What is British food?

[DaimYou]

Ds needs to plan and cook a "British Starter" (I guess the rest of the meal will come in subsequent weeks)

He has a number of ideas of things that are often on British menus but they all seem to have foreign origins.

There has to be a reasonable degree of difficulty to score good marks and he has 2 hours.

His current favourite is smoked trout pate with oat cakes and cucumber salad, but pate is French.....Or has it become traditional in Britain?

Potted shrimp or crab?

Could he do a mini Yorkshire pudding with chipolate sausages or a bit of steak?

Potted shrimps.

Maybe a soup, like cock a leekie?

I would think you would be fine with the trout pate though. Sounds lovely.

You can pot just about anything, including trout.

Egg mayo, though mayo is french it's a classic British starter.

The starters listed on this page sound good: www.bbc.co.uk/food/cuisines/british

Is pate French, or have we just used the French word?
Surely people have been making pastes of stuff for ever, but the French word for paste stuck for the meaty one, and the Italian word for same stuck for pasta (which was Chinese first, I think!).

So he could maybe do that anyway and come up with a reason why it's British? And spot marks for the language? Or make a claim as to Britishness is all about borrowing from other cultures anyway...

Classic prawn cocktail? Or is that French too?

Smoked salmon would be nice

Smoked salmon is nice but wouldn't that just be opening a packet

Smoked trout sounds fab. We had our own pastes (same word as pate) but just fancied them up with French words to make them posher. Remember Shippams paste in little jars?