Good (British) grub!

Apart from catching up with friends and family recently in the UK, the best thing about going home was the food. British food is fantastic and I challenge any ignorant fool to claim otherwise, since I know that real British food is up there among the coq au vin, the tapas and the other equally delicious European dishes.

In London I picked up a BLT. Every time I took a scrumptious bite, I let out a little mmm (barely audible for fear of scaring or worrying those picnicking near to me in Hyde Park). The bacon was crispy, not fatty, there wasn’t too much of it. The bread soft, with delicious (and nutritious!) seeds and it tasted homemade. The lettuce was everything you want lettuce to be; fresh, green and with that satisfying crunch noise as you bite into it. The tomatoes were straight from someone’s greenhouse vine. It was a rather spiffing sandwich. Well done England, you’ve done Lord Sandwich proud.

Then I was in a countryside pub, and I spent a good few minutes deciding what to have from the blackboard menu. Steak sandwich? Ploughman’s? Goats cheese salad? Bangers and mash? A whole menu of fantastic fodder. I went for the goats cheese salad – welsh goats’ cheese on crusty bread, with a salsa of fresh tomatoes. Admittedly, the idea of this dish is mighty similar to an Italian bruschetta, or a French salade de chevre chaud, but it was British goats’ cheese, homemade bread and British tomatoes. And even better because we sat outside on a wobbly wooden picnic bench in the beer garden and ate it.

You really are hard pushed to find a pub equivalent anywhere other than in the UK. The thing about our pubs is that there is no pretension. You go there, drink some local beer, eat some (usually) local food and be merry. The nearest I have come across to a good pub in Europe is the Germanic beer halls, but they tend to be a little more regimented; rows of benches laid out, smart waiters come to your table to take your order, no-one shouts ‘time at the bar’ and they don’t tend to have beer gardens.

Obviously, there are still some rather rubbish eateries in the UK. But we should celebrate the culinary diversity of the UK (I also enjoyed a Philippine meal during my trip) and the delicious and often inexpensive food that is offered to us on a plate in the UK.

And, isn’t the fact that we export so many of our cookery programmes and celebrity chefs to the continent proof enough that actually the Europeans (that’s right, even the French) want to eat British?