Letters to the Editor
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Inspiration for expats
I actually cooked from Slater's 'Real Food' tonight: I brought it, with 'Appetite', over to the US with me. His recipes deserve an American audience: improvisational, impressionistic, and engaged with seasonality. Plus he's a superb writer.
The myth of bad British food -- and it is a myth -- extends from the difference between home-cooked and restaurant offerings. Many of the best British meals don't suit the fast turnaround of dining out, but find their home on the family table. Many are unfashionable (or the unfashionable made fashionable again) but they're none the worse for it.
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not exactly a myth
As an American who has lived in England for a few years, and just survived a drive from Yorkshire to London and back this weekend, I would have to say that English restaurant offerings are among the worst I've encountered (and I'm not just talking about the fast food available on the M1, though that is BAD).
On the continent, restaurant food tends to be fantastic. On vacation in both Germany and Switzerland, we found one cafe after another, along with hotel restaurants, that served inexpensive, freshly made, delicious meals. Schnitzel, Rostis, well-seasonsed salads, lovely pasta dishes, yummy cuts of beef, and many more delightful meals dance through my head when I think of these vacations. We didn't try hard to find good places to eat; we typically just went to a reasonable-looking place when we were hungry.
But in England.... In the first place, this country is infested with a highly disappointing phenomenon called "Tea Rooms." Sounds promising, right? Well, some tea rooms do have a few nice offerings (Betty's Tea Rooms are famous for their tasty, Swiss-influenced cuisine), but most offer the same tired list of cold sandwiches, salads with NO DRESSING, baked potatoes (called "jacket potatoes") with pretty much the same things on them that the cold sandwiches have in them, and a few warm sandwiches. After these depressing entrees, diners can look forward stale, dry cake. The tea is good, though.
Pub food is rarely better. It's too sad to count the number of times I've ordered a cut of meat that simply wasn't edible. Unsalted chips, flavorless steamed vegetables, mashed potatoes with no gravy, naked new potatoes, and other such non-delights tend to round out the meal.
In the US, we have the flavor industry and all sorts of giant chains (such as TGI Fridays and Don Pablos), offering overly seasoned monstrosities, but at least one can typically find a tasty meal made with quality ingredients.
Britain's love affair with celebrity chefs is a good sign, and they are influencing home cooking, and, thanks to Jamie Oliver, school meals. But I don't know that I will ever see the day when this trickles down to English restaurants. Everyone here just seems to accept that, with the exception of certain high-end restaurants, restaurant fare will be some combination of greasy, bland, grisley, and/or stale.
Good motivation to eat at home, really, which has been great for our waistlines. I agree with Slater about diets, by the way. I see no need to calorie-restrict. Eating yummy, from scratch food at home and avoiding the unsatisfying fare everywhere else seems to keep us thin.
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Big Fan of Nigel Slater
I discovered Nigel Slater five years ago when I did a stint in the UK with my company. I bought "The 30-minute Cook," which is now dog-eared and dirty from all the fast, easy and delicious meals my husband and I have made. This book seems to have gone out of print now which is a shame.
Since being back in the US I've bought "Real Fast Food" and I already picked up "The Kitchen Diaries" last year in the UK. "Kitchen" has much richer, elaborate food that takes a bit longer to make but we can't wait to try all the recipes. Slater to me is far better than the other celebrity chefs and I hope he will make a big splash on this side of the pond.
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Only the English think it's a myth
It's true - many upper-middle class (n.b., in the context of the UK, that means 'rich') English people can cook! Yes, they can lay out a spread for special occasions. And those same upper-middle class people can afford to eat at ultra-exclusive restaurants that use fresh, seasonal foods.
But for most people in England, things aren't so nice. There's a stark divide in the national food culture. As Slater notes, there is a lively organic/local movement, thanks in large part to the mad cow scare. But the everyday food culture is appalling. Lunch for most working people means standing on the street corner in the drizzle, extracting a sandwich (mostly mayonnaise; purchased from newsagent) from a cellophane container, and jamming it into their mouth in the shortest amount of time possible. Yum!
And if you find yourself out and about with, say, 10 pounds in your pocket and hungry, there are simply no fresh or tasty food options. Mark my words, you'll wind up eating a chocolate bar or something deep-fried, or god help you, a deep-fried chocolate bar.
I miss a few things about England, but not the food. It's still terrible unless you're rich.
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Going For An English
It's true, we're just not terribly good at food. English reserve and all that, we don't like to be ostentatious. That would be vulgar.
Tesco isn't as explicity evil as Wal-Mart. In fact they genuinely seem to be trying at times not to succumb to the dark side.
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John Cleese on the Daily Show
Back in the day when Craig Kilborn was hosting, he had John Cleese on as a guest. At the end of every interview, he would have the "Five Questions" segment, where he would ask the guest five generally open-ended questions and then judge their answer right or wrong depending on his whim. When John Cleese was on, the last question Kilborn asked was:
"Why is English food so bad?"
Cleese got that teddibly English 'bemused' expression on his face and immediately replied:
"Well, we had an empire to run!"
(That was the right answer, as it turned out.)
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Tesco
I'm a fan of Slater, but that "I've never set foot in Tesco" really does come across as unsufferably smug.
As to the "£1 in every £8 is spent in Tesco" -- the Wikipedia article clarifies this as "of retail spending". That's still fairly amazing, but a much lower percentage of per-capita income.
(Oh, and congratulations Adam on the new gig.)