mmmmmmmmmmm hagelslag "You might be an American if... you think Pop Tarts are perfectly acceptable breakfast food but you mock Europeans for putting chocolate on toast"
you eat those for BREAKFAST?! You might be British if…you think beans on toast is a perfectly acceptable breakfast food but you mock the Dutch for their hagelslag.
Dude there is nothing so delightfully self-pwning as a British gourmand. Every few years I get to break the heart of some British elitist friend making fun of us for "Hawaiian pizza" by pointing out it was invented by a Greek in Canada.
The way I see it? The only countries this side of the pond who can honestly proclaim to have decent cuisine are the Italians and the French. There’s a B-tier of tryhards and then aaaaalllll the way down are the “we don’t have cuisines but we made some weird snacks and sweets?” and that’s us, Belgians, the Nordics. This D-tier is what the British aspire to. Y’all over there have gone “we don’t do cuisine but we are the Children of God and the Lord has given us Sugars and Oils and the Hands and Wits to Create so by God are we gonna use them well (plusamassivefoodindustry)” and it has resulted in Good Shit that is also more often than not Unhealthy / Unpure for our small Europotato minds. But it beats the shit out of the British.
Dunno about that. There's a lot of almost-regional foods people don't know about because they weren't a feature at British Bakeoff or something, like Eierschecke. Generally, the recipe pool is so vast, you could pick the most cursed town in Bavaria and probably still find a subset you'd enjoy eating regularly. Hungarians have some amazing foods, if you adjust spices for your pallet. Ćwikła is a pan-slavic condiment that's just beet pulp mixed with horse radish that goes with anything. Liptauer is a cheese spread that can go from basic to divinely complex, depending on experience and ingredients. Same goes for pierogi. I have a door stopper of a book of old Polish recipes where, so far, substituting venison for tofu only required common sense adjustments and hasn't backfired yet. EDIT: I know you meant 'cuisines' not 'recipes', but... where do you draw the line, really? Is pizza still Italian or just of the broadest Italian origin if most well-known variants are regional adaptations of US-spinoffs? Balkans, Greece and Turkey are mixed almost as much as Slavs and Ashenazi, Prussians, Baltics, Germans... the reason most of them don't have a well-defined 'cuisine' is that they've been raided, taken over or displaced so many times it's almost meaningless to deliniate beyond etymology.The way I see it? The only countries this side of the pond who can honestly proclaim to have decent cuisine are the Italians and the French. There’s a B-tier of tryhards and then aaaaalllll the way down are the “we don’t have cuisines but we made some weird snacks and sweets?” and that’s us, Belgians, the Nordics. This D-tier is what the British aspire to.
I’ve had some great regional foods across Europe (just discovered the wonder of Tiroler Gröstl this week), but what I was gettting at with ‘cuisine’ is a generally accepted body of recipes that are a cornerstone of the national culture. You think of Germany and you think of sauerkraut and currywurst. Things you’d be able to eat every day of the week. The Dutch word for cuisine is just “kitchen”, as in the meals you make in the kitchen. I love me some hutspot or snert but is Dutch aren’t able to fill a meal plan properly, I’d argue. And to also answer kleinbl00, decent is the wrong word, because yeah most cuisines are fine for most people. What I meant is “good enough to be up there with the best cuisines around the globe”. Which is what you do hear from Brits from time to time.
"fill a meal plan properly" is a good way to look at it. Can you eat the national cuisine every day of the week. This is definitely a test where Americans fall down, not because there's no food but because so much American food is borrowed and then bastardized. I could have English muffins, yogurt parfaits, omelets and oatmeal for breakfast, sandwiches, burritos, quesadillas and sushi for lunch, then spaghetti, roast chicken, burgers and pizza for dinner and ostensibly only two of those meals are "American" but everything else is an American version so mutated from where it started that its owners wouldn't recognize it. You can't properly call it "American cuisine" because so much of it has been borrowed. And even then, you would definitely be better off eating in France or Italy.
I think that's unkind. "Decent" isn't a difficult bar to clear and I think many countries succeed; fundamentally, "decent cuisine" needn't be much more than "something most cultures would cheerfully eat if they were hungry." As "comfort food" the world over has similar characteristics (heavy on the fat and carbs, light on the vitamins) I think the more cosmopolitan the culture the more likely their food is going to be unhealthy. The stuff that isn't intended for ex-pats and tourists is where things get gnarly; the stuff intended as a hazing ritual for ex-pats and tourists is where things get really gnarly. I would hypothesize that the French and Italians don't have much in the way of "really gnarly cuisine" because you aren't ever going to be accepted as a native no matter how much rotten shark you eat. I would further hypothesize that the British and Americans have more fat and carbs in their food because they spend more time in the land of lowest common denominators. The stereotype of 'Mexican food' is heavy carbs, heavy cheese, heavy meat, heavy grease but that's really "Mexican-american food." It, too, is a lowest common denominator of a number of cultures artificially melded into one for purposes of foreign consumption. The British ideation of Indian food is similar. Meanwhile the French and Italians have a lot of really good, really stable cuisine that you can eat all the time (assuming you can put forth the effort to cook it) without clogging your arteries while the British and Americans... don't. Not really. I think the Americans don't because everyone in America either came from somewhere else or had their culture ruthlessly stamped out by invaders. I think the British don't because their culture has been import-based for 400 years and every bit of spice or flavor that got imported needed to be balanced out with a Spotted Dick or a Yorkshire Pudding or a Brown Windsor. And I think the British spend a lot of time convincing themselves of the superiority of their dreck because absolutely no one agrees.