AH.com greatest challenge of all: Make England a 20th Cuisine Superpower

I think this doesn't mention the fact that there isn't simply one direction one needs to go in order to have good cuisine.

With a bottom-up style, you can use industrialization to feed a new paradigm in a "common" British cuisine. The growing middle class can start adapting new spices and styles to existing 'simple' dishes given the Imperial experience and their newfound wealth enhancing availability. Eventually this filters up and down, but there remains the stolid, delicious simplicity of national foods that can stand resilient and easily accessible.

That's interesting because it's very much what some of the newer celebrity chefs (Fearnley-Whitingstall) are trying.

You'd have to have the middle-classes making their innovative Norfolk whitebair pie or Welsh cawl able to influence the trend-setters. How would that happen?
 
It was established a while back that the start of English food being bad was The Hundred Years war. The basic summary of this is that English food used to be very good. Its reputation for being bad was something spread by the French during the war. The reason was that French food was really bland and to deal with it the French chefs had to make sauces to make the food more tasty. English Food didn't need sauce, it was considered that good. The problem is that the French had the right idea with sauce. Combine that reputation and the fact that post war English chefs wouldn't touch anything remotely French, and you've got the reason behind the origin of English bad food reputation.

The reason for the bad food is the same reason the USA and UK have obesity problems. A rapidly growing population and and colonising the frontiers. English food like the USA needed to be food that could give lots of energy. It also had to be cheap so everyone could eat in some way of form.

1. UK: Shepard's Pie and Fish & Chips - Lots of Fat, lots of energy and very cheap. Shepard's Pie is literally what ever you want in a pie made of Mash Potato. As a large fisher population Fish + the easiest growing vegetable in the WORLD.

2. USA: Burgers! Made so 6ft 2 guys with hairy chests and long flowing hair could east a healthy lunch of Burgers and then go fight some mountain lions.

All these foods were made for a different age. The easiest way to change British cousin?

RAISE THE SANDS OF THE EARTH AND BRIDGE THE CHANNEL!!!
 
Rules, Simpson's and the like were not necessarily restaurants that sought to expand at any period, being individual unique enterprises. The thought is a good one, but it would need a different approach - a proto Cesar Ritz in partnership with a noteworthy British chef. Even then, though, the cuisine would be the sophisticated Continental style of the time rather than a purely British approach. To do otherwise is simply not going to be viable in 19th century Paris, given the competition.

Secondly, what is the motivation for an aggressive 'push' abroad? It doesn't really gel with the British character or image of its place in the world at the time.

The British Restaurants of the Second World War present a potential means of getting good quality food to the masses postwar, but that runs smack bang into the charming red brick wall of austerity, continued rationing and the advances in food production that followed the war.

The advances in food production that followed the war are not a problem per se, far from that in fact as they will make raw materials and ingredients cheaper and more widely available. Ending rationning earlier than OTL would definitely help I agree with this, how to do this is the question however.
 
British food is good-its just that unfortunately some of it-when its bad is very bad. After all give me a Wensleydale or stilton over any French/Italian/Spanish muck you care to name. Give me a Yorkshire ham over a Serano, a Bury Black pudding over any boudin noir, and of course don't get me started on cakes, scones and the like....
Oh and consider this-staples of the professional kitchen (mainstream not uber poncy) worcester sauce, colemans mustard, maldon salt, mushroom ketchup, I rests my case....


(oh and the old roast beef of England (on bone naturally) with a rich beef onion gravy, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and parsnips in goose fat, carrots and peas -jobs a good un-you're going to tell me that some poncy arsed saltimbocca or saint jacques beats that?)
 
The advances in food production that followed the war are not a problem per se, far from that in fact as they will make raw materials and ingredients cheaper and more widely available. Ending rationning earlier than OTL would definitely help I agree with this, how to do this is the question however.

I agree that they were not a problem, but the consequent decline in quality of quite a few different kinds of produce (butter and particularly battery farmed chickens,for example) did contribute to an accompanying loss of quality in cuisine. Many foodstuffs and ingredients did get cheaper and more widely available, but this was accompanied by instant foods, frozen foods and the like, as well as the aforementioned decline in quality due to mass production. This however is a small issue compared with that of rationing.

Ending rationing earlier than the 1950s is the ideal situation - indeed, the sooner the better - but it runs into the economic necessities of the time that faced Britain. These can be changed with different decisions and actions during and particularly prior to the war, but such changes would have flow on effects far wider than the kitchen front.

To put it somewhat glibly, if the world wars can be avoided, then British cuisine is better off. To truly change its nature and its perception, we need to go further back.

KillerT: Completely agree
 
5) Anglifications and fusion food are popular. For example, one can buy a "mexican chilli cornish pastie" in Waterloo station. You see this a little in the rest of Europe (e.g. the German donner kebab) but one would be hard pressed to find e.g. French food that heavily incorporates Asian traditions nor Lebanese-Polish "chick pea pierogi" hybrids.

French-Vietnamese cuisine is regarded as among the best haute cuisine. Right, Hendryk? Hendryk?

Bahn mi is essentially a mix of Vietnamese flavors stuffed into a baguette. If there's not fusion food, I don't know what is. Senegalese banana glace is another good example of French fusion.

Also, most "Asian fusion" restaurants here in the United States, at least the ones I've been to, seem to lean heavily on French haute influences, especially in terms of presentation.
 
Consider that people rarely say, "Hey, let's get some English food tonight." or "I really feel like cooking something English." There are few restaurants outside of England that specialize in English cuisine beyond "Pub Grub" or maybe the English (or Irish) Breakfast.

One factor is that of familiarity. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have cultures that are heavily derived from English culture, so English cuisine isn't exotic enough to stand on its own in these countries. The New England popover is Yorkshire pudding. The Australian pie floater is a meat pie floating in a bowl of pea soup - Both of those elements are obvious English imports.

Those are some of the quirkier derivatives, too... Pancakes? A sandwich with sliced white bread? A baked potato with toppings? A main course of roasted meat with mashed potatoes, stuffing, and boiled vegetables on the side? Why make the effort to drive to a restaurant, endure the wait, and spend your paycheck on stuff that isn't much different from last night's leftovers? Even taking into account those who are too tired (or lazy) to cook, English-themed restaurants would have to compete with diners and chain restaurants serving such "normal" things (pancakes at IHOP, roast beef sandwiches at Arby's, fried seafood at Red Lobster, etc).

As for the rest of the world, that simmers down to immigration patterns as well as colonial influences. Immigrants from England gravitated toward those countries with very similar cultural heritages, unlike immigrants from, say, China, Mexico, or Greece. You're not going to see many English restaurants in Seoul for the same reason you won't find many Congolese restaurants in Vladivostok. This is discounting the global fast food formula, of course, which usually draws from ethnic elements but is simplified in a way that it doesn't need much cultural knowledge to be replicated ("Italian" pizza, "Mexican" tacos, "Mozambican" peri-peri chicken, etc). Pizza restaurants may be common in Chinese cities but they're not as much an emulation of Italian pizza as much as they're an emulation of the American fast food emulation of Italian pizza.

There's also the colonial element. India has a distinctive Anglo-Indian cuisine that might seem wildly divergent from traditional English food from a Western perspective, but is the difference between the two really that much greater than the distance between traditional Chinese cuisine and the average Chinese take-out place in any Western country? West Indian food is heavily English-influenced, too - Hello, Jamaican patty. Even in those parts of Africa that were once British colonies have adopted English foods... Scotch eggs are popular in Nigeria.
 
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Irish cuisine is very similar to English cuisine, too, so despite the mass influx of Irish immigrants to these countries, there hasn't been a huge demand for Irish restaurants, either. One thing the English and the Irish do have a distinctive mark on, at least where I live, is the pub culture. In my Northeastern US town, where the white majority is pretty evenly split between Irish and Italian descendants, you might find the Italians reigned supreme in terms of food (pizza and pasta restaurants), but almost all of the bars are Irish-themed. So, while you might never have Irish or English food delivered to your house, you can order beef stew or fish and chips while you're chugging down pints of beer.

I might add that restaurants specializing in British Isles tea culture seem to be growing in popularity where I live. The offerings might be lighter, but many of them are just as fancy and formal as the local French restaurants, and from a relative perspective, they're on the pricey side. What's more classy than a crustless, finger-sized, perfectly-proportioned cucumber sandwich on lightly-buttered, gossamer slices of Pullman (*cough* white bread *cough*) with fresh dill? Crumpets? Scones? Lemon curd? Clotted cream? Don't forget to raise your pinky while you're signing the bill.
 
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