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 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).
Sure there’s 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 it’s usually the most calorific element in the bread
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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.