Naa, need to vent this. 🍵
English breakfast is an embarrassment.
How do you invade the majority of global counties and build a 1000-year-old empire and end up with such blandness.
I mean, the British Museum seems to know a thing or two about pillaging culture … where is it in the food?!
English breakfast (in its more aristocratic variants) used to involve kedgeree and devilled kidneys, again imperial, though more hybrids than loans/takings.
Your “typical” English breakfast is more shaped by cost and its function as fuel for manual work than any alleged attachment to being “bland”. And then of course we have TEA, with sugar. (Sathnam Sangera’s recent podcast series on tea is excellent).
neither bacon nor Cumberland sausages are bland! American "yo Brit food so awful, I much prefer Irish food" Twitter seems to work off the completely screwed premise that the only two tastes in the world are chilli pepper and bland ...
Like, spicy from Europe or China or elsewhere?
I vaguely recall using some powdered mustard that I wanna say was complementary to Chinese foods. It was hot stuff. I never could dilute enough to make it not hot
And spicy, brown mustard seems legit but you mean spicier than that?
Spicy, elitist hot?
💯 agree. There’s nothing quite like not being able to stop yourself using too much because you know what’s going to happen but why not 🥵🔥😋
Sadly Colmans/most other English mustards contains wheat so I was in a Dijon-only void for a while but recently found out M&S do a GF one which slaps 😋
I would underline that mustard is grown in England (as across Northern Europe), and has been since the C13th, so goes against the idea that the only “spicy” English flavours originate in post-imperial cuisine. And you get interesting mustards from England, France and Germany (and beyond).
A great read about these things is Paul Freedman’s Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. The “blandness” is a modern phenomenon, really.
I have witnessed more than one visiting American VIP from head office merrily slapping the Colman's on his burger, brushing off the "go easy it's a bit strong" because everyone knows how bland British food is, and getting a bit of a surprise on the first bite.
