Dear Snugs,
I appreciate your spirited defense of England’s cuisine and other aspects of your great people.
While I am sure that there is well-prepared British food, you are well-known for over-cooking and boiling the heck out of your meats. Of course your dairy food has an excellent reputation, as do your breakfasts and treats served with tea.
That said, people don’t go to England for British cuisine. The British, like the Americans, have never been shy about importing, adapting or borrowing good things from other peoples for their own use. But you will not see to many places where the people going out say, “What will it be? How about some good steak and kidney pie?” While I don’t doubt Tuppy Glossop’s taste on these matters, it just isn’t what comes naturally to people.
On another thread (having to do with tea bags) I mocked the many American restaurants that don’t even have real butter on the premises. Then again, American food is not known for being incredibly sophisticated (though the Americanized apizza in New Haven, and properly done ribs and chicken in south Chicago are wonderful experiences not easily matched.)
Like so many Americans, I have a substantial amount of English in me, but since the rest is Polish, German and Irish, maybe I should stay off the topic of food altogether!
I think there was a very short period in history when probably Britain did boil a lot of its food and yes I agree vegetables over the years we have tended to boil the guts out of it. This however is very much in the past and most people under 50 only lightly boil or steam veg nowadays. I think that maybe the boiled thing came from the day when the only way for a family to have a cooked meal was for it to be put on in the morning before the mother or elder daughter left for work or school. My own grandmother used to have to go home at break-time to put the peas on. I think a fallacy has grown that ordinary working families in the past were the father only working at most times in history the lower working class always had to work mother, father and often children whether it be from home taking in washing, ironing etc or actually going out to work it has only been brief periods of great prosperity such as the 50s in Britain where the majority of housewives did not need to do some kind of work. With modern appliances etc it means that food though now can be prepared in such as way that a meal can be dished up fairly quickly without having to have it simmering all day.
Actually there are a lot of Brits that actually do go out for steak and kidney pie and many restaurants have started to serve traditional British food such as this along with our famous sticky puddings but unfortunately in healthy eating and more international way of cooking and tastes traditional pastry dishes are something that many Brits do not even know how to make.
Believe it or not many of my friends would not even know how to make pastry.
I agree that like America our day to day food eaten both in our homes and restaurants are imports and adapted recipes from around the world and in some ways with slight regional variations you could be in France, Germany, the US or Australia and eat very similar food prepared very similar.