Davis being a college town, the choices were either sports-bar burger joints, Chinese takeout and pizza, (which is very good there,)

This, I take it, was after Professor’s went out of business? Steve’s and Woodstock’s were fairly good but pricey for the average student. The Blue Mango was pub to go to. Excellent beer and salsa.

I think the problem is that as a visitor/tourist you just don’t know where the good places to eat are, and secondly you eat 90% of your meals in restaurants rather than cooking at home. So Brits come back from the US with a few extra pounds and Americans come back from the UK with a few extra pounds.

The lesson? Most restaurant food is made to [make a profit and] taste nice, not necessarily to be good for you.

And, Phil, the Bangers and Mash at the TAM Saturday evening event were really really poor quality. I hope you found some better ones in your other meals!

And then there is the crowning glory of British cuisine, the cheeses! Stilton, real Cheddar from the Cheddar Valley, Cheshire – I could go on…The French only THINK they know how to make cheese. Bah!

Sadly, there is very little recognition of British cheese, even within Britain. I blame the supermarkets – they stock a limited range of pre-packaged, processed cheeses that often aren’t as good as the proper fresh cheese that they are supposed to be.

I find it hard to pinpoint a favourite English cheese, since there are so many and I have had the opportunity to try so few. All I can suggest is to refer the reader to the Monty Python cheese shop sketch for a mere hint of the diversity of cheese that is produced.

As to brewing, while American brewers have come a long way, the one often imitated, never duplicated, glory is Irish, and I mean Guinness on draft (If I have to specify Guinness stout, you’re not a beer lover.).

I take issue with you here. Point 1: Murphy’s. Point 2: Maclay’s Oatmeal Stout. I rest my case.

Let me suggest mushy peas (a specialty of the Northwest, often served with fish and chips).

Nay! Mushy peas are also ubiquitous in Yorkshire and the North-east.

And, IIUC, they are a different species of pea from your normal garden peas. They naturally go colourless and mushy when cooked, and the final stage of the preparation (which I also cannot remember) changes their colour to that vivid green.

Someone once said that he who wishes to eat three meals a day in England should eat
breakfast 3 times. There’s something to that, although I couldn’t eat a full English
breakfast regularly (but do enjoy one occasionally).

Vegetables are rare, true, but there are many vegetarians, and they know where to get
them.

I once knew an English vegetarian who ended up in a steakhouse in New Mexico. After
explaining that he was a vegetarian, they brought him chicken! All a question of
perspective.

Being from Cardiff and a gentle stroll from the Cowbridge Road shop I know them well. Probably the best pie I’ve ever had! Been going since the very early 1900′s and still family owned and run. Miss them since emigrating to Australia, though luckily in Melbourne there’s plenty of great food from all around the world to make up for it.

I must confess that I do like German pilsner, but it’s not always as good as the pilsner from Plzen (in the Czech Republic), which is where pilsner originated. Starobrno is another good pivo (very roughly, “standard beer”).

But Weissbier (or Weizenbier, because it is almost always made from wheat instead of barley) is most excellent. And my fave Weizenbier has a wonderful name, too: Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen.

However, if you’re discussing German beers you must at least mention altbier, which is scrumptious.

100% agree. Schöfferhofer is really good, although their ad-campaign is terrible. Erdinger Weißbier is also really, really good!
If we mention Altbier, we should also mention “Kölsch” (which is, for obvious reasons, only made and selled in Cologne). The problem with this is, that it tastes like water with a small drop of pilsener.
And for those adventure-holiday-fans: If you really want to get in trouble, then visit Cologne during the carnival-season (in February, normally), order an “Alt” and scream “Hellau” – you will be in SERIOUS trouble. The only thing you can do then is: RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

But that said it still doesn’t hold a candle to what you can get on the continent. It is close to impossible to get bad food in France or Italy. Even the Germans (not known as great chefs) I think have some great stuff.

I like being an American but I wish we had a food culture like they do in Europe.

BTW – England’s PG Tips is the best tea on the planet. Workman’s tea. Love it.

Most people in the UK are not big on frying with animal fats. Sunflower & olive oil are ubiquitous.

True, but not as ubiquitous as rapeseed oil (most commonly sold as “vegetable oil”, and at one point was famously cheaper per unit volume than diesel and just as good for fuelling a diesel engine).

The rail system in the UK cannot be relied upon to get you from London to Birmingham without having to transfer to a bus to take you part of the journey due to rail repairs, let alone London to Scotland.

Quite right. I have used the “sleeper” from Scotland to London on a couple of occasions and it was not good, even if it wasn’t particularly late.

I think earlier in the thread someone commented that you could do Scotland as a day trip from London. Well, this is technically possible, but it will be about 5 hours each way (sauf imprévu!) and you can only visit either Edinburgh or Glasgow this way and you won’t have much time for actually doing anything while you’re there.

(I was jobhunting a few years ago and this involved a couple of train journeys from Gloucester to Glasgow or Edinburgh for interviews, and the train scheduling did not allow enough time in between arriving and having to depart to be able to do that in a day).

Look on the ingredients of most cans of pop (soda) & glucose-fructose syrup is usually the sweetner.

Er, no. First one after “carbonated water” is usually “sucrose”.

I could overlook this though if it wasn’t for the beer slurs: Bud is the same relatively bland beer the world over – the way its served makes most difference (on tap or from a bottle). UK macrobeer is the same lowest common denominator muck as the US macrobeer mostly – it cannot beat almost all microbrews – UK or US. Try a Sam Adams lager (to pick a relatively common US lager with flavour available in the UK) or anything from Brooklyn Brewery or Sierra Nevada breweries & you will see that the US microbrew scene is every bit as good as ours in the UK.

Well, I can’t comment on the US microbrewery stuff, but I disagree about the UK macro stuff. True, lager brewed in the UK is terrible, but there are other beers that are large-scale brewed and are perfectly acceptable. Boddingtons, Newcastle Brown Ale, Caledonian 80/ and Tetley bitter and all macro-brewery products that are better than the imported US beers.

BA – pub food isn’t big on veg, it doesn’t sell as well as full fat, high sugar items. Unless you go to a restaurant, you will get garnish, not veg.

Not universally so; it largely depends on the pub.

At some “foody” pubs you actually do get a decent portion of vegetables or salad with your main meals (of which a fine example is The Green Tree in Tudhoe Village, which was briefly seen on the Kim Cattrall episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?”). At others, you are better off ordering a side salad or a side order of veg to get your greens, but they are available.

My then-girlfriend took a trip to England when I was in High School. Apparently the food there was so bad that she came back with an irresistable craving for Taco Bell or McDonalds or anything with some flavor, despite having never been a fan of fast food before.

Wow! How utterly bizarre!

We have McDonalds here (have since about 1980) and I can confidently state that I’ve had better food in about 19 out of every 20 pubs in which I have eaten.

While it is true that eating out in the UK in the 1970s left one with a limited choice (“greasy spoon”-style caff where eveything is fried; or chicken-and-chips in a pub; or a pretntious restaurant), this has changed dramatically since then.

Ahh, were it not for the weather, my husband and I would live there. A wonderful place!

Hey! What’s wrong with our weather?

Where else can you get such a mild climate at 50 – 56 °N?

Drinks also depend on the region: In Prussia (northern part of Germany) you should try the many types of “Pils”. In Bavaria it is of course the famous (and, as I think, better) “Weißbier”.

I must confess that I do like German pilsner, but it’s not always as good as the pilsner from Plzen (in the Czech Republic), which is where pilsner originated. Starobrno is another good pivo (very roughly, “standard beer”).

But Weissbier (or Weizenbier, because it is almost always made from wheat instead of barley) is most excellent. And my fave Weizenbier has a wonderful name, too: Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen.

However, if you’re discussing German beers you must at least mention altbier, which is scrumptious.

Among the great delights of British cooking:

Puddings (see my comment 61 above)
Pies: Steak and kidney (pie or pudding, preferably with ale or Guinness-based stock), or chicken and leek, for example. The Melton Mowbray pork pie is a special example of the breed… Eat in small amounts to avoid heart attacks.
Roast chicken, stuffed, with all the trimmings – roast potatoes, steamed cauliflower/broccoli/sprouts/peas/carrots…
Haggis – yes, really! McSweens are the best commonly available. Serve with bashed neeps and tatties. If you like a good sausage, you will definitely enjoy this treat. (But do get the right haggis…)
Cornish pasties, of course… West Cornwall Pasty Shop offerings are the best commonly available around the UK. Avoid Ginsters unless you’re not feeling too choosy! Bears the same relationship to a good pasty as a Big Mac bears to a good burger. Er, actually somewhat better than that, the pasty actually has some flavour!
Deep-fried fish and chips – best flavour comes from being cooked in beef dripping. There are good examples around – the best one I found was from Rick Stein’s place in Padstow, Cornwall. Most examples are fairly poor on the cooking quality, I must admit.
A clotted cream tea – scones (preferably hand-made), strawberry jam and clotted cream. Serve with a proper pot of tea.
Toad in the hole – sausages (good quality!) cooked in Yorkshire pudding, served with caramelised onion gravy.
Cheeses – of course, the UK has excellent and often eccentric cheeses. Only the British could come up with something like Stinking Bishop – a real, and excellent, cheese, famous for a brief appearance in a Wallace and Gromit feature… Ah yes, blessed are the cheesemakers…

Oh, and breakfasts: Yes, the full English. With good quality (grilled) sausage, black pudding (pretty much identical, I found, to the German Blutwurst), fried or scrambled eggs, a slice of fried bread, tomato, mushrooms, or a subset of these. Sometimes with beans. Eat only occasionally!

Done right, British cooking is excellent. Don’t let the cheaper offerings put you off…

Seriously, chocolate is one of the very few things in which the UK still leads the world. The EU once tried – I kid you not! – to ban our chocolate and force everyone to make it to the Belgian recipe instead. The official reason was some BS about “standardisation”; the real reason was sour grapes because ours is better than everyone else’s.

I think this deserves some clarification:

The EU tried to get Cadbury’s Dairy Milk rebranded as something other than chocolate. This is because it only contains 20% cocoa solids, and many of our neighbours believe that chocolate should contain more than a certain minimum quantity of cocoa solids. I am sure it is mere coincidence that this chosen level excluded CDM but included all of the widely-sold Beligian, Swiss and French brands.

When I was in Florence a few years ago, I bought a bar of chocolate that was 100% cocoa solids. It had no sugar in it at all (and so was suitable for diabetics!!) and it was . . . a tad bitter (but very wonderful).

We seem to use more fat and less sugar compared to the States in my experience. Americans seem to have an ability to put corn syrup in anything.

I gained five pounds during my trip to the UK, between lager and food.

Lager? LAGER?????!!!

Why did you drink lager in the UK? Compared with continental Europe, our lager is rubbish. (Although, to be fair, most of it is still better than the imported American beers we get.)

And why did you come to the UK and drink lager? When we have the finest selection of ales in the world?

Not to mention that even the dodgiest pub will give you ice and a slice of lemon as standard in your coke unless you ask otherwise.

And it is all too common to get a glassful of ice with some Coke splashed over it. I hate that. Especially in the colder half of the year.

Dr BA, where did you go that the Coke was not automatically served at 0 °C?

Ugh, ick, English food…

English do many awesome things, but cooking certainly isn’t one of them!

And yet we have many fine restaurants that are Michelin star-rated. Are you saying the French don’t know about food, or could it be that you had a bad experience that is atypical?