English meals

The famous British writer George Bernard Show once wrote “If the English can survive their food, they can survive anything!” With these humorous words he expressed the British attitude towards their native culture cuisine. “If you discover such things as British cuisine let me know about it” - says one British cook while another praises English meals as the tastiest and the most original in the world. This can only mean that English people have two ways of approaching their own food – they are quite polar. When one will be proving that it’s very delicious another will object to him saying that it’s tasteless and it has no English ingredients in it at all.

Now, if you ask me I can’t really distinguish who is wrong and who is right I even have a reason for that. I have never tasted pure English food. Many times it has been said that we can easily find everywhere very popular French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese restaurants everywhere, where they serve dishes associated with a certain country these restaurant represent (or try to). But it seems like a difficult task to find anywhere around an English restaurant. OK. Supposing we have found one what would it treat us with? Fish, chips, boiled vegetables, butter pudding, some tea, followed by a glass of whisky or a pint of ale? Maybe, because these are the first things which come to my mind when we speak about English food? Is that all? I’m not sure. “On the continent people have good food, in England people have good table manners.” – said another british writer George Mikes. I think that one of the facts that lies behind that joke is that the British import too much food from abroad. That means that the nearest countries and English colonies had a major influence on British cooking. English kitchens, like the English language, absorbed ingredients from all over the world. Despite the fact that weather in Britain enables its dwellers to preduce great varieties of meat and vegetables, finding many purely British meals doesn’t look like a piece of cake. Anyway, these meals, I believe, can be found only in Britain, in places which are not set to be “tourists attractions”. Some dishes which may seem to us like gastronomic wonders of the world can be found there. I can even try to name some of them. Steak and mushroom pie, toast with butter and marmalade, porridge prepared from coarse oatmeal eaten with milk or cream; bacon and eggs, an unsurpassed beefsteak accompanied by roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, Lanceshire hotpot and many more. Don’t you feel Britain in the air yet? I sure you do! 

So let the British judge their food. After all, they have every right to do it. And we won’t have any until we try the real English food, and I don’t mean those the-so-called “tourists attraction” if you know what I mean. Anyway, food is as much a part of peoples culture as their language, literature and so on. “You are what you eat” – they say, and I can’t agree more because as I see it, the British food is a very good reflection of a mysterious British character.