English Food Explained

Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons
One of England's best restaurants and hotels
Copyright Orient-Express Hotels Trains & Cruises.

After the World War II much of food served in restaurants was abysmal. Maybe this was caused by wartime and post-war food rationing and caterers got into bad habits.

Nowadays, some of the most famous chefs and restaurants can be found, not only in London, but the rest of the country too. Think of Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Rick Stein and his Cornish fish restaurants, Michel Roux and the Waterside Inn, Bray, Berkshire, to name just three.

There are many less expensive restaurants and take-aways where you can buy good food, well cooked, although there are some that are still terrible but that's the same pretty much anywhere in the world.

Cooking in the home seems to split into three categories. The first is that nobody in the home can or is willing to cook and they live entirely on take-aways, ready meals or snacks. In the second category, they cook as a hobby and can produce high standard cuisine at the drop of a tablespoon - this is the smallest group.

In between these two extremes are the people who can produce what is described here as 'good plain cooking'. This is food that we all remember from our childhoods and really like. This group is usually made up of older people who learned to cook as a matter of course so it gets smaller every year as people die.

I left school in the late 1960s and all girls (yes, it was that sexist) learned to cook at school and usually at home too. By the time we were 16 years old, we had usually mastered basic cooking skills. Children have not been taught to cook at school or at home for many years now and so there is a whole generation who can't cook although they can use a microwave.

The future for home-cooked food doesn't look bright.

These are just a few of the dishes that traditionally English people love to eat. Most of them fall in the category of 'good plain cooking'.

Shepherd's Pie

This is a really good meal and easy to prepare. It can be cooked in advanced and frozen until needed. There is minced (ground) beef on the bottom, cooked with onions and sometimes other vegetables. On top, there is mashed potato which is browned in the oven or under the grill. See a recipe for Shepherds Pie.

Toad in the Hole

This is another popular dish, usually served with onion gravy and vegetables. It uses traditional English pork sausages and Yorkshire pudding, ie a batter. See a recipe for Toad in the Hole.

Steak and Kidney Pie
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Steak and Kidney Pudding
Copyright Hardillb used under Creative Commons Licence.

Both Steak and Kidney Pie and Steak and Kidney Pudding are great favourites in England. The pie is made with either shortcrust or flaky pastry and the pudding with steamed suet pastry. See a recipe for Steak and Kidney Pudding.

Many English people call desserts, puddings or even 'afters', ie after the main course!

Steamed Treacle Pudding
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This is a steamed pudding - usually an ordinary sponge mixture but with golden syrup put in the bottom of a pudding basin, then the sponge mixture put on top. It is then steamed to cook it.

Rice Pudding
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Rice pudding is sprinkled with cinnamon or grated nutmeg, usually with a little butter, then baked in the oven so that a spicy skin forms on top. Most people love this skin.

A Sunday Roast - beef, potatoes and Yorkshire pudding

The 'Sunday Roast' has been a longstanding tradition in English homes which is now dying out.

Sunday lunch was the best meal of the week and would have the most expensive meat affordable, usually a 'joint' roasted in the oven. The quintessential Sunday roast was beef served with separate Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, two different kinds of vegetables, like cabbage and carrots for example, and gravy. It would be followed by a pudding (dessert), perhaps treacle pudding, jam roly poly, apple pie or fruit crumble. All these would be served with custard. If you didn't like custard (like me), then you had it with 'top of the milk' or dry.

Carving roast meat in an English Carvery
Copyright Craig Stephen used under Creative Commons Licence.

In postwar years, when food was still rationed, a Sunday roast would be expected to last for several meals. It was served hot and delicious on Sunday, as cold meat with potatoes and vegetable on Monday, as minced meat on Tuesday and as something like rissoles or shepherd's pie on Wednesday. If the cook was really careful and bulked out the meat with plenty of carrots and swede, the shepherd's pie might do two days so you'd eat it Thursday as well. No wonder we loved our Sunday roast when it was fresh and we weren't fed up with it!

Although beef was thought to be the best Sunday roast, it could also be pork, chicken or lamb. Whatever it was, it was supposed to last for several days. The different meats, except for chicken, had their own special sauces: beef was served with horseradish and/or mustard, pork with apple sauce, lamb with mint sauce.

Nowadays, a real Sunday roast dinner or lunch is a treat because so few people cook this kind of meal regularly. Some pubs offer a 'Carvery' Sunday lunch. This means roast meat which is carved for each customer. It's a 'serve yourself' buffet, you take your plate round and help yourself to vegetables, roast potatoes, gravy and sauces. You choose what kind of roast meat you want and a server carves it for you and puts it on your plate.

These Carvery meals are hugely popular and in the best pubs, you have to make a reservation or arrive early to make sure you get served.

It is said that Chicken Tikka Marsala, a kind of curry, is now England's favourite dish. That really isn't a big surprise. We are a nation that loves to try new types of food although it hasn't always been this way. Before the 1970s, it was rare for English people to eat foreign food. "Give me good, wholesome English food" is what they used to say.

Now there are foreign restaurants and takeaways on every high street in the country. Even very small towns and some villages have them.

Almost every town has its Chinese and Indian or Pakistani restaurants or takeaways at least. Many also have Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Caribbean, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, many other nationalities as well as chains like McDonalds, KFC and Burger King and, of course, fish and chips.

I used to live in a very small town in the English county of Wiltshire which had no more than 40 stores in its high street. At least half of those were restaurants and takeaways. We were absolutely spoilt for choice and it could take longer to decide what nationality of food to eat than to order it and then eat it. Unfortunately, this meant if we wanted to go shopping for more than the most basic products, we had to drive to the nearest large town.

Chinese Aromatic Duck
Copyright Umami used under Creative Commons Licence.

On a Friday or Saturday, you see groups of men going out for a 'drink and a curry'. It's become quite traditional now. Even elderly people who once talked about 'that foreign muck' now think nothing of eating curries or Chinese food and they are so familiar with it they know what's on the menus.

As English people have got more experience with foreign food, they have become more discriminating which has led to restaurants and takeaways having to improve their standards. We all know the difference between a great Chinese aromatic duck and a poor or mediocre one.

To prove how popular foreign food has now become, in the past year there have been series on BBC TV with cooks demonstrating how to cook authentic Indian and Chinese food. There have been others showing how to cook food from other countries too.

It's great that the majority of English people have expanded their culinary horizons even if most still can't cook!