Theres a lot of great dutch food! I will defend pannenkoek, stampot, oliebollen, Gouda, spekkoek, krokets, poffertjes, stroopwafel… hell, I love pickled herring.
Bruhhhhh whenever I finally start losing this weight I’ve been packing on, I look forward to a stroopwafel warmed over my black coffee every Wednesday morning.
Compared with English food it’s certainly first class. British gourmets only survive, because in GB are a lot of Chinese, Japonese, Greek, etc. Restaurants
Pickled herring is Danish, spekoek is Indonesian and Gouda is bland.
Hagelslag though, that is something I definitely miss.
Maybe the herring is Scandinavian, but we’re not going to credit the swedes with this one, they lost that right when they started with the lingonberries.
It’s possible that people think of Gouda as that stuff which comes in the standardized, plastic-sealed block of rubbery cheese that most American grocery stores carry. That is bland. One might mistake it for the Monterey Jack next to it, were the labels switched.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still happily eat it, but yeah, real Gouda has flavor.
That makes sense! I’m currently in the US and have only seen Gouda once and it tasted nothing like it, in the Netherlands there’s also many varieties of Gouda that all taste very different.
It’s very strange seeing Dutch products on the shelves here.
don’t make me bring up the mountain of grease-soaked fried foods that brits find acceptable as a meal. even as an american, i haven’t seen so much fried food in one place. and i’ve been to the southern united states many times.
If we’re to insist on it being a specific country’s food, it really should be Indian no? It was invented by Indian diaspora in the UK as (IIRC) a take on traditional Indian food using ingredients that are easier to obtain in the UK.
IMO saying tikka masala is British food is like saying General Tso’s Chicken, which was invented by Chinese diaspora in the US for similar reasons, is somehow American food. I don’t think the country it was invented in can really claim credit in either case.
Tikka Masala is an Indian-Inspired dish which was invented in the UK by people with Indian cultural heritage. That’s about as concise a description as you can get without running into difficulties of definition - there’s no consistent way of defining what “being a dish” means without running into contradictions.
In fact General Tso’s is the perfect counter-example: Multiple Chinese people have told me they enthusiastically disown General Tso’s Chicken and explicitly call it American food. So if we say “a dish belongs to a country if it’s invented there”, then Tikka Masala is British (which I agree “feels” wrong); but if we say “a dish belongs to a country if it was inspired by the cuisine of that country”, then General Tso’s is Chinese, which, apparently not!
And that’s without even considering the question of how far “back” you should go with inspiration - what if a dish was inspired by how the Indians used food they got from the Persians who traded it with the Chinese - is it Indian food or Chinese food? (Idk if that’s historically nonsense, but you get my point) Why is the most-recent ancestor more important than the environment of creation?
I respectfully disagree with one major caveat. I’ll get that out of the way first; I think there should be a name for these foods that recognize the creators (e.g. Italian American food is American food that comes from Italian immigrants). We’ve traditionally been bad at giving credit or, worse, using names to mark a cuisine as “other” and weird.
The thing is that there really isn’t a food of a place. People use ingredients that are available and use techniques from the people around them. When cultures interact, they create remixes of cuisine that take unfamiliar ingredients and techniques and create something new.
Let me use the food of my own home, New Mexico, as an example. The food of the region is a mixture of Spanish colonizers, later Mexican immigrants, and Native American foods using a crazy combination of techniques and ingredients from all three. It isn’t Spanish food. It isn’t Mexican food. It isn’t Native American food. It is New Mexican food, a thing that arose from a place and its history. Now, with Asian immigrants moving in, the food has started to incorporate stuff from those cultures too.
That weirdly applies to museums as well. The best museums in the world are in London. Of course, they don’t serve English stuff. The Brits just knew to bring the best stuff home.
Also, what do you call English food in other countries? Prison food.
This is a subjective, but would be pretty universally laughed at in the culinary world especially when compared to France, Italy, Tokyo, or any American city.
restaurants weren’t even prevalent until the early 1900s, way past the introduction of spices.
Outside of London the UK has a very low presence of Michelin rated restaurants compared to Europe, the US, and Japan. Not the best metric, but there’s no reason why Britain’s restaurants, who would stand to benefit from such rating, is being unfairly treated.
Btw I actually like British food, and have spent a lot of time in the UK. Just think your comment is funny, and the upvotes are funnier.
I get your point number one, but any American city better restaurants than London? You cannot seriously believe that. Sure, NY, Chicago, etc but common.
to be honest, I dont know a single fellow american that thinks that “american food” (whatever that even means) is better than just about any other variety. Yet what you said is true nonetheless lmao
This reminds me of an old post I remember seeing where it depicted the contrast between anime food and English film food with some eggs. The anime ones were drawn with utmost care to look downright heavenly, while the English film eggs were very scraggly.
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