The bad reputation used to be deserved. I was born in the early 60’s. As a kid getting school dinners, every single one of the adults serving the food had gone through the Second World War and the subsequent rationing. This led to an ‘eat what you’re given and be grateful’ mentality. Not much sympathy for kids who didn’t like that particular food (yes beetroot I’m looking at you). This ‘mustn’t grumble’ mentality accompanied your average Brit in the ‘60s and ‘70s when they dived out. Nobody would ever complain about restaurant food so there was no incentive to improve it. Lastly there’s the emergence of the fridge/freezer. We had no fridge when I was a lad. There was a marble slab in the cupboard under the stairs where mum kept the butter etc. she’d also shop twice a day and pick up what she needed for the next meal. Owning a fridge allowed the shopper in the family to indulge in fantasies about modern dishes.
The aftermath of WW2 had an opposite effect in the US. We pretty much began to go ham on our quick foods and turn them into business while inviting migrants to come and further enrich our selection of cuisines. It did give a lot of people a taste for processed foods though. It was a full on processed food takeover. Think spam and frozen OJ. It's a nice snapshot of how well the US did after the war which was the opposite of how the UK did. It's quite unfortunate but as someone who enjoys blood sausage and marmite, I hope to see British foods fully shed its rationing era skin. I still don't think I can get into beans on toast though. Soggy toast with beans doesn't sound too thrilling. Where I come from, beans are for BBQ. I eat stripey bacon with peanut butter so I can't make fun.
@@RemnantCult A couple of things. The US made a big profit from WWII, with all of those countries on both sides owing big debts to the US (only 2 countries ever fully repaid the US, Britain and the Soviet Union), so while the UK was having to rebuild a lot of the nation, while repaying war loans and helping other countries rebuild, the US had none of this and could flourish. Beans on Toast - we British and also Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians know to butter our toast before putting the beans on it. This layer of butter, enhances the taste and slows sogginess down considerably, though by the end it will get through, if you leave it long enough. Also we have been brought up to enjoy this and you haven't, so you're not accustomed to the taste and textures like we are. Trying my first T-Bone Steak while visiting the US, was like a jaw exerciser, because I wasn't used to that for example.
Dutch cuisine shares some similarities with British cuisine, in that most of our traditional dishes were 'poor people's food.' Anyone know Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters? Every dish (nearly every) was based on potatoes. For the rich people's cuisine, see French cuisine. Raw herring is an exception, as that's really old. First accounts of the curing of herring go back to 1380. I guess most people ate a lot of bread and of course turnips, before potatoes were introduced. Although even tulip bulbs are edible, and many Dutch in the big cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht) turned to eating tulips bulbs during the last winter of the Second World War (Dutch Hungerwinter). Anyway, like the British, Dutch cuisine was saved by the people in our colonies, the Dutch East Indies and Suriname. Following the Indonesian War of Independence, many Dutch Indies people were 'repatriated' even though many had never been to Holland before. And when Suriname was granted independence in the 1970s, a lot of Surinamese people used their Dutch passports to emigrate to The Netherlands. The best bami dish I ever tasted was Surinaamse Bami, a combination of Javanese and Surinamese culinary influences.
My father and other family members were in England during WWII. My father was a kid and hunted as a kid. In Canada my nana was saving the rations and sending what she could to relatives to help them out during the war.
As an American, when someone says British food, I think fish and chips, bangers and mash, sunday roasts, shepherd's/cottage pie, beef wellington, and those massive breakfasts. If those are bad, then I like bad food.
@@kapuzinergruft still better than the supre processed food you guys eat evey minute lol I'm not even british, but I do dislike modern "american" food
My German wife had heard that British people added mint to everything. The idea of mint sauce with meat sickened her to the same amount as a pineapple on a pizza would a normal person. We didn't realise that to Brits, mint usually means Garden Mint whereas to them, mint means Peppermint. I made a salad that tasted 1000% of the 0.1% Peppermint I added to it before I figured that out.
@@leviturner3265 I guess it depends on what you're used to (eat). Mint to me shoud be left for a tisane (herb tea). Or some cold sauce to go with Middle Eastern food. Lamb meat is very delicate. I make fricassé, saddle steak or lamb cutlets (with rosemary, thyme and oregano), shanks, or leg roast. But no mint please. I'm Norwegian !
There's actually a bit of folk lore around the lamb and mint sauce. Supposedly, the British were eating too much lamb and the supply of sheep couldn't keep up, so the ruler at the time, I believe either queen Victoria or Elizabeth I, ordered that all lamb had to be eaten with mint sauce. This was meant to stop people from eating lamb, as it was thought that lamb and mint sauce would be terrible. However, the common folk loved the mint sauce so much that the plan backfired and they ate even more lamb than before.
Mint sauce is good with lamb, the acidic sweet sauce cuts through the fat and lamb can be rather fatty. Its like using redcurrant sauce with venison or gamey meat...or using cranberry sauce in a bacon and melted brie sandwich.
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 Personally when dealing with an old fashioned mint sauce I find the vinegar to have more of an overpowering characteristic than the mint. I am sure it does depend what one is used to. I would recommend giving it a try, to see if you like it. I generally would also look for rosemary as a seasoning for lamb, perhaps thyme, and salt and pepper of course. Even seasoning the lamb this way I would generally also make a mint sauce, if mint is in season. I have also seasoned lamb with dried mint in addition to other herbs. Mint sauce is indisputably not for everyone. Lamb fricassee... interesting. I have only made chicken fricassee and have heard of rabbit, but never lamb. Interesting.
@@petuniasevan so did the spanish, french, ottoman, greek (byzantines), russian and chinese. In all fairness, "rich people's" english cuisine is pretty good, like Wellington Beef. But the fact they made their "common" british food that gruesome is a fact.
i also blame the photography side of things. We're used to seeing photos of food taken like they're gonna be on Italian Vogue, but a lot of the "gross British food" photos are taken with crappy lighting and grainy quality that only make the dish look dull and lifeless. Sure the examples actually show off crap food a lot of the time, but a lot of those dishes would probably look better if they just opened a curtain or turned on a lamp for some warmer lighting
no, its because the british predominately eat things like pigs/toads in blankets the names are very different and unusual because english is the main trade language of the world. and everyone just understand the bland expressions that are translated to our own different cultured minds. For example what is dutch food to the british. often i get to hear. ah you mean snitzel man. but thats actually austrian. or when you ask germans why not the entire country wears bavarian clothing in oktober. its that stereotypical bs mixed with a lot of misinformation that makes it much worse.
@@bruhed1117 the British eat utilitarian. The French eat overcomplicated, the Dutch and Germans just eat what was available and efficient, the danish over produced on its main trading articles. To the point of them being gullash barons. I think that covers most of Western Europe. And for added bonus the Italians have a lot of dishes we eat and love that came from poor regions or poor people.
It annoys me so much because the frequent comment is “the British invaded all those countries for spices and don’t use them” … but they don’t realise that it was only the fucking Royalty & Aristocracy that could have had spices, whereas the rest of us plebs had fuck all, salt was a luxury! My gran was born in 1944 in Stockton on Tees, absolutely piss poor, she didn’t eat garlic for the first time until the late 80’s! I don’t think she ate Paprika until the 00’s and for most of my life she said Chinese Food, Indian Food, Pizza, Kebabs etc. was “that weird foreign muck” 🤷🏻♂️😂, whereas my mum (born in 1967) was way more open to trying new things but again, a lot of herbs & spices she didn’t really buy until the late 1990’s/early 2000’s … fast forward to me (born 1986) and 90% of what I eat has a ton of herbs & spices because it’s more readily available at a reasonable price and there’s a lot more information available at our fingertips on how to best utilise them. I think people genuinely don’t realise how in Britain we were absolutely piss poor until very recently 😂😂😂
This. The UK and US were wealthy countries during their industrial eras on paper but that was only for the upper class. The bottom half lived in abject poverty. Also some of those spices were medicinal use.
And when they brought the spices back, they didn't know how to use them. They had dishes like 'cinnamon fish'. But yes, many spices were incredibly expensive. Nutmeg, by weight, was worth more than gold.
I would add that the British didn't actually seek spices and the British empire had nothing to do with spices, it was a post industrial empire that traded in absolutely everything. The spice trade was much more the Portuguese and Dutch. Its ignorant on multiple levels, we didn't seek and empire for spices, and we also like spices.
It could still be a gamble. You never knew if there was a dead sheep half a mile up the river, but it was definitely a better option than the water out of the Thames.
@@shanewalta7876 I've never understood this issue of contaminated water, especially in the countryside. It's possible to make a water filter using layers of sand, gravel, grass, etc, and then boil the filtered water. And if you have access to a well even better still.
@@JimCarner777 The thing is, we're only knows that boiling water kiIIs most of the bacteria somewhere around the 18th century when study of microbiology is widespread after the invention of microscope.
Growing up in Canada, there was a type of Selection Bias guiding our opinions of "British Food". We thought of every day food as "British" (even when it was not) while restaurants served "Exotic" foods. ie. Beans on toast, sandwiches, canned soup, hard-boiled eggs, breakfast sausage, meat & potatoes, and boiled vegetables were "British". The very plain, mostly flavourless, low effort home cooking. But when we went to restaurants that's where we saw 'foreign cooking'. Food that was prepared with some flare: shish kabob, Sweet n' Sour chicken with pineapple, lasagne, biryani, enchilades, and crepes suzette. What we didn't get from British cuisine were any of the items from fine dining: Christmas goose, Yorkshire pudding, trifle, steak and kidney pie, cranachan, or meat pies. tldr; we got mediocre British food to the point where we identified mediocre food as British. We didn't get mediocre 'foreign' food, only a selection of the most appealing. That solidified the bias that British food was inferior.
Funny thing is, a lot of those fancy dishes you list will almost certainly be the British version of that dish. And the British dishes you've listed aren't mediocre, there's only mediocre preparation. My nan was a Cordon Bleu chef and when _she_ made those dishes, I'm sad that as good as I am at cooking, I will never be that good.
To be clear, Yorkshire pudding is the very opposite of fine dining, it's one of the simplest foods we have and came from using cheap/leftover ingredients. It's very bland too, but super crispy and airy and tender and the perfect vehicle for flavourful gravy and sweet sauces/jams 😋
I am Canadian and grew up on British cooking and what my nana and grandma made was not bland and flavourless. My mum learned to cook from her English mother and what she cooked was not lacking in flavour.
@@laurabailey1054some of the best Sunday roasts I've ever tasted were cooked by mums and grans in Canada. British is great when prepared by those who care. Cheers
I’m an American and most of these foods aren’t gross to me at all. As near as I can tell, bad British food is usually the result of bad cooking, not bad ingredients. The same can be said about American food as well.
Because you label yourself as "eastsider" suggests that you maybe of british heritage or influence. Like England you have few endemic items of food culture; look outside of your area and you will see beautiful food culture. We are more than the 13 colonies!
@@jerrelfontenot747 : As I said, I’m an American. The world’s bounty in all of its rich variations and cultures is available to me. I’m very fortunate.
@@jerrelfontenot747 We gave you the sandwich, cured meats, mustard, Worcester sauce, casseroles and apple pie! Its not that bad going that a country with "few endemic items of food culture" has created some of your "american" national favourites of today. Could you try and sound any more patronising?
@@manmaje3596 There is also how foreigners remark appreciatively on America's wide variety of pies -- flavors, ingredients, textures. Fruit pies seem everywhere and everybody, and in America no less: seems anybody making fruit conserves or preserves gets around to baking them in a pie crust sooner or later. Then you go as far afield as the citrus pies, like Key lime or lemon meringue, and fetch up at pies made of pecans. And chiffon pies. Got nothing else in the house? -- pie fillings that are mainly raisins, with or without a custard...
Usually, the voices making fun of British cuisine are Americans, but they forget a few things. 1) British traditional cuisine is pretty heavy, because that's typical for northern Europe. See German, Irish, Eastern European and Scandinavian food. So naturally it doesn't have the same characteristics as food from southern Europe and overseas. 2) Americans often eat the same food, such as fish and chips, for example. And beans. 3) British food has evolved since the rationing days and before. What was haute cuisine 90 odd years ago would be pretty boilerplate today.
@@invisibleman4827 that is unsurprisingly true But our neighbours overseas just like to yammer on about how our food is ‘bland’ and ‘boring’, as if their food isn’t just over processed and overpriced slop (plus, all the additives and dyes used is definitely not healthy…. And they have roast chicken in a can. Why.)
@@Scoutbutball British food has the spice and consistency of a joke told by James Corden. The United States is so multicultural that we've got a bit of everything here. Especially in the south, Cajun food is my favorite personally. British people need to come here lol, it'll be like a food spiritual awakening.
@@Foogi9000Britain also has a bit of everything too. We are still very much a multicultural nation, with food from all over the world. You can't compare multicultural foods to native, just because traditional British food doesn't include spices and cajun, doesn't mean we don't have those foods.
@@Gallic_Gabagool nowhere near as much as the ultra processed slop you eat in america. even your grocery store bread has absurd amounts of sugar, probably even corn additives and other garbage in it. the level of quality of the produce and basic ingredients you can get in britain is actually very good and on par with the rest of mainland europe, which actually does have regulations for what can be considered food or put in food products, unlike usa.
I would say this, very objectively speaking (I am Irish so our cuisine is not dissimilar to the British); the British have some fantastic traditional dishes. A roast dinner, done properly, is something to look forward to. Breakfast is fantastic, when done properly with good quality bacon, sausages etc. Cod & chips is also delicious when cooked with a real beer batter, freshly cut chips, tartar sauce. Etc Etc. What people make fun of is not traditional British food per-se, but more so the way Britons tend to eat on a day to day basis, particularly the "working class" - fish fingers and beans, frozen chicken fillets and beans, oven chips and fried eggs, oven chips and sausages; in essence, some kind of dry, frozen meat or chips paired with unseasoned baked beans or something similar. And especially when we see British people putting photos of these such dishes on the internet and and calling it "the best dinner ever", when objectively speaking it is not only very average but the product of complete culinary laziness. My wife, who grew up in Co. Cork in Ireland, always seasons her baked beans with herbs, black pepper, and cheese, which makes them richer, less sweet, and thicker. They actually taste great when you do that to them.
In the 19th century, currys and chutneys became part of British cuisine as soldiers who had served in India wanted those dishes when they returned to Britain.
Hey everyone! Thanks for the love on this, quick clarification. My last two longform videos took two different approaches, for this one the budget went completely on an editor. For the Last one (Amsterdam food tour) the budget went on the content itself and I handled the whole production. Its clear the use of AI isnt going down well with you guys, and the edit pulls away from my style too much, so in future Ill be taking a different approach, but thanks for watching regardless.
You missed (possibly on purpose, if you have a large US audience) that the biggest reason for British food's poor reputation is that during WWII, we had around 4 million US military based here in the UK and they arrived (late) after we'd been at war for around 2 years and were on heavy rationing. This meant that US servicemen, were given very bland but hearty foods to sustain them, while here and after the war, they took these stories of bland, boring, tasteless, British food, home with them and the internet has revived kept these tales and reputation in the minds of US Americans to the present day.
I am Polish and I like British food. We have kaszanka and czernina instead of black pudding, and blood is very nutritious. Indian and Mexican food is rubbish, honestly.
Or they eat it but don't know it's from here, to this day Americans will even claim Alexander Graham Bell or Andrew Carnagae are Americans so its no surprise that they don't know that macaroni cheese, apple pie, possibly fried chicken, and many other dishes are British.
Well, I must admit the Stargazer Pie looks a bit... Different. That said, Norwegians eat fermented mountain lake trout, and fermented cod. (Only Icelandic cousins take it one notch up, with fermented shark, and whale blubber ditto). The Swedes of course have a mad love for über fermented herring. 😮 But that's close to suicede... Love from Norway 😊❤
As a Brit, my main criticism of our food is the lack of consistency. I've had great Scotch eggs, I've had bad ones. I've had great Cornish pasties, I've had bad ones. I've had great fry-ups, I've had bad ones. You get the idea. We need consistency in order for our food to be considered, well, consistently good.
But surely that's the joy of it. Never knowing what you're going to get. Sometimes it's a nice tasty meal. Sometimes it's food poisoning. You have to take risks to feel alive. Living for the now, or waiting for the ambulance. It's all the spice of life.
I would agree that consistency adds a lot to the reputation of a cuisine type. Not saying I've _never_ had bad Mexican food in my life, but the fact that around 99% of my experiences with Mexican food have been positive tells me that its popularity is very well deserved.
As a Belgian food blogger (Vegatopia), I don't quite understand the bad reputation of British food. Until the 1980's cuisine in most of Western Europe was incredibly bland, with the Netherlands as somehow an exception because of colonial influence. We crossed the border for more flavourful groceries. Several of my childhood dishes were even quite similar like "balkenbrij" (check Wikipedia) and black pudding. I had it with pan fried apple slices. On the one hand British food is mocked at because it is supposed to be weird, bland and overcooked, on the other hand British chefs conquered the world and influenced many other cuisines. So, the there's a contradiction and not so much rationality. Be proud of your heritage!
You forget western europe included Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and sorry as a Portuguese i have to say you're incorrect we have and INCREDIBLY LONG AND COLOURFUL FLAVOURFUL EVEN culinary history stretching back to the age of discovery we started by sailing around africa to reach india and capitalise on the spice trade before the UK dutch or any other European had the chance, then with the discorvery of the new world Portugal and Spain were thr FIRST european to use POTATO'S (Portuguese keeps the exact same word as the natives in south america used to refer to BATATA) As well as peppers and the first people outisde of mexico to start using chilis and cacao were portugal and Spain also. Without Portuguese spreading chillies to africa india china etc there wouldn't be the same piri piri chicken no spicy indian curries like you know or chinese food you might be familiar with either. Due to the favourable climate in southern europe we have been cultivating these plant's for near 5 centuries did i even mention tomatoes too😂 what would Italian cuisine be like now without these contributions from south America brought to the outside world by Portuguese and Spanish explorers? Not to mention our amazing history of pastries cakes and baked goods which gave rise to some of the deserts and cakes you see in macau china and japan today ! Truly an extensive and tasty culinary history to be found in western europe if you ask me! No fish and chips or tea time in England either the list goes on😂
Interesting, because Dutch food nowadays has a reputation for blandness similar to the British (yes it does, Dutch people, stop pretending it doesn't!).
Um, you're Belgian so right next to France and you don't understand why British food has a bad reputation?! Lmao. When I was in the UK the food is like ten times worse than in France or Belgium and more expensive.
As a British South Asian myself, I will say people HEAAAAVILY overdramatise British food as an "awful" thing. While it's arguably not the most complex cuisine on the planet, it's definitely more about simple comfort foods and that doesn't mean British cuisine cannot be delicious. Is it out of this world? Maybe if your taste pallet is simple it might be a huge standout, but if you've had the chance to discover many different cuisines and tastes in the world, you will find that many other cuisines have more standout qualities. It's also a matter of who cooks that specific British food. There's a reason why Gordon Ramsay got mad at lots of British cooks before lol. 😂
Dude at no time did anyone criticize British food for being simple. Italian food is simple, but they know how to make food taste like the ingredients that are in it. Salt isn't bad for you unless you have a health condition like high blood pressure, or you rarely drink water. Food made in the UK, unless it's London, isn't made with much care how it's made or the ingredients that go into it. At least not in Peterborough. Meat and two veg can be good if those items are cooked and seasoned well, but they just aren't. Get some chucky chips that have been seasoned with salt *the moment* they come out of the oil, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Absolutely adored the abundance of alliteration in this food focused feature. The clever, continuous cadence of culinary commentary kept me captivated!
The bad reputation was largely spread by Americans who had served in Britain during WW2. The wartime British diet was monotinous, and alien to the food most American soldiers got from their well-supplied Army. The GIs were often complaining that their US Army rations were inferior to mom's home cooking, but complaining about the US rations is a tradition. At the end of the war, they almost immediately went back to the booming happy days in the post-war US, well before rationing and shortages ended in the UK, so the contrast was even more severe. American veterans who got to the UK but NOT into combat - could talk about how rough they had it having to eat British food, a few times, when they could not talk about real suffering.
@weseld1 Same applies to the 'bad teeth' stereotype. If you look at old footage of British soldiers from WW1 and WW2, there used to be more people with really crooked or missing teeth, and with dentures. This seems to gave changed for people born after 1948 with the NHS and improved dental care.
@@invisibleman4827 Yes. I had a college roommate who was born in London in1944, and had what I thought if as typical British teeth. As did most of the parents of my classmates, thanks to poor nutrition in the US and UK during the Great Depression. I and many other American "War Babies" (born 1940-45) benefitted from the extra ration coupons for expectant mothers and free dental/medical care for the wives of US servicemen.
Most of the distaste about british food culture is because we have a very honest food culture. What we say we eat is what we do eat, for everyone. In most other countries, their food culture is aspirational, but the UK's is WYSIWYG.
That's true. I've been living in Japan for 3 years and honestly, and people can be served a turd and it won't complain. On TV, they just start yelling "OISHIIII" (delicious) before the food even reaches their mouth. Part of the reason for this is to be polite, the other is that being defaming a business, even if it's your own perfectly valid opinion, is a crime. Ironically there's a cafe/bakery near me, called Penny Lane, a beatles themed place and it is heaving. Despite the isolated location, it's stupidly busy even on weekdays and it's the only place in Japan I've found which serves proper pub grub with proper pub style burgers and triple cooked chips, nice pies etc. Yet, if you asked any of those diners "Do you like British Food?" They'd probably turn around and say "Like Stargazy pie? Nah! British food is terrible!" (Probably in Japanese of course.)
True, most British food in restaurants are basically tarted up versions of what people eat at home. In many other countries, the food you get in restaurants is almost never eaten at home, maybe only on a special occasion.
@@327legoman yeah but we can’t exactly claim burger and chips as British food. As you describe it, it’s just a British spin on a quintessential American food. But I do agree in essence. If there was a restaurant doing proper pie and mash, Sunday roasts, toad in the hole etc then people would love it (may need to adjust for each countries palate as we do here).
True but 'Scotch' is generally a word used (even by us Scottish folk) for foods and of course drinks, at least in more recent centuries and not to do with the location of production or origin.
British food has a bad rep because rationing led to very poor food during a period when there were 3 or 4 million US troops in the country. So if they ate outside the unit mess would have been served a very bad or ersatz version of something they ate at home.
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 Traditional German food is in fact well-seasoned. It's more the strong Puritan influence, with the emphasis on 'plain, honest, simple fare' and a suspicion of making food too 'extravagant' in preparation or flavouring.
this is what i also think, the people of GB had it hard in WW2, much much harder than the dominions, my MIL was 14 when WW2 started, she was born and raised in Birmingham
So there was a British food joke that popped up in Dragon Age origins: “ we take the biggest pot we can find and put everything in it, then cook it for as long as possible until everything is bland and tasteless. When everything is a uniform, greyish colour, that’s when I know it is done”…
That's not a joke. That's the recipe for 1970 school meals. It's pointless making anything tasty because some kid is only going to poke their snot-covered finger into it before you can eat it anyway. There's a reason for everything.
For people who grew up with wartime rationing, making a little food go along way became the standard way to cook, and the money they saved meant they carried on cooking these terrible, but cheap, meals. Surprisingly, the nation has never been fitter than in that era.
I love our pork sausages, they just perfectly present you with the flavour of pork. We like taking just a few ingredients and cooking them to perfection to present their unaltered flavour.
Modern British food for the most part is actually really good, the quality of the ingredients on the European continent is usually far superior to the quality of food in other places (excluding Japan, Korea etc) due to strict food standard laws which really contributes to these classic meals tasting really great without the need of heavy seasoning or alteration, some people (mostly Americans) simply can't comprehend this because most of them haven't tasted food in Europe which for the most part is of a much higher standard and quality than what they're used to
Because baked beans in the US Vs UK are very different. They've never tried Heinz beans before. And TBF, the beans themselves taste better than they look
@@MostlyPennyCat It's an American company, it's not an American product, they don't really sell them over there. Well they sell baked beans but they're not the same. I think they do actually sell some called "British style" or something (edit: Oh, they are literally pictured in this video) because I saw a video about it, which compared them to actual British Heinz Beanz, but even they are not identical, and most people probably don't even know you can buy them. For some reason as a kid I didn't like baked beans. I thought they were kinda gross. Nowadays I think they're pretty good. Oh and Heinz aren't even the best.
Beans is a less costly, good source of protein if you can't have meat. In Norway we serve tomato beans with thick slices of fried unsmoked salty bacon. This is eaten with steamed potatoes and white sauce. The Danes add chopped parsley to the sauce, where as in Sweden they just swap tomato beans for brown beans. Very typical Scandinavian... 😊❤
British food is a long way from being awful. In fact it's a huge improvement on the food most people in the world today eat. But it's fashionable to criticise the British and everything British, and so we have to endure this nonsense.
@@tommymorrison6478 That’s because us Brits actively said no to being run by the globalist state in 2016, so they are trying to take us down because of it.
Most British Indian restaurants were started by families from Sylhet which was India but now in Bangladesh, and they brought East Bengali food with them. Sylhetis were very popular as crew in the UK Merchant Navy, and after the Second World War they were given special immigration status and Sylheti communities sprang up in many port cities, where they opened restaurants and gradually spread throughout the country. Using local ingredients they also cooked other popular Indian foods from all over India but with a Bengali twist. Apparently Chicken Tikka Masala was invented in Glasgow when someone complained that their oven roasted chicken (tikka) was too dry so the chef reached for a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup and history was made!
@@YOSSARIAN313 Yes, very similar story. A lot of Chinese arrived on the West Coast for various gold rushes and also were used as cheap labor building the Western leg of the Transcontinental railroad up from Sacramento .. hundreds died. However many of them stayed and opened restaurants where they adapted Chinese dishes to local tastes. Particularly Chop Sui and Chow Mein!!
Two reasons: 1. The nearest neighbor, France, has an amazing food history 2. The US, Britain's oldest and favorite child, has an amazing food culture from its immigrant past. That's why. British food is fine, but compared to France and the US, it's just not comparable in a reputation sense
Thank you for this video. It pisses me off so much when I see people bashing traditional British food or daring to say that it doesn't even exist and that it was stolen from other places. British food is great. It's very similar to other European cuisines and there's nothing wrong with that.
The thing is, the war time rationing mindset stuck with an entire generation. Even in the early 2000s, I remember my nan (who grew up during the depression) being horrified by me at lunch as I dared to put ham AND cheese in a single sandwich 😂
Bro couldn’t even find an image of someone looking at some fish fingers in a shop or even a pub so he resorted to AI images smh. Still a good video regardless, I am now very hungry
Apparently the indigenous Americans ate fried beans but it was made with bear fat not tomato sauce. Baked beans were inspired by that to make bake beans in sauce in a convenient tin for travel
Jellied Eel sounds good. I'm deffinetly gonna give it a try. Here, in Ukraine, we have jelly but made out of pork. I'm really excited to taste jellied fish. (in Ukraine we call jallied pork like [holodets])
We have pork jelly too, but usually we only use it to fill up the space in a pork pie between the meat and pastry that's formed as the pie cooks. Keeps the meat away from the air and adds an extra texture and juiciness.
I've been making Halupsi, except I now need a meat grinder to make them really well. And I want to use fermented sour cabbage however I think that's, er, can't remember the nation that's from.
People really do forget that unlike America, the majority of people in Britain had very limited options for food for different reasons. The First World War led to food shortages, after that unlike America there was no great economic uplift in the 1920s, compounded by the Great Depression, and then by the Second World War and rationing which went on for nearly twice as long as the war did. So that's four decades of limited food options for many people. Okay it's an excuse the French, Italians and Spanish could have as well but don't, but for a lot of people born in the 50s and 60s, all they'll have known growing up was crap, unseasoned food
I don't buy these excuses. British empire was the biggest empire in history with territories in the Americas, Asia and Africa so historically they had access to many ingredients and techniques meanwhile Japan also went through famine and rationing, destroyed in war but had much more limited access to other ingredients and their cuisine is considered one of the bests of the world. Japanese cuisine often focus on making the best of limited ingredients, one of their most famous dishes is raw fish with no spices or other ingredients besides some soy sauce.
@@whome9842 Its not like Japan didn't have a substantial empire too. If that theory held then other empires would show as much impact by the countries they ruled over. I think most of the influence went the other way. Japan was rebuilt by the west, mostly for the west. Their international cuisine is probably more tailored to a western palette that it would otherwise have been.
@@MartynPS When did Japan had colonies in the Americas, Africa and Oceania? Potatoes, tomato, corn and many other things came from the Americas. UK couldn't have fish and chips without their colonies.
@@whome9842 You're ignoring the biggest thing Nibbles didn't really go into, Britain's extremely rigid class system. The working class didn't have access to the imported goods of the empire. The peasant farmers who raised cows spoke Anglo-Saxon wheras the nobility who ate the meat of cows called it beef because they spoke French, this continued for centuries.
@@whome9842 IIRC it was the Spanish who introduced the Potato to Europe, and the Portuguese who have the earliest example of fish and chips. I don't recall either being part of the British Empire. 'Modern' changes British food, like much of Europe, is influenced by its neighbours via the upper classes. Until globalization started kicking off most new foods and techniques were out of reach of most of the population.
As someone pointed out during World War II, there was very severe rationing of food and this rash actually persisted into the early 1950s I think this rationing lasted into maybe 1953 even 1954 a time when North America was going through Renaissance of consumer items and advertising I’d have to ask why did the British government insist on rationing food into the early 1950s? What happens with food is that people associated with comfort and familiarity so low quality ration food actually became a stable and people would prefer having it as a form of familiarity and comfort I think that’s where the bad reputational British food comes from mid to late 20th century
2:22 Now if you're vegetarian, fair enough, black pudding is gross, but then so is all meat. But you can hardly call it gross if you're willing to eat hot dogs or American burgers with whatever they make them out of.
I heard an american lose his mind "I can't understand how *anyone* could eat something as vile as that!" myself (Australian born), a Ukrainian friend and my own mother (born in Switzerland where it was common) all said "poverty" and shut him up real quick.
@@emkalina Yep that's what my mother also said about where she grew up, but in hers and my friend's case it was definitely poverty being a huge factor too.
Baked Beans were the standard Sunday meal in colonial New England. Basically, they banked the oven fires on Saturday night. They set the crock with beans and sauce in the oven the night before, and it was ready the next day. This made cooking on the Sabbath unnecessary. 12:50
Having lived in Germany for several years, I agree. Fortunately though, nowadays you can buy proper bread here, but it's 10 times the cost of what I call 'plastic bread'.
In the Philippines, we also eat baked beans thanks to the only brand producing this Hunts. We usually like to combine with hard boiled eggs, but I don't find baked beans on toast appetising, that's like putting banana ketchup on Korean noodles or pineapple on pizza.
I grew up in the 60s, surrounded by people that had survived WW2, rationing was eliminated in 1955. The parents had learned to be frugal in all things including meals, the seasonings used when my mum cooked were salt and pepper, the condiments were tomato sauce (ketchup) and brown sauce (HP or Daddies) that's it. Spaghetti came out of a can (Heinz). Bread with everything. Yep, very boring, but filling. The local farm market had a cart selling hot black pudding/blood pudding (just like food trucks do now), and to this day I can still see my reaction when I could smell it - (IMO) I hated it. Exotic veg was a green pepper, I don't remember any exotic fruit. I love many different cuisines now, but sometimes I get a craving for cheese and onion pie, or 'rag' pudding and chips. Thanks for the memories.
@hartmann3288 I don't even consider it the proper meal yet without cheese tbh. The pictures you see people react to are always just beans on an underdone bit of cheap, pre-sliced white toast. No wonder they aren't impressed, GET SOME BLOODY BROWN SAUCE ON IT 😤
Nah. A few gastropubs and Gordon Ramsay do not make a culinary wonderland. Been in the UK often and finding a decent place to eat, particularly outside of London and a few other areas, can still be quite the challenge. I'd rate the food about average by Northwest European standard, but that's not the highest bar. The problem is not the dishes themselves; they can be lovely when done right. But often, the choice of ingredients and care of preparation is still lacking, simply because it's not part of the natural culture to care about these things. Of course, this a generalization, but when I can walk into a random place in the outskirts of, say, Leeds, and be certain to have a good meal, will things really have changed.
As a Mexican guy I can say that besides jelly eel I didn't find anything gross on the dishes showed in the video. Bland? Definitely, but gross? Absolutely no.
They don't even have to be really bland, it's not a fiery hot cuisine overall but a lot of these things were supposed to be served with sauces and condiments like horseradish and mustard (English mustard is usually much hotter than USA version) or highly flavoured herby/fruity accompaniments and relishes.
Anyone making fun of baked beans hasn’t had good baked beans. But I still don’t get why you guys put them on toast. Wouldn’t that just make the toast soggy and basically just revert it to bread?
@@surprisedchar2458 No funnily enough it doesn't make the toast soggy. Most people will also add something of their choice to it. I personally like to add some smoked paprika to the beans as they are cooking and then sprinkle some grated cheese on top of it when it has been served.
@@Chris-hf2sl Stoppit you lot. Heat those beans until they steam --- reduce them; do a little reduction. Also see my other remarks on baked bean preparation: I get moistened toast, never soggy toast...
5:15 another fun fact: this still shot comes from a recent (2023) Polish movie adaptation of the Polish mandatory reading book called "The Peasants" :)
I ate breakfast in england once. I ordered a "british breakfast" off the menu. They gave me: fried tomato, fried potato, fried egg, fried sasuage, fried beans, and fried bread. ... it was actually surprisingly tasty. but a bit too heavy and greasy. and the bread was too soggy from the oil it was fried in.
As an American with a British family, i go to visit every few years. The food in the uk is too many times mediocre and overpriced. However, if you go to an actual local staple like a pork pie shop or something, it's pretty good, and yall invented the sandwich, so honestly, i agree British food is good.
You’re calling our food overpriced? Wasn’t that long ago people in the US were unable to afford eggs while I was getting 6 farm fresh organic free-range large eggs for £2.50. Food Wars recently did a comparison of UK fish and chips vs US fish and chip and the UK consistently came out cheaper with larger portions (a rare occurrence). The only costly foods are the imported ones which we can largely blame Brexit and the war in Ukraine for.
@danielriley7380 wasn't really buying farm produce. Here in Texas, if i were to buy eggs locally, it would be similarly priced. but when it came to restaurants or even fast food, it made the us look a lot less expensive. Even my English family said UK food can be shit and expensive, and people will accept it more than the US. The prices did just tend to be higher generally in the UK because of inflation, though.
@@Turdinkledge you’ve just watched a video where UK and US fish and chips were compared and the UK was generally cheaper than the US *and* for bigger portions.
« Illiterate »? I mean the Britons,yeah, but the Anglo-Saxons.They are known for having a huge body of literature back then. Don’t tell me they did’nt mention how they cooked.
@@felixbonnet6639 no the Britons had been a literate culture since the romans brought the Latin alphabet over half a milenia before the arrival of the Anglo Saxons, first in Latin and then in Brythonic around the 5th century.
@@Blaidd7542 tbf, literacy in the anglo saxon period was fairly high, comparatively speaking. Its literary works and artistry were, and are, highly regarded. Anglo Saxon England also had one of the most advanced tax systems in Europe at the time. The idea that Anglo-saxon England was a backwater is nonsense.
As a Canadian of Scottish and French Canadian heritage I grew up essentially eating 'British' food, with traditional Québécois dishes thrown in. In the 60's and into the 70's what our American relatives ate seemed often really weird to us. Over the decades every trip I made to Britain left me amazed at the quality of food especially in hotels and even museum cafés! And now, retired in a small town on Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada, I will gladly pay $10 for a rather small little package of Wensleydale, Stilton or Lancashire at the local supermarket just because as cheeses go, they are so good! But eating baked beans for breakfast? No way!
Modern British food is actually pretty good and due to the rich diversity of ethnicities in the UK has evolved through the fusion of cultures mixing in the right way, though the food was basic and bland during wartime and in fairness the rest of the 20th century, British food has evolved, most people don't realise that chicken tikka masala wasn't born in India, it was born in the UK and is the national dish, most people don't realise that the UK has almost as many Michelin star restaurants as the US despite being a tiny nation compared to them... The immigrant population of the UK is currently 14% and the influx of tastes from India, The Middle East, China, Eastern Europe, Africa and in particular Korea recently, which has become very popular in the last few years has massively impacted British tastes as a whole
I think people that don't like blood sausage (whichever country it comes from), should at least try it once. There's absolutely nothing off-putting about it, it's a very mild taste. It's "weird" for Americans, but it's totally tasty to many other cultures.
I got to watch Gordon Ramsay's Christmas cooking special on Roku last year, and I was shocked at how charming and demure he is in it. It's still something I love to watch every year.
I was born in Trinidad came to England in 1964 age 3 went to school in 1966 age 5. I love school dinner of that era mice meat and dumplings with vegetables baked victorian rice pudding with nutmeg and raisins fish and chips jelly with ice cream found memories.
Personal opinion but I think the main issue is how the dishes look visually. People aren't particularly adverse to brown white and beige, but if those colors are next to bright greens and reds they nearly disappear. They of course are delicious but the colors don't catch your eye like something like a taco de pescado.
I lived in the UK outside of Cambridge for 3 years. I moved back recently. Just my and my families opinion. The restaurant food outside of the major cities is pretty bland, boring and often undercooked by our standards. The Asian style foods are often just unedible. However, even in our small village there was an amazing Japanese/Chinese restaurant that was very good. By contrast eating at someone's house was always a treat. I never left without being amazed how different it was from getting a take away. So called American themed restaurants in England were always way over salted, way over sugared, and nothing that most Americans would ever dream of eating together. Groceries stores are also extremely different. There is much less choice at a uk gr9cery store. However, the quality of fruit, veg, dairy, meat and seafood is so much higher in the UK. The cost is also so much lower. We didn't care for most of their frozen or pre-packaged foods. The dairy selection was also much smaller than than North America. But what they do have is very good and of a high quality. The selection we really shocked me as I thought that being so close they would have more imported food. As far as bread. Yes sandwich bread in the us mostly has too much sugar, but we I barely noticed a difference in taste between the English bread and US. We also have access to bakeries and artisan breads. Since covid there is also a marked uptick in people making their own. I will say everything I ate in Ireland was amazing. I know not what were really talking about. In the end there are pros and cons of both countries. And also just a matter of preference base on what we are used to. I would kill to get access to a Saintsbury s here. Especially with the lower prices. But I prefer all of north Amercas restaurant food with only a few exceptions. But I respect that many Brits would rather have their food over ours.
Oddly as a Brit I went to the US expecting to be massively impressed by their breakfasts, but I wasn't. I ought to mention though, I'm a pescatarian, and have only visited two states. But the best I got was Eggs Hollandaise in NY, and a Breakfast Burrito, in Arizona. This doesn't compare to the delicious mash-up which even a vegetarian can get in the UK: scrambled/fried eggs, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, baked beans, veggie sausages, toast and (two imported US items) hash browns and waffles. Obviously a meat-eater could add bacon, pork sausages and maybe black pudding. Probably flavoured with brown sauce. But the US seemed to have relatively few albeit tasty items, dominated by eggs, or a sickeningly sweet heap of waffles, pancakes etc which AFAIC is dessert, not breakfast! Admittedly beating US cuisine might be considered a low bar, but I think, at least with breakfast, we may achieve it. However I have to say my experience of US food is very limited in regional terms. Also I'm somewhat allergic to avocados.
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 Maybe.. I've never seen Jamie make anything and not make massive technical errors and add weird flavors. Like starting fried rice with rice in a cold wok and adding water to the rice 😂 As a non-brit to us he is like the archetype of blasphemous British cooking.
@@ravilagro7896 He started off cooking actually tasty dishes. Where he went off the rails is deciding to prepare food from different cuisines based on zero preparation or learning, only his own vague ideas of what those dishes should be like.
@@diarmuidkuhle8181 Yeah I believe you. He couldn't have gotten famous over bad cooking. But when he tries to put his own spin on things it's always like ying and yang 😅 I think why a lot of people dislike him as well is his dishonest school lunch program that was just good for him financially but bad for every kid at school.
Yup. Delia Smith was an especially logical one to have mentioned... yet wasn't 🤦♂️ . Gary Rhodes too (sadly passed away in 2019) as well as Hairy Bikers (one sadly now passed) and Two Fat Ladies (one hath passed) ...not to mention the legendary F@nny Craddock and Mrs Beaton 😌👌 .
Best video yet on this channel, and by some distance. A fascinating watch, not just for the food, but also the history. The history of British tea is also the history of the British empire. The most prized possessions in the west were the Caribbean islands where sugar cane was grown. Tea was bought from China (tea being a corruption of cha), which led to a shortage of British silver and the need to get some back (resulting in the Opium war and Hong Kong). The search for other sources made Sri Lanka important. Milk in tea was a result of drinking habits in India.
My granny was 100% British, raised as a kid during the Depression while I was kid born and raised in Australia. My father was the brat always complaining and she'd pelt him with the wooden spoon for being so fussy. To me there was nothing wrong with her cooking, it was just a different style for a different climate well away from the Indian/Rest of Asia cuisines that had become the norm to us Aussies, I have a deep respect for all styles thanks to understanding not *everyone* had the spoilt for choice fancy ingredients as a part of their culture, by default.
The internet has brought a wave of colonization by American food, Barbecue etc. For this reason I’m very very happy to see the survival of the Sunday Roast!!!This is a unique phenomenon in fact, now only for Thanksgiving and major feast days, here in North America. Brilliant video! Well done! Subscribed.
@@sevenember3332 We have something similar to scrapple, called haslet. Usually sliced thinner than scrapple and served as a cold lunchmeat, but can also be heated up.
For pity's sake, it's not the CUISINE, it's the QUALITY. The British CUISINE is fine. But Brits in general accept a really, really low standard in their bought food. I spent half a year in the UK recently and lost over 10kg because eating was just something to regret. I ended up looking for places to eat where it looked like the cooks grew up somewhere else. It's the QUALITY that's the problem. Even if you go to McDonald's in the UK, the buns are consistently slightly stale - and this is a global chain that has perfected getting disinterested teenagers to make identical food. I remember once getting a Thai green curry at a Thai place in the O2 Arena... and it was half *pea soup*. You yourself say the same thing at 18:00 when you reference the *thousands* of bad eateries. YOUR food that you personally make for this channel is fine because you're a food enthusiast, and yes you can find good food in the UK, but you have to hunt for it. In other countries you don't have to hunt, you just throw a brick and chances are you'll hit an eatery that's decent. Or look at a chain store like Greggs that's really popular, and their offerings are oily, soggy things. Nothing wrong with a sausage roll... but that popular chain makes miserable ones. I personally thought the "British food is bad" thing was a meme because of the rivalry with the French who do food well. Then I lived in the UK for a bit. Brits accept really poor quality in their bought meals, like no place else. As a history video, it's great. But it completely misses providing the "real reason" in the title. (and seriously - the UK was not the only place that had war rationing. that really isn't part of the reason.)
Ironically French food is the opposite case of largely iffy food that's hyped up. After all the French invented Margarine (via boiling up roadkill 😂), have made a tradition of being d1cks to Geese and other birds, and think that Snails is a starter 🤦♂️ . Och, and we Brit's have more varieties of Cheese than the French do 😏 .
I would actually really agree! After visiting the us a couple of times, i realised that the degree to which you can just walk into like. A random shitty diner/“greasy spoon” and eat cheap but genuinely tasty and well-made food is MUCH greater than in the uk, where you really can’t do the same. Also, nice food here tends to be wayyyy overpriced +tiny portions (excluding things like fresh produce which are cheaper here+relatively avaialable everywhere consistently, although mainland eu still has MUCH nicer fresh veg+fruit than here imo after brexit). the only consistently good and cheap thing in both the us+uk is like, middle eastern food, so like kebabs for us and like a halal truck in ny or something Edit: i also think that customer service culture in the us vs the uk plays a big role here, wherein i think its more acceptable to complain if your food is bad in the us whereas here youre kind of paying a premium if you want the person making it to actually give a shit
As a brit who has also eaten abroad, disagree. You just have to know where to eat and where to avoid, same as any city in any country on the planet. Chain stores and tourist traps like the O2 arena?? Of course you're going to have a bad experience. BTW, these places make a good chunk of their income from holidaymakers, so it's not even us Brits who have the bad taste.
My parents came to UK from Jamaica. I was born here. Everything here was bland we would season everything. Even beans. To this day I season everything shop bought. Everyone loves my cooking.
The problem with British cuisine is the presentation. Non-British look at British cuisine and see a monotone beige/brown, and it always looks kinda messy. If the presentation looks a little better, I'm sure the reputation will be gone.
Like with the recent controversy on TikTok about Chinese food in the UK. Americans made fun of it, and the British retorted that American Chinese food isn't any more authentic than theirs. But it really wasn't about authenticity. It was about the lack of color. It was all beige. American Chinese food might not be "authentic," but it's almost always full of vegetables and very colorful. I"ve had some British dishes that tasted great to my mouth, but my eyes always look at it and wonder "where's the green?"
@@dexmartin4358 but chinese american food is more authentic, given that most of what we know as Chinese food in the West was invented here by Chinese immigrants centuries ago.
The British have a very high standard of ingredient quality, Everything from potatoes to lamb is very heavily controlled and sourced usually from grass fed free range animals, And with such a small population all relatively close to each other, we don't have to transport food 1000+ miles across country in freezers, Combined with a "weekly shop" culture food doesn't have as many preservatives and fake flavourings added to combat the bland old produce that's been on a shelf for 6 weeks. So whilst we might not use every herb and spice know to man in our food, its because believe it or not, a simple well made mash potato with 2 local butchers sausages and some simple meat gravy has plenty of flavour and doesn't need dousing in "BIG TEDS FLAMING HOT GRILLED EAGLE DICK SPICE MIX" like they do in the good ol' USA. Also WW2 did some weird shit to us as well to be fair..
America is like 100 times the size of the UK. If anything, America is underpopulated for its size. Most countries it's size have a population of over a billion. Russia doesn't count because most of its land mass is uninhabitable.
I’m lucky to live in a part of the US where, from spring to mid-autumn, produce stands are run selling mostly locally grown or made food. I try to stick to seasonal produce when possible and when not, frozen vegetables with no added preservatives. We do weekly shops here too. Not every American has their freezer loaded with and dines exclusively on convenience meals just as I know not every Brit takes advantage of the high-quality meat and produce you’re proud of (and you should be). Spice mixes, outside of specific cuisine, are the crutch of people who don’t know how to cook. And again, not every American is ignorant of how to properly produce a tasty meal. It’s not even the majority. Please don’t pretend every American is the same with poor taste as I don’t do the same for you. And the blame for the reputation of British cooking can be laid entirely on the transition from wood fire cooking to coal fire cooking. When the main meal needed to be cooked in a pot, it was typically boiled for most people. That’s when things went downhill. And no, the war didn’t help Side note: I’ve had tasty food in England. I’ve also had boarding school food. Take that as you will
@@sevenember3332 All very fair points! I suppose what I'm trying to say is that geographically its easier in the UK for us to take advantage of local produce etc than in some areas of the united states (From what I've Seen/Heard) due to the UK being a smaller land size therefore we might have greater options with choosing our food locally, And admittedly yes I was a bit harsh with putting "Americans" in a singular group like I did, I know of (If only online) Great American cooks who choose their produce carefully and season things brilliantly. The USA has produced many MANY cooks and forms of cooking that I myself use on a weekly basis, I just know of my own experience here in the UK knowing I can go 2 minutes down the road and buy things such as Eggs/Bacon/Vegetables from the nearby honesty box of the local farmers etc, So its probably a bit out of mu world to imagine struggling for food when my concept of food is so simple. American healthy diets do seem like a bit of a minefield though 😬😬
Former PM Harold Wilson added Brown (HP) sauce to everything. HP sauce is made from salt, sugar, vinegar, tomatoes and dates mostly. And British people still do that to this day, whether it be stew, pies, toad in the hole, bacon/egg/sausage sandwiches, or any breakfast really, even I still add it to baked beans on toast, some people add it to cheese on toast, some people even add it to spaghetti bolognese.
Celebrity chefs, gastro pubs and little restaurants serving deconstructed roast beef tacos is all very well,but the sad fact is the food most people eat at home is pretty ordinary. And to be fair, given the country isn’t exactly overflowing with affordable, fresh fruit, veg, meat and seafood it’s understandable.
I spent some of my youth in the UK, doing Year 5 through Year 8 there. I've been living here in Italy for the past 7 years and I still miss British food every once in a while. Personally, I have breakfasts more similar to British ones. I always have eggs, milk and/or some form of meat. Typical Italian breakfast, however, is just milk and biscuits, though they might sometimes shop for croissants. As it turns out, insulin spikes first thing in the morning are not good for your health so I know older family members that are now starting to eat eggs and/or meat for breakfast instead due to health reasons. This morning, at 9:00am, I felt super hungry so I decided to have some burgers with eggs and a housemate of mine asked if I was having lunch all while she was, in fact, eating biscuits and milk lmao. I don't think people realise just how bad sugars are first thing in the morning. Up to this day, I still crave fish and chips as well as beef Wellington very often but it's hard to find anything here. Not to mention that I love dairy and, while Italy does have mozzarella and parmesan, I also miss British dairy. In fact, I mostly use butter over olive oil, I still dine at 6:00pm (Italians dine at roughly 8-10:00pm) and I am actually drinking tea as I am watching this. While it may be true that the UK has a high obesity rate, that's largely because of processed foods, like KFC, McDonald's or just the fact that people like to stuff their mouths with food. However, because of the sheer number of snacks here in Italy, there is actually a higher rate of child obesity here than in the UK. From personal experience, I can tell you that British people are just not afraid of trying out different foods. Brits didn't ditch their food because it was bad, it's just that people from countries like China, India, Thailand, Italy etc. where moving in and people just liked these options. Here in Italy, if you dare to say you like curry over pizza, people will look at you weird. British people don't judge and just eat whatever they want. British people just absolutely don't care and that's what I miss about the UK. Lots of cooking in the UK isn't necessarily about making complex things but making something your taste buds will enjoy. A lot of British food can just be described as comfort food and I like that. I don't care what anyone says but sausages on a pie go hard as hell 😂
3:42 Indeed, British cheese is great. And while all cheese is processed food, admittedly, at least in Britain and elsewhere in Europe it's sold in big chunks or wheels, not those horrible ultra-processed slices you get in America.
We don’t want it. It’s something the government came up with to process the stockpiles of milk they bought during the war. There were eventually so many of the stockpiled cheese loaves that the government started giving it away to low-income families that it eventually got the name of “government cheese”. It’s not even properly cheese, it’s cheese *food* and while it does have a few good applications (part of a sauce, on a burger) I’d rather use an aged cheddar style cheese
I am American, and always felt embarrassed about those squares being called "American cheese", until I learned just recently that they do have one redeeming feature: unlike other cheeses (or "actual cheeses") they are made of cheese that has been processed with sodium citrate, so it can melt beautifully into a smooth cheese sauce.
@ It works especially well when combined with freshly grated extra sharp cheddar to make the sauce. That way you get a velvety texture with a good amount of flavor
Thanks for the effort you put into this video. As others have indicated, the AI artwork was a poor choice and some examples could even mislead a viewer as to what some dishes are or how they are served. Class and social factors have been hugely relevant to British food culture (in particular related to the industrialisation of the country during the 18th and 19th century), as these both seem to be aspects that have influenced a lot of the opinion about British food: notably how, for many centuries, the aristocracy and monarchy identified much more strongly with continental Europe (and particularly France) so even within our borders, "British" food was dismissed as food of the poor, whereas French food was aspirational. This attitude pervaded society so much through to the mid-20th century that the general population discarded a lot of the food culture they inherited from their forebears (and it wasn't recorded, due to most recorded history being the preserve of the wealthy) and aspired to the cuisine of continental Europe and further afield.
Hi mate, been loving your shorts for ages now, great longer video too. Only criticism is that the use of AI imagery is a bit outputting. Otherwise, nicely done
This was very interesting. As a German I have to admit that I really liked the more simple British dishes like Bangers and Mesh or Fish 'n' Chips and I really love baked beans and black pudding. I find them all quite similar to traditional German cuisine, wich won't win you any prizes internationally but will get you filled, be quick to make and relatively cheap.
Well am Greek from Cyprus I came here in 1959 from the first time I arrived I did not find British food to be bad at al different yes bad No, even today after so many years cottage pie Lancashire hot pot fish n chips are 3 of my favourite foods along with full English breakfast, of course is getting better as time goes by when I went to china for a month what did I missed the most? fish n chips fasoles (Greek/Turkish cooked beans) n Kebab ops n of course Bread n butter putting Rubab pie
British food has the same problem as all the other northern european cuisine. It does't LOOK good. Also foods in Britain, Germany and Scandinavia were made to survive harsh winters. Because of that we have many fermented foods and our food is rather heavy and extremely meat based. If you look at the countries that are famed for their cuisine its always a country with warm climate. They have lots of "light" food, many spices etc.
easy answer - the italians hate all other cooks then them the french use suger and butter in all their recipies India spices their food so much they literally cannot eat anything else but spiced food America- is a mixture of all 3 but to the extreme, they also try to deflect from the fact they invented "Junk food" . its also important to remember 2things with british cooking, 1 , we come from a line of cooks that use herbs, which has delicate flavours, so our food is designed to enhance the meats not overpower them which is lost on people that put suger and spice in everything and 2, every person that thnks we dont spice our food just means we dont over spice our food,(for the reasona above) but also forgets every curry they can name was probably invented by the british or in britain, they dont eat vindaloos in Bombay.
@@Weary_Wizard Vindaloo might not be eaten in Mumbai but down the coast in Goa pork with wine and potatoes is a popular dish. Indian is a big place and what is eaten in Simla and Madras is as different as Scotland and Scilly.
Curry and we'll seasoned food is fine once in a while, but like you said, the more you eat of it the less you enjoy other food, not because it's better, but because it makes your taste buds blind to anything else, plus, when im eating chicken curry, im not doing it for the chicken or rice, it's basically just eating curry sauce with a side of texture. Anyway there are tons of cultures that don't season their food like Japan and a lot of South American countries, but they don't get any crap for it. Seasoning is great but it's completely out of place in traditional british cuisine, except for like herbs and pepper/fresh vegetables
OP makes an excellent point, a lot of European cuisines are very insular. They don't do change or foreign influences. Britain is the original multicultural nation, we're obsessed with everybody's food and no, not because ours is "bad". Our food is fantastic, flavoursome and has been for centuries. Go look up the original ketchup, white ketchup and tell me that's bland. But we love everybody's food, we take in every influence we can and make new things with it.
I'm Italian and the few days I spent in london were just fine: managed to taste some good typical food with decent prices and when I couldn't find local there was a good alternative from all over the world. Meat pies are great and tomorrow I'll try to cook toad in the hole. The only thing that was a bit disgusting was the smell of fried fish, not the freshest... For the rest the bad reputation is really exagerated. That being said, I know some locals and what they eat and its generally not really tasty.
The bad reputation used to be deserved.
I was born in the early 60’s. As a kid getting school dinners, every single one of the adults serving the food had gone through the Second World War and the subsequent rationing.
This led to an ‘eat what you’re given and be grateful’ mentality. Not much sympathy for kids who didn’t like that particular food (yes beetroot I’m looking at you).
This ‘mustn’t grumble’ mentality accompanied your average Brit in the ‘60s and ‘70s when they dived out. Nobody would ever complain about restaurant food so there was no incentive to improve it.
Lastly there’s the emergence of the fridge/freezer. We had no fridge when I was a lad. There was a marble slab in the cupboard under the stairs where mum kept the butter etc. she’d also shop twice a day and pick up what she needed for the next meal. Owning a fridge allowed the shopper in the family to indulge in fantasies about modern dishes.
The aftermath of WW2 had an opposite effect in the US. We pretty much began to go ham on our quick foods and turn them into business while inviting migrants to come and further enrich our selection of cuisines. It did give a lot of people a taste for processed foods though. It was a full on processed food takeover. Think spam and frozen OJ. It's a nice snapshot of how well the US did after the war which was the opposite of how the UK did. It's quite unfortunate but as someone who enjoys blood sausage and marmite, I hope to see British foods fully shed its rationing era skin.
I still don't think I can get into beans on toast though. Soggy toast with beans doesn't sound too thrilling. Where I come from, beans are for BBQ. I eat stripey bacon with peanut butter so I can't make fun.
@@RemnantCult A couple of things.
The US made a big profit from WWII, with all of those countries on both sides owing big debts to the US (only 2 countries ever fully repaid the US, Britain and the Soviet Union), so while the UK was having to rebuild a lot of the nation, while repaying war loans and helping other countries rebuild, the US had none of this and could flourish.
Beans on Toast - we British and also Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians know to butter our toast before putting the beans on it. This layer of butter, enhances the taste and slows sogginess down considerably, though by the end it will get through, if you leave it long enough. Also we have been brought up to enjoy this and you haven't, so you're not accustomed to the taste and textures like we are. Trying my first T-Bone Steak while visiting the US, was like a jaw exerciser, because I wasn't used to that for example.
Dutch cuisine shares some similarities with British cuisine, in that most of our traditional dishes were 'poor people's food.'
Anyone know Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters?
Every dish (nearly every) was based on potatoes.
For the rich people's cuisine, see French cuisine.
Raw herring is an exception, as that's really old. First accounts of the curing of herring go back to 1380.
I guess most people ate a lot of bread and of course turnips, before potatoes were introduced.
Although even tulip bulbs are edible, and many Dutch in the big cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht) turned to eating tulips bulbs during the last winter of the Second World War (Dutch Hungerwinter).
Anyway, like the British, Dutch cuisine was saved by the people in our colonies, the Dutch East Indies and Suriname.
Following the Indonesian War of Independence, many Dutch Indies people were 'repatriated' even though many had never been to Holland before.
And when Suriname was granted independence in the 1970s, a lot of Surinamese people used their Dutch passports to emigrate to The Netherlands.
The best bami dish I ever tasted was Surinaamse Bami, a combination of Javanese and Surinamese culinary influences.
@@RemnantCult Yeah, we suffered a lot less scarcity after the war.
My father and other family members were in England during WWII. My father was a kid and hunted as a kid. In Canada my nana was saving the rations and sending what she could to relatives to help them out during the war.
A fun little experiment is to post English food on social media calling it ”tavern food”. Watch how everyone suddenly thinks it looks delicious.
Maybe if you're from the north
Your last meal - what would it be, I'm all ears. Recipe in full- :)
@@phild5454 My wife is English, and is a damn fine cook.
Anything tastes good when you wash it down with a liquid that numbs your brain. Tavern food is just lower standard.
@@phild5454 10 cans of red bull
As an American, when someone says British food, I think fish and chips, bangers and mash, sunday roasts, shepherd's/cottage pie, beef wellington, and those massive breakfasts. If those are bad, then I like bad food.
Yes, you like bad food 😂
@@kapuzinergruft still better than the supre processed food you guys eat evey minute lol
I'm not even british, but I do dislike modern "american" food
@@NayuzAqua McDonalds and Hersheys don't constitute as 'American food', just corporate rubbish, which we all eat by the way🤮
Yes you do. But what else can we expect ? The British are the ones who teached your country how to cook !
😂😂
They're not bad, just mid as fuck.
My German wife had heard that British people added mint to everything. The idea of mint sauce with meat sickened her to the same amount as a pineapple on a pizza would a normal person. We didn't realise that to Brits, mint usually means Garden Mint whereas to them, mint means Peppermint. I made a salad that tasted 1000% of the 0.1% Peppermint I added to it before I figured that out.
Mint is good on lamb meat. Mint sauce is vinegar, sugar, and mint.
@@leviturner3265
I guess it depends on what you're used to (eat).
Mint to me shoud be left for a tisane (herb tea).
Or some cold sauce to go with Middle Eastern food.
Lamb meat is very delicate.
I make fricassé, saddle steak or lamb cutlets (with rosemary, thyme and oregano), shanks, or leg roast.
But no mint please.
I'm Norwegian !
There's actually a bit of folk lore around the lamb and mint sauce. Supposedly, the British were eating too much lamb and the supply of sheep couldn't keep up, so the ruler at the time, I believe either queen Victoria or Elizabeth I, ordered that all lamb had to be eaten with mint sauce. This was meant to stop people from eating lamb, as it was thought that lamb and mint sauce would be terrible. However, the common folk loved the mint sauce so much that the plan backfired and they ate even more lamb than before.
Mint sauce is good with lamb, the acidic sweet sauce cuts through the fat and lamb can be rather fatty. Its like using redcurrant sauce with venison or gamey meat...or using cranberry sauce in a bacon and melted brie sandwich.
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 Personally when dealing with an old fashioned mint sauce I find the vinegar to have more of an overpowering characteristic than the mint.
I am sure it does depend what one is used to. I would recommend giving it a try, to see if you like it. I generally would also look for rosemary as a seasoning for lamb, perhaps thyme, and salt and pepper of course. Even seasoning the lamb this way I would generally also make a mint sauce, if mint is in season. I have also seasoned lamb with dried mint in addition to other herbs.
Mint sauce is indisputably not for everyone. Lamb fricassee... interesting. I have only made chicken fricassee and have heard of rabbit, but never lamb. Interesting.
I seem to remember that someone insulted British food in John Cleese's hearing. He snapped, "We had an empire to run!"
@@petuniasevan so did the spanish, french, ottoman, greek (byzantines), russian and chinese.
In all fairness, "rich people's" english cuisine is pretty good, like Wellington Beef. But the fact they made their "common" british food that gruesome is a fact.
@@alejandronieto4212 Beef Wellington.
Guess he should have said lots of civil engineering projects to do.
@@GeorgeDCowley the other way actually makes a lot more sense, but it doesn't even matter
@@realchiknuggets It's like "beef pie".
Lots of countries feature blood pudding not just Brits.
Oh no! I'm not sure I want to stay on this planet anymore.
Because of colonization
@@SrhIsntSilentBackup Because of famines. :) If you're hungry enough, anything will taste good.
@@SrhIsntSilentBackup many cultures eat all parts of the animal - including stomach, lungs, eyes :)
We eat "black pudding" too in France.
It's called "boudin noir" and it's absolutelly delicious with mashed potatoes.
It’s because social media only talk about beans on toast and that stupid fish head pie. British food is great when you look into it
man u fan 💀💀💀
i also blame the photography side of things. We're used to seeing photos of food taken like they're gonna be on Italian Vogue, but a lot of the "gross British food" photos are taken with crappy lighting and grainy quality that only make the dish look dull and lifeless. Sure the examples actually show off crap food a lot of the time, but a lot of those dishes would probably look better if they just opened a curtain or turned on a lamp for some warmer lighting
no, its because the british predominately eat things like pigs/toads in blankets the names are very different and unusual because english is the main trade language of the world. and everyone just understand the bland expressions that are translated to our own different cultured minds. For example what is dutch food to the british. often i get to hear. ah you mean snitzel man. but thats actually austrian. or when you ask germans why not the entire country wears bavarian clothing in oktober. its that stereotypical bs mixed with a lot of misinformation that makes it much worse.
British food is definetly not as bad as people say, but with the exception of a handful of pretty good foods, it is super bland and uninteresting
@@bruhed1117 the British eat utilitarian. The French eat overcomplicated, the Dutch and Germans just eat what was available and efficient, the danish over produced on its main trading articles. To the point of them being gullash barons. I think that covers most of Western Europe. And for added bonus the Italians have a lot of dishes we eat and love that came from poor regions or poor people.
It annoys me so much because the frequent comment is “the British invaded all those countries for spices and don’t use them” … but they don’t realise that it was only the fucking Royalty & Aristocracy that could have had spices, whereas the rest of us plebs had fuck all, salt was a luxury! My gran was born in 1944 in Stockton on Tees, absolutely piss poor, she didn’t eat garlic for the first time until the late 80’s! I don’t think she ate Paprika until the 00’s and for most of my life she said Chinese Food, Indian Food, Pizza, Kebabs etc. was “that weird foreign muck” 🤷🏻♂️😂, whereas my mum (born in 1967) was way more open to trying new things but again, a lot of herbs & spices she didn’t really buy until the late 1990’s/early 2000’s … fast forward to me (born 1986) and 90% of what I eat has a ton of herbs & spices because it’s more readily available at a reasonable price and there’s a lot more information available at our fingertips on how to best utilise them.
I think people genuinely don’t realise how in Britain we were absolutely piss poor until very recently 😂😂😂
This es interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience.
This. The UK and US were wealthy countries during their industrial eras on paper but that was only for the upper class. The bottom half lived in abject poverty.
Also some of those spices were medicinal use.
And when they brought the spices back, they didn't know how to use them. They had dishes like 'cinnamon fish'.
But yes, many spices were incredibly expensive. Nutmeg, by weight, was worth more than gold.
I would add that the British didn't actually seek spices and the British empire had nothing to do with spices, it was a post industrial empire that traded in absolutely everything. The spice trade was much more the Portuguese and Dutch. Its ignorant on multiple levels, we didn't seek and empire for spices, and we also like spices.
Correction: water was a gamble in the cities not the rural areas.
It could still be a gamble. You never knew if there was a dead sheep half a mile up the river, but it was definitely a better option than the water out of the Thames.
@@shanewalta7876
Hmm, yes.
Brown bog water can hide a lot of sins...
Luckily I'm Norwegian.
❤
@@shanewalta7876 I've never understood this issue of contaminated water, especially in the countryside. It's possible to make a water filter using layers of sand, gravel, grass, etc, and then boil the filtered water.
And if you have access to a well even better still.
@@JimCarner777
The thing is, we're only knows that boiling water kiIIs most of the bacteria somewhere around the 18th century when study of microbiology is widespread after the invention of microscope.
@@ozelhassan8576 British also bathed before Vikings arrived.
Growing up in Canada, there was a type of Selection Bias guiding our opinions of "British Food".
We thought of every day food as "British" (even when it was not) while restaurants served "Exotic" foods. ie. Beans on toast, sandwiches, canned soup, hard-boiled eggs, breakfast sausage, meat & potatoes, and boiled vegetables were "British". The very plain, mostly flavourless, low effort home cooking.
But when we went to restaurants that's where we saw 'foreign cooking'. Food that was prepared with some flare: shish kabob, Sweet n' Sour chicken with pineapple, lasagne, biryani, enchilades, and crepes suzette.
What we didn't get from British cuisine were any of the items from fine dining: Christmas goose, Yorkshire pudding, trifle, steak and kidney pie, cranachan, or meat pies.
tldr; we got mediocre British food to the point where we identified mediocre food as British. We didn't get mediocre 'foreign' food, only a selection of the most appealing. That solidified the bias that British food was inferior.
Funny thing is, a lot of those fancy dishes you list will almost certainly be the British version of that dish.
And the British dishes you've listed aren't mediocre, there's only mediocre preparation.
My nan was a Cordon Bleu chef and when _she_ made those dishes, I'm sad that as good as I am at cooking, I will never be that good.
To be clear, Yorkshire pudding is the very opposite of fine dining, it's one of the simplest foods we have and came from using cheap/leftover ingredients. It's very bland too, but super crispy and airy and tender and the perfect vehicle for flavourful gravy and sweet sauces/jams 😋
I am Canadian and grew up on British cooking and what my nana and grandma made was not bland and flavourless. My mum learned to cook from her English mother and what she cooked was not lacking in flavour.
@@laurabailey1054some of the best Sunday roasts I've ever tasted were cooked by mums and grans in Canada. British is great when prepared by those who care. Cheers
Fair comment.
I’m an American and most of these foods aren’t gross to me at all. As near as I can tell, bad British food is usually the result of bad cooking, not bad ingredients. The same can be said about American food as well.
Because you label yourself as "eastsider" suggests that you maybe of british heritage or influence. Like England you have few endemic items of food culture; look outside of your area and you will see beautiful food culture. We are more than the 13 colonies!
@@jerrelfontenot747 : As I said, I’m an American. The world’s bounty in all of its rich variations and cultures is available to me. I’m very fortunate.
@@jerrelfontenot747 yeesh, what am embarrassing comment
@@jerrelfontenot747 We gave you the sandwich, cured meats, mustard, Worcester sauce, casseroles and apple pie! Its not that bad going that a country with "few endemic items of food culture" has created some of your "american" national favourites of today. Could you try and sound any more patronising?
@@manmaje3596 There is also how foreigners remark appreciatively on America's wide variety of pies -- flavors, ingredients, textures.
Fruit pies seem everywhere and everybody, and in America no less: seems anybody making fruit conserves or preserves gets around to baking them in a pie crust sooner or later.
Then you go as far afield as the citrus pies, like Key lime or lemon meringue, and fetch up at pies made of pecans. And chiffon pies. Got nothing else in the house? -- pie fillings that are mainly raisins, with or without a custard...
Usually, the voices making fun of British cuisine are Americans, but they forget a few things.
1) British traditional cuisine is pretty heavy, because that's typical for northern Europe. See German, Irish, Eastern European and Scandinavian food. So naturally it doesn't have the same characteristics as food from southern Europe and overseas.
2) Americans often eat the same food, such as fish and chips, for example. And beans.
3) British food has evolved since the rationing days and before. What was haute cuisine 90 odd years ago would be pretty boilerplate today.
@@invisibleman4827 that is unsurprisingly true
But our neighbours overseas just like to yammer on about how our food is ‘bland’ and ‘boring’, as if their food isn’t just over processed and overpriced slop (plus, all the additives and dyes used is definitely not healthy…. And they have roast chicken in a can. Why.)
@@Scoutbutball British food has the spice and consistency of a joke told by James Corden. The United States is so multicultural that we've got a bit of everything here. Especially in the south, Cajun food is my favorite personally. British people need to come here lol, it'll be like a food spiritual awakening.
@@Foogi9000Britain also has a bit of everything too. We are still very much a multicultural nation, with food from all over the world. You can't compare multicultural foods to native, just because traditional British food doesn't include spices and cajun, doesn't mean we don't have those foods.
@@Scoutbutball British food uses additives and dyes too, perhaps you should look in a mirror (or an ingredient list). And you have PIE in a can. Why.
@@Gallic_Gabagool nowhere near as much as the ultra processed slop you eat in america. even your grocery store bread has absurd amounts of sugar, probably even corn additives and other garbage in it. the level of quality of the produce and basic ingredients you can get in britain is actually very good and on par with the rest of mainland europe, which actually does have regulations for what can be considered food or put in food products, unlike usa.
I would say this, very objectively speaking (I am Irish so our cuisine is not dissimilar to the British); the British have some fantastic traditional dishes. A roast dinner, done properly, is something to look forward to. Breakfast is fantastic, when done properly with good quality bacon, sausages etc. Cod & chips is also delicious when cooked with a real beer batter, freshly cut chips, tartar sauce. Etc Etc. What people make fun of is not traditional British food per-se, but more so the way Britons tend to eat on a day to day basis, particularly the "working class" - fish fingers and beans, frozen chicken fillets and beans, oven chips and fried eggs, oven chips and sausages; in essence, some kind of dry, frozen meat or chips paired with unseasoned baked beans or something similar. And especially when we see British people putting photos of these such dishes on the internet and and calling it "the best dinner ever", when objectively speaking it is not only very average but the product of complete culinary laziness. My wife, who grew up in Co. Cork in Ireland, always seasons her baked beans with herbs, black pepper, and cheese, which makes them richer, less sweet, and thicker. They actually taste great when you do that to them.
In the 19th century, currys and chutneys became part of British cuisine as soldiers who had served in India wanted those dishes when they returned to Britain.
Hey everyone! Thanks for the love on this, quick clarification.
My last two longform videos took two different approaches, for this one the budget went completely on an editor.
For the Last one (Amsterdam food tour) the budget went on the content itself and I handled the whole production.
Its clear the use of AI isnt going down well with you guys, and the edit pulls away from my style too much, so in future Ill be taking a different approach, but thanks for watching regardless.
British moment
You missed (possibly on purpose, if you have a large US audience) that the biggest reason for British food's poor reputation is that during WWII, we had around 4 million US military based here in the UK and they arrived (late) after we'd been at war for around 2 years and were on heavy rationing. This meant that US servicemen, were given very bland but hearty foods to sustain them, while here and after the war, they took these stories of bland, boring, tasteless, British food, home with them and the internet has revived kept these tales and reputation in the minds of US Americans to the present day.
I am Polish and I like British food. We have kaszanka and czernina instead of black pudding, and blood is very nutritious. Indian and Mexican food is rubbish, honestly.
B. food is as bad, broken and bizarre as the 6-fingered AI figures on your video stream.
i bet %99.9 of people who diss British food has never even been close to trying it
Correct.
And guess what they say when they do get to try our food? 😂
Or they eat it but don't know it's from here, to this day Americans will even claim Alexander Graham Bell or Andrew Carnagae are Americans so its no surprise that they don't know that macaroni cheese, apple pie, possibly fried chicken, and many other dishes are British.
Well, I must admit the Stargazer Pie looks a bit...
Different.
That said, Norwegians eat fermented mountain lake trout, and fermented cod.
(Only Icelandic cousins take it one notch up, with fermented shark, and whale blubber ditto).
The Swedes of course have a mad love for über fermented herring. 😮
But that's close to suicede...
Love from Norway 😊❤
@@John-kc4cg
Americans think they invented planet Earth...
❤😂
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 I am English ...and before this comment thread i had never even heard of stargazy pie. Its not a common item in UK diets.
As a Brit, my main criticism of our food is the lack of consistency. I've had great Scotch eggs, I've had bad ones. I've had great Cornish pasties, I've had bad ones. I've had great fry-ups, I've had bad ones. You get the idea. We need consistency in order for our food to be considered, well, consistently good.
Bad Cornish pasties?! My Dad is from Michigan (pasties introduced there by Cornish miners) and he never made a bad pasty. How can one mess up a pasty?
@@Leitis_Fella I've had a bad pasty too. Was just too dry with no flavour
But surely that's the joy of it. Never knowing what you're going to get. Sometimes it's a nice tasty meal. Sometimes it's food poisoning.
You have to take risks to feel alive. Living for the now, or waiting for the ambulance. It's all the spice of life.
I would agree that consistency adds a lot to the reputation of a cuisine type. Not saying I've _never_ had bad Mexican food in my life, but the fact that around 99% of my experiences with Mexican food have been positive tells me that its popularity is very well deserved.
There is no bad British food, only bad cooks.
As a Belgian food blogger (Vegatopia), I don't quite understand the bad reputation of British food. Until the 1980's cuisine in most of Western Europe was incredibly bland, with the Netherlands as somehow an exception because of colonial influence. We crossed the border for more flavourful groceries. Several of my childhood dishes were even quite similar like "balkenbrij" (check Wikipedia) and black pudding. I had it with pan fried apple slices. On the one hand British food is mocked at because it is supposed to be weird, bland and overcooked, on the other hand British chefs conquered the world and influenced many other cuisines. So, the there's a contradiction and not so much rationality. Be proud of your heritage!
You forget western europe included Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and sorry as a Portuguese i have to say you're incorrect we have and INCREDIBLY LONG AND COLOURFUL FLAVOURFUL EVEN culinary history stretching back to the age of discovery we started by sailing around africa to reach india and capitalise on the spice trade before the UK dutch or any other European had the chance, then with the discorvery of the new world Portugal and Spain were thr FIRST european to use POTATO'S (Portuguese keeps the exact same word as the natives in south america used to refer to BATATA) As well as peppers and the first people outisde of mexico to start using chilis and cacao were portugal and Spain also. Without Portuguese spreading chillies to africa india china etc there wouldn't be the same piri piri chicken no spicy indian curries like you know or chinese food you might be familiar with either. Due to the favourable climate in southern europe we have been cultivating these plant's for near 5 centuries did i even mention tomatoes too😂 what would Italian cuisine be like now without these contributions from south America brought to the outside world by Portuguese and Spanish explorers? Not to mention our amazing history of pastries cakes and baked goods which gave rise to some of the deserts and cakes you see in macau china and japan today ! Truly an extensive and tasty culinary history to be found in western europe if you ask me! No fish and chips or tea time in England either the list goes on😂
Interesting, because Dutch food nowadays has a reputation for blandness similar to the British (yes it does, Dutch people, stop pretending it doesn't!).
@@Croz89 Dutch food is the worst in Europe
When I go to the Netherlands I always look for Dutch croquettes, salted herring, smoked eel, appelstroop and salted liquorice.
Um, you're Belgian so right next to France and you don't understand why British food has a bad reputation?! Lmao. When I was in the UK the food is like ten times worse than in France or Belgium and more expensive.
"We still eat like Germans are flying overhead" - that one made my day! 🤣
Greetings from Berlin
As a British South Asian myself, I will say people HEAAAAVILY overdramatise British food as an "awful" thing. While it's arguably not the most complex cuisine on the planet, it's definitely more about simple comfort foods and that doesn't mean British cuisine cannot be delicious. Is it out of this world? Maybe if your taste pallet is simple it might be a huge standout, but if you've had the chance to discover many different cuisines and tastes in the world, you will find that many other cuisines have more standout qualities. It's also a matter of who cooks that specific British food. There's a reason why Gordon Ramsay got mad at lots of British cooks before lol. 😂
Gordon Ramsey: “this is dry as a camels asshole in a sandstorm”
@NaviRyan gotta love Gordon's brutal reality checks for bad cooks 😂
Exactly, it isn't overly elaborate and aims to make the best out of simple things.
@@mahdireza5695 As a South Asian British, we love to hate British food. Most of us rarely try it but the rest of us, we love it secretly.
Dude at no time did anyone criticize British food for being simple. Italian food is simple, but they know how to make food taste like the ingredients that are in it. Salt isn't bad for you unless you have a health condition like high blood pressure, or you rarely drink water. Food made in the UK, unless it's London, isn't made with much care how it's made or the ingredients that go into it. At least not in Peterborough.
Meat and two veg can be good if those items are cooked and seasoned well, but they just aren't. Get some chucky chips that have been seasoned with salt *the moment* they come out of the oil, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Absolutely adored the abundance of alliteration in this food focused feature. The clever, continuous cadence of culinary commentary kept me captivated!
The bad reputation was largely spread by Americans who had served in Britain during WW2. The wartime British diet was monotinous, and alien to the food most American soldiers got from their well-supplied Army. The GIs were often complaining that their US Army rations were inferior to mom's home cooking, but complaining about the US rations is a tradition. At the end of the war, they almost immediately went back to the booming happy days in the post-war US, well before rationing and shortages ended in the UK, so the contrast was even more severe. American veterans who got to the UK but NOT into combat - could talk about how rough they had it having to eat British food, a few times, when they could not talk about real suffering.
@weseld1 Same applies to the 'bad teeth' stereotype. If you look at old footage of British soldiers from WW1 and WW2, there used to be more people with really crooked or missing teeth, and with dentures. This seems to gave changed for people born after 1948 with the NHS and improved dental care.
@@invisibleman4827 Yes. I had a college roommate who was born in London in1944, and had what I thought if as typical British teeth. As did most of the parents of my classmates, thanks to poor nutrition in the US and UK during the Great Depression. I and many other American "War Babies" (born 1940-45) benefitted from the extra ration coupons for expectant mothers and free dental/medical care for the wives of US servicemen.
Most of the distaste about british food culture is because we have a very honest food culture. What we say we eat is what we do eat, for everyone. In most other countries, their food culture is aspirational, but the UK's is WYSIWYG.
@@UnicornsAndUnions That’s actually a really good point.
That's true. I've been living in Japan for 3 years and honestly, and people can be served a turd and it won't complain. On TV, they just start yelling "OISHIIII" (delicious) before the food even reaches their mouth. Part of the reason for this is to be polite, the other is that being defaming a business, even if it's your own perfectly valid opinion, is a crime. Ironically there's a cafe/bakery near me, called Penny Lane, a beatles themed place and it is heaving. Despite the isolated location, it's stupidly busy even on weekdays and it's the only place in Japan I've found which serves proper pub grub with proper pub style burgers and triple cooked chips, nice pies etc. Yet, if you asked any of those diners "Do you like British Food?" They'd probably turn around and say "Like Stargazy pie? Nah! British food is terrible!" (Probably in Japanese of course.)
True, most British food in restaurants are basically tarted up versions of what people eat at home. In many other countries, the food you get in restaurants is almost never eaten at home, maybe only on a special occasion.
@@327legoman yeah but we can’t exactly claim burger and chips as British food. As you describe it, it’s just a British spin on a quintessential American food. But I do agree in essence. If there was a restaurant doing proper pie and mash, Sunday roasts, toad in the hole etc then people would love it (may need to adjust for each countries palate as we do here).
@@artspooner not American either 😂 German, Belgian and French origins.
I was hoping you'd point out that Scotch Eggs are English, as that always riles someone up. Solid video, and great editing!
Scotch eggs are fucking fire
Yesss
They are amazing
I knew this but had forgotten. Thanks!
Seagull eggs anybody ?
Love from Norway ❤😅
True but 'Scotch' is generally a word used (even by us Scottish folk) for foods and of course drinks, at least in more recent centuries and not to do with the location of production or origin.
British food has a bad rep because rationing led to very poor food during a period when there were 3 or 4 million US troops in the country. So if they ate outside the unit mess would have been served a very bad or ersatz version of something they ate at home.
German ancestry ?
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 Traditional German food is in fact well-seasoned. It's more the strong Puritan influence, with the emphasis on 'plain, honest, simple fare' and a suspicion of making food too 'extravagant' in preparation or flavouring.
No, it had a bad reputation well before then. Victorian era British food was even worse.
this is what i also think, the people of GB had it hard in WW2, much much harder than the dominions, my MIL was 14 when WW2 started, she was born and raised in Birmingham
@@diarmuidkuhle8181 It's not that seasoned in the Stuttgart area.
So there was a British food joke that popped up in Dragon Age origins:
“ we take the biggest pot we can find and put everything in it, then cook it for as long as possible until everything is bland and tasteless. When everything is a uniform, greyish colour, that’s when I know it is done”…
That's not a joke. That's the recipe for 1970 school meals. It's pointless making anything tasty because some kid is only going to poke their snot-covered finger into it before you can eat it anyway. There's a reason for everything.
For people who grew up with wartime rationing, making a little food go along way became the standard way to cook, and the money they saved meant they carried on cooking these terrible, but cheap, meals. Surprisingly, the nation has never been fitter than in that era.
@@RevStickleback People were fitter, and there was less obesity, but there were some people who got very poor nutrition and suffered malnourishment
Listen, when i had Bangers and Mash when I went to England, it changed my life.
YES
I love our pork sausages, they just perfectly present you with the flavour of pork.
We like taking just a few ingredients and cooking them to perfection to present their unaltered flavour.
Modern British food for the most part is actually really good, the quality of the ingredients on the European continent is usually far superior to the quality of food in other places (excluding Japan, Korea etc) due to strict food standard laws which really contributes to these classic meals tasting really great without the need of heavy seasoning or alteration, some people (mostly Americans) simply can't comprehend this because most of them haven't tasted food in Europe which for the most part is of a much higher standard and quality than what they're used to
@@MostlyPennyCatPork sausage british style is fat pressed into the shape of a sausage... 😮
@@JlandelMoncada1
For the comedian who got deleted for saying British sausages are fat and filler:
Baked beans taste great, I don't know why people dislike them so much.
Who dislikes them ?
Because baked beans in the US Vs UK are very different. They've never tried Heinz beans before. And TBF, the beans themselves taste better than they look
@@Bedic-Mag
It's literally an American product.
_Heinz_
@@MostlyPennyCat It's an American company, it's not an American product, they don't really sell them over there. Well they sell baked beans but they're not the same. I think they do actually sell some called "British style" or something (edit: Oh, they are literally pictured in this video) because I saw a video about it, which compared them to actual British Heinz Beanz, but even they are not identical, and most people probably don't even know you can buy them.
For some reason as a kid I didn't like baked beans. I thought they were kinda gross. Nowadays I think they're pretty good. Oh and Heinz aren't even the best.
Beans is a less costly, good source of protein if you can't have meat.
In Norway we serve tomato beans with thick slices of fried unsmoked salty bacon.
This is eaten with steamed potatoes and white sauce.
The Danes add chopped parsley to the sauce, where as in Sweden they just swap tomato beans for brown beans.
Very typical Scandinavian...
😊❤
British food is a long way from being awful. In fact it's a huge improvement on the food most people in the world today eat. But it's fashionable to criticise the British and everything British, and so we have to endure this nonsense.
@@tommymorrison6478 That’s because us Brits actively said no to being run by the globalist state in 2016, so they are trying to take us down because of it.
British curry houses sound exactly like american mexican restaurants from your description lmao
The main difference is that there are no chain versions and so every one is different, and each family owned restaurant has its own specialities.
I agree. They are analogous.
Most British Indian restaurants were started by families from Sylhet which was India but now in Bangladesh, and they brought East Bengali food with them.
Sylhetis were very popular as crew in the UK Merchant Navy, and after the Second World War they were given special immigration status and Sylheti communities sprang up in many port cities, where they opened restaurants and gradually spread throughout the country.
Using local ingredients they also cooked other popular Indian foods from all over India but with a Bengali twist. Apparently Chicken Tikka Masala was invented in Glasgow when someone complained that their oven roasted chicken (tikka) was too dry so the chef reached for a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup and history was made!
@@Bribie12very similar to american chinese restaurants
@@YOSSARIAN313 Yes, very similar story. A lot of Chinese arrived on the West Coast for various gold rushes and also were used as cheap labor building the Western leg of the Transcontinental railroad up from Sacramento .. hundreds died. However many of them stayed and opened restaurants where they adapted Chinese dishes to local tastes. Particularly Chop Sui and Chow Mein!!
Full English breakfast is one of the best inventions in humans history. One dish = energy until evening.
agreed- love a fry up. Only if you eat like that every morning you´ll need to run a marathon each afternoon lest your heart´s gonna explode😆
Two reasons:
1. The nearest neighbor, France, has an amazing food history
2. The US, Britain's oldest and favorite child, has an amazing food culture from its immigrant past.
That's why. British food is fine, but compared to France and the US, it's just not comparable in a reputation sense
Thank you for this video. It pisses me off so much when I see people bashing traditional British food or daring to say that it doesn't even exist and that it was stolen from other places. British food is great. It's very similar to other European cuisines and there's nothing wrong with that.
The thing is, the war time rationing mindset stuck with an entire generation. Even in the early 2000s, I remember my nan (who grew up during the depression) being horrified by me at lunch as I dared to put ham AND cheese in a single sandwich 😂
Bro couldn’t even find an image of someone looking at some fish fingers in a shop or even a pub so he resorted to AI images smh. Still a good video regardless, I am now very hungry
@CraftZ08 I was looking for this exact comment
Apparently the indigenous Americans ate fried beans but it was made with bear fat not tomato sauce. Baked beans were inspired by that to make bake beans in sauce in a convenient tin for travel
@@jaconbran2367 that’s just refried beans. Mexicans still eat them
Long form content lets go
Jellied Eel sounds good. I'm deffinetly gonna give it a try. Here, in Ukraine, we have jelly but made out of pork. I'm really excited to taste jellied fish. (in Ukraine we call jallied pork like [holodets])
Jellied eel tastes better with some parsley sauce.
We have pork jelly too, but usually we only use it to fill up the space in a pork pie between the meat and pastry that's formed as the pie cooks. Keeps the meat away from the air and adds an extra texture and juiciness.
Yes, I thought of that too, but if there are bones in the fish it would be a pass for me
I've been making Halupsi, except I now need a meat grinder to make them really well.
And I want to use fermented sour cabbage however I think that's, er, can't remember the nation that's from.
@@MostlyPennyCat you mean sauerkraut? I think its german 🤔
People really do forget that unlike America, the majority of people in Britain had very limited options for food for different reasons. The First World War led to food shortages, after that unlike America there was no great economic uplift in the 1920s, compounded by the Great Depression, and then by the Second World War and rationing which went on for nearly twice as long as the war did. So that's four decades of limited food options for many people. Okay it's an excuse the French, Italians and Spanish could have as well but don't, but for a lot of people born in the 50s and 60s, all they'll have known growing up was crap, unseasoned food
I don't buy these excuses. British empire was the biggest empire in history with territories in the Americas, Asia and Africa so historically they had access to many ingredients and techniques meanwhile Japan also went through famine and rationing, destroyed in war but had much more limited access to other ingredients and their cuisine is considered one of the bests of the world. Japanese cuisine often focus on making the best of limited ingredients, one of their most famous dishes is raw fish with no spices or other ingredients besides some soy sauce.
@@whome9842 Its not like Japan didn't have a substantial empire too. If that theory held then other empires would show as much impact by the countries they ruled over. I think most of the influence went the other way.
Japan was rebuilt by the west, mostly for the west. Their international cuisine is probably more tailored to a western palette that it would otherwise have been.
@@MartynPS When did Japan had colonies in the Americas, Africa and Oceania? Potatoes, tomato, corn and many other things came from the Americas. UK couldn't have fish and chips without their colonies.
@@whome9842 You're ignoring the biggest thing Nibbles didn't really go into, Britain's extremely rigid class system. The working class didn't have access to the imported goods of the empire. The peasant farmers who raised cows spoke Anglo-Saxon wheras the nobility who ate the meat of cows called it beef because they spoke French, this continued for centuries.
@@whome9842 IIRC it was the Spanish who introduced the Potato to Europe, and the Portuguese who have the earliest example of fish and chips. I don't recall either being part of the British Empire.
'Modern' changes British food, like much of Europe, is influenced by its neighbours via the upper classes. Until globalization started kicking off most new foods and techniques were out of reach of most of the population.
As someone pointed out during World War II, there was very severe rationing of food and this rash actually persisted into the early 1950s
I think this rationing lasted into maybe 1953 even 1954 a time when North America was going through Renaissance of consumer items and advertising
I’d have to ask why did the British government insist on rationing food into the early 1950s?
What happens with food is that people associated with comfort and familiarity so low quality ration food actually became a stable and people would prefer having it as a form of familiarity and comfort
I think that’s where the bad reputational British food comes from mid to late 20th century
This is true. A whole generation grew up on poverty food, and it became their culture.
2:22 Now if you're vegetarian, fair enough, black pudding is gross, but then so is all meat. But you can hardly call it gross if you're willing to eat hot dogs or American burgers with whatever they make them out of.
I think people don't like the idea of too much blood in their food.
Black pudding in contrary to meat actually has some vitamins in it
I heard an american lose his mind "I can't understand how *anyone* could eat something as vile as that!" myself (Australian born), a Ukrainian friend and my own mother (born in Switzerland where it was common) all said "poverty" and shut him up real quick.
@rustyhowe3907 not exactly poverty but lack of land more precisely. Europe has no shitload of free space for cows to graze freely
@@emkalina Yep that's what my mother also said about where she grew up, but in hers and my friend's case it was definitely poverty being a huge factor too.
Baked Beans were the standard Sunday meal in colonial New England. Basically, they banked the oven fires on Saturday night. They set the crock with beans and sauce in the oven the night before, and it was ready the next day. This made cooking on the Sabbath unnecessary. 12:50
It’s not that British food is bad, and while each cuisine has its questionable dishes, Britain definitely has some notably questionable dishes.
@@jackryan444 most countries do to be fair
Me, a Dutchman, seeing typical British food: 'Finally, some good fucking food!'
Worst experience you can have as a German in the UK is their bread.
Having lived in Germany for several years, I agree. Fortunately though, nowadays you can buy proper bread here, but it's 10 times the cost of what I call 'plastic bread'.
@SolarCookingGermany Germans love their bread. My ex was German, and she said German bread was the best in Europe.
My favorite joke: "the beauty of their women and the taste of their food make Brits the best sailors in the world".
This is great, love the deep dive and clearly tons of effort has gone into this! Bonus points for defending our mid cuisine.
We have blood sausage in France too, it's called boudin noir.
In the Philippines, we also eat baked beans thanks to the only brand producing this Hunts. We usually like to combine with hard boiled eggs, but I don't find baked beans on toast appetising, that's like putting banana ketchup on Korean noodles or pineapple on pizza.
Pineapple on pizza is awesome! When it's with ham... If it's just pineapple and cheese, well, that's messed up...
I grew up in the 60s, surrounded by people that had survived WW2, rationing was eliminated in 1955. The parents had learned to be frugal in all things including meals, the seasonings used when my mum cooked were salt and pepper, the condiments were tomato sauce (ketchup) and brown sauce (HP or Daddies) that's it. Spaghetti came out of a can (Heinz). Bread with everything. Yep, very boring, but filling. The local farm market had a cart selling hot black pudding/blood pudding (just like food trucks do now), and to this day I can still see my reaction when I could smell it - (IMO) I hated it.
Exotic veg was a green pepper, I don't remember any exotic fruit.
I love many different cuisines now, but sometimes I get a craving for cheese and onion pie, or 'rag' pudding and chips.
Thanks for the memories.
Black pudding is legitimately good
Like
Why y’all foreigners dissing it >:(
beans on toast is peak too, especially with a bit of cheese on top
@hartmann3288 I don't even consider it the proper meal yet without cheese tbh. The pictures you see people react to are always just beans on an underdone bit of cheap, pre-sliced white toast. No wonder they aren't impressed, GET SOME BLOODY BROWN SAUCE ON IT 😤
Or add a fried egg
Make it crispy on the edges with salt and pepper seasoning
That makes things ten times better imo ❤️
FR, americans literally believe they know everything, the guys who diss our food i bet haven't even had it before 💀
Because I've had it, it tastes like liverwurst but warmed up, just ew
Nah. A few gastropubs and Gordon Ramsay do not make a culinary wonderland. Been in the UK often and finding a decent place to eat, particularly outside of London and a few other areas, can still be quite the challenge. I'd rate the food about average by Northwest European standard, but that's not the highest bar. The problem is not the dishes themselves; they can be lovely when done right. But often, the choice of ingredients and care of preparation is still lacking, simply because it's not part of the natural culture to care about these things. Of course, this a generalization, but when I can walk into a random place in the outskirts of, say, Leeds, and be certain to have a good meal, will things really have changed.
As a Mexican guy I can say that besides jelly eel I didn't find anything gross on the dishes showed in the video. Bland? Definitely, but gross? Absolutely no.
They don't even have to be really bland, it's not a fiery hot cuisine overall but a lot of these things were supposed to be served with sauces and condiments like horseradish and mustard (English mustard is usually much hotter than USA version) or highly flavoured herby/fruity accompaniments and relishes.
English mustard with sausages, rashers and black and white pudding.
Anyone making fun of baked beans hasn’t had good baked beans. But I still don’t get why you guys put them on toast. Wouldn’t that just make the toast soggy and basically just revert it to bread?
@@surprisedchar2458 No funnily enough it doesn't make the toast soggy. Most people will also add something of their choice to it. I personally like to add some smoked paprika to the beans as they are cooking and then sprinkle some grated cheese on top of it when it has been served.
The bread becomes infused with the sauce, like an angel embrasing a new born infant, but slightly more soggy.
The beans with the toast make a complete protein.
Yes, the toast does go soggy if you put the beans on top unless you gobble it all up very quickly. Solution: put the beans to the side of the toast.
@@Chris-hf2sl Stoppit you lot. Heat those beans until they steam --- reduce them; do a little reduction. Also see my other remarks on baked bean preparation: I get moistened toast, never soggy toast...
5:15 another fun fact: this still shot comes from a recent (2023) Polish movie adaptation of the Polish mandatory reading book called "The Peasants" :)
I ate breakfast in england once. I ordered a "british breakfast" off the menu.
They gave me: fried tomato, fried potato, fried egg, fried sasuage, fried beans, and fried bread.
... it was actually surprisingly tasty. but a bit too heavy and greasy. and the bread was too soggy from the oil it was fried in.
You're supposed to load up on calories in the morning, then defeat a large foreign army, then have tea.
As an American with a British family, i go to visit every few years. The food in the uk is too many times mediocre and overpriced. However, if you go to an actual local staple like a pork pie shop or something, it's pretty good, and yall invented the sandwich, so honestly, i agree British food is good.
You’re calling our food overpriced? Wasn’t that long ago people in the US were unable to afford eggs while I was getting 6 farm fresh organic free-range large eggs for £2.50.
Food Wars recently did a comparison of UK fish and chips vs US fish and chip and the UK consistently came out cheaper with larger portions (a rare occurrence).
The only costly foods are the imported ones which we can largely blame Brexit and the war in Ukraine for.
@danielriley7380 wasn't really buying farm produce. Here in Texas, if i were to buy eggs locally, it would be similarly priced. but when it came to restaurants or even fast food, it made the us look a lot less expensive. Even my English family said UK food can be shit and expensive, and people will accept it more than the US. The prices did just tend to be higher generally in the UK because of inflation, though.
@danielriley7380 Fish and chips are terribly overpriced here.
@@Turdinkledge you’ve just watched a video where UK and US fish and chips were compared and the UK was generally cheaper than the US *and* for bigger portions.
@@danielriley7380 I know bro that's a rare one bro.
As an Vietnamese and an Asian, i like blood sausage. We all have our version of blood sausage here in SEA
Bro just skipped the Anglo-Saxon period 💀
Almost like that time period is known as the dark ages specifically because unlike the literate native Britons the Anglo Saxons were illiterate.
« Illiterate »? I mean the Britons,yeah, but the Anglo-Saxons.They are known for having a huge body of literature back then. Don’t tell me they did’nt mention how they cooked.
@@felixbonnet6639 no the Britons had been a literate culture since the romans brought the Latin alphabet over half a milenia before the arrival of the Anglo Saxons, first in Latin and then in Brythonic around the 5th century.
@@Blaidd7542 tbf, literacy in the anglo saxon period was fairly high, comparatively speaking. Its literary works and artistry were, and are, highly regarded. Anglo Saxon England also had one of the most advanced tax systems in Europe at the time. The idea that Anglo-saxon England was a backwater is nonsense.
@ the Anglo Saxon era covers a period of around 4 centuries.
As a Canadian of Scottish and French Canadian heritage I grew up essentially eating 'British' food, with traditional Québécois dishes thrown in. In the 60's and into the 70's what our American relatives ate seemed often really weird to us. Over the decades every trip I made to Britain left me amazed at the quality of food especially in hotels and even museum cafés! And now, retired in a small town on Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada, I will gladly pay $10 for a rather small little package of Wensleydale, Stilton or Lancashire at the local supermarket just because as cheeses go, they are so good! But eating baked beans for breakfast? No way!
There are other countries where you can find things like blood sausage, for example in Poland or Germany.
Modern British food is actually pretty good and due to the rich diversity of ethnicities in the UK has evolved through the fusion of cultures mixing in the right way, though the food was basic and bland during wartime and in fairness the rest of the 20th century, British food has evolved, most people don't realise that chicken tikka masala wasn't born in India, it was born in the UK and is the national dish, most people don't realise that the UK has almost as many Michelin star restaurants as the US despite being a tiny nation compared to them... The immigrant population of the UK is currently 14% and the influx of tastes from India, The Middle East, China, Eastern Europe, Africa and in particular Korea recently, which has become very popular in the last few years has massively impacted British tastes as a whole
Our cultures aren't mixing well anymore, specifically middle eastern culture
I think people that don't like blood sausage (whichever country it comes from), should at least try it once. There's absolutely nothing off-putting about it, it's a very mild taste. It's "weird" for Americans, but it's totally tasty to many other cultures.
I got to watch Gordon Ramsay's Christmas cooking special on Roku last year, and I was shocked at how charming and demure he is in it. It's still something I love to watch every year.
I was born in Trinidad came to England in 1964 age 3 went to school in 1966 age 5. I love school dinner of that era mice meat and dumplings with vegetables baked victorian rice pudding with nutmeg and raisins fish and chips jelly with ice cream found memories.
Just to be clear... you meant to say nice meat, right?
Love this format, would love to see more educational long form food vids!! 👏👏
your editing is fluid af omgg
but bro if you rendered this in 60fps, it'd be buttery
i think he went to a school for that or something
@@swankmankhe literally mentioned hiring an editor at Fiverr in another comment 😅
I'm a U.S Southerner....Black Pudding sounds and looks soooooo good to me. Om nom nom nom. Wish we had it here.
@@dibs3615 go to Louisiana and get some boudin noir
It is awesome
I know you usually make shorts with cooking and dry, distinctively British comedic narration but I really enjoy this standard length video here.
Personal opinion but I think the main issue is how the dishes look visually. People aren't particularly adverse to brown white and beige, but if those colors are next to bright greens and reds they nearly disappear. They of course are delicious but the colors don't catch your eye like something like a taco de pescado.
I lived in the UK outside of Cambridge for 3 years. I moved back recently. Just my and my families opinion.
The restaurant food outside of the major cities is pretty bland, boring and often undercooked by our standards. The Asian style foods are often just unedible.
However, even in our small village there was an amazing Japanese/Chinese restaurant that was very good.
By contrast eating at someone's house was always a treat. I never left without being amazed how different it was from getting a take away.
So called American themed restaurants in England were always way over salted, way over sugared, and nothing that most Americans would ever dream of eating together.
Groceries stores are also extremely different. There is much less choice at a uk gr9cery store. However, the quality of fruit, veg, dairy, meat and seafood is so much higher in the UK. The cost is also so much lower. We didn't care for most of their frozen or pre-packaged foods.
The dairy selection was also much smaller than than North America. But what they do have is very good and of a high quality. The selection we really shocked me as I thought that being so close they would have more imported food.
As far as bread. Yes sandwich bread in the us mostly has too much sugar, but we I barely noticed a difference in taste between the English bread and US. We also have access to bakeries and artisan breads. Since covid there is also a marked uptick in people making their own.
I will say everything I ate in Ireland was amazing. I know not what were really talking about.
In the end there are pros and cons of both countries. And also just a matter of preference base on what we are used to. I would kill to get access to a Saintsbury s here. Especially with the lower prices. But I prefer all of north Amercas restaurant food with only a few exceptions.
But I respect that many Brits would rather have their food over ours.
Just tagging this for future reference.
Oddly as a Brit I went to the US expecting to be massively impressed by their breakfasts, but I wasn't. I ought to mention though, I'm a pescatarian, and have only visited two states. But the best I got was Eggs Hollandaise in NY, and a Breakfast Burrito, in Arizona.
This doesn't compare to the delicious mash-up which even a vegetarian can get in the UK: scrambled/fried eggs, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, baked beans, veggie sausages, toast and (two imported US items) hash browns and waffles. Obviously a meat-eater could add bacon, pork sausages and maybe black pudding. Probably flavoured with brown sauce. But the US seemed to have relatively few albeit tasty items, dominated by eggs, or a sickeningly sweet heap of waffles, pancakes etc which AFAIC is dessert, not breakfast!
Admittedly beating US cuisine might be considered a low bar, but I think, at least with breakfast, we may achieve it. However I have to say my experience of US food is very limited in regional terms. Also I'm somewhat allergic to avocados.
Loved this long form video man. Naming Jamie Oliver among British 'culinary cred' was a big mistake though 🤣
Jamie has tought at least one generation of Brits to dare cook their own, simple meals...
@@ninaelsbethgustavsen2131 Maybe.. I've never seen Jamie make anything and not make massive technical errors and add weird flavors. Like starting fried rice with rice in a cold wok and adding water to the rice 😂
As a non-brit to us he is like the archetype of blasphemous British cooking.
@@ravilagro7896 He started off cooking actually tasty dishes. Where he went off the rails is deciding to prepare food from different cuisines based on zero preparation or learning, only his own vague ideas of what those dishes should be like.
@@diarmuidkuhle8181 Yeah I believe you. He couldn't have gotten famous over bad cooking. But when he tries to put his own spin on things it's always like ying and yang 😅 I think why a lot of people dislike him as well is his dishonest school lunch program that was just good for him financially but bad for every kid at school.
@@ravilagro7896love uncle Roger reacting to Jamie Oliver.
It’s a travel myth. Everyone knows someone who knew someone who went to the UK and said the food was dreadful.
It’s actually not.
This video is so well made! Definitely deserves more attention
How on earth did you not mention Ainsley Harriott in the Celeb chef section, he deserves it way more than Jamie Oliver!
Yup. Delia Smith was an especially logical one to have mentioned... yet wasn't 🤦♂️ .
Gary Rhodes too (sadly passed away in 2019) as well as Hairy Bikers (one sadly now passed) and Two Fat Ladies (one hath passed)
...not to mention the legendary F@nny Craddock and Mrs Beaton 😌👌 .
Are we about to have a Harry Hill moment?
Best video yet on this channel, and by some distance. A fascinating watch, not just for the food, but also the history.
The history of British tea is also the history of the British empire. The most prized possessions in the west were the Caribbean islands where sugar cane was grown. Tea was bought from China (tea being a corruption of cha), which led to a shortage of British silver and the need to get some back (resulting in the Opium war and Hong Kong). The search for other sources made Sri Lanka important. Milk in tea was a result of drinking habits in India.
My granny was 100% British, raised as a kid during the Depression while I was kid born and raised in Australia.
My father was the brat always complaining and she'd pelt him with the wooden spoon for being so fussy.
To me there was nothing wrong with her cooking, it was just a different style for a different climate well away from the Indian/Rest of Asia cuisines that had become the norm to us Aussies, I have a deep respect for all styles thanks to understanding not *everyone* had the spoilt for choice fancy ingredients as a part of their culture, by default.
Production value on this one is a bit crazy
Good job :>
The internet has brought a wave of colonization by American food, Barbecue etc.
For this reason I’m very very happy to see the survival of the Sunday Roast!!!This is a unique phenomenon in fact, now only for Thanksgiving and major feast days, here in North America.
Brilliant video! Well done! Subscribed.
Yanks just simply cannot comprehend the complexity of the greggs sausage roll
No, we can’t, but have you ever had a scrapple egg and cheese sandwich? Regional, but very tasty
Greggs sausage rolls are okay, not great because it's a big chain bakery/store with low quality meat, half cooked pastry and not local and home made.
@@sevenember3332 We have something similar to scrapple, called haslet. Usually sliced thinner than scrapple and served as a cold lunchmeat, but can also be heated up.
Gregg's is mediocre at best, but it'll suffice if you don't have a good local independent bakery.
Greggs is trash. Come over to the US and we have Colombian joints that make Arepas Ranchero with more flavor than you can comprehend.
For pity's sake, it's not the CUISINE, it's the QUALITY. The British CUISINE is fine. But Brits in general accept a really, really low standard in their bought food. I spent half a year in the UK recently and lost over 10kg because eating was just something to regret. I ended up looking for places to eat where it looked like the cooks grew up somewhere else. It's the QUALITY that's the problem. Even if you go to McDonald's in the UK, the buns are consistently slightly stale - and this is a global chain that has perfected getting disinterested teenagers to make identical food. I remember once getting a Thai green curry at a Thai place in the O2 Arena... and it was half *pea soup*.
You yourself say the same thing at 18:00 when you reference the *thousands* of bad eateries. YOUR food that you personally make for this channel is fine because you're a food enthusiast, and yes you can find good food in the UK, but you have to hunt for it. In other countries you don't have to hunt, you just throw a brick and chances are you'll hit an eatery that's decent. Or look at a chain store like Greggs that's really popular, and their offerings are oily, soggy things. Nothing wrong with a sausage roll... but that popular chain makes miserable ones.
I personally thought the "British food is bad" thing was a meme because of the rivalry with the French who do food well. Then I lived in the UK for a bit. Brits accept really poor quality in their bought meals, like no place else.
As a history video, it's great. But it completely misses providing the "real reason" in the title.
(and seriously - the UK was not the only place that had war rationing. that really isn't part of the reason.)
Ironically French food is the opposite case of largely iffy food that's hyped up.
After all the French invented Margarine (via boiling up roadkill 😂), have made a tradition of being d1cks to Geese and other birds, and think that Snails is a starter 🤦♂️ .
Och, and we Brit's have more varieties of Cheese than the French do 😏 .
I would actually really agree! After visiting the us a couple of times, i realised that the degree to which you can just walk into like. A random shitty diner/“greasy spoon” and eat cheap but genuinely tasty and well-made food is MUCH greater than in the uk, where you really can’t do the same. Also, nice food here tends to be wayyyy overpriced +tiny portions (excluding things like fresh produce which are cheaper here+relatively avaialable everywhere consistently, although mainland eu still has MUCH nicer fresh veg+fruit than here imo after brexit). the only consistently good and cheap thing in both the us+uk is like, middle eastern food, so like kebabs for us and like a halal truck in ny or something
Edit: i also think that customer service culture in the us vs the uk plays a big role here, wherein i think its more acceptable to complain if your food is bad in the us whereas here youre kind of paying a premium if you want the person making it to actually give a shit
👍
@@vacri54 where in the UK were you living?!
As a brit who has also eaten abroad, disagree. You just have to know where to eat and where to avoid, same as any city in any country on the planet. Chain stores and tourist traps like the O2 arena?? Of course you're going to have a bad experience. BTW, these places make a good chunk of their income from holidaymakers, so it's not even us Brits who have the bad taste.
My parents came to UK from Jamaica. I was born here. Everything here was bland we would season everything. Even beans. To this day I season everything shop bought. Everyone loves my cooking.
You can always go back
The problem with British cuisine is the presentation. Non-British look at British cuisine and see a monotone beige/brown, and it always looks kinda messy. If the presentation looks a little better, I'm sure the reputation will be gone.
Like with the recent controversy on TikTok about Chinese food in the UK. Americans made fun of it, and the British retorted that American Chinese food isn't any more authentic than theirs. But it really wasn't about authenticity. It was about the lack of color. It was all beige. American Chinese food might not be "authentic," but it's almost always full of vegetables and very colorful. I"ve had some British dishes that tasted great to my mouth, but my eyes always look at it and wonder "where's the green?"
@@conho4898 I want food that TASTES good. EFF your “Presentation is everything” BS.
@@dexmartin4358 but chinese american food is more authentic, given that most of what we know as Chinese food in the West was invented here by Chinese immigrants centuries ago.
The British have a very high standard of ingredient quality, Everything from potatoes to lamb is very heavily controlled and sourced usually from grass fed free range animals, And with such a small population all relatively close to each other, we don't have to transport food 1000+ miles across country in freezers, Combined with a "weekly shop" culture food doesn't have as many preservatives and fake flavourings added to combat the bland old produce that's been on a shelf for 6 weeks. So whilst we might not use every herb and spice know to man in our food, its because believe it or not, a simple well made mash potato with 2 local butchers sausages and some simple meat gravy has plenty of flavour and doesn't need dousing in "BIG TEDS FLAMING HOT GRILLED EAGLE DICK SPICE MIX" like they do in the good ol' USA.
Also WW2 did some weird shit to us as well to be fair..
@Dionysos640 relative to the USA, it does, America has a pupulation of around 350 million, compared to around 70 million in the UK.
America is like 100 times the size of the UK. If anything, America is underpopulated for its size. Most countries it's size have a population of over a billion. Russia doesn't count because most of its land mass is uninhabitable.
I’m lucky to live in a part of the US where, from spring to mid-autumn, produce stands are run selling mostly locally grown or made food. I try to stick to seasonal produce when possible and when not, frozen vegetables with no added preservatives. We do weekly shops here too. Not every American has their freezer loaded with and dines exclusively on convenience meals just as I know not every Brit takes advantage of the high-quality meat and produce you’re proud of (and you should be). Spice mixes, outside of specific cuisine, are the crutch of people who don’t know how to cook. And again, not every American is ignorant of how to properly produce a tasty meal. It’s not even the majority. Please don’t pretend every American is the same with poor taste as I don’t do the same for you.
And the blame for the reputation of British cooking can be laid entirely on the transition from wood fire cooking to coal fire cooking. When the main meal needed to be cooked in a pot, it was typically boiled for most people. That’s when things went downhill. And no, the war didn’t help
Side note: I’ve had tasty food in England. I’ve also had boarding school food. Take that as you will
How about doing both tho? Having good food quality does not stop seasonings from making it even better.
@@sevenember3332 All very fair points!
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that geographically its easier in the UK for us to take advantage of local produce etc than in some areas of the united states
(From what I've Seen/Heard)
due to the UK being a smaller land size therefore we might have greater options with choosing our food locally, And admittedly yes I was a bit harsh with putting "Americans" in a singular group like I did, I know of (If only online) Great American cooks who choose their produce carefully and season things brilliantly. The USA has produced many MANY cooks and forms of cooking that I myself use on a weekly basis, I just know of my own experience here in the UK knowing I can go 2 minutes down the road and buy things such as Eggs/Bacon/Vegetables from the nearby honesty box of the local farmers etc, So its probably a bit out of mu world to imagine struggling for food when my concept of food is so simple. American healthy diets do seem like a bit of a minefield though 😬😬
Former PM Harold Wilson added Brown (HP) sauce to everything. HP sauce is made from salt, sugar, vinegar, tomatoes and dates mostly. And British people still do that to this day, whether it be stew, pies, toad in the hole, bacon/egg/sausage sandwiches, or any breakfast really, even I still add it to baked beans on toast, some people add it to cheese on toast, some people even add it to spaghetti bolognese.
Well done video, mate! Excellent culinary history lesson, replete with your wonderfully witty wordplay and delightfully dry analogies. ☮
Celebrity chefs, gastro pubs and little restaurants serving deconstructed roast beef tacos is all very well,but the sad fact is the food most people eat at home is pretty ordinary.
And to be fair, given the country isn’t exactly overflowing with affordable, fresh fruit, veg, meat and seafood it’s understandable.
A lot of that food looked sad af
I spent some of my youth in the UK, doing Year 5 through Year 8 there. I've been living here in Italy for the past 7 years and I still miss British food every once in a while.
Personally, I have breakfasts more similar to British ones. I always have eggs, milk and/or some form of meat. Typical Italian breakfast, however, is just milk and biscuits, though they might sometimes shop for croissants. As it turns out, insulin spikes first thing in the morning are not good for your health so I know older family members that are now starting to eat eggs and/or meat for breakfast instead due to health reasons. This morning, at 9:00am, I felt super hungry so I decided to have some burgers with eggs and a housemate of mine asked if I was having lunch all while she was, in fact, eating biscuits and milk lmao. I don't think people realise just how bad sugars are first thing in the morning.
Up to this day, I still crave fish and chips as well as beef Wellington very often but it's hard to find anything here. Not to mention that I love dairy and, while Italy does have mozzarella and parmesan, I also miss British dairy. In fact, I mostly use butter over olive oil, I still dine at 6:00pm (Italians dine at roughly 8-10:00pm) and I am actually drinking tea as I am watching this. While it may be true that the UK has a high obesity rate, that's largely because of processed foods, like KFC, McDonald's or just the fact that people like to stuff their mouths with food. However, because of the sheer number of snacks here in Italy, there is actually a higher rate of child obesity here than in the UK.
From personal experience, I can tell you that British people are just not afraid of trying out different foods. Brits didn't ditch their food because it was bad, it's just that people from countries like China, India, Thailand, Italy etc. where moving in and people just liked these options. Here in Italy, if you dare to say you like curry over pizza, people will look at you weird. British people don't judge and just eat whatever they want. British people just absolutely don't care and that's what I miss about the UK. Lots of cooking in the UK isn't necessarily about making complex things but making something your taste buds will enjoy. A lot of British food can just be described as comfort food and I like that. I don't care what anyone says but sausages on a pie go hard as hell 😂
3:42 Indeed, British cheese is great. And while all cheese is processed food, admittedly, at least in Britain and elsewhere in Europe it's sold in big chunks or wheels, not those horrible ultra-processed slices you get in America.
We don’t want it. It’s something the government came up with to process the stockpiles of milk they bought during the war. There were eventually so many of the stockpiled cheese loaves that the government started giving it away to low-income families that it eventually got the name of “government cheese”. It’s not even properly cheese, it’s cheese *food* and while it does have a few good applications (part of a sauce, on a burger) I’d rather use an aged cheddar style cheese
Yes, indeed...there are many many great english cheeses out there, like Cheddar, Stilton...ehm...yes...Cheddar (did I already?🤔)...uhm...
I am American, and always felt embarrassed about those squares being called "American cheese", until I learned just recently that they do have one redeeming feature: unlike other cheeses (or "actual cheeses") they are made of cheese that has been processed with sodium citrate, so it can melt beautifully into a smooth cheese sauce.
@ It works especially well when combined with freshly grated extra sharp cheddar to make the sauce. That way you get a velvety texture with a good amount of flavor
5:20 this painting doesn't depict a British "party". It is "the peasant's Wedding" painted by Brabantian painter Pieter Bruegel The Elder in 1567-68.
Thanks for the effort you put into this video.
As others have indicated, the AI artwork was a poor choice and some examples could even mislead a viewer as to what some dishes are or how they are served.
Class and social factors have been hugely relevant to British food culture (in particular related to the industrialisation of the country during the 18th and 19th century), as these both seem to be aspects that have influenced a lot of the opinion about British food: notably how, for many centuries, the aristocracy and monarchy identified much more strongly with continental Europe (and particularly France) so even within our borders, "British" food was dismissed as food of the poor, whereas French food was aspirational.
This attitude pervaded society so much through to the mid-20th century that the general population discarded a lot of the food culture they inherited from their forebears (and it wasn't recorded, due to most recorded history being the preserve of the wealthy) and aspired to the cuisine of continental Europe and further afield.
What
"Where'd you get the coconuts?"
"We found them!"
Hi mate, been loving your shorts for ages now, great longer video too. Only criticism is that the use of AI imagery is a bit outputting. Otherwise, nicely done
This was very interesting. As a German I have to admit that I really liked the more simple British dishes like Bangers and Mesh or Fish 'n' Chips and I really love baked beans and black pudding. I find them all quite similar to traditional German cuisine, wich won't win you any prizes internationally but will get you filled, be quick to make and relatively cheap.
Well am Greek from Cyprus I came here in 1959 from the first time I arrived I did not find British food to be bad at al different yes bad No, even today after so many years cottage pie Lancashire hot pot fish n chips are 3 of my favourite foods along with full English breakfast, of course is getting better as time goes by when I went to china for a month what did I missed the most? fish n chips fasoles (Greek/Turkish cooked beans) n Kebab ops n of course Bread n butter putting Rubab pie
British food has the same problem as all the other northern european cuisine. It does't LOOK good. Also foods in Britain, Germany and Scandinavia were made to survive harsh winters. Because of that we have many fermented foods and our food is rather heavy and extremely meat based.
If you look at the countries that are famed for their cuisine its always a country with warm climate. They have lots of "light" food, many spices etc.
easy answer - the italians hate all other cooks then them
the french use suger and butter in all their recipies
India spices their food so much they literally cannot eat anything else but spiced food
America- is a mixture of all 3 but to the extreme, they also try to deflect from the fact they invented "Junk food" .
its also important to remember 2things with british cooking, 1 , we come from a line of cooks that use herbs, which has delicate flavours, so our food is designed to enhance the meats not overpower them which is lost on people that put suger and spice in everything and 2, every person that thnks we dont spice our food just means we dont over spice our food,(for the reasona above) but also forgets every curry they can name was probably invented by the british or in britain, they dont eat vindaloos in Bombay.
@@Weary_Wizard Vindaloo might not be eaten in Mumbai but down the coast in Goa pork with wine and potatoes is a popular dish. Indian is a big place and what is eaten in Simla and Madras is as different as Scotland and Scilly.
Curry and we'll seasoned food is fine once in a while, but like you said, the more you eat of it the less you enjoy other food, not because it's better, but because it makes your taste buds blind to anything else, plus, when im eating chicken curry, im not doing it for the chicken or rice, it's basically just eating curry sauce with a side of texture. Anyway there are tons of cultures that don't season their food like Japan and a lot of South American countries, but they don't get any crap for it. Seasoning is great but it's completely out of place in traditional british cuisine, except for like herbs and pepper/fresh vegetables
@@davidwright7193
Ah yes, vindaloo that famously _Portuguese_ recipe! 😂
Vindaloo is a British version of a Goan version of a Portuguese dish!
OP makes an excellent point, a lot of European cuisines are very insular. They don't do change or foreign influences.
Britain is the original multicultural nation, we're obsessed with everybody's food and no, not because ours is "bad".
Our food is fantastic, flavoursome and has been for centuries.
Go look up the original ketchup, white ketchup and tell me that's bland.
But we love everybody's food, we take in every influence we can and make new things with it.
@@MostlyPennyCat- ketchup is the best you could think of 😂😂
I'm Italian and the few days I spent in london were just fine: managed to taste some good typical food with decent prices and when I couldn't find local there was a good alternative from all over the world. Meat pies are great and tomorrow I'll try to cook toad in the hole. The only thing that was a bit disgusting was the smell of fried fish, not the freshest... For the rest the bad reputation is really exagerated.
That being said, I know some locals and what they eat and its generally not really tasty.