ATESTAT LA LIMBA ENGLEZ

Candidat: Polocoer Oana

Profesor coordonator: Buliga Mihaela

2013-2014
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British cuisine

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."
-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Tabel of contents:
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 4 A BRIEF HISTORY ..................................................................................................................... 5 BRITISH REGIONAL CUISINE ................................................................................................ 6 TRADITIONAL CUISINE ........................................................................................................... 7 BASIC INGREDIENTS ....................................................................................................................... 7 THE SUNDAYS ROAST DINNER ...................................................................................................... 7 BLACK PUDDING: ........................................................................................................................... 8 REGIONAL BRITISH MEALS ................................................................................................ 13 BREAKFAST ................................................................................................................................... 14 DINNER .......................................................................................................................................... 15 HIGH TEA....................................................................................................................................... 16 PERSONAL CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 17 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 18

Introduction
British cuisine has carved a niche for itself in the hearts of food connoisseurs all over the world. British food has evolved considerably incorporating the cooking styles and cuisines of other countries yet at the same time retaining its originality. Each region of Britain has it own characteristic culinary traditions that have played a major role in enriching the history of British cuisine. For instance, the pork pies have been identified with the culinary customs of the shires, whereas in Cornwall, the pasty constituted an important part of lunch of the workers. Some cuisines in Britain although associated with particular localities have attained a national recognition, like the very famous Yorkshire pudding. A great part of my spare time, I have spent it watching Jamie Olivers TV shows about preparing traditional British dishes. Because of that, when I saw this task I decided to chose it to find more information about food in United Kingdom and offer the opportunity for others to find out new information. To emphasize my way of thinking I consider that I have chosen the subject British food because had always been captivated by the flavor of any dish that exists and I have been interested in anything that has to do with Great Britain. Also, I consider that the food is subject with a major importance and this is not only because if you do not eat properly you cannot have a healthy life but also because food is the support of everything that lives around us. Another controversial aspect that make me chosen this subject is the way that British food had been influenced in history by others way of cooking. Remarkable is the fact that the GB is a place where food and meals are an important part of people lives. In the first place Britain is a country where everyone respects the time of a meal, and of course everyone eats or tries to eat at the certain time. Secondly people of this part of the world consider food to be an important part of any event of festival. This is not only because food is indispensable but, also because an event or a feast that has a little of everything brings people together. All in all, the utmost aspect which made me chosen this subject was the fact that I love cooking and I love learning new things about food. In conclusion I believe that food is the most important thing in life because without it we cannot live but be careful: EAT TO LIVE, DO NOT LIVE TO EAT!!(AnthelmeBrillat- Savarin )

A brief history
Whenever people visit the British Isles, they just cannot get over the wonderful taste of British cuisine. Although it has been the subject of much ridicule from its European counterparts, British cuisine has one of the longest histories besides being a great dining experience. Some of the finest restaurants in the world serve British cuisine. With the increasing diversity of the population, many new cultures and influences have penetrated the preparation of British food in the country. Unfortunately a great deal of damage was done to British cuisine during the two world wars. Britain is an island and supplies of many goods became short. The war effort used up goods and services and so less were left over for private people to consume. Ships importing food stuffs had to travel in convoys and so they could make fewer journeys. During the second world war food rationing began in January 1940 and was lifted only gradually after the war. The British tradition of stews, pies and breads, according to the taste buds of the rest of the world, went into terminal decline. What was best in England was only that which showed the influence of France, and so English food let itself become a gastronomic joke and the French art of Nouvell Cuisine was adopted.

British regional cuisine

In the late 1980's, British cuisine started to look for a new direction. Disenchanted with the overblown (and undernourished) Nouvelle Cuisine, chefs began to look a little closer to home for inspiration. Calling on a rich (and largely ignored) tradition, and utilising many diverse and interesting ingredients, the basis was formed for what is now known as modern British food. Game has enjoyed resurgence in popularity although it always had a central role in the British diet, which reflects both the abundant richness of the forests and streams and an old aristocratic prejudice against butchered meats. In London especially, one can not only experiment with the best of British, but the best of the world as there are many distinct ethnic cuisines to sample, Chinese, Indian, Italian and Greek restaurants are amongst the most popular. Although some traditional dishes such as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Cornish pasties, steak and kidney pie, bread and butter pudding, treacle tart, spotted dick or fish and chips, remain popular, there has been a significant shift in eating habits in Britain. Rice and pasta have accounted for the decrease in potato consumption and the consumption of meat has also fallen. Vegetable and salad oils have largely replaced the use of butter. Roast beef is still the national culinary pride. It is called a "joint," and is served at midday on Sunday with roasted potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, two vegetables, a good strong horseradish, gravy, and mustard. Today there is more emphasis on fine, fresh ingredients in the better restaurants and markets in the UK offer food items from all over the world. Salmon, Dover sole, exotic fruit, Norwegian prawns and New Zealand lamb are choice items. Wild fowl and game are other specialties on offer. In fact fish is still important to the English diet, we are after all an island surrounded by some of the richest fishing areas of the world. Many species swim in the cold offshore waters: sole, haddock, hake, plaice, cod (the most popular choice for fish and chips), turbot, halibut, mullet and John Dory. Oily fishes also abound (mackerel, pilchards, and herring) as do crustaceans like lobster and oysters. Eel, also common, is cooked into a wonderful pie with lemon, parsley, and shallots, all topped with puff pastry.

Traditional cuisine
Basic ingredients Meat The British people consume regularly all types of meat: pork, rabbits or some wild bird species. All of these may be served in restaurants, but, also, fish (salmon, cod, trout) is present. Vegetables- potato is the basic vegetable in Britain, used since the earliest times, when it was the principal food for poor families, then following cucumbers, cabbage, onions, peas. Fruit - mainly apples grown throughout the country, but also berries, which grow smoothly thanks to the cooler climate

Traditional meal is rarely eaten nowadays, apart from Sundays. A recent survey has proved that most people in Britain eat curry! Rice or pasta dishes are now favoured as a British Dinner. The Sundays Roast Dinner Sunday lunch time is a typical time to eat the traditional Sunday Roast. Traditionally, it consists of roast meat (cooked in the oven for about two hours) two different kind of vegetables and potatoes with a Yorkshire pudding. The most common meats consumed are beef, lamb or pork, chicken is also popular. Beef is eaten with hot horseradish sauce, pork with sweet apple sauce and lamb with green mint sauce. Gravy is poured over the meat. The tradition has survived because the meat can be put in the oven to roast before the family goes to church and be ready to eat when they return.

Beefsteak, Oyster, and Kidney Pudding: Oysters may seem unlikely in this meat pudding, but their great abundance in the Victorian age and earlier eras inspired cooks to find ways to incorporate them creatively in many different recipes. This steamed pudding combines the meats with mushrooms, onions, tomatoes, and Worcestershire, then wraps the whole in a suet pastry. Black Pudding: invented in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis black pudding is often served as part of a traditional full English breakfast. Cock-a-Leekie: This Scottish specialty can be classified as a soup or a stew. It combines beef, chicken, leeks, and prunes to unusual and spectacular ends.

Crown Roast Lamb: The crown roast encircles a stuffing of apples, bread crumbs, onion, celery, and lemon. Hasty Pudding: A simple and quick (thus the name) steamed pudding of milk, flour, butter, eggs, and cinnamon. Eccles Cake : Puff pastry stuffed with a spicy currant filling.

Irish Stew: An Irish stew always has a common base of lamb, potatoes, and onion. It could contain any number of other ingredients, depending on the cook.

Likky Pie Leeks: pork, and cream baked in puff pastry.

Mincemeat: Beef suet is used to bind chopped nuts, apples, spices, brown sugar, and brandy into a filling for pies or pasties - not to be confused with minced meat!. Mulligatawny Soup: What this soup is depends on who is cooking it. Originally a south Indian dish (The name means pepper water in tamil ), it has been adopted and extensively adapted by the British. Mullitgatawny contains chicken or meat or vegetable stock mixed with yogurt or cheese or coconut milk and is seasoned with curry and various other spices. It is sometimes served with a separate bowl of rice. Syllabub: In the seventeenth century, a milkmaid would send a stream of new, warm milk directly from a cow into a bowl of spiced cider or ale. A light curd would form on top with a lovely whey underneath. This, according to Elizabeth David, was the original syllabub. Today's syllabub is more solid (its origins can also be traced to the seventeenth century, albeit to the upper classes) and mixes sherry and/or brandy, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, and double cream into a custard-like dessert or an eggnog-like beverage, depending upon the cook. Trifle: Layers of alcohol-soaked sponge cake alternate with fruit, custard and whipped cream, some people add jelly, but that's for kids. Welsh Faggots: Pig's liver is made into meatballs with onion, beef suet, bread crumbs, and sometimes a chopped apple. Faggots used to be made to use up the odd parts of a pig after it had been slaughtered.

Welsh Rabbit (or Rarebit): Cheese is grated and melted with milk or ale. Pepper, salt, butter, and mustard are then added. The mix is spread over toast and baked until "the cheese bubbles and becomes brown in appetizing-looking splashes"(Jane Grigson in English Food, London: Penguin, 1977 ). Westmoreland Pepper Cake: Fruitcake that gets a distinctive kick from lots of black pepper. Other ingredients include honey, cloves, ginger, and walnuts. Fish and chips is fish fried in egg crust, served with fried potatoes, in most cases the code is used, fresh or smoked, add salt, with vinegar. In a classic way it is served in paper. Shepherds pie or cottage pie is the most popular pie served, consists in minced meat, lamb or beef, mixed with onions and covered with mashed potatoes and then kept in oven 45-60 minutes. Yorkshire pudding was invented during the war, when it was a food shortage, in that time it was made marking pudding with fat from the roast meat left from Sunday. Another dish, resulting in debris but very tasty, is Bubble and Squeak, made of scraps of potatoes, cabbage and roast cold. British import much of its food products, and I believe they have learned to live relatively cheaply.

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The Sandwich
It was named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th- century English aristocrat, although he was neither the inventor nor sustainer of this food. It is said that he ordered his valet to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread, and because Montagu also happened to be the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, others began to order "the same as Sandwich!" It is said that Lord Sandwich was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue playing cards, particularly cribbage, while eating without getting his cards greasy from eating meat with his bare hands.

Fish and Chips

Who first had the bright idea to marry fish with chips remains the subject of fierce controversy and we will probably never know for sure. It is safe to say it was somewhere in England but arguments rage over whether it was up north or down south. Some credit a northern entrepreneur called John Lees. As early as 1863, it is believed he was selling fish and chips out of a wooden hut at Mossley market in industrial Lancashire Others claim the first combined fish n chip shop was actually opened by a Jewish immigrant, Joseph Malin, within the sound of Bow Bells in East London around 1860. However it came about, the marriage quickly caught on. At a time when working-class diets were bleak and unvaried, fish and chips were a tasty break from the norm.

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The long-standing Roman Catholic tradition of not eating meat on Fridays -especially during Lent and of substituting fish for other types of meat on that day -continues to influence habits even in predominantly Protestant, semi-secular and secular societies. Friday night remains a traditional occasion for eating fish-and-chips; and many cafeterias and similar establishments, while varying their menus on other days of the week, habitually offer fish and chips every Friday.

Meat Pies
British meat pies come in all shapes and flavours. Old time favourites can be found on most local high streets- usually in the traditional butcher's shop.

The humble pie was still very famous in Victorian times when meat pies were sold all over England by travelling pie-men who walked the streets with their freshly made pies held high in a basket. They sold their wares in taverns and public houses and were always to be seen at race meetings and fairs. Simple Simon met one in the 18th Century and the nursery rhyme reminds, that in those days a tasty meat pie could be bought for only one penny.

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About Victorian gambling and "Tossing the Pie man": the pie men knew that most of the local population, as well as the hawkers and peddlers, were inveterate gamblers and had been since they were children. They would therefore gamble for their pies. Tossing the Pie man meant tossing a penny coin along with a call of heads or tails. If the pie man won he would take the penny and if he lost he gave a pie. These was often the only way a pie man could get rid of his stock and make some money as many people would toss the pie man, even though they didn't actually want one of his mangy pies.

Regional British meals

In many European countries it is normal to have a long break in the middle of the day when all members of the family return to their houses to eat together. This is not very common in Britain because normally it is a long way from the place of work or school to the home. Consequently the British people tend to have a big breakfast before they go to work and the meal at midday is not spent with the members of the family but with workmates or schoolmates. Lunch is normally eaten between 12.30 pm and 1.30pm. Most people finish work at five thirty. It often takes at least an hour to get home from the school or workplace so people tend to eat their evening meal or "dinner" between 6.30pm and 8pm. On Sundays people don't have to work so they take the opportunity eat together with their family. Sunday lunch is usually the best meal of the week and many of the meals which are considered typically British are eaten for Sunday lunch. For example roast beef and yorkshire pudding. This is a typical British family eating together on Sunday. After lunch the father will smoke his pipe and read the newspaper sitting on his favourite armchair while his wife washes the dishes. The children will play traditional English games such as hopscotch, skipping or doctors and nurses.

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Meals and meal times

Traditionally, the meals are: Breakfast - between 7:00 and 9:00 Dinner (The main meal) - between 12:00 and 1:30 p.m. High Tea - anywhere from 5:30 at night to 6:30 p.m.

The British Breakfast

A typical English breakfast consists of bacon (traditionally back bacon, less commonly streaky bacon), poached or fried eggs, fried or grilled tomatoes, fried mushrooms, fried bread or toast with butter and sausages, all washed down with a cup of coffee. Now-adays, however, a typical English breakfast is more likely to be a bowl of cereals, a slice of toast, orange juice and a cup of coffee. In the winter many people will eat "porridge" or boiled oats.

The traditional English breakfast is called the 'Full English' and sometimes referred to as 'The Full English Fry-up'.

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Dinner
Is the main meal of the day, and is served between 12:00 and 1:30 p.m. In the Middle Ages, great nobles ate the most formal dinner, around noon or one p.m. Their dinner was more than a meal; it was an ostentatious display, a statement of wealth and power, with dozens of servants attending in a ritualized performance. Lesser nobles, knights and manor holders ate a far less formal dinner, but at the same time of day.

A typical British meal for dinner is "meat and two vegetable put hot brown gravy, (traditionally made from the juices of the roast meat) on the meat and usually the vegetables. One of the vegetables is almost always used are potatoes.

The traditional meal is rarely eaten nowadays, apart from on Sundays. It consists of roast meat, (cooked in the oven for about two hours), two different kinds of vegetables and potatoes with a Yorkshire pudding.The most common joints are beef, lamb or pork; chicken is also popular.

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High Tea
High tea (also known as meat tea) is an early evening meal, typically eaten between 5pm and 6pm. It is now largely followed by a later lighter evening meal. High tea would usually consist of cold meats, eggs or fish, cakes and sandwiches.

In it is origin, the term high tea was used as a way to distinguish it from low tea or afternoon tea. The words 'low' and 'high' refer to the tables from which either tea meal was eaten. Low tea was served in a sitting room where low tables (like a coffee table) were placed near sofas or chairs generally. The word high referred to a table, this one on a dining room table, and it would be loaded with substantial dinner dishes - meats, cheese, breads, perhaps the classic shepherd's pie or steak and kidney pie.

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Personal conclusion
To offer a personal conclusion I believe that food is the most important aspect of life that influences us. Firstly no one can live without food and that's why we learned to cook to survive. But while evolving different recipes I discovered that we have seemed more delicious than others, and through this way I learned to eat only what we love. But even if this is completely true, food do not have to be a proposal in life but a way of surviving. With regard to the way food is cooked in Great Britain I think that in Britain is a special place where flavors of many countries had encounter. Even British cuisine does not say much she give to Great Britain world famous chefs. Jamie Oliver, Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay are among the top-known chef in the world. Blumenthal and Ramsay hold even the three-Michelin-rated restaurants, world peak of refinement. Great Britain is a place where everyone can enjoy food because here the meals are an important part of people life. British cuisine is not recommended for those who want to follow a healthy lifestyle and dietary essential because it is too consistent in calories. In recent years trying to revive modern British cuisine with Mediterranean and Asian influences, but so far without great success. For ordinary people, British cuisine will always be similar based on substantial breakfast of beans or fried fish served with potatoes. To put in a nutshell, I think I have learned some important aspects about British food that had influenced my vision that I had about Great Britain.

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Bibliography
Great British Food author Heather Hay French The Diary Book of British Food author Ebury Press British food an Extraordinary thousand Years of History Colin Spencer, Elizabeth Martyn Food & Bar Magazine Good Food Magazine Kitchen Secrets Magazine Web Bibliography: www.wikipedia.org www.artline.ro www.britishoppe.ro www.scribd.com www.dsc.discovery.com www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk www.royal.gov.uk www.jamieoliver.com

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