National stereotypes have a habit of lingering past their use-by date. It’s been ages since the French surrendered to the Germans, who – by the way – no longer run their state with all that supposed Teutonic efficiency. (I read recently they still use floppy disks in the German navy.) The Irish drink less than the British these days. And we haven’t worn shoes with buckles on them and little top hats in years, thank you! Last I checked, Australia was not unusually run amok with convicts. And… this is a dangerous game, so I will stop playing.
With one exception: England’s reputation for dreadful food endures, when it really shouldn’t. “Gruesomely bad,” said the New Yorker in 2001. This was fair then of that dull, plodding diet, weighed down by suet, washed down with Bovril. Pork pies that managed at once to be gelatinous and arid deserved to be called gruesome. It was enough to make the dill-drenched beetroot-y melange over on the eastern side of this continent seem desirable. (Being mauled by a dog, I suspect, is preferrable to being mauled by a bear.)
But things have improved: Fergus Henderson opened St John in the 1990s and demonstrated that bone marrow was a worthy subject of inquiry; Jeremy Lee at Quo Vadis proved that the most Dickensian of ingredients – eel – might be cool; Rick Stein cooked fish on a beach somewhere in Cornwall and everyone cheered. Britain – a nation awash in batter, chewing on meats that have been poached to eternity? No, no. English food, the hogget and maybe even the eels, is a destination in itself now.
Why, then, is the badness of English food still semi-synonymous with England’s identity? The attitude from visiting East Coast Wasps is no longer open-mouthed disgust, but something closer to a pat on the head: “Well aren’t you doing so well?” they chirp. “Beyond porridge and boiled mutton: A taste of London,” the New York Times was gracious enough to concede in 2018. By my calculations, it’s entirely plausible that Jack the Ripper was the last person in England to dine sincerely on boiled mutton. So, to the question. How to relinquish this most ungenerous of typecasting?
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Time for some unfashionable victim blaming. I have often wondered what it is about the self-infantilising nature of the English culinary lexicon. Jacket potato, pigs in blankets, bubble and squeak. The latter is an 18th-century onomatopoeic interpretation of what cabbage “sounds” like. While “toad-in-the-hole” is called that because the sausages supposedly look like toads, in a hole. My knowledge of frogs and holes is good enough to declare this is an unusably abstract visual analogy. Meanwhile, once a man three years my senior – no, not two children in a trench coat – offered me “dippy” eggs and “soldiers” for lunch.
And so, with a combination of poor eyesight and overactive imaginations, Brits marched into the world, conquered a quarter of it, then came back with nursery rhymes to describe dinner. And now (screw the great literary tradition of this nation) the descendants of Dickens and Eliot are instead forced to speak a language yoked to their least serious forbears. It is no wonder why the good people at the New York Times were so quick to patronise. Take your own food as a joke and the whole world will too. I do not know how many perfectly balanced eel and pickle sandwiches Quo Vadis must sell to offset the destructive forces of a single mention of “spotted dick”.
The Paddington Bear Department of the Great British Psyche has taken over the culinary landscape – hiding behind whimsy for fear of sincerity, indebted to the spurious and the twee. Restaurateurs can rail against the unearned primacy of French and Italian cooking all they like in 2026, but so long as we insist on talking about lunch like toddlers, that project will only get so far. The seriousness of the entreaty should not be doubted, by the way. Basic patriotism demands it. And no, I don’t want “spag bol” for dinner, thank you. I’m 30.
[Further reading: How to eat like a Roman emperor]
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