The Off Topic Topic

[HVC]

Americans make fun of British food?
I mean sure. The Italians I get. Their food is awesome. And the French. They hate everything.
But Americans?

pizza, steak, and hamburgers beat offal and boiled chicken, sorry

[celedhring]

Contempt for Brits cooking keeps people together 

(And I'll have you know I make an outstanding paella and a very good arroz negro too )

This reminds me of one of my favourite Twitter accounts: Italians Mad at Food:
https://twitter.com/ItalianComments

Oh, my paella is awful 

One of my life projects is to get better at it so I don't rely solely on my mother's (which is excellent), but I get trapped in the vicious circle of "paella is not something you cook for just yourself" and "my paella is not good enough for guests". Not that I have had dinner guests in nearly a year anyway 

[Sheilbh]

pizza, steak, and hamburgers beat offal and boiled chicken, sorry

Italian fury incoming

I love offal but it's something I associate with European/non-British food. British people are generally far too squeamish about this stuff, especially the English - it's fairly regional. I'm very weird for liking it so much

[Sheilbh]

One of my life projects is to get better at it so I don't rely solely on my mother's (which is excellent), but I get trapped in the vicious circle of "paella is not something you cook for just yourself" and "my paella is not good enough for guests". Not that I have had dinner guests in nearly a year anyway 

Yeah - it's been a long time since I've had a reason to cook one - or anything substantial for guests

[HVC]

pizza, steak, and hamburgers beat offal and boiled chicken, sorry

Italian fury incoming

I love offal but it's something I associate with European/non-British food. British people are generally far too squeamish about this stuff, especially the English - it's fairly regional. I'm very weird for liking it so much

American pizza is a whole separate thing from Italian. I like it more as well

I actually like offal, but only the Mediterranean way, with plenty of garlic and onions to hide the flavour hah. My main gripe with English food is its bland. You guys went around the world looking for spices and then just decided   Not to bring them home   with the exception of curry which only happened in the last what, 50 years?   Even with sausages you guys use rusk so it's like 50% bread filler so doesn't taste sausagy enough.

[Josquius]

Yeah, offal isn't so common in the UK. Haggis is about the only common "weird" thing.
If one typical British food must be picked its probably pie.

British sausages are also without a doubt the best in the world. German style can be OK but have too much of a plasticy skin.
Cumberlands are rather spicy.

[Sheilbh]

American pizza is a whole separate thing from Italian. I like it more as well

Good lord!

I actually like offal, but only the Mediterranean way, with plenty of garlic and onions to hide the flavour hah. My main gripe with English food is its bland. You guys went around the world looking for spices and then just decided   Not to bring them home   with the exception of curry which only happened in the last what, 50 years?   Even with sausages you guys use rusk so it's like 50% bread filler so doesn't taste sausagy enough.

So this is nonsense

There was an Italian woman I worked with and she always said that spice was the big thing in English food - that was the thing she noticed because it's just used far, far less in Italian or French food where she previously lived. I pointed out that Spain exists, but she was quite dismissive of that fact

With curry - the first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809. Kedgeree the great Scottish breakfast (basically curried rice with smoked fish and a poached or soft-boiled egg) or mulligatawny are both early 19th century creations and basically both a type of curries. The curry house explosion was in the last 70 years (largely driven by post-war migration) but curry has been in British food more or less since Clive arrived in India. I have a copy of Mrs Beeton from my grandmother - published in 1910s - and it has multiple curry recipes.

And sausages are an interesting example. There are traditional ones with a very high meat content and certain fixed ingredients - a bit like the Toulouse sausage in France - the Lincoln sausage (with sage) springs to mind. But the Cumberland sausage is the most famous sausage - now it typically has 85-98% meat and is spiced but the spices vary. But in the 19th century when it was being mass-produced for workers it did have up to 50% rusk content (though as that hot take points out this reflects the calorific needs of early industrialisation).

Cumberland sausages are now protected, because Europe () so the spices it includes are - white pepper, black pepper, sage, thyme, nutmeg, mace and cayenne pepper - but traditionally it included more spices. There's records of various spicy Cumberland sausages since the 18th century as butchers just experimented with all the new ingredients they were getting - so you have recipes with ginger, or rum, or mollasses, or various other spices. Food in Cumbria and the North-West in general normally includes a lot of sugar and/or spices because they're close to ports and had relatively early access to all these goods.

But even brown sauce (which I love - it's like a type of ketchup) - is very much a product of empire and 19the century trade. A recipe to make it at home includes tomatoes, apples, dates, tamarind, star anise, cloves, chilli, allspice, molasses or treacle etc. It's so spiced and imperial the Guardian once called it the "UKIP of condiments" - which I sort of took personally

[alfred russel]

Americans make fun of British food?
I mean sure. The Italians I get. Their food is awesome. And the French. They hate everything.
But Americans?

American food is awesome, but most of our great food is thought of as regional. For example, no one has ever said cajun food sucks. But it is associated with Louisiana rather than the larger country.

[Sheilbh]

American food is awesome, but most of our great food is thought of as regional. For example, no one has ever said cajun food sucks. But it is associated with Louisiana rather than the larger country.

I get that - although I've always wondered if actually Southern food is great. All the sort of amazing food traditions in the US that I want to explore seem to be in the South - cajun and creole food, Tex-Mex, BBQ etc.

I don't know if that's just my preferences or, say the Mid-West doesn't get a fair shout.

[DGuller]

We have Philly cheesesteaks in my part of US, have you forgotten about that? 

[Sheilbh]

We have Philly cheesesteaks in my part of US, have you forgotten about that? 

Fair. There's great foods I want to try for sure all over the use.

But and this may just be my ignorance that they often seem like great individual dishes while it feels like the south has whole traditions/cuisines like cajun food etc.

[alfred russel]

I get that - although I've always wondered if actually Southern food is great. All the sort of amazing food traditions in the US that I want to explore seem to be in the South - cajun and creole food, Tex-Mex, BBQ etc.

I don't know if that's just my preferences or, say the Mid-West doesn't get a fair shout.

I think that is correct...though maybe I mostly only see the foods where I've lived.

New England has some distinctive dishes...I'm not really sure what the mid west has going for it...

A lot of the country was fairly empty until 100 years ago (and isn't that full now). That kind of seems to be the time limit for developing new "cuisines" distinctive to an area. I really think the whole concept of associating certain foods with nations is an interesting case of freezing a historic snapshot. Around here, when people think of Italian food, the first image is probably spaghetti with a red sauce, or less likely pizza. But tomatoes are obviously a new world plant--those foods do not have a deep history in Italy. And then today, plenty of Italians are eating a diet a lot like I do--in any given month there are probably a few burgers, some sushi, a bowl or two of pho, a curry here and there, probably a bit of pasta too.

[Sheilbh]

A lot of the country was fairly empty until 100 years ago (and isn't that full now). That kind of seems to be the time limit for developing new "cuisines" distinctive to an area. I really think the whole concept of associating certain foods with nations is an interesting case of freezing a historic snapshot. Around here, when people think of Italian food, the first image is probably spaghetti with a red sauce, or less likely pizza. But tomatoes are obviously a new world plant--those foods do not have a deep history in Italy. And then today, plenty of Italians are eating a diet a lot like I do--in any given month there are probably a few burgers, some sushi, a bowl or two of pho, a curry here and there, probably a bit of pasta too.

Absolutely - tomatoes a great example but I always think about chilli as well -  it's impossible to imagine it not being a part in cuisine across Eurasia. There was a time when, say, Thai or Indian food had no chillis.

And I think that process of freezing a cuisine is really interesting. I think China traditionally has eight great traditions (Fujian, Sichuan, Cantonese etc), but in the West I think it's really started by the French who self-consciously create a canon of great dishes and to an extent measured against them. Food moves from being an "ethnic" cuisine among many ethnic cuisines to being "elevated into fine dining" and comparable with the French. I read a really interesting article on how this happened to Japanese food in the 70s and 80s - in the 60s it was just dismissed as "roots, twigs and raw fish". Now it's a given that Japan has the most Michelin stars and that Japanese food is very easily haute cuisine. Other cuisines despite their potential for "elevation" stay perceived as generally "ethnic" cuisine rather than fine dining - it's the exception not the rule for Chinese food or Indian food (maybe because we are only just exploring regionalism in the last 20 years in the West? Or because it's too widely available/common?).

[alfred russel]

My best friend is Taiwanese and whenever I want to get him riled up I just say something about "chinese food". He is simultaneously confused why Chinese food in America is reduced to a few shit dishes and why there is a concept of "chinese food" when there is so much variation in China (we don't usually talk about "european food").

One theory is that there is an immigration model from China that helps families get set up in the US by moving to places without a chinese restaurant and setting one up there. So we end up in a town in rural alabama and will often find a chinese restaurant run by an immigrant family. From what he tells me, some family in China gets the ability to move to the US but doesn't really have contacts here, and immigration groups will identify that bumblefuck, alabama doesn't have a chinese restaurant and help them with what they need to do to get it going. Of course the family isn't a group of gourmands, and the customer base in bumblefuck, alabama probably doesn't want sophisticated food anyway. So you get a zillion restaurants with cheap and crappy chinese food and that is how americans encounter the cuisine.

I assume that would be vaguely applicable to europe as well.

[celedhring]

In Spain a disproportionate number of Chinese immigrants hail from the province of Zhejiang, which has influenced what Spaniards think (and expect) as "Chinese food" massively. The dishes I could find in your throwaway cheap Chinese restaurant in both New York and Barcelona were nearly nothing alike, which was rather funny (I wish somebody imported General Tso's Chicken, which IIRC isn't even Chinese to begin with).

We of course have loads of other Chinese restaurants with different regional cuisines, but those are more upscale - I personally love Taiwanese and Shanghai ones.