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
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 “quality of ingredients” 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 they’d lost one.
Plenty of spices were also preservatives and spices can’t 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, “switching sides”, with classes is very common. Lobsters used to be considered a poor person’s 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.
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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.