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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24815 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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People love to rag on English food, but I don't really think that's fair. Any culture that comes up with a dish as great as fish and chips deserves respect.

...it's literally just breaded fish with French fries. How can one claim credit for coming up with that?

... Because they did come up with it? I'm not seeing the problem.

White fish + white flour + white potatoes, all cooked in neutral flavour vegetable oil. If anything warrants the reputation for bland beige British food it's fish and chips. It's not even cheap, it's practically the same price as a takeaway chicken curry with rice.

Who cares? It's absolutely delicious, one of the all-time great dishes. I don't give a damn about the color.

Also pies (pork / game / steak & ale etc.), bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, toad in the hole, Shepherd's / Cottage Pie (not a pie despite the name), Lancashire hot-pot, sticky toffee pudding, plum/Christmas pudding, Victoria sponge cake, Eton Mess, chutneys, marmalades, roast pheasant, the Full English, the Sunday Roast...

English food had a dip because of the wars and the temporary loss of food culture, but more than that it's suffered terribly from central heating & reduced global exercise resulting in a drive for low-calorie food.

There is also an earlier dip because we urbanised before the development of refrigeration, meaning that there were a lot of people with very limited access to fresh food. The other country of which this is true is Belgium, which is not coincidentally the other country whose cuisine is a joke and whose signature dish is cheap seafood and chips.

Fair, it's not just fish and chips. That is the one that comes to mind most readily for me (probably because I'm from the Midwest and we love fried fish there), but the Brits have given us other good food as well.

Not complaining, just appending! I want British food to be more generally known, I think there's a lot to offer. We just need to find a format that works.

A friend noted that English food would have been eaten much more communally in the old days, buffet / feast style - it was much easier to do portion control when you had a table full of pies and hams and cakes and things and you just took a little of each and the rest went back for the next day.

There are actually plenty of widely beloved British dishes, they’re just so widely adopted that they’re not considered uniquely English by most people(world spanning empire will do that to you) so distinctively British dishes are things like beans on toast, mushy peas, and warm beer.

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