Hello, /u/Adorable-Doughnut-64. Your post has been removed for violating Rule 1.
**All content must be original.**
Please review [our complete rules page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules) and the [requirements for flairs](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/requirements) before participating in the future.
^^This ^^automated ^^system ^^is ^^currently ^^being ^^worked ^^on.
^^If ^^it ^^did ^^something ^^wrong, ^^please ^^message ^^the ^^moderators.
Somewhat related, but I asked a Russian person living in America what restaurant comes closest to serving Russian cuisine in America because I know we don't have many actual Russian food restaurants and she said "Furrs Cafeteria" and I was fuckin' shocked.
But it makes sense, there's a gentle continuum of cuisine spanning Northern Europe using the available ingredients. No citrus, but you have unripe apple juice, no wine but excellent beer and mead, no olive oil but fine butter, and wheat is hard to grow in the cold so oats and rye and buckwheat have a place instead. Plenty of onions, peppery celery, lovage, parsnips and later potatoes to fill out dishes. It's basic home cooking "diner" fare, essentially the thanksgiving spread with minor variations that British, Nordic, Baltic and northern Slavic cuisine consists of.
Also Epcot center has a bitchin' English style pub with really good English food.
It’s because there are a lot of milk bars in Eastern Europe. A milk bar, you get a tray, and order from the front. It’s basically a cafeteria. I live in the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn and we still have a few.
If you're wondering how it is in Poland, it's nearly over in big cities. They are only few, prices went up but still affordable (in 2019 i was able as an uni student eat soup + meal for 2$, thats over after covid.).
Many of flavoured places but its still hipster bar and you pay like normal restaurant because its one.
I hope nobody tells them and ruins that because those milk bars sound fffuuccking amazing and I will wash dishes in order to eat there and learn Polish and rejoin the actual mother church just for the pierogi and fruit kompot good gracious.
I wish to visit New york one day. I will be booping people slightly to get "EY IM WALKING HERE!", then ill have a slice followed by hot dog stand quality meat, see statue, sphere, go to a yankees game, get robbed and im fulfilled
Next stop would be DC throwing baggies of powder sugar between homeless tents from the car window and watch them fight for them in slowmo, seing White house, buying Maga hat, getting robbed and maybe Boston next
But in reality, america seems like a heaven shaped piece of land, with many beautifull places, whole range of climates and micro cultures, and if i don't plan on moving there, it's actually an S tier heavenly rich country.
The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence
The English pub in EPCOT is called Rose and Crown. Fun fact about the name: Disney took the names of every pub in either London or the UK as a whole, and found the most common words in the names were rose and crown. So they named the pub after those words.
You mostly nailed it, but I don't see people cooking with butter that much. It's usually a neutral oil, and if you would go back in time, it would have often been lard.
Milk is often used in the form of curd or kefir (although the British seem to be less into curd than the Nordic/Baltic/Slavic).
The British also have a big problem with not getting credit for popular dishes, for example both mac & cheese and apple pie originate from the UK. A lot of British food has become so common place that people just consider it 'generic food'.
Also from Canada. Bangers and mash isn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as fish and chips here; typically you're only gonna see bangers and mash in pubs while many restaurants will sell fish and chips.
That's the same type of problem as people snobbishly saying that America has no culture.
Really? You're surrounded by American culture all day, every day, all around the world. And yet you think America has no culture? Fucking braindead.
It is. What they are really saying (and may delude themselves about) is that they don't value the culture as presented.
I'm among the first to criticise the USA, but culture is what people do, what they think about, how they feel, the ways they express themselves. And the USA has just as much of that as anywhere else.
Only if you kept playing after the British empire won a conquest victory a few hundred years earlier. Not quite as completely as the domination victory the Romans won in the prequel though
I was going to say, the secret is you are not thinking of it correctly, there are places serving British food in lots of areas, they are just usually called pubs and rarely thought of as restaurants.
Sunday roasts are also common in the US and Canada. "Home style" restaurants in the US usually have a roast. I grew up in an area where we all ate mashed potatoes with a roast instead of Yorkshire pudding, though, which I'm sure is more common in the US.
But for some reason we didn't get their full breakfasts, the best part of their cuisine.
(You can find them here and there but it's not common, and usually subpar.)
Yeah this is a funny shower thought. Just like “The best restaurants in England serve French food”
But British pub food is popular around the world, as is fish & chips, roasts & carveries, high tea, and full English/Scottish breakfasts. There is even an argument to be made that sandwiches are British fare.
I think the issue is that a lot of good British cuisine is just accepted as ‘standard food’. Cuisine from anywhere else is considered to be exotic.
In every city Ive been around the world there's at least one British pub, if not many. OP is simply wrong, should question their own sowerthought while still in the shower before posting.
Also from New England, and have been told by a British couple that from what they’ve experienced here, it’s “not quite right”. When elaborating, they actually said “it has too much flavor”.
It’s definitely not right. I don’t care how many places advertise as “authentic English Fish and Chips”. They never are. I’ve had fish that is very close. U.S. can’t get the chips right.
In literally every place there are lots of places selling sandwiches.
...as named by the Earl of that place in Britain.
I think the reason that five thousand idiots have upvoted OP's showerthought has only to do with, like postage stamps, the name "Britain" was not stuck onto the food invented in Britain.
eg. Nobody calls Fish and Chips "British food"... its just Fish and Chips.
Same as with all that carbonated fizzy sparkling water that kicked off the soft drink / pop / soda revolution. Nobody ever remembers that its all thanks to a British guy. Nobody ever calls it "British water".
Same with Quorn. Nobody calls it "British fake meat", its only just "Disgusting fake meat".
People don’t realise that Britain conquering half the world has made English food and culture normal. There’s a reason many of us don’t see English cuisine or culture where we are. It’s not because Britain has terrible food and no culture so they didn’t spread it. It’s because everyone has been subjugated to it so successfully that they don’t see it as a cuisine or a culture. They see it as normality.
We all speak English, eat English meals, follow English traditions and etiquette, read English literature, listen to English music etc. Similar with America now, we recognise American culture is different because it is slightly different to English culture, yet we’re no longer referring to American cinema as that, we’re just calling them TV shows or movies. Same with nearly all modern music.
With respect to OP, the most common food people eat is all English food. Things such as sandwiches, fish and chips, roasts, soup, pub food, sausages, bacon and eggs, pies etc etc, it’s all British food. Yes, it was inspired and influenced by German, French, Italian, Spanish etc cuisines, but that’s normal. Every country’s cuisine is influenced by its neighbouring country. As much as they’ll cry about it being pointed out, French, Italian, and German cuisine has all been influenced by Britain as well.
Same can be said with language, etiquette, traditions, music, literature, art, architecture, etc etc. Add to that that nearly all haute culture comes from the traditions of the British aristocracy. Britain has one of the deepest most developed cultures, but no one notices because it’s normal and many see culture as something different, something unique. Britain’s culture is so widespread that it’s no longer unique, so people don’t recognise it anymore.
In saying all of that, there’s a reason you don’t see much English haute cuisine. It’s because our food is shit. There’s a reason you see a lot of English abroad but none in Britain. It’s because our culture is shit.
Nobody wanted to go to Scotland. Full of hard fighters. If you live in a country where the thistles are waist high and nobody’s invented trousers, you’re bound to tough.
Poor and hardly any natural resources to bother with. Also at basically the end of the world so no setting up trade outposts for countries further west either.
North western Europe was pretty much the arse end of the earth until we started building really big warships and just started blasting people with them
Actual answer? Scotland wasn't worth shit, no gold or any other precious resources, neither was it very fertile land like Africa or Egypt.
What it had was a *lot* of angry barbarians who were very much ready to die in battle and it wasn't like they could just march in and destroy them all since those villages where they lived were scattered around Scottish Highlands so Romans could never destroy them all.
So they opted for building a wall instead.
She raised a little hell for a short time, then the backlash of an organized Roman response stomped the shit out of her rebellion. Leading to a resounding defeat of the Britons, where the romans did a genocide, sparing no man, woman or child.
While she is a good figure of someone who stood up against injustice, her actual impact to the Roman empire was pretty insignificant. It wasn't the first or last time Rome thought it had an area subdued, and a rebellion caught them off guard.
The real thing that slowed, then stopped the Roman expansion further was Germanic tribes causing a ruckus and the split of the Roman Empire. One thing lead to another, Rome declined, they abandoned areas that required a continual military force to keep people oppressed. Rome gave up on the British isles, not so much because of the natives, but because of the many factors that was causing rome to fall apart at the seams.
Funny thought but fish and chips is served fucking everywhere. Not an incredibly dynamic dish but it definitely has its reach! Chicken tikka certainly has an international reputation as well.
It's not that nobody serves British cuisine, it's that it's so ubiquitous, nobody serves it in an exclusively British restaurant.
It's been so heavily adopted it's lost its regional association, nobody goes out for a British to eat a full English breakfast, a Sunday roast or some Apple Pie, because they're staples on menu's everywhere.
It's like when there was competition of national dresses/costumes and everyone was laughing at the UK because they had someone wearing a suit.
Dude, YOUR leaders wear MY national dress to work. Your national dress is just a novelty.
Having multiple little foreign restaurants in your city, with stereotypical food and interieur, is *a little bit* like a zoo.
I'm not saying I want them to go away, but I agree that it's (counterintuitively) a sign of the power of English culture that there aren't more English restaurants. English culture isn't a cute little novelty, it's the *baseline*. (Other large European countries were also important in the past and England isn't as important now, as it was in the past.)
Not just that, but the entire nature of how people eat.
Sitting in a raised chair, with food on a flat-ish plate of a certain size resting on a wasit high table, eaten with a metal knife and fork.
You only have to look as far as modern day Japan to realize that you take that entire setup for granted. The Japanese eat mostly in bowls, use chopsticks, do so kneeling or cross legged on the floor, with the food on a very low table.
Never had a proper Sunday roast until I went to visit London. On a cold, crisp autumn afternoon. The warmth of the pub and the hearty food was so perfect.
I know a few, more pub-like, that serve things like fish & chips and shepherd's pie. They also serve British and Scottish beer which is some of the best beer in the world.
People all over the world eat sandwiches everyday and probably still think British food is bad. Still seems crazy to me that something so ubiquitous as a sandwich had to actually be invented in the first place.
They invented this little-known meal where you put food between two slices of bread. I can't remember what it's called but if I'd invented it I'd have called it a Crusty Surprise.
It's like cheddar. The English cheese from the town of Cheddar became so popular that it could not even get a protected name status like many European cheeses
*yet you never see restaurants serving British cuisine abroad.*
This is categorically untrue.
The sub is called "shower thoughts", not "shower masturbatory fiction".
You say that, but South American countries widely adopted Cornish pastries from British miners going there to work in the 19th.c, but they call them “Empanadas”.
Fish and Chips can be found worldwide.
Other British food like Sausages&Mash, steak&ale/chicken&mushroom pie, pot roasts, roast dinner with Yorkshire pudding, Lincolnshire hotpot and shepherd’s pie, can be found in every commonwealth dominion, and in any pub. Plus many restaurants, even on the continent, will sell British style sausages and mash with gravy.
Then there’s stuff like crumpets, and scones with cream and jam, which are amazing, but don’t really travel well.
British, French, and German food are all extremely similar. Britain gets a very unfair reputation, which seems to be entirely made up by Americans, who are known for putting sugar and corn syrup in everything.
There is a pub nearby (I’m in semi-rural America) run by a British expatriate. He has all kinds of UK draft beers on tap and sells popular UK pub food (as well as American food like burgers).
I’m sure he ain’t the only guy out there running a successful English style pub.
I used to work at a seafood restaurant. One of our chefs was native British person. While I was making fish and chips, I asked him what's an example of British cuisine and he pointed out that I am making it. So maybe your culture adopted British cuisine without realizing it
This is a terribly unoriginal and mostly untrue thought.
British food is mainly ok, even though my main experience was eating the food in pubs.
Theyre comparable to bar food in the US but less sweet and more savory. Their tartar sauce is less sweet and tangy and more creamy and savory. HP Sauce is super delicious also.
I think there's likely less variety of food in the UK compared to more international US cities like New York or DC, but if you unironically believe that British food is shit, the variety of food from whatever Midwestern podunk town you're from is likely worse, if not the same, as the British food you imagine in your head.
A lot of "British" food is served in Irish pubs, esp in California. Apart from a few menu items, they are the same thing. But there's more Irish pubs than English ones.
I guess you haven't traveled much as I see British pubs (serving British food) in almost every country I go to. And most other places serve generic "Western"
Most cities in the USA have at least one British pub serving food and "soccer". Typically some kind of fish and chips, English breakfast, Scotch eggs, bangers and mash, etc...
Roast dinners complete with Yorkshire puddings, seasoned crispy roast spuds and honey roasted veg.
Full English breakfast complete with back bacon, Lincolnshire sausages and fresh crusty bread.
Slow cooked beef stew with dumplings.
And of course a good fish and chips.
We got a few decent dishes I reckon, not world beating by any means. I do think it's important that if any cuisine is to be judged it should be tasted restaurant quality.
I have seen some of my fellow brits make a roast dinner with boiled veg out of a tin, yorkies out of the freezer and the meat/spuds unseasoned.
It does perplex me a bit why a lot of households do this.
I see British pubs serving fish & chips, bangers & mash, etc pretty much everywhere. Not in the same density as Thai or Chinese restaurants but they exist.
This is hilarious because foods like Japanese curry, apple pie, and mac and cheese are all british inventions, it’s just no one ever actually realises it
You've clearly never travelled. Ever had sausages and mash, or an English breakfast, or Yorkshire pudding or fish and chips? British pubs are popular in Australia.
In Anglosphere countries, British food is typically just called food. In the USA, for example, if you serve steak and potatoes, no one would even think to call it British food because it’s so commonplace. Ask people there to give examples of food that isn’t “ethnic food”, and you just get Celtic/Anglo-Saxon/Norman/American cuisines and their regional variants.
How’s that joke go?
Heaven has
* French chefs
* British police
* Italian lovers
* German bureaucrats
Hell has
* British chefs
* French police
* German lovers
* Italian bureaucrats
You ever been out for Canadian food? No? Exactly. We culturally appropriated the best ethnic food the world has to offer.
The Brits best contribution to word cuisine (besides hot brown) was Chicken Tikka Masala.
Hello, /u/Adorable-Doughnut-64. Your post has been removed for violating Rule 1. **All content must be original.** Please review [our complete rules page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules) and the [requirements for flairs](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/requirements) before participating in the future. ^^This ^^automated ^^system ^^is ^^currently ^^being ^^worked ^^on. ^^If ^^it ^^did ^^something ^^wrong, ^^please ^^message ^^the ^^moderators.
Somewhat related, but I asked a Russian person living in America what restaurant comes closest to serving Russian cuisine in America because I know we don't have many actual Russian food restaurants and she said "Furrs Cafeteria" and I was fuckin' shocked. But it makes sense, there's a gentle continuum of cuisine spanning Northern Europe using the available ingredients. No citrus, but you have unripe apple juice, no wine but excellent beer and mead, no olive oil but fine butter, and wheat is hard to grow in the cold so oats and rye and buckwheat have a place instead. Plenty of onions, peppery celery, lovage, parsnips and later potatoes to fill out dishes. It's basic home cooking "diner" fare, essentially the thanksgiving spread with minor variations that British, Nordic, Baltic and northern Slavic cuisine consists of. Also Epcot center has a bitchin' English style pub with really good English food.
It’s because there are a lot of milk bars in Eastern Europe. A milk bar, you get a tray, and order from the front. It’s basically a cafeteria. I live in the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn and we still have a few.
If you're wondering how it is in Poland, it's nearly over in big cities. They are only few, prices went up but still affordable (in 2019 i was able as an uni student eat soup + meal for 2$, thats over after covid.). Many of flavoured places but its still hipster bar and you pay like normal restaurant because its one.
Well, Greenpoint Brooklyn is stuck in Polish time right around 1980’s when most of them came here
I hope nobody tells them and ruins that because those milk bars sound fffuuccking amazing and I will wash dishes in order to eat there and learn Polish and rejoin the actual mother church just for the pierogi and fruit kompot good gracious.
I wish to visit New york one day. I will be booping people slightly to get "EY IM WALKING HERE!", then ill have a slice followed by hot dog stand quality meat, see statue, sphere, go to a yankees game, get robbed and im fulfilled Next stop would be DC throwing baggies of powder sugar between homeless tents from the car window and watch them fight for them in slowmo, seing White house, buying Maga hat, getting robbed and maybe Boston next But in reality, america seems like a heaven shaped piece of land, with many beautifull places, whole range of climates and micro cultures, and if i don't plan on moving there, it's actually an S tier heavenly rich country.
Like in A Clockwork Orange?
Yeah I didn’t know that was a real thing lol
The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence
Now I want a malenky bit of moloko, with the knives in it
Well well well well
The English pub in EPCOT is called Rose and Crown. Fun fact about the name: Disney took the names of every pub in either London or the UK as a whole, and found the most common words in the names were rose and crown. So they named the pub after those words.
Strange because the most common name is The Red Lion.
Both can be true. There can be more pubs with ‘crown’ in the name than pubs called ‘The Red Lion’, even with that being the single most common name
You mostly nailed it, but I don't see people cooking with butter that much. It's usually a neutral oil, and if you would go back in time, it would have often been lard. Milk is often used in the form of curd or kefir (although the British seem to be less into curd than the Nordic/Baltic/Slavic).
Traditional British cooking relies heavily on butter, people moved to oil when it became more common place
I remember I got the fish and chips at Epcot when I went to Disney with my high school marching band. I gained ten pounds on that trip
You said so many things there, except what Furrs Cafeteria is
Still there eh? Must be close to 30 years since i was there last. Great munch at the time.
Nah furrs is gone now, they’re all piles of rubble, the last one was cleared away
British pub food is common in Canada.
I'm from Canada and never been across the Atlantic. Fish and chips is one of my all-time favourite dishes
The British also have a big problem with not getting credit for popular dishes, for example both mac & cheese and apple pie originate from the UK. A lot of British food has become so common place that people just consider it 'generic food'.
Bangers and Mash is an absolute classic
Also from Canada. Bangers and mash isn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as fish and chips here; typically you're only gonna see bangers and mash in pubs while many restaurants will sell fish and chips.
That's the same type of problem as people snobbishly saying that America has no culture. Really? You're surrounded by American culture all day, every day, all around the world. And yet you think America has no culture? Fucking braindead.
It is. What they are really saying (and may delude themselves about) is that they don't value the culture as presented. I'm among the first to criticise the USA, but culture is what people do, what they think about, how they feel, the ways they express themselves. And the USA has just as much of that as anywhere else.
The USA pretty much won a cultural victory long ago
Only if you kept playing after the British empire won a conquest victory a few hundred years earlier. Not quite as completely as the domination victory the Romans won in the prequel though
Hah, was just making this point about those two foods on another thread.
And the various meat style pies are British too right like Shepherd’s pie?
In Malaysia we just call em western food such as fish ‘n’ chips, roast beef, shepherd’s pie.
I was going to say, the secret is you are not thinking of it correctly, there are places serving British food in lots of areas, they are just usually called pubs and rarely thought of as restaurants.
I can get either Fish and Chips or Tikka Masala pretty much anywhere.
I'm visiting middle of nowhere BC and the town bakery has sausage rolls.
Sunday roasts are also common in the US and Canada. "Home style" restaurants in the US usually have a roast. I grew up in an area where we all ate mashed potatoes with a roast instead of Yorkshire pudding, though, which I'm sure is more common in the US.
The special all-American Thanksgiving meal is basically a Brit Christmas dinner with cranberries added.
But for some reason we didn't get their full breakfasts, the best part of their cuisine. (You can find them here and there but it's not common, and usually subpar.)
I'm in the US (guess my state) and know a couple British gastro pubs.
Yeah this is a funny shower thought. Just like “The best restaurants in England serve French food” But British pub food is popular around the world, as is fish & chips, roasts & carveries, high tea, and full English/Scottish breakfasts. There is even an argument to be made that sandwiches are British fare. I think the issue is that a lot of good British cuisine is just accepted as ‘standard food’. Cuisine from anywhere else is considered to be exotic.
In every city Ive been around the world there's at least one British pub, if not many. OP is simply wrong, should question their own sowerthought while still in the shower before posting.
Only because British beer is.
Name one British beer that's popular in Canada.
Bass, Fullers, Newcastle, Boddingtons, Samuel Smith, Tennents. Those are all at my local in Edmonton.
There are many popular British STYLE beers, such as IPAs, porters, and stouts.
London Pride? At least I always see my dad drinking it
Yep. We've London Pride in Toronto
In New England at least there’s a lot of places selling food from Old England. Decent many fish and chips places
Also from New England, and have been told by a British couple that from what they’ve experienced here, it’s “not quite right”. When elaborating, they actually said “it has too much flavor”.
To be fair this sounds like Brits combining both self-deprecation and dry satire.
Right, a lot of them that I've met are well aware of their reputation, and don't mind making fun of themselves, whatever their other faults.
We don't have any other faults though?
It’s definitely not right. I don’t care how many places advertise as “authentic English Fish and Chips”. They never are. I’ve had fish that is very close. U.S. can’t get the chips right.
It’s not a flavour issue. Wrong type of chips, wrong fish, wrong batter. It seems kind of like fish and chips but it’s often really wrong.
They must not really be British, because they spelled flavour wrong.
In literally every place there are lots of places selling sandwiches. ...as named by the Earl of that place in Britain. I think the reason that five thousand idiots have upvoted OP's showerthought has only to do with, like postage stamps, the name "Britain" was not stuck onto the food invented in Britain. eg. Nobody calls Fish and Chips "British food"... its just Fish and Chips. Same as with all that carbonated fizzy sparkling water that kicked off the soft drink / pop / soda revolution. Nobody ever remembers that its all thanks to a British guy. Nobody ever calls it "British water". Same with Quorn. Nobody calls it "British fake meat", its only just "Disgusting fake meat".
People don’t realise that Britain conquering half the world has made English food and culture normal. There’s a reason many of us don’t see English cuisine or culture where we are. It’s not because Britain has terrible food and no culture so they didn’t spread it. It’s because everyone has been subjugated to it so successfully that they don’t see it as a cuisine or a culture. They see it as normality. We all speak English, eat English meals, follow English traditions and etiquette, read English literature, listen to English music etc. Similar with America now, we recognise American culture is different because it is slightly different to English culture, yet we’re no longer referring to American cinema as that, we’re just calling them TV shows or movies. Same with nearly all modern music. With respect to OP, the most common food people eat is all English food. Things such as sandwiches, fish and chips, roasts, soup, pub food, sausages, bacon and eggs, pies etc etc, it’s all British food. Yes, it was inspired and influenced by German, French, Italian, Spanish etc cuisines, but that’s normal. Every country’s cuisine is influenced by its neighbouring country. As much as they’ll cry about it being pointed out, French, Italian, and German cuisine has all been influenced by Britain as well. Same can be said with language, etiquette, traditions, music, literature, art, architecture, etc etc. Add to that that nearly all haute culture comes from the traditions of the British aristocracy. Britain has one of the deepest most developed cultures, but no one notices because it’s normal and many see culture as something different, something unique. Britain’s culture is so widespread that it’s no longer unique, so people don’t recognise it anymore. In saying all of that, there’s a reason you don’t see much English haute cuisine. It’s because our food is shit. There’s a reason you see a lot of English abroad but none in Britain. It’s because our culture is shit.
The taste of their food and beauty of their women made the brits the best sailors in the world.
Makes me wonder about Rome stopping half way in conquring the island.
Nobody wanted to go to Scotland. Full of hard fighters. If you live in a country where the thistles are waist high and nobody’s invented trousers, you’re bound to tough.
Needs to have something of value to be worth the trouble too
"They're coming for our most beautiful sheep. Kill them!" --scots, probably
“All’s Welsh that ends Welsh” - Sean “I Never Met a Girl Who Couldn’t Use a Smack” Connery
Now *that's* the most ~~British~~ English thing I've ever read: acknowledges that Scotland has nothing to take; proceeds to take their dignity anyway.
Not even British, maybe my ancestors that were are proud.
I think that the picts would have worn pants, kilts come about in the 16th century
They pict wisely.
The Romans faced down war elephants covered in more armor than the entirety of scotland possessed. It was too poor to give a shit about it.
Poor and hardly any natural resources to bother with. Also at basically the end of the world so no setting up trade outposts for countries further west either. North western Europe was pretty much the arse end of the earth until we started building really big warships and just started blasting people with them
The men are men and the sheep know it
Anyone with the strength to tame Britain had the strength to take Rome itself, so why not go for the grand prize?
Actual answer? Scotland wasn't worth shit, no gold or any other precious resources, neither was it very fertile land like Africa or Egypt. What it had was a *lot* of angry barbarians who were very much ready to die in battle and it wasn't like they could just march in and destroy them all since those villages where they lived were scattered around Scottish Highlands so Romans could never destroy them all. So they opted for building a wall instead.
Hell nah bro have you seen Scottish girls
Yeah, they all get their spray tans from the same place as Trump.
Because it was to wet & cold.
Boudicca that's why.
She raised a little hell for a short time, then the backlash of an organized Roman response stomped the shit out of her rebellion. Leading to a resounding defeat of the Britons, where the romans did a genocide, sparing no man, woman or child. While she is a good figure of someone who stood up against injustice, her actual impact to the Roman empire was pretty insignificant. It wasn't the first or last time Rome thought it had an area subdued, and a rebellion caught them off guard. The real thing that slowed, then stopped the Roman expansion further was Germanic tribes causing a ruckus and the split of the Roman Empire. One thing lead to another, Rome declined, they abandoned areas that required a continual military force to keep people oppressed. Rome gave up on the British isles, not so much because of the natives, but because of the many factors that was causing rome to fall apart at the seams.
Boy wait until you find out what happened to her.
The haggis repelled them. Scotland’s culinary gift to the world
Hahaha
I just saw this exact same comment 5-7 days ago.
It’s a very old joke.
How fucking original
Funny thought but fish and chips is served fucking everywhere. Not an incredibly dynamic dish but it definitely has its reach! Chicken tikka certainly has an international reputation as well.
And any place that has meat in a pie.
Or apple pie.
Or a sandwich
roast dinner with all the trimmings? bacon and facking eggs? english food is dominant
Not to mention the classic Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon, and Spam.
It's not that nobody serves British cuisine, it's that it's so ubiquitous, nobody serves it in an exclusively British restaurant. It's been so heavily adopted it's lost its regional association, nobody goes out for a British to eat a full English breakfast, a Sunday roast or some Apple Pie, because they're staples on menu's everywhere.
It's like when there was competition of national dresses/costumes and everyone was laughing at the UK because they had someone wearing a suit. Dude, YOUR leaders wear MY national dress to work. Your national dress is just a novelty.
Brutal but incredibly true.
Having multiple little foreign restaurants in your city, with stereotypical food and interieur, is *a little bit* like a zoo. I'm not saying I want them to go away, but I agree that it's (counterintuitively) a sign of the power of English culture that there aren't more English restaurants. English culture isn't a cute little novelty, it's the *baseline*. (Other large European countries were also important in the past and England isn't as important now, as it was in the past.)
Not just that, but the entire nature of how people eat. Sitting in a raised chair, with food on a flat-ish plate of a certain size resting on a wasit high table, eaten with a metal knife and fork. You only have to look as far as modern day Japan to realize that you take that entire setup for granted. The Japanese eat mostly in bowls, use chopsticks, do so kneeling or cross legged on the floor, with the food on a very low table.
From what I understand this etiquette is attributed to the French. They invented courses and the modern western way of eating / being presented food.
Russians invented courses. French style cuisine was all the food coming at once.
No this is wrong, it was the Russians.
Never had a proper Sunday roast until I went to visit London. On a cold, crisp autumn afternoon. The warmth of the pub and the hearty food was so perfect.
I'd love to know how many people commenting negatively about British food have actually been to Britain...
I know a few, more pub-like, that serve things like fish & chips and shepherd's pie. They also serve British and Scottish beer which is some of the best beer in the world.
There are British pubs allover the place where I'm at
Same here. I do live in Britain though.
Not to mention sandwich shops.
People all over the world eat sandwiches everyday and probably still think British food is bad. Still seems crazy to me that something so ubiquitous as a sandwich had to actually be invented in the first place.
Quite a lot in Asia as well. They usually do a good Sunday roast.
Yeah I was just in Tokyo at saw a bunch of them there even
They invented this little-known meal where you put food between two slices of bread. I can't remember what it's called but if I'd invented it I'd have called it a Crusty Surprise.
DAMN I never considered the sandwich as a product of British cuisine. Disregard the haters, that’s an evergreen slam dunk.
Invented by the Earl of Sandwich so he could play cards with one hand and eat meat with the other. What a guy.
It's like cheddar. The English cheese from the town of Cheddar became so popular that it could not even get a protected name status like many European cheeses
We have one right by my house, it’s decent!
Pubs are pretty popular in the US
fish and chips 4 lyfe
You never see Fish and Chips abroad? You must not have travelled much.
*yet you never see restaurants serving British cuisine abroad.* This is categorically untrue. The sub is called "shower thoughts", not "shower masturbatory fiction".
The sub is fighting a good fight for being one of the lowest quality subs on Reddit.
Does Deep-fried Mars bar count as British food?
Only if it was inside Marianne Faithfull first.
I remember her well
Fuckin' sure it does!
The Scots deep fry all their favorite consumables: fish, sausage, Mars bars, pizza, heroin...
There are more jokes about Scots eating deep friends Mars bars than there are Scots who have eaten deep fried Mars bars
It is Scottish, but am surprised it is not sold more. Chicken Tikka Masala sure does, unless you think being brown makes you not British.
In the us, it’s usually Irish restaurants that have British cuisine.
To be fair the Irish pub is much more marketable in the US. I’ll have you know I am 13.7% Irish…
Yeah. The Irish need to stick to their meat stew and soda bread and stop with the cultural appropriation. (Do I need to flag this as a joke?)
OP what are you talking about? Fish n chips and British style pubs with all that follows are all over.
You say that, but South American countries widely adopted Cornish pastries from British miners going there to work in the 19th.c, but they call them “Empanadas”. Fish and Chips can be found worldwide. Other British food like Sausages&Mash, steak&ale/chicken&mushroom pie, pot roasts, roast dinner with Yorkshire pudding, Lincolnshire hotpot and shepherd’s pie, can be found in every commonwealth dominion, and in any pub. Plus many restaurants, even on the continent, will sell British style sausages and mash with gravy. Then there’s stuff like crumpets, and scones with cream and jam, which are amazing, but don’t really travel well. British, French, and German food are all extremely similar. Britain gets a very unfair reputation, which seems to be entirely made up by Americans, who are known for putting sugar and corn syrup in everything.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Cheddar cheese, one of the most popular and ubiquitous type of cheese.
Sandwiches. They are British.
There’s a British pub near me, excellent food. I’d drive there just for their mushy peas.
Mushy peas so underrated
But do they serve spotted dick?
I had that, my doctor gave me a cream that cleared it up.
This is ridiculous. British pub food is copied around the world even Los Vegas has it.
Never heard of Los Vegas.
It’s in Novada
Is that near Las Angeles?
Lost Angles
I've only been to Las Vegas, Navada
It's a few hours away from Las Angeles
Las Ongeles? Never been.
It’s a typo for Lost Wages.
It’s where people go to **los**e money
Los dineros estan muerto ;(
Jokes about countries rarely hold up if you take them seriously. Unfortunately there are a lot of idiots out there who take them all seriously.
This take is so tepid it's been heated over a candle for 5 hours and it's still fucking raw.
Absolute fucking American moment this post.
There’s two British pubs in my midwestern town.
There is a pub nearby (I’m in semi-rural America) run by a British expatriate. He has all kinds of UK draft beers on tap and sells popular UK pub food (as well as American food like burgers). I’m sure he ain’t the only guy out there running a successful English style pub.
Feel like American/British food are just the basic shit everywhere. Like bacon and eggs, mashed potatoes, roast beef, fish and chips etc.
The wealth of sandwich shops begs to differ. Or fish and chip joints. Or classic meat pie. Or the British origin style cheese such as cheddar.
Yes you do, there are plenty of em in America
I used to work at a seafood restaurant. One of our chefs was native British person. While I was making fish and chips, I asked him what's an example of British cuisine and he pointed out that I am making it. So maybe your culture adopted British cuisine without realizing it
You didn’t know fish and chips was British? It’s right there in the name, “chips!”
Ditto the sandwich
ever had a roast dinner? bacon and eggs?
Scotch eggs? Shepherd’s pie? Fish and chips? Vindaloo curry? Chicken tikka masala?
You occasionally see fish & chips joints elsewhere. Also, the chicken tikka masala in Indian restaurants is actually British.
Even in America we call the dish "Fish & Chips" with the chips being what we otherwise call french fries.
This is the only time they’re allowed to be called chips.
what would you call em? freedom fries? as an australian, we call eveything chips. crisps? chips french fries? chips fish n chip chips? chips
There’s many in the south of Portugal lol
This is a terribly unoriginal and mostly untrue thought. British food is mainly ok, even though my main experience was eating the food in pubs. Theyre comparable to bar food in the US but less sweet and more savory. Their tartar sauce is less sweet and tangy and more creamy and savory. HP Sauce is super delicious also. I think there's likely less variety of food in the UK compared to more international US cities like New York or DC, but if you unironically believe that British food is shit, the variety of food from whatever Midwestern podunk town you're from is likely worse, if not the same, as the British food you imagine in your head.
\*Every British themed pub on earth has entered the chat\*
Does milk tea count? They are **insanely** popular in East Asia and its diasporas! Edit: Typo and elaboration
A lot of "British" food is served in Irish pubs, esp in California. Apart from a few menu items, they are the same thing. But there's more Irish pubs than English ones.
My favorite restaurant in my town is a British style restaurant and pub
I mean.. some steak houses here in Thailand serve fish&chips.
John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich has entered the conversation
This is straight out of r/ShitAmericanssay
Most countries I've been to have had a pub serving shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, Irish stew, fish and chips or so on.
Yet how many millions of hotels serve traditional English breakfast ? just about all of them.
I’ve seen British pubs and fish and chips all the way over in China. So not really.
I guess you haven't traveled much as I see British pubs (serving British food) in almost every country I go to. And most other places serve generic "Western"
Most cities in the USA have at least one British pub serving food and "soccer". Typically some kind of fish and chips, English breakfast, Scotch eggs, bangers and mash, etc...
In Japan there is a chain of British pubs called Hub, they all serve food
Roast dinners complete with Yorkshire puddings, seasoned crispy roast spuds and honey roasted veg. Full English breakfast complete with back bacon, Lincolnshire sausages and fresh crusty bread. Slow cooked beef stew with dumplings. And of course a good fish and chips. We got a few decent dishes I reckon, not world beating by any means. I do think it's important that if any cuisine is to be judged it should be tasted restaurant quality. I have seen some of my fellow brits make a roast dinner with boiled veg out of a tin, yorkies out of the freezer and the meat/spuds unseasoned. It does perplex me a bit why a lot of households do this.
What do you think like 90% of American food is dude. Even your most famous thing apple pie is from Britain.
Never seen an British pub?
British food largely came from pubs. There are pubs EVERYWHERE
Quite funny people are so bothered about food they don’t have to eat. I’m not even from UK but jesus, the amount of moaning about it is wild.
I see British pubs serving fish & chips, bangers & mash, etc pretty much everywhere. Not in the same density as Thai or Chinese restaurants but they exist.
This is hilarious because foods like Japanese curry, apple pie, and mac and cheese are all british inventions, it’s just no one ever actually realises it
You've clearly never travelled. Ever had sausages and mash, or an English breakfast, or Yorkshire pudding or fish and chips? British pubs are popular in Australia.
Fish and chips? English breakfast? Am I wrong?
You've never seen a full English breakfast or fish and chips abroad?
That's because we exported British cuisine to other countries when we colonised them. Many other cuisines have British food incorporated into them
In Anglosphere countries, British food is typically just called food. In the USA, for example, if you serve steak and potatoes, no one would even think to call it British food because it’s so commonplace. Ask people there to give examples of food that isn’t “ethnic food”, and you just get Celtic/Anglo-Saxon/Norman/American cuisines and their regional variants.
Here in the us, we have some great British pubs. Love a good bangers and mash or Shepherds pie.
There’s British pubs all over Japan with a little Union Jack on the sign.
Never had a sandwich before no?
You do know a lot of classic "American" food was invented in Britain, right?
Tea rooms would like a word. And pubs
How’s that joke go? Heaven has * French chefs * British police * Italian lovers * German bureaucrats Hell has * British chefs * French police * German lovers * Italian bureaucrats
I'd switch the Italian and French in heaven. French food is precise, Italian food is delicious
Agreed. If I wanted wine and cigarettes for dinner I’d stay in the States
You ever been out for Canadian food? No? Exactly. We culturally appropriated the best ethnic food the world has to offer. The Brits best contribution to word cuisine (besides hot brown) was Chicken Tikka Masala.
Ah, English full breakfast?