I dated a British girl in high school. She microwave broccoli in water. No salt or seasoning. No butter. No nothing.
She took it out, drained the water and told me her dish was done.
That was the last time she made anything for us.
Sounds like me, except I would drink the broccoli water.
Once you reset your palette, cutting out excess salt and sugar and cheap fats, and processed foods, you learn to enjoy the taste of whole foods all on their own. Salted ourselves to taste, which is far less than processed food will add.
I feel like I’m missing something, was her task not to cook the broccoli? What is meant by “dish”? It is just broccoli? Am I Bri’ish?
I wouldn’t even mind such a dinner. A clear red flag is people who boil meat or don’t use any oil anywhere.
There’s somewhere between 10 and 20 spices in the food pictured, why do you think its orange?
Bean juice?
I mean the beans mostly get their color from the molasses and sugar but lots call for Worcestershire sauce which is going to have a bunch of stuff.
Use sparingly:
Salt
Pepper
BBQ rub seasoning from ???
Onion powder
Garlic salt
Misc. dried Italian herbs you’ve owned for years
Anything else left in your pantry
sparingly
onion
garlic
Garlic and onion seasonings are measured with the heart, not the brain.
Camping advice from a feral Redneck, throw garlic and onion powder in your pack. It’ll come in good if you need a bit of oomph for your food, or you pull a me and over season the unholy amalgam of top ramen noodles and flavoring, chili, mac and cheese, and a hot dog tasted meh but the calories meant I didn’t need to eat for 30 hours so it was fine.
“spices”, in this context, is Obese American for " salt, butter, and bacon grease"
Ha ha, that is the holy trinity.
But spices are used to disguise low quality ingredients just like the aforementioned salt, fat, and sugar. Namely garlic and onion powders, which are added for that purpose to all manner of processed foods that they aren’t elsewhere. IE italians are aghast at pizza sauce having garlic in it.
I know that it’s mostly a joke, yet it is worth mentioning that those valuable spices were exclusively used by the rich and wealthy. Ordinary people and their food did not benefit from the spice trade at all. If you delve a little bit into culinary history and find out what the aristocrats did with (for example) extremely rare and precious nutmeg the British Empire fought wars over, you want to dig up their bones, revive them, just so that you can kill them again.
The limies weren’t even that big into the spice trade, it was the dutch. You mention nutmeg, nutmeg and cloves came from a certain string of small indonesian islands only. There were some english traders there, when the dutch were trying to monopolize the trade.
The dutch sent a delegation, that angered the natives that killed them. The dutch came back and exterminated the natives. Killed every single one of them, and the english and other traders there.
Edit: Adaman islands if memory serves, fuzzy on the years no time to look up.
Jesus fucking christ, there’s never a shortage of harrowing greed
I mean, that’s true, but hasn’t been the case for at least a century, so why do they still eat like the aristocrats are hoarding all the spices?
WW2 rationing really messed up their culinary scene
Sure, but that ended in the 50s. They can no longer reasonably use that excuse.
The real problem in my view is that people don’t recognise post-imperial fusion cusines as ‘legit’ British food even though the curry house is the definition of an Anglo-Indian institution. When people in Britain claim the tikka masala it’s not being twee or politically correct, rather it’s earnestly considering an immigration-originated fusion cusine as part of the wider national one.
Also even pre-20th century British food isn’t exactly bad, I’d argue it doesn’t travel amazingly in many cases but a Sunday roast in our climate is sheer perfection. Too many people expect France or Italy from a country with nothing like their climate.
It’s a bit like more traditional Anglo and Celtic American foods in that respect, lots of simple shit that tastes good by itself but is generally considered basic or has had certain context stripped with time. A good example is meatloaf which in some reasons was basically whatever meat and possibly eggs you had lying around after a bit thrown together in an loaf. But then you get shit like cheese curds and it’s just deep fried cheese and it’s great.
Also you can end up with something like my ancestoral food traditions where it’s just soup, cooked meats, and weird increasingly modified trail foods. The trail foods also happen to still be cheap even with modifications, though I guess rice and chili ain’t exactly that complex.
They tried to fix it later though
I always wonder whether it’s a lingering effect of rationing,which didn’t end until the '50s.
“Culture”
You’re somewhat correct but also not.
The spice scarcity and making do without is a result of two world wars ravaging a somewhat isolated island nation. See e.g. the Irish potato famine. Some were misfortunate enough to have no food at all - and many had to live with bland, rationed food items.
Those decades were formative and a lot of that stuck around.
And to be perfectly honest… I kinda like it. I like spiced (spicy in the flavourful, not the hot sense) food too, but there’s some beauty in putting together a dish of meat and potatoes where you let the flavour of the meat and potatoes come through. In some sense it’s actually similar to Japanese cuisine, specifically sushi, where the focus is on the fish itself, with minor added flavours (salt from soy sauce, heat from wasabi).
wow i dont have time to research what they did. tell me what did they do?
They ate it, mostly as a status symbol. They’d carry it around with a small silver grinder to add it to their food. I’m not sure what was so bad about that, other than adding something worth a laborer’s salary for a year on your food. Also, it contains myristicin which if one consumes enough in one sitting can sort of give a high - a really bad one with hallucinations that go in for 48h - don’t try it, it can make you very sick.
visited a greggs for the first time this summer, i was genuinely shocked at what they served. it’s like they went out of their way to not put any flavor in. and it was packed.
Yeah because a Stilton and cheese bake is totally favoueless, right?
Not enough salt and corn syrup for the discerning American tongue
We are forced into it, there are few to no not super sugary and salty and fatty processed foods here.
The only way to get away from it is to eat whole foods, which is also the cheapest and otherwise healthiest way to eat, if you don’t consider all the chemicals they douche our food in, or the poison shit they fertilize fields with here, (shitty story, municipal sewers will accept industrial waste of all sorts, then sell the result to farmers to use, now laced with all sorts of nasty stuff. Often applying it wrongly because there is no regulation anymore, leading to run off on top of it. A problem mostly solved from the 70’s on, that came back this last decade.)
It certainly won’t earn you any favours with me!
I’m sorry to hear that you’re stuck in a permanently basic bitch state. Stilton and steak is delicious.
You said “favoueless” instead of “flavourless.” They were making a joke about your typo.
It’s even better with good cheese!
apparently.
I read before ww2 rations got Brits used to bland flavourless food and they gave the same to their children so now it’s just what they do there
but there are also flavourful things there! i visited edinburgh and their black pudding and haggis were very pleasantly spiced. i just don’t get why they would charge almost €4 for a completely un-toasted bread roll and a tiny sausage.
Is black pudding blood pudding? Sheep blood?
You liked the haggis? It sounds revolting. Maybe not as bad as ludafisk, where they preserve fish in lye in scandanavia.
dunno if it’s sheep or pig, but i know it’s seasoned differently to what we have at home. haggis is just pölsa sausage so that’s just completely normal food. nothing wrong with a bit of lutfisk for christmas either.
I was under the impression haggis was sheep organs mixed with onion and oatmeal and lard cooked in a sheep stomach over a fire (traditionally on the cooking.) The last part doesn’t sound gross. It’s the oatmeal as the carb that seems off to me. I’ve tried and failed to use oats in that kind of savory way and it never works for me, and haven’t seen any other recipes using it as such.
sounds like a skill issue ngl
You can’t improve on perfection
“perfection”
“British food”
Pick one
it was just a joke man ._.
Sure. But what does this have to do with British food?
If that were perfection, the rest of the world would be eating it.
We only got them to stop the Dutch getting them.
The tragedy is that many of the spices most jealously traded for became so integral to British and international cuisine that memesters don’t even realise that they were ever unusual or expensive. I guarantee you that those baked beans have a bunch of black pepper in them and guess what… pepper don’t grow in Britain! It’s in more or less every single kitchen thanks to a global spice trade that is now forgotten. Ginger is a main flavour in many British recipes and also doesn’t grow in Britain.
But Britain was in fact not that big a player in the spice trade, being beaten by the Dutch, who got there first and had better financial backing. The British East India Company tried to make its way by raiding ships of the Dutch East India Company but after a bunch of wars eventually had to settle for less exciting endeavours - trade in cotton being a staple.
The Dutch are themselves not renowned for their food either, though it is my firm belief that every country has great food if you’re willing to look past your prejudices, and stamppot is great.
I just wish long pepper was more widely known, I can get it easily from Indian shops in the UK but it’s not so widely known or available. It’s among my favourite spices, think black pepper but way more aromatic and ‘flowery’. It was known to the Romans but fell out of favour many centuries ago in Europe.
I bought some to make some old recipes (from Tasting History, which I imagine is a not-insignificant driver of online types having long pepper…?) but had to go online. The local place I go to for spices also didn’t have lovage or savoury - tsk!
Haha guilty as charged, him and Historical Italian Cooking both introduced me to it.
One thing that’s somewhat more annoying to get hold of is Colatura di Alici, the garum-like anchovy sauce. You more of less must order it from Italy and ship internationally. Absolutely top-tier stuff though, I use it in modern dishes too. I can see why it was so popular.
Yeah I once looked into getting that but gave up. I just use fish sauce you buy in an asian supermarket. He recommended this as a substitution at some point but I don’t remember if they’re supposed to taste that different.
Grains of Paradise are my archaic pepper of choice. They have a bit of tartness to them.
There’s some fantastic dutch food!
👀
Curry beans would like a word
