best food from Orwell's "In Defense of English Cooking"

new potatoes are actually best eaten cold the next day

challops like a fucking firehose itt

this is england, where we eat what we want

I can see how it's theoretically possible for new potatoes to be nice, but I just associate them with disgusting school dinners/canteen food and undercooked/green/mouldy potatoes so would never choose to eat them if there was any other option available.

what i'm hearing here is that we need an 'ILX DECIDES THE BEST POTATO' poll

too hard, for example

good chips > good roasties

but mediocre roasties are way > than mediocre chips

what i'm hearing here is that we need a multi-stage, forensically detailed 'ILX DECIDES THE BEST POTATO' poll

yes we can do this

it's a feel bad topic for me because even tho potatoes are basically my favourite food and i celebrate them in all forms, as a vegetarian i can't claim full expertise due to necessarily limited experience of roasters

aw dude :(

I cook my roasties in olive oil more often than not and it works great

the key is parboiling first

yeah and shaking the pot to scuff them after the boil. you defo don't need animal fat to make great roast potatoes.

in my greengrocing days we had a prolonged quest trying to find the ideal potato for a fussy michelin star-toting chef. for weeks we brought him many varieties which were pooh-poohed but he was finally satisfied with yukon gold

saves us all having our own opinions

new potatoes are delicious served with green beans and shovels of butter

i am v happy with non-animal fat roast potatoes of course but most ppl are gonna say that animal fat ones are better

i mean, chips as well, but here we enter greyer territory in my personal approach to vegetarianism

Want to try that, thanks.
I voted for dark plum cake which I've never had, but sounds fab!
Good to know English cooking got better in the 70s; why then?
new potatoes in the English way Oh wtf does this mean? Sounds like something O'Brien would show to Winston.

i am holding off my various bids for worst potato on this thread as i don't wish to obscure the work the gizzard pizza has been doing

(they were all served at the school mentioned above: they were beyond belief)

"Want to try"parboiled potatoes in olive oil, I meant.

the great kathmandu in didsbury seems to roast potatoes in a marmite-coloured chilli sludge and they are incredible

what is a potato

can't believe i have never thought to combine potatoes and marmite. seems so obvious.

Gizzard pizza might be good depending on what cheese. Chicken gizzards are like chicken livers, but chewier. Even supermarket tomatoes taste better if I don't refrig.

roast sweet potato wedges with marmite are also delicious

no fish pie and no full breakfast fuck this list

what is a potato

a miserable little pile of secrets iirc

refrige

Good to know English cooking got better in the 70s; why then?

in the early stages (50s/60s) a mix of cultural pressure from the likes of raymond postgate (see above) and elizabeth david (ditto), cheap availability of much better produce flown in from round the world (also via entering the european community), to service higher-end supermarkets from america on the safeway model (this sounds counter-intuitive but i think it's an element)

also -- tho i don't know so much abt this -- changes in how home economics (usually called domestic science) in the uk was taught, and a huge improvement in catering courses at polytechnics etc

latterly i think good and v popular TV shows that promoted it as kind of fun (starting with the galloping gourmet and keith floyd)

taste's very strange!

i'm v much enjoying mark s' lessons in the history of british gastronomy itt

now back to making castlevania jokes about potatoes

was the "full english breakfast" actually established as such -- in its canonic modern form -- in 1945? all the sites i'm looking at have a ton of blather abt "grand british tradition" but then they're very coy abt when it actually coalesced into the selection we'd recognise… 19th century fancy breakfast for posh people was more of a buffet sideboard of dishes inc.cold cuts from the night before, which did routinely include many of the GBT classics (but not necessarily at every breakfast, it wd vary w/kedgeree, kidneys etc)

(baked beans were an expensive delicacy for the first few decades -- you got them at fortnum and masons in the 1890s -- though the ministry of food had declared them an "essential" by the 1940s)

I think package holidays to Europe also changed British tastes: first mouthfuls of pasta, moussaka, paella etc made people want to attempt recreations at home. And it became a Middle Class Thing to serve foreign muck at your dinner parties together with a bottle of plonk encased in straw.

taste's very strange!

thanks for reminding me of this: http://gawker.com/this-probably-made-up-reddit-story-about-a-potato-is-in-1696895697

actually mrs beeton's list of options (1861) does cover much of FEB/GBT territory (bacon, sausage, eggs -- though interestingly not fried eggs -- toast butter and marmalade), but it also provides for a lot of fish options (mackerel, whiting, herrings, dried haddock), plus mutton chops and rump-steak, and kidneys (plus the cold cuts and cold pies, which she lists first)

you'd only get *all* these as choices in a hotel i'm guessing, and you only piled them all onto one dish if you were attempting an all-you-can-eat bet

oh wait, oeuf au plat is fried eggs, so they are in there

<3 I've found my thread

mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint mint
sauce not jelly obv

can't choose between crumpets and roasties

when did Brits start using oil to fry food? I was wondering this the other day. Like, have they always used things like vegetable oil? is olive oil a relatively new thing for the UK? or did they use animal fats and butter for most cooking?

love mint jelly. like LocalGarda with his bread sauce, it was part of my upbringing

until the 60s you'd mostly fry stuff in blocks of lard (which is animal-based cooking fat)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o9LWUU1Etvk/TxkJyaCgKjI/AAAAAAAACO0/GbJGSBw7aR4/s1600/Trex.jpg

my wife loves to talk about her granny frying chips in lard in their designated chip pan.

more i look at this list, i wonder if all my favorites are modern inventions --
pasties? pork pies? steak & kidney pies? sausage rolls?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco

^^^a solid block ("shortening") until the 60s, when they started marketing a bottled version

My People Were Fair and Had Lard in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Use Oil and not Cows

olive oil traded in the med in all of recorded history, but i doubt it was in widespread use in britain before the 70s (also you can't really use to it cook things that need get very hot as it turns bitter)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil#History_and_trade

I know an (Italian owned) old skool chippie in Ayrshire which fries the chips in olive oil, which is quite the achievement because olive oil doesn't get as hot as your trad Brit frying fats.

from memory i associate vegetable oil with shopping in supermarkets in the 70s rather than eg cornershops or grocers, and feel that's it when arrived and began selling in the UK in largeish amounts with e.g. safeway in the mid-60s (bcz they could keep the prices a bit via economies of scale)

lol len deighton in his "action cook book" (1965) says of olive oil "it is expensive and not easy to find (ask the best wine-merchant you know for details)" -- he then mentions all the other oils (sunflower, peanut etc) , so they clearly were available and not quite as pricey, but in his table of burning temperatures he is careful also to list beef suet and lard also

also

my parents remind me at least once a year that in their youth they cld only buy olive oil in tiny bottles from the chemists

all the pastry biz ian mentions was around before the 50s, perhaps excluded by orwell on the basis that it's more snack/lunch type baking than Proper Cooking?