milk, lamb, beef, pork, all sorts of vegetables, gorgeous soft fruit, lovely apples in the autumn, and so on.

In Brazil we cook food that could be considered 'international' but in fact our ancestors are from all over so this is probably the reason why. We do have a very traditional brazilian cuisine also.

It's that plus the industrial revolution was very dramatic in the UK, large rapidly growing urban population working long hours and minimal facilities so just bought a pie or ate bread and cheese instead of cooking. In the country they'd have had access to a wider range of food. We basically lost our food culture in large swathes of the country.

Plus postwar rationing as you say.

Plus the UK has high rates of women working, which means food has to be quick to prepare. Traditional food is often laborious to make and incompatible with having a job.

There's no real reason why food in the UK should be bad, eg France isn't far away and much of it has a similar climate to us but the food is better.

It's also partly a reverse snobbery so people think caring about food or wanting it to be good quality is 'poncy'. Working class food in other countries is often good strong peasant cuisine, here it's unhealthy and bland.

I only really make British stuff because that's what I'm good at cooking and I'm not very adventurous. If we get a takeaway it might be Indian or Chinese. I make curries and spaghetti bolognese, things that aren't traditionally British, but that aren't made authentically, more like how they are adapted by British people.

Come to think of it, when I lived in Germany I met quite a few Germans who did not really like German cuisine that much (similar reasons, lots of carbs and meat) and cooked mostly Italian and Spanish food.

I'm Irish, I eat a variety of meals. Basic foods are reasonably similar between Ireland/ UK tho. I find meat, spuds and 2 veg gets repetitive. Stews/ cottage pie/ mash/ roasties all very very tasty but more winter food too.

Rice/ Pasta dishes seem to be quicker to do as well. Also cheaper and easier to store. Bag of rice v bag of spuds

Only, I doubt it. But British culture is very willing to copy what we like from basically anywhere in the world. I guess it's a legacy of having invaded most of it.

"Traditional" British cuisine is very dependent on ingredient quality I think. Using the natural flavours of the main ingredients, rather than being heavily spiced or herbed. Which means if you cost-cut on the ingredients or you're not a good cook, it really shows.

Yes, I have a Dutch friend in the Netherlands who I chat to daily, and they regularly tell me they're having pizza, pasta, jambalaya, nasi goreng etc for dinner.

When we cook british things like cottage pie, we learned to use 3x more seasoning (and garlic) than the recipe says...

Grew up in CE and we cooked food from all over alongside our traditional

Historically the UK was far wealthier and more industrialised than much of the world, including mainland Europe. Its wealth and industry attracted immigrants who brought their cuisines with them, hence why the UK has a much longer and more established tradition of adopting elements of international cuisines and assimilating them into its own diet. I think a lot of people don’t realise how poor and rural countries like Spain and Italy were until relatively late in the twentieth century and how relatively little immigration - and therefore external influence - they experienced. “British food” is incredibly varied because our culture and our population is incredibly varied.

Really? I lived in Madrid for five years and it was far far cheaper. We ate fish daily for example. We still notice the difference now when we go back.

I think it has always been true of British food, that it is not great because of the limitations in what was available. Look at Mrs Beeton's recipes for example.

https://git.macropus.org/bbc-food/www.bbc.co.uk/food/chefs/mrs_beeton.html

In Canada we eat a vast array of food from all cultures, British food features strongly in my experience. This was also my experience in Norway.

cranfordscones it’s spag bol as in bolegnese

We had cod fish cakes, steamed jersey royals with butter and parsley and a mixed seasonal salad last night - pretty nice, light british summer food.

Tonight we are having nasi goreng though.

Lancashire hotpot and many other traditional stews
Soups of all kinds, e.g. Cullen Skink, Cock-a-leekie, mulligatawny
Pies, both sweet and savoury, eaten both cold and hot - Melton Mowbray pork pies are wonderful and have a very distinctive pastry (hot water crust)
Roast meats of all kinds with gravy, served with vegetables and various traditional accompaniments, e.g. Yorkshire puddings and horseradish sauce traditionally eaten with roast beef, apple sauce and sage & onion stuffing with roast pork, mint sauce with roast lamb, bread sauce with roast chicken
Glamorgan sausages, made with Caerphilly cheese
Welsh rarebit
Haggis and all sorts of blood puddings and sausages
Scones, crumpets, English muffins and many other distinctive baked goods
Beautiful cakes, e.g. rich fruit cake, Victoria sponge
Boiled puddings, again both sweet and savoury - steak and kidney, jam roly poly, for example - using a suet crust pastry
Lots of very regional specialities, e.g. laverbread from Wales, Staffordshire oatcakes and stovies from Scotland
The list goes on.

Where I live in France the French love the British fish and chip van. They regularly sell out.

I'm Scottish and cook lots of traditional food but am just as happy cooking a lot of Asian and Mediterranean dishes, especially at this time of year.

I also don't mean that Europeans say don't eat intentional cuisine but was wondering how often it features on their menu at home as part of their day to day cooking like in the UK

My italian colleagues cooks curries quite often.

I am German and cook a large variety of dishes, German food is similar Meat and two Veg like British but I found it often too time consuming and heavy for under the week compared to a pasta dish or a stir fry so we mix it up.

I had a Chinese colleague who didn't cook chinese as soon as she moved out from home. I think she only did it when family visited.

Isn’t Taco Tuesday (or maybe it’s Friday) a big thing in Scandinavia? Sweden anyway. But the inevitable sniping is well underway.

My MIL is Spanish and she cooks plenty of dishes from other countries. They do sometimes have a bit of a Spanish twist to them, such as she will put garlic and herbs that don't really belong there into some British dishes, but then I don't expect that when I cook recipes from other cuisines I am totally authentic!

This annoys me. We have some fantastic dishes and are pie and pudding masters!

Also, we are world leaders in great beers.