A lot of the "British food is bad" meme comes from older victorian sensibilities where the upper class sensibilities were very against unfamiliar or particularly flavorful foods. A common cook book at the time called potatoes "suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious", and also said things like garlic were offensive.
Another part of it comes from the fact that the UK went through rationing during and after WWII, lasting 15 years total, and the recipes that originated during that time were...not always great things, and they carried for a long time afterwards as people who grew up during the blitz ended up enjoying those recipes and continuing to make them.
The actual bad stuff is kinda hard to find nowadays. It's been outcompeted. Kidney pie, or blood pudding, or stuff like that is 'divisive' in the sense that it's something that some people are scared of, but they don't actually taste bad if you try it. The same book that holds the first recipe for steak and kidney pudding is the same one I got the quote from earlier from, and is also the same book that holds a recipe for a "Toast Sandwich". Stuff like that is more where this idea comes from.
This is the comment I came looking for. The American soldiers stationed here during world war two did us bloody dirty, and unfortunately the stereotype persists from people who've never even been here, let alone have actually tried beans on toast.
The Americans soldiers started it, but today's Americans continue with aplomb. There was a national cuisine tier list fill and British food got brigaded to 'why would you eat that', not even 'mid', below German and Irish food. The yanks have 2 jokes: that we eat like WW2 is still on, and that despite having am empire to get spice we don't use it in our food. Then they all chortle away in a massive insecure circle jerk because it is something they can look down on us for.
At the same time they claim macaroni cheese and apple pie as their own, use Worcestershire sauce in a lot of their cooking, and make cottage pie a lot, miss-calling it shepard's pie, then get defensive in the comments when you point it out.
Also they think we think beans on toast is a delicacy.
Sorry my ribs are really painful, I have barely slept and it's my birthday today so had to unleash
Yessssss, it pisses me off when they say apple pie is theirs the earliest recipe was from the UK in the 14th centuryđalso Happy birthday and I hope ur ribs feel better soonđ
Thats a big one. But the fact that macaroni and cheese is one of ours as well sends them frothing. No. Its for once, not the Italians. That specific recipe was us. Thomas Jefferson had it during a visit and brought it over (not messing with you that's actually what happened)
Yes absolutely frothing at the mouth angry, a very real thing.
This is extremely stupid. Â It's the equivalent of implying pasta isn't Italian or fish and chips or curry isn't British (or eating American beans on toast). Â It's not implying invention or a monopoly on the idea. Â In the colonial period people in New England would eat apple pie for nearly every meal.
The irony here in context is also that mac and cheese mostly became a thing because of WW2.  Kraft dinner / Velveeta / whatever the branding was back then was a special treat.  It was rare to get any sort of dairy during the war so it became a food people ate for celebrations, and that stuck around as a kind of Sunday roast sort of tradition.  You are correct on the provenance but macaroni was a haute food until industrial production.Â
lmao. Â It was terribly hard to deal with the shame at first but after years of therapy I did learn to face the fact that medieval Brits sometimes put apples in pastry.
Common bit of classist and at times racist apocrypha made up by the wealthy and noble to distance themselves from the lower classes once spices became more affordable and readily available for the lower classes of the empire to enjoy.
There was a purposeful shift away from the heavily spiced foods that had traditionally only been enjoyed by higher class of people in the medieval and renaissance periods due to cost and rarity. And then when they started looking to differentiate their food to feel superior and exclusive again they decided to go for âquality of ingredientsâ as their replacement and started spreading the lie that spice was used to hide quality to denigrate the poors and regain a de facto sumptuary luxury where theyâd lost one.
Plenty of spices were also preservatives and spices canât fix shit that is going bad. Heck, there was a theory that a big contributor for the reason why humans love spices is because it made food safer and spices=good became a universal concept among humanity.
As a side, food, âswitching sidesâ, with classes is very common. Lobsters used to be considered a poor personâs food where it was abundant, potatoes were considered food for the poor and many rich people refused to eat them (there is even a famous story King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette trying to popularize the food), and so on.
The truth is that food has a universal law, people cook what they have and what they can get, rich people can just get more. Food classism has always been and will always be bullshit.
Cottage pie and Shepherds pie are different.
Both are still British. One is Beef (cottage) the other is lamb (shepherds)
And yeah. Apple Pie is British, and I believe Mac n Cheese is french.
The fact that Irish food may be more highly regarded in the US is so ridiculous. Itâs basically the same as British food (shepherds pie, stew, sausage and mash etc) but because thereâs so many plastic paddies they seem to think itâs superior.
American GIs didn't have rationing like British civilians had and couldn't understand it.
The American military had to make educational films telling GIs not to complain about British civilians only offering them a little food when they visit a civilian's home as it could easily be over a week's ration for that family.
The "British Teef ar bad" meme is from American GIs too. At the time, it was a valid barb, but over the last 80 years, the UK's dental outcomes have outpaced the US'.
Stuff like this really is a great example of "common sense" being complete horseshit, baseless, and based entirely on how people feel. It's the lesson to learn in the modern day if you don't want to be led around by internet memes and bullshit artists.
You donât define ânecessaryâ as âyou look ugly and have crooked teethâ though. Itâs only if itâs like a medical problem. In the US, anyone with crooked teeth will get them because their parents donât want their kids to be unnecessarily ugly for no reason, which impacts their quality of life in lots of ways that are well documented. British parents donât care about their kids in the same way (and have no money lol) and so you get a lot of hideous snaggletoothed people
There's also the thing where we keep natural teeth that are healthy but might be slightly crooked or yellowed. Where as the US tends to favour straight white bleached teeth.
American soldiers stationed abroad during and after WW2 tended to do everyone dirty. They're the reasons American associate japanese geishas with prostitution.
That's because they have been conditioned for so long that they are the best country in the world. The best athletes, smartest people, richest country, best at everything, the american dream, everybody wants a slice. They learn so little about the outside world that they believe they are superior.
The US GI's complained about British grub, then when they got to the continent they insulted the Italians and French by asking for really watered-down coffees (where Americano comes from) đ
Iâd say toasts were one of the most shocking experiences in Britain for me. Like people do really eat toast bread in real life⌠instead of fresh loaf with crunchy crustâŚ
I suppose it depends if people have the time, energy, and access to buy bread every day. I donât live breakfast- close to a bakery, Iâm not baking bread first thing, and toasted sliced bread is a good blank canvas for butter.
Weâve got whole shelves at the supermarket dedicated to spreads for toast đ like thereâs any range of selections for any range of tastes. I donât know anyone who would eat dry toast.
Essential difference in our perception is that I wasnât speaking about plain toasts
at all, but about eating toast bread in all that combinations instead of cooking an actual meal.
Well, there is no objective measurements, I suppose.
But England was the only country where I had mostly negative food experience, and I visited a few dozens and lived in six. Partly because I was too young to get my hands on pub cuisine, but thatâs exactly why Iâm talking about difference between culinary tradition and modern food culture.
And mind you, I lived in Berlin and hadnât any problem with Abendbrot. Many cuisines rely on bread as the main carb source.
And I eat toasted bread (usual, from bakery) like once per week as part of some âgirls breakfastâ situation. Itâs not awful, itâs just not a dish, not nutritional, not notable and not unique to Britain. I buy toast bread mostly for egg sandwiches fir British tea party, but I also bake a few things too.
We can take rice as an example. Rice is the heart of several gorgeous cuisines and is eaten on daily basis. Fresh harvested rice is fabulous.
But rice itself isnât what makes Japanese or Chinese cuisines well-respected. And equivalent to toast bread would be not just rice, but eating Uncle Benâs boil-in-bag rice daily and saying âjust add ketchup, itâs soooo goodâ. I mean I know people who eat like this and enjoy, butâŚ
Okay, even if we imagine that Britain is the single place on Earth where people invented toasting bread and/or combining it with butter/jam⌠Iâve been to England and I was introduced to all the ways of eating toast bread.
Thatâs exactly why I found it shocking. Like the toast bread itself isnât stuff that is worth eating more than monthly, but the idea that âadding the jam makes it mind blowingâ is just sad. Itâs okayish breakfast for hurried morning once in a while, but thatâs it.
So yeah, Brits have gorgeous traditional cuisine. One of my top-5 favorites, Iâm studying it again this year, to expand my repertoire.
But itâs seems that many Brits skip it and mostly chew on sad bread. I donât understand.
We never said itâs mind blowing and itâs not like our national dish or something itâs just cooked bread, we didnât invent it. Itâs weird that you never considered it.
I dunno if you get told this a lot but youâre a strange person.
Like. Iâm English Iâm telling youâre wrong and youâre doubling down.
Sometimes Iâm told that Iâm pedantic. Thatâs true.
Speaking of which⌠you can reread your previous comment and see thar you literally said that trying to dip bread into sauce, quote, âwill blowâ my mind. Also you were rude and your comment is built around assumption that Iâve only tried some plain bread. Which is honestly unlikely.
My point was: toast bread is awful bread and not really a meal and I was shocked that people in England do actually eat it often instead of proper rich British food or baked goods.
Your point about various (also mostly plain) stuff that you can add to plain sad bread isnât actual rebuttal. Rebuttal would be something: âoh, you just had some unlucky experience, usually we donât rely on toasts often, we actually cook food dailyâ.
But I got only âbut toasted bread is glorious!â comments. Which I can respect as subjective opinion, but itâs one of the reasons why British food is catching strays despite being actually good.
Yes, I understood that you are English. Thatâs why we are discussing this.
Hard to answer. I often toast my bread and I eat bread and butter, but usually itâs not the âtoast breadâ. Just normal tasty non-shelf stable breads from bakery.
I donât eat toast and jam, itâs as tasty and nutritious as cereals which is taste of morning depression, covered by sugar.
I mean I lived a few times in England as a high school student (useless attempts to learn the language properly). Toasts were for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch (from the same sad bread), some pasta for dinner. That was traumatic.
So I think itâs not WW2 rations and kidney pie are ruining British cuisine reputation, itâs âwell, we have toasts with something, itâs greatâ. Nah, mate, beef Wellington is great. To be fair, fish and chips are great.
Well, I agree. And even any tasty bread can be toasted even before going stale.
The things I donât get are: toast bread instead of tasty bread, using this bread for packing sandwiches (soggy!), eating bread as meal twice per day daily (my maximum is twice per week, for example).
Also, to be fair itâs not very nutritious aside from calories. Which I wasnât too concerned about, but now Iâm getting older.
Thatâs because you havenât tried it. I said the same thing before I went to the UK, itâs now a go-to dish. Beans are inexpensive and theyâre good for you. You usually add shredded cheese to the top as well. Itâs really not too dissimilar from some Mexican dishes that use carbs, beans, and cheese, and nobody is losing their minds about that. Just different bread and beans being used.
I know that you haven't even tried it then, so may I ask, what are you imagining "beans" refers to in "beans on toast"? Because I've seen so many people mess this up.
Ironically, the beans most Brits agree are the best are actually an American export. Hell, it might just be the zenith of US cuisine as far as I'm concerned. We're talking about Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce - a near perfect balance of sweet, salty, and umami; soft as you like without becoming mush; so full of lean protein and fibre that you can feel your body thanking you as you eat it.
Now slap that on some well buttered, well done toast while it's all very hot, and dig in while the toast is still crunchy. And trust me when I say the balance of textures and flavour profiles is enough to make anyone understand that this has never been British haute cuisine, nor is it a delicacy. This is simply comfort food that can be eaten at literally any hour, and will feel like a warm hug.
My sister moved to Canada and the first time she made beans and toast she was disgusted. She has to drive to Peteâs Frootique to get proper heinz (British import) as the Canadian ones were too sweet.
Ours are usually haricot or berlotti beans as well (personally I detest beans on toast and it has never made an appearance in my house no matter how skint Iâve been)
Interestingly, the upper class food sensibilities seems to be a common thing. Chilies were viewed as trash peasant food used to improve bad meat in China until Mao's revolution championed them as the people's spice.
That's because black pudding is delicious if cooked correctly. Best part of a Full English IMO. Morcilla too, for that matter. People that like a nice rare or juicy steak should especially try them.
Some of these dishes have stuck around and become culinary institutions because they're just really tasty. People who are scared to try them are missing out.
This is very true, and I think some of the meme persists in part because stuff like the Great British Bakeoff had "Taco night" and it was clearly a foodstuff they just had no idea what to do with. That doesn't mean British food is bad, but particularly in the US, people are used to seeing different kinds of foods that just aren't as common or popular in the UK.
The meme is not helped when a small subsection of internet folk continue to try and shit talk American food, claiming all bread is cake, too sweet, too salty, to big, too mushy, etc., always inferior. And internet shit stirrers who do things like claim that Americans don't know how to make a "jacket potato" (baked potatoes with toppings), or that chipped beef on toast (shit on a shingle) is a common American staple (its a WWII rationing/military meal and they cooked it wrong).
When I was a kid in the 90s we ate our versions of Chinese, Indian, Jamaican and Italian food all the time. We also had Chili but other Mexican dishes (and Thai) seemed to come later. Some of this is national but it probably also has to do with my parentâs class position.
If you watch early 2000s episodes of Come Dine With Me you can see thereâs still the nouveaux riche idea that âfancyâ meant coq au vin, and then over the coming decades it becomes a bit more cool for middle class people to be seen as âworldlyâ in their tastes.
Americans donât seem to understand social class in Britain and love to see what one section of society does and call it a national trait. They also donât seem to understand how geography and colonial history impact what people in a country eat most commonly, despite - I expect - having towns where people of European heritage eat more or less Asian or South American food due to the makeup of the local community.
Tacos aren't particularly common in the UK, but Fajitas are - I wouldn't say it's authentic, but we have Fajitas nights at home, and it wasn't uncommon to have Fajitas when I went over friend's houses when I was younger. They aren't an uncommon sight in pubs/restaurants either. Quesadillas and Enchiladas are more popular than Tacos too, now that I think about it.
Really hard to find places selling good ones, the only place I've found that makes them well is a tiny family run place in the middle of an industrial estate that don't do delivery.
Sure thereâs artisanal bakeries in the America that are lovely and make decent bread, but fact is the freely/commercially available bread is terrible. There is zero reason to add any sugar to bread and yet itâs usually the most calorific element in the bread
Queen Victoria was famous for that towards the end of her reign. The book i quoted and environment i described are closer to mid 19th century. Queen Victoria only started eating curry regularly in about 1887, and that was part of what broke that culture actually.
"British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History" by Colin Spencer talks a great deal about the specific culture.
Yes that's all true. I'm not saying this was a permanent cultural phenomenon, or universal between all classes. I'm saying that mid 19th century upper class Victorian England had a tendency to view bland food as morally superior, and particularly flavorful food as sinful, and this belief contributed to the ideas of British food being bland.
This is a well documented thing, there's plenty of books beyond the ones i already mentioned detailing it.
I think the other factor is that people are bad at picking good food while traveling. If you don't know a cuisine you don't know which parts you will and won't like, and you won't what what is or isn't a good example. If you don't know the area you won't know which are the better places to get food. And touristy areas tend not to have good food at a good price, and overpriced mediocre food is always a bad experience even if the food isn't bad per se.
Never been to Britain but grew up in a touristy city in the US and saw people do these things all the time.
To be fair, the US also has some terrible depression era recipes. I donât think we can judge you for that. We also have an embarrassing number of jello and casserole recipes that should never see the light of day.
On the first bit about potatoes, it wasn't even just us that were suspicious of them - I read a book about crisps (chips to some) and it spoke of the history of potatoes and how hard it was to get them accepted in other countries too.
Also traditionally Americans salted food in the kitchen, and Brits salted food at the table. So British food tasted bland to Americans and American food tasted salty to Brits.Â
That goes for every fast food chain tho. That's like going to a McDonald's and saying "all American food is bad" or a Taco Bell and saying the same about Mexican food. Greg's isn't 'British Cuisine' it is fast food slop that is quick and cheap to grab on your way home or to work. If you go to a new country and only hit up the fast food chains thats just on you.
It infuriates me sometimes that we came out of rationing after Germany yet we get this grief. My mother (Iâm a millennial) grew up just after rationing ended and it took her a long time to break the must be frugal mindset sheâd been brought up with.
Then add in the growth of convenience food (and feminism and then the 70s financial issues) all happening immediately after rationing and itâs taken us a while to rediscover the joy of food.
Our food has been steadily improving since the 1980s.
WW2 is honestly the biggest factor. That's when US troops came over to the UK, saw what we were eating in the midst of prolonged war, then went home and spread that stereotype.
I'm guessing that the cookbook is Mrs Beeton's, which is hardly reliable since it describes Tomatoes as good and bad for you and was largely cribbed from other books.
I have a 1920s copy of Enquire Within Everything (which seems largely un-updated after the rights were bought by a small/vanity publisher from what I can tell) and it's actually quite keen in adding spices to things _except_ when feeding them to children (which is very Victorian).
A lot of the "British food is bad" meme comes from older victorian sensibilities where the upper class sensibilities were very against unfamiliar or particularly flavorful foods. A common cook book at the time called potatoes "suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious", and also said things like garlic were offensive.
Upper classes wouldn't have been using cooking books tbh
Not sure where you've got this from but Victorian Upper and even Middle Classes were famous for talking about the superiority of Continental foods, over native ones and derided things we considered traditional British foods.
Garlic was finally accepted during the Victorian era, despite being associated as peasant food earlier on, before it once again fell out of fashion and was finally revived the 1980s and 90s.
A lot of the plainer btitish palette goes back far further than the Victorian era, with it being visible in the late medieval period. In writings back then we were often teased by our European counterparts for having far more pastries, red meat and hardier and plainer foods.
By the 1600s we were notorious for our plain food. Also due to dominance of the spice trade by the Dutch early on with our naval and trade wars with the we struggled to get hold of spices.
Alongside their obsession with putting fruit in everything, it was the main driving force for the tutors to seek getting dried fruits and currants from the Ottoman empire.
While we eventually managed to get spices from India but by then the market had largely collapsed with spices starting to become incredibly cheap due to supply. By then cotton and sugar became far more important, so spices never effected British dishes in the same manner as mainland Europe who had access far earlier and in larger amounts.
Also, the French. For a long-ass time, the British Empire was the top dog, so you couldn't carelessly besmirch of them, because they owned like a third of the planet. However, making fun of their food was a safe target, especially because the classic dry, self-deprecating English humor was already a thing back then. Then, as is tradition, the French took advantage of this in their long-standing rivalry with the British by proclaiming that they were the pinnacle of culture in all ways, including the culinary arts, while the brits were eating slop, meaning the French ways were obviously superior, and it just got entrenched in culture.
Then the WWII rationing and the US soldiers stationed there came about, into a context where the brits were already joking "Yeah, our food's bloody terrible, amirite?", and then US pop-culture blasted that into the global collective conscious.
The world war 2 rationing is key for how it became known as this in the current day. Just listen to âSweet Jamaicaâ by Lord Kitchener - calypso song. Its about the windrush generation experience in the 1950s and 1960s and these are some of the lyrics:
âAnother thing that hum-buggin' me
Is the food control in London city
They say you must have a ration book
Before you could put on something to cook
And friends, the weekly ration's so small
In a day or two, you can sure eat all
So before I suffer, I'm going over
For my ackee and saltfish in Jamaicaâ
Our period of rationing went on far longer than other ppl so many grew up with very strange food options. Like spam and baked beans became common because they were cheap and went far!
This is what it originally is but at this current, specific point in time people are making it basically a personality trait and it's exhausting. I've genuinely dropped friends from namely the US for pulling these constant "jokes" because there's a point there just aren't funny anymore.
In fairness, potatoes were a new world thing as are tomatoes, both are part of the nightshade family.
So to europeans, it is fairly logical at first to assume something related to nightshade is poisonous. If no one you knew had tried potatoes and tomatoes before, you probably wouldn't want to be the first.
But they very quickly became a staple food of Ireland and The North.
458
u/alexxerth 22d ago
A lot of the "British food is bad" meme comes from older victorian sensibilities where the upper class sensibilities were very against unfamiliar or particularly flavorful foods. A common cook book at the time called potatoes "suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious", and also said things like garlic were offensive.
Another part of it comes from the fact that the UK went through rationing during and after WWII, lasting 15 years total, and the recipes that originated during that time were...not always great things, and they carried for a long time afterwards as people who grew up during the blitz ended up enjoying those recipes and continuing to make them.
The actual bad stuff is kinda hard to find nowadays. It's been outcompeted. Kidney pie, or blood pudding, or stuff like that is 'divisive' in the sense that it's something that some people are scared of, but they don't actually taste bad if you try it. The same book that holds the first recipe for steak and kidney pudding is the same one I got the quote from earlier from, and is also the same book that holds a recipe for a "Toast Sandwich". Stuff like that is more where this idea comes from.