As most people know, British food has improved a million times since the days of Fanny Craddock on black & white TV. British people know about food now, watch endless foodie shows, they can cook, and the UK supermarkets have great ingredients. The influx of people from what was the empire helped open everybody's horizons.
You get the weird situation where the Indian food in Britain is the best in the world, for example.
> the Indian food in Britain is the best in the world
Got about a billion people here who'd like to disagree. In fact, of all the crimes against humanity the British visited on India, I think that assertion might just be the worst.
You’re being heavily downvoted but I can’t imagine by who or why. Certainly not by people who’ve eaten Indian food in both India and the UK.
While there are a few good restaurants, most Indian restaurants in the UK are bland beyond reason, catering to the common palate. There’s nothing wrong with liking bland food or restaurants catering to that preference, but let’s not make this extraordinary claim that it’s better than the food in India. For most part the food is plain and plays it safe. For example, it’s rare to find Indo-Chinese, a cuisine nothing like Chinese or Indian but a staple of cuisine in India.
This isn't an argument over say Italian vs French cuisine. That's undecideable.
This is an extraordinary claim that by taking Indian food to the UK, stripping it of it's spice to suit the locals somehow made it better. It'd be like claiming Italian cuisine became better without the tomatoes or Mexican cuisine better without the beans.
TBH I am sick to death of this website and am therefore clearing this comment. Apologies to the commentor responding below - I posted a response to your comment in a previous edit of this comment. Somebody please invite me to the land of crustaceans.
The comment doesn't appear downvoted now, but it was possibly because "No it's not!" isn't much of an argument.
Maybe you find British Indian food too bland, too dry, too sweet, to have a lack of variety or to use low quality ingredients. Whatever it is, it could more usefully continue the discussion.
However, I think even people who've tried food in both countries (I haven't) will often find themselves arguing, based on their experience. The majority of "Indian" restaurants in Britain are cheap -- a step above a takeaway. Like similar restaurants in Britain, they have a menu based on combining pre-prepared ingredients/sauces to lower costs. There are also middle and some high-end Indian restaurants. I can easily imagine people experiencing "takeaway+" and assuming this standard of food is universal in Britain, or (especially on HN) someone on a business trip to London being taken to a high-end restaurant and generalizing from there.
Indeed. The combination of the class system and the war rationing absolutely wrecked British cooking in the 20th century, but from about the 1980s the middle class became interested in improving this, largely by importing cuisine.
Nowadays the top end is a bit self-parodic with too much emphasis on weird visual presentation, culminating in Heston Blumenthal, but the middle rank of available restaurants are great.
> The combination of the class system and the war rationing absolutely wrecked British cooking in the 20th century
I don’t think this explains it. Being the first place in the world to get processed food has more to do with it. Britain’s been importing a lot of calories for a long time and canning and other flavor destroying methods of preservation really didn’t help. Rationing is unlikely to be relevant. British food was widely considered dreadful long before WWII. See any description of boarding school food or just consider the paucity of decent cheese in the UK in the 50s. The US didn’t have post war rationing and food in DC was terrible well into the 70s going by restaurants. Anglos have never beg known for great food culture like the Italians, French or Spanish.
The impact of the Great Depression on food in the US cannot be overstated. The Depression followed by the war was a relatively long period of time and for an entire generation the food of this time became what they were used to. Additionally prior to WW2 the middle class was fairly limited and most people in the US didn’t have lots of money. Industrialized food was simply less expensive and kept for long periods of time.
I had plenty of great food in the 70’s and 80’s just not usually in restaurants.
I’d imagine in the U.K., they probably didn’t have enough farmland to feed everybody given a rapidly growing population during the industrialization period. If you have to import food, it had to be preserved and again you acquire a taste for poor quality food because that’s what’s available.
Italy, France, and Spain did not industrialize anywhere near the scale that existed in Britain or the US.
> Italy, France, and Spain did not industrialize anywhere near the scale that existed in Britain or the US.
???
Northern Italy has been among the richest, most developed parts the world non-stop since the renaissance. They didn’t achieve that without industrializing. France was so rich that it conquered half of Europe after 1800 and then it got richer with the Industrial Revolution. Paris was one of the biggest cities in the world for over 200 years by any standard. No history of the West, or the world would make any sense without France since the Revolution. You do not manage to acquire imperial possessions on every continent without industrializing early and fast. Spain, sure. It, Portugal and Southern Italy did not do as well as most of the rest of Western Europe.
When you read about the British with their rationing bringing about a near-starvation diet during WW2, and then reading what delicacies and their amounts that Churchill was eating and drinking at the same time, it's a wonder that he wasn't lynched from the nearest lamp-post when the British public found out.
