Though this epithet of the United Kingdom’s cooking is little more than a harmless quip, I did find it interesting how far removed the great joke of British gastronomy is from reality. However, flicking through Dorothy Hartley’s 1954 Food in England and Elizabeth David’s Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, published some sixteen years later, I find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the meme of British cuisine does not hold up to historical scrutiny. Certainly, I have my own qualms with the cuisine of my home country: it’s often bland, usually heavy and always beige.
The internet is littered with this sort of thing, it’s a joke which recurs with reliable regularity. ‘Britain conquered half the world for spices and decided it didn’t like any of them’ is a caption usually accompanied by a photo of a mound of anonymous boiled stodge.
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