So, before we came to London, we’d heard plenty of tales of the bland and boring British food.  I have no idea what people who talk like this have been smoking.  Maybe I don’t know what what THEY consider to be good food.  We’ve been having a great time eating in the UK, both at restaurants and in our own kitchens.

So, clearly there are whole books on a country’s cuisine, but here are some things that British food has been to us:

British food, sort of like American food, seems to be basically family restaurant or pub fare.  The signature dishes are fish’n'chips and bangers’n'mash.  Everyone’s heard of the former.  The latter is sausages and mashed potatoes.

And oh the sausages!  One of the first things we discovered in the grocery store was Cumberland sausages.  They’re pork sausages with a pleasant mild flavoring, but there is something in the filling that makes them the lightest, fluffiest sausages I’ve ever tasted.  Every sausage with this name we’ve tried, in restaurants or cooked up from our own groceries, has been very good.  There are plenty of other kinds of sausages floating around here, but these are the ones we like best.  And it’s a good thing, since we have found nothing that tastes remotely like an American breakfast sausage here.

Fish and chips really do fill the slot for burgers and fries here.  There are chip shops everywhere.  Batter-dipped fried whitefish is incredibly good, especially if you eat it as fast as you can once you buy it.  It definitely loses something if you let it cool.

But here’s something that really flies in the face of the American stereotype: the Brits are not shy with their spices.  Terran learned from some of his Victorian era research that Britain began a love affair with Indian curry when India became part of the empire.  That has not gone away.  Indian dishes are often listed next to the fish’n'chips in pubs.  And if you see any food here, even packaged potato crisps (called “crisps” here because “chips” was taken) marked as “hot and spicy,” be ready for some real burn.  Even if you order your Chinese food in the US at the top of the heat scale, keep in mind that you’re only qualified for medium in the UK.  Brits like their hot food hot.

Another famous type of British food is the hot savory pie.  We learned at a historic food demonstration at Hampton Court Palace that this type of cooking dates from the Tudor era, where flour/water crusts were often used in place of baking dishes for stews.  Back then, the crust was just a wrapper to be thrown away.  Since then, it’s become an integral part of the dish.  Sometimes a pie has an entire crust, but often the stew is made in a baking crock with just rolled pastry over the top.

Steak and ale pie is everywhere.  However, Terran had a hankerin’ for steak and kidney pie.  This has turned out to be very, very hard to find.  We’ve checked dozens of pubs, and only one of them even advertised such a pie for sale.  When we asked, they were out.  Sigh.  So, a couple of weeks ago, Terran undertook a quest to bake is own.  He used lamb kidneys and did his research.  They turn out to be unintuitive and kind of difficult to prepare.  But the result was very good, and we’re going to make it again.

I, on the other hand, experimented with some Welsh cooking, inspired by our hike in Pembrokeshire.  Welsh cooking seems to be known for leeks, dairy, and bacon.  I tried a more modern recipe for a turkey and leek pie with a milk and whipped egg filling.  That was a lot of fun. It was a nice lighter contrast to the steak and kidney pie, which is nothing if not hearty.  I’ve also tried my hand at cream of leek and potato soup (with bacon).  This came out shockingly yummy.

I haven’t even touched on tea.

Tea the meal, which seems to fit in around 4pm between lunch and dinner, is something I can’t really figure out.  I’m simply not hungry for a pile of mostly carbohydrates at that time of the day, and if I skip lunch and try to go until 3pm, I’m likely to make myself sick.  And to be fair, we’ve read that formal tea is dying off in the UK anyway. That said, we’ve managed to make high tea work a few times, and it is so much fun that I’m sad that I can’t come up with any nutritional purpose for it.

I really like black tea with a bit of milk and sugar, and I liked it before I came here, so I fit right in.  Since coming here, I’ve sampled scones and clotted cream.  Clotted cream is a tasty and different pastry spread — basically cream cooked slowly until it congeals.  It has a flavor like light butter and a texture like cream cheese.  Scones are one of the few things I’ve eaten where I think you really need to go to a high-end pastry shop to get them.  The ones I’ve bought in the supermarket have, in my opinion, tasted awful, while the ones we’ve had at high tea have been wonderful.  I want to try cooking these myself.

Crumpets, on the other hand, seem to be great from the bargain counter in the grocery store. I picked a package up on a whim, and I really like them.  They’re like very holey English muffins, but much eggier.

If you’re hanging out at home, you are supposed to make your tea in an electric kettle.  We have one in the house, and it’s so convenient that I think I will look for one when we return.  We have a whistling kettle for the stove at home, but when you have company, it’s just so nice to bring the kettle into the room and plug it in so that people can serve themselves.

Oh, and off the tea theme, there’s cheese.  A lot of cheeses I think of as ordinary are hard to find here.  You can get emmentaler in the big grocery stores, but I haven’t seen any holey swiss.  On the other hand, cheddar expands from the orange block in the corner of the cheese counter to an entire way of life.  There are literally hundreds of different types of cheddar here, and most of them aren’t even orange.

In summary, this has been a great sabbatical for our food horizons.