/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>11154684
Pic related shows what the English were actually eating during the war. This takes into account undersupplying. Obviously you cannot ration something that you don't even have because of lack of supply.

And as was posted much earlier in the thread, the idea of war rationing having anything to do with this is nonsense, given that Beeton (and others) wrote about it in the 1850's. That's nearly a hundred years BEFORE WWII.

>>11126962
Why does this myth refuse to die?

>>upper class food was loaded with seasonings and ingredients from the colonies
Nonsense. Refer to Mrs. Beeton's for example. That book contains recipes for the upper class, yet the seasonings are virtually non-extant. A dish that serves 12 people might call for a single teaspoon of spices. Those spices which are called for are pretty much the same thing in nearly every recipe: walnut ketchup, mushroom ketchup, salt, pepper, and mace. Oh, and Harvey's sauce. Harveys sauce and mushroom ketchup fucking everywhere. If you have those you can make nearly any recipe in the whole damn book. Mrs. Beeton's also specifically references the "abysmal reputation of British cuisine abroad", and yet this was decades BEFORE even WWI, let alone WWII.

As for rationing: I'm sure it did have an impact on British cuisine, but that's hardly an excuse. The French had it far worse than the Brits did, and their cuisine didn't sustain such a blow to its reputation, pic related.

>>10937528
Sure, but I'd say that has more to do with his writing style than anything else. He could probably describe a freshly dropped turd and make it sound appealing. Granted it's been years since I read Dickens, but I don't recall him comparing British food to any other nation.

Beeton specifically discusses the "Abysmal reputation of British food abroad" (her words, not mine).

BTW, I'm not putting the food down. I love a lot of British stuff. But at the same time I find the poor reputation of that food to be fascinating, especially since most of the explanations are obviously incorrect. Most of the time I see this discussed people just throw out muh war rationing, and that clearly can't be the case given that the reputation predates even WWI by decades (at least...Beeton's is simply the earliest reference I found), and various other nations got fucked much harder by rationing than the Brits did, and their cuisine reputation didn't suffer.

>>7764180
>Britain however, took a tumble at the beginning of the 20th Century though, what with the Boer Wars, the world wars and subsequent rationing,etc.

That's often repeated but in my opinion it's simply not true.

1) British cuisine had a poor reputation well before those wars. Mrs. Beeton's--a very well known English cookbook from the 1860s--discusses the poor reputation of English cooking, and that pre-dates even the Boer wars by several decades.

2) A great many countries suffered though wartime rationing and there was not anywhere near as much of an impact on their cuisine. Heck, France had worse rationing than the English had and yet they still managed to hang on to their reputation for excellent cooking.

>>7687061

this piqued my interest so I did a bit of research online. turns out the data is all there, it just takes some digging to find it.

looks like the French got fucked far worse than the Brits did, except for sugar.