Food and Drink

This section on food and drink has been added to the chapter on England for two reasons. The first is that English cuisine is familiar to, and often repeated in, the other countries in this textbook, with perhaps the exception of parts of the USA. The second is that there are many myths and misconceptions in Ukraine about the food and drink of Britain.

English cuisine has long suffered from accusations of being bland, unimaginativeand boring. Its culinary highlight was roast beef, to such an extent that the French nicknamed the English les rosbif. The Yeomen of the Guard at the Tower r London are still called "Beefeaters". Even today, although there are many thousads of restaurants offering the cooking of over 180 countries in New York, there is allegedly not one single restaurant serving solely English food.

Historically eating turnips, parsnips, swedes, with buckwheat as the staple in theMiddle Ages, the British excitedly adopted potatoes after their introduction from the New World, and for special occasions, boiled beef and carrots complementeda glass of gin. Little changed until after the Second World War. Despite being a European hub of the spice trade, only salt and pepper was commonly used until recently and garlic was despised by the majority of the population before the Gastronomic Revolutions in the 1960s. The special dish created to commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 called, not surprisingly, Coronation Chicken,was scandalous in that it contained a hint of Indian curry spices. Exotic exceptions long found in classical English cuisine were few, such as ginger beer and chocolate limes. The former is a sweet non-alcoholic soft drink with ginger and the latter are lime-flavoured boiled sweets with a chocolate centre. Gin-t and limes were both introduced from the West Indies in the 17^th century.

National classic dishes that excite gourmets are few, once expensive and only-for-^-elite dishes such as venison, Dover sole, pheasant and salmon are removed from r menu. The most esoteric is roast swan, forbidden by law to be eaten other than by:Royalty and the dons at Oxford and Cambridge Universities by Royal Charter.

More usual are pork (often eaten with apple sauce), lamb (often eaten with mint sauce),chicken, duck (often eaten with orange sauce), white sea-fish (frequently eaten,with tartare sauce ) and inevitably beef (when roasted, eaten usually with (Yorkshire puddings).

A traditional Sunday Dinner of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mashed potatoes, vegetable and gravy.

British sausages or " bangers ", eaten with brown sauce, are uniquely flavoured with pepper and various cereals to give them an unusual flavour that often surprises foreign visitors. Generally sold as pork sausages or beef sausages, more recently chicken, turkey and venison sausages have appeared on sale. Regional specialities may add various herbs, mustard, tomato or many unusual additions. Cumberland sausages, from the area now known as Cumbria, are claimed to contain a high percentage of good meat.

Pies with short or flaky pastry (and sometimes puddings with suet pastry) continue to be popular - the most popular fillings for hot pies being steak and kidney, beef and onion, chicken and mushroom, lamb and mushroom, cheese and onion and meat and potato. Suet pastry puddings are made with steak and kidney or beef and onion fillings. Pork pies are made from cooked minced pork with a very high fat content surrounded by pork jelly and made in a crispy pie crust.

Pies are made as individual portions or large sizes for families and guests. Pasties are similar to pies al­though always only made for one person.

The most famous is the Cornish pasty, traditionally made in Cornwall for shepherds and other agricultural workers to take with them to the fields as their lunch. These were once made as pies with assorted vegetable and minced meat filling in one end and sweet, often apple, cherry or plum, filling in the other end. Today's Cornish pasties are only savoury.

Fish consumed in Britain is most frequently sea fish as no point in Britain is far from the sea. River fish most usually eaten are salmon or trout, while pike, perch and other such river fish are rarely eaten. Most fish is bought cooked and hot from Fish and Chip shops (see below) although fish fingers made from cod and cooked from frozen, are very popular, especially as a children's meal. The English once consumed vast numbers of fresh oysters although these are now becoming expen­sive and much rarer, while imported prawns are now used in a multitude of dishes. The English continue to eat cockles, mussels and whelks, often with malt vinegar.

The traditional English breakfast has now become the traditional British breakfast - the traditional oat porridge breakfast in Scotland has mostly disappeared. Despite perhaps every episode of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories produced in Russia featuring Holmes and Watson breakfasting on oat porridge, this was not the case in the original literature and extremely rare in England.

The English breakfast is designed to make people fat, with its usually fried components being a selection (or sometimes all) of bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and fried bread. Some of the other traditional elements of an English breakfast such as kippers, kidneys and kedgeree have fallen out of favour in recent years.

A breakfast may be preceded by cereals and milk, and followed by toast with marmalade. Orange marmalade is by far the most popular although lime marmalade may be found. Although traditionally the British drank Indian tea with milk, coffee,also usually drunk with milk, is more widespread in the 21^st century, e same time, the convenience of instant coffee is being overtaken by the preferentialtaste of natural coffee.

Health awareness, lack of time and the desire of many British people to reduce their calorieintake is relegating breakfast from a main meal to a brief snack. Cooked casts are slow to prepare and produce a great deal of washing-up, despite most homes now having a dishwasher. Fried breakfasts are often a weekend luxury, except whenstaying in a hotel or Bed and Breakfast (B&B), or may be bought in the cafeteria of most large supermarkets or hypermarkets, motorway services or cafes.

Satisfies vary enormously as to the extent of vegetarian attitudes to food in Britain. It is probably the case that up to half the population will reduce their meat intake,occasionallyor frequently, for dietary or ideological reasons with a proportion of those being vegetarian and a small percentage vegan. For example, vegetarian lasagne is frequentlyoffered alongside traditional lasagne and often omnivores will choose the vegetarianoption purely for variety. Most British cheeses are still made with rennet althoughstrict vegetarians will choose cheese with artificial substitutes for rennet

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