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Change my mind: Traditional English food is good

  • July 1, 2024

I believe that traditional English food is pretty good, but the average English person eats rubbish and that's a shame, but the traditional food is good. It might not look super flashy but it's filling, warming and hearty for a cold English winter. It gets way too much hate. Change my mind.

by nath_rv

45 comments

  3. facts

    the lower class ruin it with their obsession with beans and turkey dinosaurs

  4. As a frenchman, in couple with an English women I had to spend some time in her Cornish family and… Damn some English food is really underrated.

    That mint sauce with lamb, those pasties and the FCKING true English Roasted potatoes!! A cloud of fluffyness with an insane crust. TBF I don’t cook patates sautées and switch to those now…

    Those holiday meals are really good. Although rest of the week was hell…

  6. Most of them stolen from french recipes (classic UK behavior) but we’ll allow it.

    You can even take more !

  8. It looks nice, but too fatty (and we deep fried too much, mind you). If you need too much salt, sugar, fat or cheese in order to make it tasty and good, is not a good recipe. It’s the problem I have with vegetables here, most people just add a ton of cheese, prawns or bechamel and you lose the flavor of the vegetables.

    I would love to go to western England, drive along those roads and eat some proper traditional British food. Some day I hope.

  11. It’s pretty much the same as most northwestern european food. Tasty, filling, relatively heavy to get through cold and wet climate (Stews, meat, braises etc.) and very brown in general. Good but nothing fancy / flashy.

  12. English food is better than French, might just be the fact I eat bread and cheese almost exclusively

  17. The meat/purée pie you have is extremely similar to something that we have here, actual banger

  19. Its “good”

    Any persons likes meats, eggs and sausages

    The meme implies that its horrible, but for someone who has to endure to live in england for most of my childhood i can guarantee that English food isnt special..but nonetheless appreciable and tasty, they have very good cheese, good meat and for some reason they can produces goated stuff like beef wellington

    Its just that england doesnt really have the diversity of weather like France, Italy or Spain but still produce good products.

  20. I don’t know a lot about food, but I think English food and beer is similar to German, maybe they should be part of Germany

  21. Beef and Guinness pie and pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw are 2 dishes I’ll never forget. Ate them in Canterbury, both very nice.

  22. Unironically yes, the problem is you’ll never find that shit in a restaurant so if you are not a local and when I say local I mean from that specific village doing that specific dish you’ll never get to experience the actual food.

    Been to Sweden recently, the same story applies there, lots of delicacies but most of them are found in rural godforsaken villages, even if you travel there restaurant will not serve them, they’ll have “”””””””Pizza”””””””” instead.

  23. After half my lift spent abroad, lads, you cannot comprehend how much I miss decent pies and pasties. Tbf I have spent that time in Holland and Ireland, two countries even worse than England for food.

  24. English or British? The latter adds many tasty extras, including crumpets (which are Cymric/Welsh)

  25. I fucking love anything with gravy and Poutine is one of my favourite foods. So I’d really like to try authentic Yorkshire Pudding once.

    I am planning on going to the UK this year. Is there a city in which I can get a really good one, my Britbong fellas?

  26. I’d eat that much rather than any premade meal you can get in supermarkets. I mean I also do eat similar stuff, traditional food from around here

  27. English food actually holds its own, I really enjoy it.

    I think there’s 3 factors that give it its abysmal reputation compared to those cuisines that are reputed as good.

    1. The average is bad.

    When you think of English food, there’s little to no dishes that everyone’s heard about that are tasty. You can find them, but they’re not widely known and probably not widely consumed. Think for instance of Italian pasta/pizza or French cheeses. There’s fish and chips, but one dish isn’t enough.

    Also, the average English person simply doesn’t care about eating good English food, whereas an Italian or a Frenchie will have a heart attack if it’s not Michelin-starred.

    2. The culinary crimes are notorious.

    When England disregards all that is sacred, the Devil himself weeps. We’ve all probably heard of that fish pie, or the bread in bread sandwich.
    Italy has the casu marzu, France has frogs, etc., but they’re just not that well-known nor widespread.

    3. The highs are modest.

    I can’t think of many (to be fair, none) English dishes where everything goes, where either the best ingredients or dozens of steps are needed, those jewels of cuisine. They might exist, but they’re too unknown outside of England.

    That being said, it’s actually good food.

  28. Sunday roast is the only English dish that is decent. What else do you have? Jelly cake?

  29. Like everything, there are ups and downs. Some stews I’ve seen online looks really tasty, to the point where whenever I visit GB again I would definetly try them, and the full british breakfast is really great (But the blood sausages. You can keep those at home). Is a food that would fall into the filling-heavy food but if you’re from a cold area or during winter looks absolutely great. That aspect is similar than the kind of food we have in the nothern areas of Spain.

    If you try that on the southern areas you would melt from the heat of the digestion.

  30. Dammn bro this is seriously some gourmet shit, also why does this look exactly like what’s sold in overpriced Francophone Montrealer shops?

  31. I would agree with this meme except that it has a picture of Steven Crowder in it

  33. Would you say then that the British food we know is mostly a bi-product of the industrial revolution ? Kinda like with German food as well right ?

  35. I personally don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying the Spanish alternative, but I generally like this kind of meat

  36. I heard that the main reason english food got that fame (at least acording to my half english dad) was due to the sortages after ww2 basically killed traditional recipies… so we can blame it all on Hans again

  38. if i had to eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would be a proper Cornish pasty

  42. It’s bland and typically made of 1/3 potatoes, 1/3 fatty meats and 1/3 gravy. It’s what I expect to serve a 7-year old so that it won’t offend their delicate and unimaginative tastebuds. It’s the type of food eaten by people who drink Carlsberg and only ever use the missionary position.

  44. >It gets way too much hate.

    I will agree with this.

    Sunday Roast is outstanding. Full English is good. Sandwiches are worldwide. Fish and chips are always great.

    But England has a larger number of recipes that just come across as weird. Toad in the hole? Stargazy Pie? Jellied Eels?

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