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.

The British habit of boiling vegetables in water then serving them plain isn't great. Even if they are not overcooked there are so many more interesting ways of doing them.

I lived in Luxembourg and everyone there cooked Greek, Italian, French, Spanish and British all the time....

I think you have met some weird people OP 😂 what a weird thread

Literally three posts in and someone pipes up with this crap.

My parents are not from the UK and they definitely grew up eating their own type of food.

We grew up eating from both cuisines and adding in other things (like roast or shepherds pie) so English food, plus my mum tries all sorts of other cuisines as she enjoyed cooking.

Traditional dishes that my mum cooked

. Homemade pies, meat and veggie ones. Liver and onions cooked so that the liver melts in your mouth. Lancashire hot pot. Cottage/shepherd's pie.

Slow cooked lamb or pork chops. Served with steamed new potatoes and fresh green veg.

And the done thing in Luxembourg is to slather Nutella on everything!

So it isn't just Brits who don't value their food 😂

I think you need a new hobby. One that doesn't judge or stereotype 😉

I think I'm an outlier among my friends. I'm British but rarely cook typically British food. I usually make Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese..
Yet my Indian friend who lives in Italy mostly makes Indian food. My Chinese friend living in Germany mostly makes Chinese food and so on and so on.

Yes this. Born and raised in USA, I like all kinds of food not just “American”, I cook Asian, Mexican, Italian, I love it all. There is something delicious in every cuisine. If I had to stick to (North) America only it’d be a limited menu. I have a cookbook by Bobby Flay called Bold American Food that is very much South American influenced and the recipes are so good.

I have to say though one of my faves is British fish and chips, yum! Traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts are my go to in the holidays as well.

Oh god, that reminds me of the vegetables school served up.🤢 I love vegetables now, so many ways to cook and dress them.

We did a food tour with a guide in Rome who said she'd never had a Chinese or Thai meal (and that wasn't untypical).

I know Italian food is great but I can't imagine never trying something from elsewhere.

And Greek and French too! How could I forget those.

The folk in Belgium love boiled vegetables. No drizzling or seasoning allowed 😂

Again, not just a British thing. Just a way to cook food.

It really depends what you mean by British food. That the OP starts by saying Brits and then goes on to mention their English friends sort of sums up the confused nature of British identity. A lot of what might be regarded as traditional British food isn't, it's been assimilated from other cultures and successive generations of immigration. A lot of regional identity in our native cuisine has been lost. Most people just aren't that adventurous when it comes to traditional ingredients and would turn their noses up at trip, oysters, fish not in batter, udder, etc.

Our German friends and family manage to balance both their own regional and national cookery with international influences. And German cooking has fantastic online resources such as ChefKocch.de that acts as a repository for regional cooking and family recipes.

I think a lot of traditional UK food was also pie based and suet based and with less and less of the population being in manual labor many have fallen out of fashion.

I do think we do desserts well but also think we adapt a lot of recipes and ingredients from other places and make them our own like chicken tikka masala -it has a disputed origin but everyone agrees it was created in some bit of the UK.

Traditional British food is mainly based on meat and root vegetables, which was the food that was readily available in the 50s and 60s. It's the sort of food my mother used to cook when I was a child, with lots of things like suet puddings - both savoury and sweet - meat pies, stews and real horrors like stuffed hearts and soused herrings! In those days, few people had cars and we walked and cycled everywhere, plus many jobs involved a lot of physical activity, so such heavy fare was acceptable, but I'd never dream of cooking like that now. I aim for a more Mediterranean-based diet with less animal protein and more vegetables, grains and salads and I also like Asian food too. This all has the advantage of much less actual cooking and eating a much wider variety of foodstuffs. Women have far too much to do already, with full-time work, domestic chores and childcare without having to spend every spare minute cooking highly calorific food that I'm sure would no longer appeal to most modern palates!

I love the idea of Italians making tuna pasta bake, soss egg chips and beans, or broccoli boiled till it’s flaccid and grey.

There are any amount of traditional British dishes that use spices, which date back to the Middle Ages. Mincemeat for mince pies, rich fruit cakes, Christmas pudding - lots of sweet spices in there, e.g. nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, ginger, cloves. Gingerbread is a British staple. Bread sauce uses bayleaf, cloves and nutmeg. The Victorians loved curry and invented lots of anglicised versions of Indian dishes using ingredients easily available in the UK, seasoned with curry powder. Mustard is a standard British condiment and has been since Roman times.

This.

I'm a damn good cook and so is everyone in my family. We like food and we eat well.

It always makes me laugh when groups of international students (invariably Italian tbh) come to the residential summer school I work at, and head for Burger King on excursions and evenings out. Then complain on their feedback forms that people in Britain only eat at Burger King.

@tt9 amazing thank you!

I'm British and don't do any of those things.

Italians eat pasta with tuna regularly though.

Spices have been used in British food for many centuries. Look at an old cookery book like Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (1747) and there are recipes using cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, truffles, morrels, pepper, ginger, mace, vanilla, cardamom....

I suspect the main thing is that, for most of that part of history during which "British" food has developed, we have been rich enough and well enough connected around the world to have access to spices and recipes from "exotic" places. These have fulfilled our needs for highly flavoured foods, and we're well enough informed that we still think of them as "foreign".

For example, my local butcher sells a variety of highly spiced sausages. We still think of them as some sort of fusion food, reflecting the influence of foreign cuisines of what we eat, but actually very similar sausages could perfectly well have been served in the middle ages - and almost certainly were.

We used to have hot pot/ roast lamb/ shepherds pie for school dinners- yum.

My Irish MIL had never cooked pasta or rice before. DM did curries and spag bol but that was because a chef in a place she worked taught her how - and they were cheap, filling and tasty.

I tend to try all sorts but I really like cooking and trying out new recipes from all over the world.
@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g that's some list - and lots of lovely options.

Usually where people weren't keen on their own cuisine it was usually down to an unenthusiastic cook and mediocre output of food whether that was themselves, spouse or their mother.

We used to have hot pot/ roast lamb/ shepherds pie for school dinners- yum.

: yuck

The British didn't eat spices in foods seems to have come from terminally online Americans who seem to think spice=chilli.

British food has long incorporated all sorts of spices and more exotic foods. I mean brown sauce contains dates and tamarind!

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.

Agree with this. We live on beef casserole and dumplings, roast dinners, Toad in the Hole etc type food, with lots of local veg, in the winter/autumn. In summer we do eat more cosmopolitan things, paella, Frittata, prawns wraps etc all with lots of salad, cheese and biscuits etc if it’s too hot to eat much.

You can’t beat British foods but agree it can be expensive to buy local.