I’m never sure how genuinely British “Modern British” cuisine is(*), though I think it’s a lot more common nowadays than you give it credit for.
(*: I mean it’s British in the sense that it evolved in Britain and you won’t often find it elsewhere, but sometimes I feel it’s an evolution of french cuisine using British ingredients rather than anything else.)
All his snagging offor of British cuisine!
Have you forgotten about the cheeses, the pickles, various pickled foods (look up pickled walnuts), the ciders, the perries, the jams, cooked hams, curries (the word is English and the dishes were concocted to help with the Indian heat,) so many soups (muligatawny omg! ) the good mustards, chocolate (the solid stuff you eat was invented by a Brit,) pies, jellied eels, the beers, the ales, roast beef, roast everything(especially poultry), Yorkshire pudding, crackers, tea ( the way the English do is is rather remarkable) custard (creme anglaise,) and ice cream (basic icebreaker cream is frozen custard) crème brûlée (burnt cream, creme brûlée sounds much nicer. English invention, from Eton, though the French contest it. Mind you they claim the croissant and “French fry” arw French too!) Eton mess (also Eton, ) mince pies, black and white pudding, proper smoked salmon (Scottish and Scandinavian to be fair,) pickled herrings (Scottish, English, Dutch and Swedish versions exist. Ikea do some good stuff,) gin and tonic (gin itself is Dutch in origin but adding tonic was a British thing done in India, to make the quinine palatable), scones (and clotted cream oh my fucking god that stuff is awesome) and the sandwich (thankyou earl of Sandwich, you fat gambling Bastard!)bread and butter pudding and a hundred other hot desserts (noone else comes close, although a hot apple strudel, or a tarte aux pommes, when it’s cold outside is quite nice,) tonnes of good seafood (caveat, get thee to the sea to enjoy it. Go to Cornwall. Fresh fish simply made. Decent prices. Lobsters too!)
Pork scratchings (black Country specialty. Delicious when done well.)
Not just fish and chips.
I strongly advise thou all go digging through some old recipe books, there are some amazing English and other home nations cuisine.
However, recall that Britain was the first country to get industrialised, and in the process many things got commoditised. I’ll happily admit that the average person on the street knows bugger all about cooking, but there is a legacy and a heritage that is very rich and interesting.
This is a process that’s still going in, in many countries.
In Britain we fondly imagine Spain is pretty pure food wise.
Half the stuff in the supermarkets is bastardised bullshit.
Instant paella mixes amd stocks full of chemicals etc.
Should anyone care, I’m about to go into a supermarket. I can take photos!
Edit: Wall of text and typos.
Bite me, am on phone. Predictive text has thrown in some interesting stuff, like icebreaker cream…
I do wonder how much of the foreign distaste for British cuisine originates from the ex-pat comfort food places you see wherever the British concentrate abroad. It can actually quite hard to find places serving only(*) that kind of food on the streets of your typical British town.
(*: On reflection, lots of pubs, particularly chain pubs, will serve it, but they’ll also serve pizzas and curies as well.)
I wasn’t meaning to suggest it’s uncommon. Just that in the 100 best restaurants in London, maybe a couple of dozen at most will self-identify as British or Modern British. And that’s after quite a few high profile openings in recent years which have probably increased the ratio.
I don’t think it’s just that. For a long time the UK, and London in particular, had a pretty poor mainstream restaurant culture, in the sense that unless you really knew where to look it was hard to go out and spend a modest amount of money and get a really good meal in the way it’s trivial to do so in France or Italy. And it was especially true for British cuisine. It was either high end, high price restaurants or crappy pub food, more or less, no middle ground. That’s definitely changed in the last decade or two.
Why would you do such a thing???
I spent two nights in London in 1980. One night I had Indian food, the other night (6 weeks apart by the way) I had just got off an all day train ride from Paris, my hostel had a bar/restaurant just down from it. The place had what looked like an American style buffet in it, and they would not make me a sandwich. In fact, they were pretty rude about it. So dinner that night was a beer in the rain on their patio.
Why not?
Come back, I’ll make you a sandwich!
Apparently you could only get a dinner plate and at that point in time I just wanted a sandwich.
The beer was good.
I have had worse dinners.
Thannosdidnothingwrong on Reddit is Livestreaming a massive banhammer going down right now
https://m.twitch.tv/reddit
God I hate Reddit. The system is good at a very narrow range of things (essentially anything dominated by funny pictures, or conveying “what’s hot” on subjects that change rapidly) and absolutely hideous for every single other use case.
You forgot porn.
I mean, so I’ve heard.
↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑
As someone who has been on reddit for something like 6 years now, one of the uses that works is to only frequent subreddits that are your particular interests. For example, r/battletechgame, r/vive, r/photography and the like. The mods on these kind of subs are pretty good about keeping things clean. Of course, YMMV.
Yeah I use the X-wing miniatures reddit, and literally never go to any other.
There it is a useful place for information, tournaments, meta changes, FAQs, etc.
It’s also not garbage like so much of the rest of the site.
It’s funny that @wumpus says
While, if you are careful, you never need to worry.
I will posit that Wumpus went on to reddit once or twice and internalized his bad experiences as the whole thing sucks. As opposed to Discourse which is perfect.
I mean there are aspects of Reddit which help to cultivate the community they have.
Reddit is a sea of shit, with occasional islands of quality. And it has everything to do with how it is designed. Same for Twitter or Facebook, really.
Discourse is indeed perfect!
My Reddit observations are based on many years of participation in a few different subreddits. I wrote about it a while ago, in 2012 for example.
The TL;DR is that the reddit formula heavily weights time, so things fall off the front page suuuuuper rapidly. This naturally favors ephemeral “quick hits” like funny meme images, big current news events, and splashy one-offs. It also results in a metric ton of repetition, it’s easier and more karma-y to start a new topic than revive an old one, even if it’s an exact duplicate of the old one from less than a week ago!
I did an AMA on Reddit a while ago. I eventually destroyed that account because I just kinda fuuuuucking hate reddit. I want substantive discussions, or at least a realistic semblance thereof, and Reddit is so very profoundly bad at that. Reddit’s all about the adrenaline rush of what’s new and hot, to the exclusion of everything else. (It is very good for finding out what’s currently going on / big news in a particular game or whatever, though.)
It’s also kinda pathological that in Reddit you can instantly create an account, without even validating your email and begin downvoting everything in sight. I particularly objected to downvoting on small subreddits like the yoyo one where the participation and overall voting is so low; downvotes serve no purpose there other than to bring da pain. Subreddits can’t disable downvoting, either.
Reddit’s management summed up in one headline:
Yea, I sat with an Aussie and had a few. Turned out we were both in the same hostel.