EXACTLY, people will point out the insane bullshit they see online and tout it as the countrywide norm. I used it purely as an example the british food haters have recently started latching onto and exploding in the youtube algorithm
I occasionally see jellied eels in very old school east London chippies, but that's it. It's probably less common than something like rocky mountain oysters in America and I'd honestly rather eat the eels lmao.
They're just a historical novelty. I've seen one takeaway advertise jellies eels in my old hometown (Sutton), which I'm pretty sure is there just to signal they're an old school spoons/takeaway rather than be a top-selling item
I was going to ask about jellied eels. As an American who has visited GB in the past, I did enjoy pretty much everything that I ate there, with the exception of your bacon.
We have good bacon and bad bacon, it depends where you ate it and where it was sourced from, how much you want to spend, and who is cooking it, etc.
Like many western countries, we also eat a variety of food from all round the world. Our supermarkets have aisles dedicated to officially Italian food, indian, thai, mexican, etc, and we have restaurants with cuisine from round the world.
The quality differs according to what budget you have.
Jellied eels used to be very very cheap in London, because the Thames was full of eels ready to fish out, and the "jellied" part is just what naturally happens when you boil them with a few seasonings and some vinegar.
They were never a delicacy, but they were one of very few foods that actually came from London, so there was a certain degree of London pride to them amongst the common folk.
Then some stuff happened and eels are now very rare in the Thames, so now they only really exist as a novelty food for tourists.
They're not rare, they're just not excessively common as they once were.
Once watched a seagull on the bank at Vauxhall manage to swallow a whole eel. Its neck was huge, genuinely thought it was about to keel over. Then the whole eel came back out again. Good times...
I think they are talking about Stargazy pie, which is specifically a Cornish dish. It is one of the weirder dishes in British cuisine, but I imagine quite tasty. The fish heads poking out of the crust can be off putting for some.
Stargazy pie is a regional novelty, jellied eels are the same, yet people judge the country based on that. It'd be like judging Italian cuisine based on casu martzu.
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u/HyperionSaber 22d ago
As a Brit for nearly 50 years, I've never heard or seen herring pie anywhere ever.