England Restaurants

If you’d like to sample some traditional English dishes while visiting us (and you should!), here are some ideas, and explanations of what to expect:
Sunday roast: this is the traditional midday day meal shared with the family. The meat is most usually beef, lamb, chicken or pork, and each of these has a traditional accompaniment – Yorkshire pudding (see below) and horseradish sauce (very hot – eat sparingly!) with beef, sausage-meat stuffing with chicken, apple sauce with pork and mint sauce with lamb. The meat is served with potatoes roasted in the same pan and a selection of green vegetables. In the past, and to some extent still in cheaper pubs especially, these vegetables would have been rather over-cooked and soggy, but we’re learning these days to serve them more al dente, thank goodness.
Yorkshire pudding: the traditional accompaniment to Sunday’s roast beef, but often served with other roast meats too (ask your waiter if you’d like to try some but aren’t eating beef – they will often oblige and add one to your plate, even if it’s not listed as an accompaniment). Although called a pudding, this isn’t sweet, but is a sort of batter made from flour, eggs and milk and baked in the oven. In Yorkshire you may even find it served the old-fashioned way, with vegetables and gravy as a starter – the idea was that you would satisfy your appetite with this hearty dish and not want too much of the expensive meat that poor families could scarcely afford.
Fish and chips: England's most well-known take-away food, although nowadays over-taken in popularity by Indian dishes such as Chicken Tikka. The fish (usually cod, haddock or plaice) is deep fried in flour batter and served with chips (“French fries”), usually dressed with malt vinegar and served with a side order of mushy peas. In the past the food would be wrapped in newspaper, although these days that is considered unhygienic and plain paper will be used. Fish and chips can be cooked at home but are usually bought at a fish and chip shop ("chippie") to eat on the premises or as to "take away". You’ll also see the dish on the menu in many pubs and restaurants. If you can eat it in a seaside resort, so much the better, as the fish is almost guaranteed to be super-fresh and delicious. Bad for the waistline, but a must-try treat, once at least!
Ploughman's Lunch: this dish is usually on the menu in pubs. It consists of a piece of cheese, some pickle (relish) and pickled onion, and a chunk of good crusty bread. If no choice is offered the cheese will probably be Cheddar, but look out too for Stilton, a blue cheese and my personal favourite of the English cheeses.
Shepherds' Pie: made with minced lamb and vegetables, topped with mashed potato and baked in the oven until the topping if crispy. Cottage Pie is similar but made with minced beef, and fisherman's pie is as the name suggests, made with fish.
Lancashire Hotpot: a one-pot dish from the north-west of the country, consisting of meat and vegetables topped with sliced potatoes and baked slowly until the latter go dark brown and crispy at the edges. Like many traditional dishes, this was a staple of poorer families, with a small cheap cut of meat bulked out with lots of vegetables to make a substantial meal.
Pie and Mash: this is a traditional meal from the East End of London. Pies, found all over the country, are any foodstuff, sweet or savoury, encased or topped with pastry. In the East End they were originally made from eels which were cheaper than meat. About fifty years ago, mince beef pies replaced the eels, but another eel dish, jellied eels, remains a favourite in this part of the city.
Bangers and Mash: this is mashed potatoes and sausages, usually served with gravy. Bangers is slang for sausages, a term derived during wartime rationing when they were so filled with water that they often exploded when they were fried. At one time another poor man’s option, sausages have been elevated to new heights in recent years and there are some excellent ones available made from all sorts of meat – look out for venison, which is both tasty and healthy.
Cornish Pasty: sometimes known as an “Oggie”, this consists of a crisp pastry envelope filled with seasoned chopped root vegetables and minced beef. It was invented as a dish for miners to take down the tin mines, and in those days the pastry shell would have acted simply as a container for the meat, rather than something to be eaten. As with so many of these dishes, modern variations are common, and places such as the West Cornwall Pasty Shop chain, to be found in several locations in London and elsewhere, are quite inventive in their creations.
Sandwiches: now found all over the world, sandwiches are said to have been invented by the 4th Earl of Sandwich so that he could eat conveniently at the gaming table. The first printed reference to a sandwich is from 1762. Slang terms include "butties" (in the north of England) or "sarnies" (pretty much everywhere).

Despite the tastiness of most of the above dishes, many English people of my generation and younger eat them only rarely. Nowadays our meals are as likely to be influenced by the people of many nationalities who have come to make their homes here, such as Indian or Chinese, or by our travels abroad. Not only do we choose to eat Italian, French or Spanish food in restaurants, most of us will cook it at home as well. There is a danger that these traditional dishes will die out, especially as many of them are, perhaps rightly, perceived to be less healthy than a Mediterranean style of diet.

England Restaurants

Visiting England?

Visiting England?

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