In Defense of British Food
Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 06.24.09 | 12:47 PM ET
Photo by Over at The Titanic Awards, Britain has easily carried the win in a poll on the world’s worst national cuisines, with 25 percent of the vote. I’m not surprised—“British food is bad” is a truism that even many Brits buy into—but I do want to take a moment for some spirited dissent.
The truth is, the meals I had in Britain remain some of the things I miss most about my time living there. I loved sitting down in the pub for a ploughman’s lunch, gorging myself on mulled wine, mince pies and Jaffa Cakes at Christmastime, grabbing a cheese and onion pasty at Gregg’s on an early morning or seeking out a full English fry up on a late, lazy one.
Pimms and lemonade with fresh fruit on a summer afternoon? Perfection. Beans on toast in front of the TV on a winter night? Maybe even better. And that’s not even getting into the country’s adopted (and adapted) imports—chicken tikka masala, for instance, or the much-loved spag bol.
Seriously, people, put your preconceptions aside. Sit down at the British dinner table. And then, just maybe, go back and tell those poll respondents how wrong they are?