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The whole "the English can't cook" thing is funny, but honestly, meat pies and Yorkshire puddings, among other things, are good as heck?
Like, sure, throwing butter and browned meat at the problem feels like cheating, but god. A proper beef roast is, wow.
It's funny, and it's ...frequently well-deserved. But also often not, and keeps delving back into mocking based around classism ("But This Time It's Okay Because It's The English™") and for as often as I have my head in my hands over people showing their whole ass on twitter by posting "Greatest meal in the world!!!" alongside a picture of a plate of slop and boiled-until-translucent unseasoned potatos, I'm kinda tired of it?
Like... there's a lot of good stuff! (Or at least half-decent stuff!)
This is a nation of huge wealth disparity, of massive inequality; people make do with what they have, and they can do wonders for getting calories into mouth quickly and inexpensively.
Like, c'mon, a wigan kebab? Fuckin grand idea. Take a pie. Put it in a bread roll (Probably one that was leavened with waste/ yeast-product left over from brewing!)
The ever-mocked smack barm pey wet! Fried potato slice/scallop, on a cheap bread roll, and drizzled with the juice from mushy peas. It's cheap, fast, and easy.
Beans on toast, if you can stomach it. (Not a fan of baked beans, personally. I'll eat 'em if that's what's there, but I avoid 'em if I can.) Cheap, fast, easy.
And, of course, there's always the go to's of cheap cuts of meat, and whatever vegetables could be got, in stews or pies or ... anything, really.
But there's also lots of ... well, I'm not quite sure how to classify it, other than people who never learned to cook beyond boiling things to death, and then forcing their kids to eat the flavourless result.
....boiled beef-mince, and unseasoned mashed potato. *shudder*
...there's lots of food like that, that people have a very strong emotional attachment to because it's what they ate as a child, and they would rather revel in "the good old days" (...of a freezing cold house, eating little else but beans on toast because it's all their parents could fucking afford) rather than taking a step back and going "yeah, it's not great, but it's forged in poverty and nostalgia"
And honestly, a lot of the mockery is at how things are named, but c'mon now, are y'all saying you don't have local & regional dialects that give things names that are utterly ridiculous to others who haven't grown up with them? Really now?
...
Anyway, throwing butter and onions at a problem is absolutely cheating, and it's the most universal way to cheat. 😋
Yeah, it's basically funny to about the same extent that dunking on Canadian whatever is — there's a lot of laughable stuff going on here, but without clarity as to what one's dunking on, those shots often end up landing where they shouldn't.
But definitely, like, there's a ton of English dishes where, if we're keeping things to "what could be improved solely by using local ingredients?", my thoughts are "literally just add pickled something and some herbs and it'd be incredible". And yeah, in the boiling example, the Maillard reaction would help a ton, lmao.
Aaaaaaand yeah. Seeing as England is where English comes from, it's no wonder you've got so many things that are close enough to being standard English words that they sound… funny, on the surface? Kinda the same way that Dutch text has that "wow this is almost English but what the heck is going on" kind of feel. (Though in parts of the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, regional dialects that are distinctly far from the standard are few and far between, so that might also be a factor.)
Basically, though, yeah, butter and onions! Though I'll often go with olive oil instead.
Yeah, we have a lot of regional dialect variation packed into a small space.
Well, used to, it's all being smoothed out by greater movement (plus people being forced further afield by work), the ever-present americanisation of the world, and whatnot.
ed: And I mean, really, what is "standard" English? 'cause it feels more and more like everything's getting covered in a thick smear of 'American English'...
Did not reputation mostly come about as a result of the English keeping around World War II era food rationing past World War II
