English food – The honest part

To be fair to English cuisine from the start, as a non-resident, it would be easy to point the finger at the English in order to slag about their cuisine, but it would not be fair.

Because if you consider what grows in my home country:

•   between the emaciated coal mines of the Ruhr area in the west;
•   the more southerly climes where in the year 1516 only water, hops and malt were mentioned, to be part of the only lasting export hit of the German diet: beer;
•   and the fields of the north-eastern marshlands at the Baltic coast.

Nothing grows except a few types of grain, cabbage, potatoes, and turnips. Altogether, not much more than sauerkraut and turnips, hops and water! Ok water doesn’t grow – but beer needs some fluid! 🙂

And the English food?

On the late afternoon outbound flight to England, sitting in the tourist class, we had the pleasure of being served a cake. My girlfriend had a cake with beamy dark blue icing; mine was one with glossy green lime-coloured icing. It tasted delicious, but why the heck would you colour your food with signal colour, which signals: DO! NOT! EAT! ME! – This substantiates my claims about English food: avoid it!

Avoiding English food is simple:

Just do not eat it if you do not have to! And I didn’t have to, did I? I did not subscribe to anything to do so. For breakfast in our hotel, there was a continental breakfast. Actually, it was a buffet breakfast or brunch or whatever you call it. Doing supper in London, I remember one Indian restaurant, one Greek restaurant, and a Jewish restaurant we had entered for the first time in my life, and all was wonderful.Life is like a box of chocolates. You should look every time where it came from!

Nevertheless, we arrived at Southend-on-Sea at the pier restaurant. I had to succumb to English food.

Well, the two of us stood in front of the lunch buffet, a little perplexed, staring at fried squares, slightly darker fried rectangles, round, oblong fried blobby things and fried things in all sorts of colours and shapes. There were cooked potatoes, fried potatoes, rice and some variety of vegetables and salad. Maybe the coffee beans were roasted, who knows..but I’m not sure about this yet.

Probably because we looked a bit perplexed for too long, a very friendly waitress joined us, pointed to the different fried shapes, explained what all this used to be when it was alive, and cried for help not to get fried. I grabbed the fried fish and some side dishes; it was very fine for me.

To be honest and not only be just polite, but I can also tell you here, I had never eaten any food in England that doesn’t sound familiar to me! The reason is maybe I am such a coward. My girlfriend isn’t – she is more adventurous! She tried some food she never heard of and perhaps never would, but she did!

She loved the Guinness as an evening drink, but then again – that is a drink from Ireland…

English food – The fantasy part

Years after this journey to England, I read a story about THIS:

22 Countries Great Britain did not invade!

https://katapult-magazin.de/de/artikel/laender-in-die-grossbritannien-nicht-einmarschiert-ist

I sent this to a friend, who claimed: I should not believe all things on the internet! Ok, 2 x Click-clack – copy/paste the name “Stuart Laycock” and “Voila!” a book was showed on amazon about him and this story. Ok, you can fake it too, advertise a non-existent book online, and do not sell any copies because it is allegedly “sold-out“. However, who am I for having to prove it?

Historian Stuart Laycock: All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To

With reading this online article about the 22 countries, Great Britain did not invade ever, a puzzle jointed in, piece for piece, and unveiled a century-old mystery:

Why did England subjugate so many countries?

My conclusion of all this: the young boys preferred going on years of life-threatening high seas journeys, peril malaria, chickenpox, cannibalism, and agonising scurvy. The distraught English boys were looting, pillaging, and plundering half of the world for only one understandable reason that comes to my mind:

To get away from the homelike dishes they had to suffer and to look into every foreign pot to get better food!

Does this sound plausible? If so, we can say we are lucky that the Hungarians can cook so well! Why? Because if the Hungarians would have subjugated the half-world, we all must have learned things like this in school:

,,Sokkal finomabbak az ételeitek, mint otthon! Adjatok még belőle!" 
("Your food tastes better than home. Give me more of it!") 
Hungarian is probably the most difficult language to learn in Europe.

>>See also: London by car