In Search of Good English Food
How come it is so difficult to find English food in England? In Greece you eat Greek food, in France French food, in Italy Italian food, but in England, in any High Street in the land, it is easier to find Indian and Chinese restaurants than English ones. In London you can eat Thai, Portuguese, Turkish, Lebanese, Russian, Polish, Swiss, Swedish, Spanish, and Italian – but where are the English restaurants?
It is not only in restaurants that foreign dishes are replacing traditional British food. In every supermarket, sales of pasta, pizza and poppadoms are booming. After all, this is the 21st century and we can get ingredients from all over the world in a just few hours. Anyway, wasn’t English food always disgusting and tasteless?
The British have in fact always imported food from abroad. From the time of the Roman invasion foreign trade was a major influence on British cooking. English kitchens, like the English language, absorbed ingredients from all over the world – chickens, rabbits, apples, and tea. All of these and more were successfully incorporated into British dishes. Another important influence on British cooking was of course the weather. The good old British rain gives us rich soil and green grass, and means that we are able to produce some of the finest varieties of meat, fruit and vegetables, which don’t need fancy sauces or complicated recipes to disguise their taste.
The word ‘foreign’ (in bold-italic in the text), has its synonym in which alternative?
