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.

It's not true that British food is crap now but it certainly used to be and this is a factor, I think.

Part of the reason why Brits fell in love with international foods in recent decades is that food in the period after WW2 really was total crap. My mum (born in 39) said when she was in her 20s and 30s cool people wouldn't be seen dead eating British food and they preferred French/Italian/Indian/Chinese.

I think we were forced to innovate because our cuisine was so disgusting and it's turned Britain into what's now a bit of a gastronomical paradise. Now we've rediscovered our own native cooking and learned how to cook it properly (stopped overboiling vegetable etc) even that tastes better.

But people from Italy/Spain/France never had the experience of growing up in a gastronomical desert so they never really felt the need to experiment with other kinds of cooking in the same way.

I also think global warming is a factor. I love hearty English food in the winter but on a day like today I don't want to eat meat and two veg or a pie or something really heavy and suety. I'd much rather eat a salad/couscous/pasta or something like this.

Traditional British food is basically just stodge, without any flavour. The joke about the British taking over the spice routes but never letting a trace of spice enter their cuisine is very true.

Sooo unfair. Gimme a leek and potato soup, apple crumble, sticky toffee pudding, Sunday roast, or hearty bangers and mash any day. Our food is delicious.

Are they “far lower”? The U.K. certainly tops the list, but not by much according to this graph. I think it’s a bit a myth that Spaniards and Greeks are all svelte bastions of good health nibbling away on fresh fish and olives for every meal.

I find some traditional British foods quite hard to come by. M&S and Waitrose might (I don't shop there) but when is the last time anyone has seen gooseberries, sausage meat, elderflower or suet on sale in the more budget shops? Certainly not around here and so many British recipes I have rely on them.

I am originally foreign, and I cook a mixture of food from all over the world, including my come country. But none of the latter are traditional, each have their own family and regional twists - I thought that was normal?

I echo that British cuisine can be very stodgy and as such is better in winter. In summer, I often rely on Mediterranean or South-East Asian food.

And to be fair to be British culture, people are generally more open minded to trying other foods. On the continent, the same open mindedness to international cuisines does not exist. They are a lot more insular.

You need to try serving some vegetables with your meals.

Some people on this thread are taking the comments about traditional food being bad as a personal insult. It’s not just British food that lacks flavour. Eastern European cuisine is even worse. As is Scandivian. In fact Eastern European and Scandi food even looks horrible. It’s probably climate related and about poor availability of fresh ingredients.

I live nearly half the year in Spain, and I can confirm food prices have risen a lot recently.

My mamma served me the same foods that she and her own mother before her cooked to send down the valley mines with their men. If I needed healthy, filling and home cooked food.. I wouldn’t look elsewhere than the old valleys.

You’re looking at this from a white lens. I don’t know a single Brit of any culture who doesn’t feed their kid roast dinners, pies or other British fayre. But in Europe only the locals eat local food - people from other backgrounds tend stick to their own dishes because there is mistrust about food. Eg my Arab friend lived in France and the Spain for years and never ate non-Arab food because you can’t trust the halal meat provision but you can in the UK. My Hindu friends in Germany have Indian snacks imported from the UK because even Indian aimed food isn’t vegetarian when it says it is.

French are crazy for sushi and Asian food generally. Big in Spain too

The joke about the British taking over the spice routes but never letting a trace of spice enter their cuisine is very true.

It's really not. Have you bothered to read the thread? There have been plenty of examples of spices being used.

It really is. I don’t need to read the thread to know that. Compare the average British recipe with Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Turkish, Arab and do a spice ingredient count.

I've been trying to think when I last ate a "traditional" British meal and the only 1 I can think of is a toad-in-the-hole I made about a month ago. British cuisine is for the most part boring. If I'm going to spend time cooking a meal I want to be able to enjoy it and in all my 57 years on this planet I've yet to have a British meal that's made me think " that was delicious".

They are also horrified at the quantity of prepared and processed food at supermarkets.
When my family visited they were looking at the isles of ready meals like they saw an actual alien. It's getting to other countries now too though but still nowhere near

There are but we don't eat many of them anymore. Chutneys, piccalilli and pickles in general, brown sauce (some also has tamarind in) devilled kidneys, all the sweet spices used in cakes and desserts.

I think that may be a cultural issue, not a culinary one. I think English people are less rigid in terms of trying anything and enjoying something different to what they know. I accept that this is not going to be a popular opinion and will take cover immediately 😂

Same for me. I think even though it's more common, it's still not seen as something to consume often. Whereas most Brits eat processed food several times a day. It's hard for foreign friends and family to get their heads around that.

It really is. I don’t need to read the thread to know that. Compare the average British recipe with Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Turkish, Arab and do a spice ingredient count.

You said never a trace of spice yet you've apparently read the lists of spices that were and are used in British cuisine? So do we use spice or don't we? No one claimed that we use the most but we do use them. It's hardly a surprise that people in countries where they're more easily accessible use more.

It's ironic that black pudding and wild garlic is now only n top restaurant dishes. Traditional British included, rabbit, swan, pheasant, duck, pigeon, deer, wild boar. The meat and vegetables actually had flavour. As said it depends on how far you go back before you consider traditional cuisines. I like rabbit and barley, carbs don't have to be potatoes. We had native pulses. Our fish, when freshly caught don't need spicing up.

This

There's lots of eating of 'foreign' food in other countries. I lived in South Africa and it was quite normal to make thai curries or Indian curries there, obvious there is a lot of Asian influence in terms of Malay/Indian culture in SA. And I lived in India and pizza and pasta was really popular there. Actually, some of the best pizza I've had, oddly. Burgers are also really popular, though I think people eat them out more than cooking at home. There's lots of German and Israeli influence in some areas too, obviously due to tourism.

Almost all American food is a derivative of another country, so very little traditional American.

Yes. The indigenous food moulded into the mix from immigrants. Iirc Southern food is heavily based on indigenous cooking. I don't knkw if people atill eat bison (hehehehehe orwater monsters).

Looking at food is interesting. Like poor people's food is considered middle class here apparently.

This 😂and not very healthy or varied! Plus we are very international