The UK's modern food culture is seriously diverse and exciting. In our cities, you can have sushi for lunch, and dosa for dinner, with pakora or a bahn mi as a snack in between.
But we Brits still love our potatoes, overdone meat, and root vegetables — all of which come plastered with brown gravy so thick you could have it on toast. Which, unsurprisingly, some people do.
If you'd like to transport yourself to a damp, English Sunday afternoon, try one of these delicious dishes, as curated by a begrudgingly nostalgic Brit who's been writing about food for years.
A Cornish pasty is a large, half-moon pastry enclosing chunks of beef skirt, finely chopped potato, and turnip with lashings of black pepper and a slab or two of butter.
The pastry, which is somewhere between shortcrust, flaky, and hot-water crust, should have the rigidity to withstand being transported, as traditionally it was taken down the tin mines as a "crib" (Cornish for a mid-morning snack).
The pasty's edge is crimped on the side, never the top, and was traditionally thrown away because the miner's hands would have been covered in arsenic and other metals, which are a tad deadly if ingested.
If you're in the UK, I'm afraid you'll have to go to Cornwall to eat a decent pasty.
A Sunday roast is like a Thanksgiving or Christmas meal that occurs regularly.
It typically consists of roasted meat (often a whole chicken, a joint of beef, or pork with crackling) plus roast potatoes, root vegetables such as carrots and parsnips, and lashings of that aforementioned brown gravy.
Around Christmastime, roasts are often paired with our version of pigs in blankets — meat wrapped in more meat. Specifically, they are mini sausages hugged by a rasher of streaky bacon. Outrageous, I know.
Yorkshire puddings are clouds of cooked batter that puff up in the oven and soak up gravy like the most delicious sponge you've ever used.
They pair well with a roast, and so does stuffing (usually sausage mixed with onions, sage, and breadcrumbs served either inside the meat or cooked separately) and green vegetables.
It's unclear why the dish is called toad-in-the-hole, but some suggest it's because the sausages peep out of the batter in the same way toads might hide just in the entrance of their burrows.
One thing is for sure, though: It's a crime to serve your toads without a rich onion gravy, made slowly on the stove by caramelizing onions and reducing beef stock to a thick, brown tangle.
Some have traced the origins of this popular British dish back to Jewish immigrants fleeing Portugal.
Source: Read the original article on www.businessinsider.com
