[Sca-cooks] pub food, was Re: Ramsey RE: risotto...

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Tue Aug 9 22:29:33 PDT 2011


From what I've seen, read, heard and eaten, the meme of bad English cookery starts with Victorian and Edwardian practices of everyone who can afford to, sending their kids away to school or having them eat with servants. What this amounts to is entire generations of people who travel and write having their childhood comfort foods being, essentially, school food service fare, with people lying awake at night dreaming fondly of shrimp wiggle in a gluey sauce. Now, take that mentality and add decades of assorted enforced rationing and other forms of austerity, and entire generations who have forgotten what their native cuisine tasted like when it was prepared by people who could actually cook. When British food is bad, that's a big part of the reason.

I always get rave reviews when I just pick up my copy of Mrs. Beeton, take good ingredients and follow the instructions. "Hey! This can't be steak and kidney pie! This is good! Is there more."

Adamantius

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 9, 2011, at 3:22 PM, "Pixel, Goddess and Queen" <pixel at hundred-acre-wood.com> wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 9 Aug 2011, James Prescott wrote:
> 
>> At 12:43 PM -0500 8/9/11, Michael Gunter wrote:
>> 
>>> I do find it amusing at the sudden surge of British cooking since it has always been
>>> considered the worst food around.
>> 
>> 
>> Many years ago, driving around the Lake District, we noticed a sign on
>> a rural pub: "Lamb Steaks".  Had to stop.
>> 
>> Absolutely wonderful.  Not foodie stuff, just simple excellent cooking.
>> 
>> So I've for many years known that sometimes in the most obscure places
>> in the UK you can sometimes get good food.  Their Indian and vegetarian
>> restaurants were very often excellent, but that doesn't quite count as
>> offsetting the usual semi-vile stuff.
>> 
>> 
>> Thorvald
> 
> Every time we have been to England we've always eaten in pubs. I have never had a bad meal at a pub. I think the cuisine that is meant when British cooking is reviled is Victorian boil-everything-to-bland-mush rather than pub fare.
> 
> Margaret fitz William
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