Great British Food

[LIRR]

 

 

Maybe our real contribution to world cuisine has been the great British breakfast but Somerset Maughan's advice that "To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day." was all to true until comparatively recently. You used of course to be able to get a really good British breakfast in BR dining cars but that all went with privatisation along with affordable tickets for journeys you hadn't planned a year ahead.

 

Hi David,

 

I'm not even sure we can claim the breakfast either. I had assumed that the cooked breakfast was a British dish until my first visit to Ireland when I was served a traditional Irish breakfast - basically the same as you get in England, Wales, Scotland and Berwick, but with small local differences. Even my local pubs in New York call their full breakfast an Irish dish.

 

Anyway the best cooked breakfast I had was made in a small Italian cafe in the south of Birmingham with kidneys, fresh mushrooms and not a single baked bean or tinned tomato in sight.

 

Andy

[Natalie]

 

I'm not even sure we can claim the breakfast either. I had assumed that the cooked breakfast was a British dish until my first visit to Ireland when I was served a traditional Irish breakfast - basically the same as you get in England, Wales, Scotland and Berwick, but with small local differences. Even my local pubs in New York call their full breakfast an Irish dish.

 

 

Could these be as a result of Ireland being a part of Britain until the Government of Ireland Act 1920 bought about the partitioning to create Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland? I think there is a large section of New York which as a result of ancestry etc strongly identifies with Ireland. I am pretty much the same with my Welsh ancestry despite being born in Coventry to English parents...

[Ozexpatriate]

Even my local pubs in New York call their full breakfast an Irish dish.

Could these be as a result of Ireland being a part of Britain until the Government of Ireland Act 1920 bought about the partitioning to create Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland? I think there is a large section of New York which as a result of ancestry etc strongly identifies with Ireland.

I would suspect it is much more due to 19th century immigration patterns from Ireland into the northeast of the US than the Irish Republic, and secondarily, it avoids a "British" label.

[APOLLO]

I am permanently banned from our kitchen because I can burn water !!

 

Tell you about British food - last year we spent over three weeks in Thailand, now their food is probably the best in the world, and we ate well for those 3 weeks - BUT coming home on the plane I was looking forward to - beans on toast (Heinz of course - made in WIGAN !!) and a decent bacon butty (or two),

 

Brit15

[Flying Pig]

I am permanently banned from our kitchen because I can burn water !!

Patent the method: there are 30-odd million males in this country and quite a lot of them would pay good money for a solid excuse like that.

[Pacific231G]

Would you care to guess which country is McDonalds best market per person outside N. America. Hint, it's not the UK.

 

France?

 

It is France which surprised me when I first found out as it seemed to run against what I thought were French culinary habits. It does still seem to be true as according to the Economist earlier this month "After the US, it is the French who are McDonald's best customers in monetary terms," In terms of outlets there are 1198 in the UK, 1248 in France and 1427 in Germany but with a much larger population that's only one for every 57 000 Germans compared with about one for every 52 000 people in Britain and France. McDonalds reared its head because it is just about the the non specifically national or regional food there is. I've got a bit of a beef with them as several good and AFAIK profitable pubs round here have been turned into McDonalds over the years including one that used to offer live music. I assume that turning a pub into a fast food restaurant doesn't involve any change of use.

[melmerby]

McDs like a lot of global and national brands sells on name and "must have" image rather than content.

 

No it doesnt "fall short" we eat what we like !

 

We don't eat what we like, we eat what we are told.

They're the "street cred" places to go even if the food is IMHO abysmal.

 

It's amazing how many people you can see in supermarket car parks swapping shopping from Asda or Aldi bags to Sainbury's or Waitrose bags ready to unload at home!

 

 

Keith

[iL Dottore]

You. yourself, Il Dottore, dismissed sausage and mash in an earlier post, though later accepted a quality British sausage as a fine food.

I fear my post was not clear, I did not "dismiss" sausages in my first post, but considered them as "comfort food", and given that the sausage is so widespread a foodstuff with every country having their own version of the sausage (as another poster pointed out), the Banger is not really uniquely "British" in the way that - say - smoked salmon, kippers or scones are. For example the Germans and the Swiss have various "wurst" that are very close cousins to the breakfast sausage...

 

My original contention, which I repeat, is that with quality ingredients, skillful preparation, British food can be superb and certainly the equal of French cuisine, whether formal (e.g. Roast Venison), comfort food (haggis, tattles and neeps, soss and mash) or street food (Cornish pasties, sausage rolls).

 

Unfortunately, I have seen in the UK that too often the "quality ingredients" and/or "skillful preparation" part of the equation lacks...(especially the former...)

[melmerby]

 

 

Unfortunately, I have seen in the UK that too often the "quality ingredients" and/or "skillful preparation" part of the equation lacks...(especially the former...)

Hence the reason that Britain's 'favourite' sausages have more rusk & rubbish than meat, Britain's 'favourite' chocolate tastes more of sugar than cocoa and Britain's 'favourite' Ice cream contains no cream. These and many other examples show just how adulterated British food has become and also we have seen the lengths that the tabloids et al will go to protect these "classics" from foreign (e.g. EU) interference (e.g. sorely needed minimum standards!)

None of these products IMHO should be allowed on sale.

But when one sees the hordes in McD's, Greggs etc. one despairs.

 

Keith

[AndyB]

Tend to agree, Keith.

I was in a leisure centre the other day and happened to overhear the exchange between a pair of teenage girls, as follows.

Teenager 1. "Wooooow."

Teenager 2. "What?"

Teenager 1. "They've got a Wimpppppeeey"

Teenager 2. "What's a Wimpey?"

Teenager 1. "It's like an American diner where you can get a burger and fries."

 

This was in a leisure centre where one might have hoped for healthy messages.

 

Genuinely I've got nothing against a burger and fries once in a while.

But to see people in awe of the food at a Wimpey ? You'd have thought they'd parachuted in courtesy of Live Aid.

 

Sad.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Would you care to guess which country is McDonalds best market per person outside N. America. Hint, it's not the UK.

 

 

 

It is France which surprised me when I first found out as it seemed to run against what I thought were French culinary habits. It does still seem to be true as according to the Economist earlier this month "After the US, it is the French who are McDonald's best customers in monetary terms," In terms of outlets there are 1198 in the UK, 1248 in France and 1427 in Germany but with a much larger population that's only one for every 57 000 Germans compared with about one for every 52 000 people in Britain and France. McDonalds reared its head because it is just about the the non specifically national or regional food there is. I've got a bit of a beef with them as several good and AFAIK profitable pubs round here have been turned into McDonalds over the years including one that used to offer live music. I assume that turning a pub into a fast food restaurant doesn't involve any change of use.

 

In Narbonne, we lost a very good brasserie which had only been refurbished months before. McD stripped the building back to a bare shell.

 

With regard to planning use, I think it would depend whether their main activity was meals eaten in the restaurant (A3 use same as a pub) or takeaway (A4 use).

[Jol Wilkinson]

Would you care to guess which country is McDonalds best market per person outside N. America. Hint, it's not the UK.

 

 

 

It is France which surprised me when I first found out as it seemed to run against what I thought were French culinary habits. It does still seem to be true as according to the Economist earlier this month "After the US, it is the French who are McDonald's best customers in monetary terms," In terms of outlets there are 1198 in the UK, 1248 in France and 1427 in Germany but with a much larger population that's only one for every 57 000 Germans compared with about one for every 52 000 people in Britain and France. McDonalds reared its head because it is just about the the non specifically national or regional food there is. I've got a bit of a beef with them as several good and AFAIK profitable pubs round here have been turned into McDonalds over the years including one that used to offer live music. I assume that turning a pub into a fast food restaurant doesn't involve any change of use.

 

Clearly different statistics to those I found, which place France sixth for the number of Golden Arch eateries and seventeenth for their sales measured against GDP (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_mcd_res_pergdp-food-mcdonalds-restaurants-per-gdp)

 

Japan is cited as having the highest number of McDonald's after the States. However, I can't find how recent the data is.

 

Finding individual country sales for McD's is rather difficult, France is quoted at 3.9Bn Euros (2011?), but I could only find a figure for the UK of £2Bn in a McDonalds PR dated 2010.

 

Another example of "statistics, damned statistics".