Tonyfinch

This begs another question Where in France are people queueing up for Italian,Chinese and Japanese food?(OK a few ethnic restaurants in Paris but that's it) The wonderful French cuisine that you hold so dear-are people clamouring for it in Italy?Or in Spain,or in Australia in New Zealand? I will mention China ,Thailand etc. even though you've made it clear in other posts that their opinions don't count in these debates. Where are there non Spanish restaurants in Spain?Or non Greek restaurants in Greece.? As Fat Guy says a country or a city's restaurant culture is determined by immigration patterns as much as anything else and that is why there is such a range available in London and NYC. But in Rome no-one gives a stuff about French food,or Spanish food,or Thai food or any of the cuisines that you hold up as superior to British. No-one is clamouring for rognons de veau a la creme in Bangkok,believe me.However the meat pie does still hold sway in vast tracts of Australia and New Zealand and toy can still get great Anglo Indian cuisine(discussed recently on the India board ) from Bombay to Nairobi.

Steve,fritto misto in Italy,pescado con patates frites,or freidura(mixed fried fish) in Spain,not to mention tempura in Japan. Fish fried in batter can be found everywhere.

Palwins No 1,along with Nos 2,3,4,5,6-all tasting exactly the same-sweet kosher Pesach wine from Israel of course.What do you lot drink on Seder night over in NYC? (sorry,this is way off thread.any answers on the holiday board maybe?)

Up until the time the populace unlimited had access to sweet water beer was drunk instead. A lot of it was very mild alcoholically and it was drunk by people of all ages and classes.Obviously people knew it wasn't food as such but they believed it contained nutrients that were beneficial to health and that it helped stave off sickness and disease.It was also a lot less likely to poison you than a lot of the foods that were available to the poorer people.The truth is that for a lot of the poor up until,say,the end of the 19thC,beer was one of the healthier things they consumed. As large breweries took over the production and distribution of beer they fostered its image as a nutritionally valuable and healthy product."Guiness Is Good For You" is a slogan that was used in Guiness ads. up until very recently and the notion of this beverage containing iron and vitamins and minerals is still dearly held in Ireland and England. It is also a faux-food.It is filling and can satisfy hunger pangs.It makes you feel good and relaxes you.Given a choice people often preferred to spend their money on beer and could kid themselves that they had eaten.So the demarcation line between beer as a straight alcoholic drink and beer as a nutritionally sound "foodstuff" was easily and regularly blurred.

Steve,I don't know about schnapps but we can certainly take credit for Palwins No 1 . Why sneer at Scotch? Scotch whisky is a great contribition to world gastronomy.It has its experts and devotees much as wine does and is savoured and appreciated across the gastronomic world.Like wine,a lot of it is bog standard but at the higher levels it reaches great intensity and complexity and can be a truly 'wow factor' drink. I rarely drink spirits these days but given the choice I'd opt for a well chosen luxury malt whiskey over a Cognac or Armangnac any day

Yvonne,Jancis may be right about how port was "discovered" but the fact is it was necessary to do something because the public were in revolt about the appalling state the non-fortified Portuguese wines were in by the time they reached Britain. Port is not just an after dinner drink.The French use it almost exclusively as an aperitif-and drink gallons of it.White and tawny port,with tonic,lemonade or soda makes a wonderful thirst quenching long drink with lazy lunches in hot climes.Chilled tawnies match very well with foie gras and other pate preparations and port can be drunk with virtually any food that calls for sweet wine. Top vintage port is one of the great drinks of the world. In my opinion the classic English pairing with Stilton doesn't work all that well.The cheese is often far too strong and salty for the wine.I find Stilton,like lots of strong English cheeses, actually goes better with good ale.Vintage port should be contemplated either without food,or with a few walnuts or,especially pecans,to set it off-it is one of the great gastronomic experiences.

This is a telling point.For hundreds of years in Britain beer was regarded as much as a food than as a drink and was considered to contain as much nourishment as many foodstuffs.It was certainly safer to drink than many local water supplies and the terms "mild" and "small beer" come from the weakness of the beer that people drank morning noon and night and which was given to children and the elderly and sick,again in preference to water.The perception of beer as a foodstuff was one of the reasons Britain developed a drinking culture that was separate from food. English pies and savoury puddings-steak and kidney,beef and oyster,game and rabbit pies,pork pies etc.are perfect matches for real ale.I also agree that a lot of the stronger English cheeses pair far better with well kept bitter or stout than they do with wine.Fish and chips is best drunk with beer and most people prefer it with Indian food,although this cuisine is not nearly as wine unfriendly as some seem to think.

Port and Lemon (as in Lemonade) was THE drink for women in pubs throughout the end of the 19th and first half of the 20thC. So ubiquitous was it that many didn't regard it as an alcoholic drink at all ("I don't drink but I don't mind a wee port & lemon to relax me " )being a common joke at this time. Sherry,or sherris,was the "sack" drunk by the masses and by Falstaff in the Shakespeare plays and preceded the common drinking of spirits by a long time.The wines were originally fortified,like port,in order to better survive the journey from Iberia to Britain,where the market was massive. Claret and "Rhenish" (German) wines were drunk just as much as ale and were available in most taverns and inns throughout London and increasingly in the rest of the country from the 1700s on.

No,please do go on.Fascinating stuff,even if not totally surprising.Better to spill bile than wine eh?

Whew,that's a relief.Actually the finest food I've eaten in Central/Eastern Europe was in Budapest-wonderful old restaurants and complex cuisine incorporating French influences(lots of foie and lots of cream)-creative use of duck and roast goose(rarely to be found in restaurants) wonderful vegetables and creative spicing and very passable wines,including the lovely Tokay-all at dirt cheap prices.It really was a revelation.

BTW I can put away 2 bottles of wine at a sitting without a problem.Maybe I'm an alcoholic but I prefer to think of myself as an honorary Frenchman.

Now look! I'm perfectly prepared to compare "English" cuisine unfavourably with French cuisine,but I'm shocked and bewildered that you can characterise German cuisine as "great" as opposed to English "lousy". GERMAN cuisine for God's sake.The only "great" things about German cuisine are the size of the great big plates of schweinflesch they serve up to you at every opportunity,accompanied by dumplings and knodel that will sink you to the bottom of the Rhine as surely as if you were encased in concrete The Germans are obsessed with pork.I know someone who runs an Indian restaurant in Vienna (yes I know its not Germany but its the same thing ).Pork is not a meat much eaten in India and is unknown on Indian restaurant menus in the UK.He has to make virtually every meat dish out of pork otherwise no-one will eat in his restaurant. I have nothing against pork per se,but its ridiculous overuse in German cuisine leads me to seriously dispute that you can term it great. As someone said ,the Germans cook saurkraute,but over the border here in Alsace we cook CHOUCROUTE-enough said.

Fat Guy,alcoholism is a major problem in France and Italy,but public drunkenness is not.Being so dependent on alcohol for large swathes of its econonmy the French and Italians have been far slower than the Brits and the Yanks to admit that there's a problem,although they have begun to do so recently.The same applies to the Spanish and Portuguese.

This is probably a topic for another thread,but in fact the French and Italians have a far higher overall alcohol consumption than the Brits and a much higher death rate from alcohol related diseases(Must be all those homemade eaux de vies and grappas that they're nipping on the side).Its just that they don't set out to get pissed by drinking endless pints all night. Jancis Robinson,in her fascinating book "How To Handle Your Drink" quotes a survey carried out by the WHO about what constitutes "normal" or "average" daily drinking in different countries.Back came the answer from Britan-3 pints,or something like that.Back came the answer from France-3 LITRES of wine!!-and that was AVERAGE. Ahem-that must say something about something.

The British working classes go out to DRINK.They do not go out to eat.To eat they go to the caff and they take their kids to Macdonalds.They may go to The Light Of Bengal when the pub shuts and they'll take the wife for a treat to Il Siciliana for lasagne and a bottle of Chianti. I know plenty of people who think nothing of spending £50 in an evening in a pub ("nah,nah,its MY round") but who look askance if you tell them you've spent £50 pp on a meal.Drinking and getting pissed is what constitutes fun for the Anglo Saxon working classes.Eating just gets in the way.

I'm not going to get into how Steve P argues or why he argues,but it's hard to disagree with his basic premise. Every two-bit town you go through in France has charcuteries,boucheries,boulangeries all with wonderful window displays and merry service.Every town,or so it seems,has one of those central market areas selling local meat,fish,cheese wines to local people.Yvonne mentioned Steve Hatt-one decent fishmonger in North London?! Some of these one-horse places have five or six fish stalls in the market. Every village of any size in France has at least one auberge or restaurant of decent quality catering mainly to locals and you're never far away from a more upscale place if you want one. Of course you can get great foodstuffs,and there are fine restaurants, in Britain.But good food is imbued into the daily lives of ordinary French people in a way that is patently not the case here. WHY this is has been debated by myself and others above and on different threads and there are lots of reasons for it.Britain is tasting better now than at any time in the recent past,but the truth is that it still doesn't taste anywhere near as good as France.

As it happens the restaurant is still there,although for a long time it has been just another run of the mill tandoori restaurant among hundreds of others. Since that time I found the only way I could really replicate that first experience ws to cook tandoori chicken at home,either on a bbq or in a chicken brick.

Commonplace now of course but the time I first ate Tandoori chicken at the Agra restaurant Whitfield St (London) circa 1969 was one of the great food revelation moments of my life. The Agra was,or claims to have been,the first restaurant in London serving Tandoori food.The chicken wasn't orange but a deep red colour,with charred black crusty,crunchy edges.It came sizzling with lemon and onions,divided into drumsticks and thighs,giving off a heavenly aroma.Beneath the reddened surface the chicken was incredibly juicy and moist and ,when eaten with naan (also new to me) I remember being almost in tears with the culinary beauty of it all. I can't remember the rest of the meal and I can't remember who I was with,but that moment will stay with me forever.

Brilliant.Thanks a lot

Well that killed the conversation.

These are four odd sentences. Who gave you the option to choose? Why do you have to choose,at 16 or at any other age?You chose to remain vegetarian,but you eat meat.This is a bit like saying you're a non-smoker in between cigarettes. By your definition meat eaters are vegetarians when they're not eating meat. I thought a vegetarian was someone who did not eat meat at all,or have I been labouring under a misapprehension.?

Simon,could you expand on what you mean by "dishonest" in this context?

A far higher proportion of the British working classes were concentrated into the industrialized cities where they had to purchase food from their meagre wages.Hence there was a need to supply cheap food in bulk to the cities which affected the way food was produced.In France the majority were still on the land and eating the surplus of what they produced. In these cities many of the poor had no proper cooking facilities,or were not allowed to cook in the lodging houses where they lived.Single men especially would buy and eat cheap food from street vendors or congregate for company in pubs.The pub culture is not an eating culture.Company,warmth,companionship came to be associated with drinking,but not eating.The evening meal,often referred to as "tea" was seen as something to be gulped down quickly UNaccompanied by alcohol,before going off to the pub to drink beer and socialise.Women and children would "make do" on what was left after the man of the house had been fuelled for 12 hour shifts down mines or in mills or steelworks or whatever. In such an environment the "quality" of what you are eating ceases to be a priority.Quantity and sufficiency is all to keep self and family going.The situation was exactly the same in the industrialized areas of France(compare Dickens and Zola-very similar) but a far smaller proportion of the population was involved .Meanwhile the wealthy classes in Britain were eating just as well as their French counterparts,both quality and quantity wise. Two world wars,the Depression,rationing and the continuing perception amongst the poorer classes that eating and drinking are separate activities has meant that for many in Britain an true interest in quality food and also in wine has only been a recent possibility.The ability of poorer people to have foriegn holidays has probably been the biggest single kick start factor but it's true that the legacies of the past still remain today,especially outside of London.

France is such an agriculturalized country, such a high proportion (relatively) earns its living from producing food and wine that the Govt. has always had to be more mindful of the needs and demands of the food and wine producing lobbies-hence farmers blockading and burning everytime the Govt. tries to cut their subsidies,or their product is threatened by cheaper imported products. The French food and wine industry has also done a fantastic job of marketing their product.French cheeses are NOT superior to English or Italian cheeses.Charolais beef is NOT superior to Scotch Beef,Marches Lamb is NOT superior to Welsh lamb and so on,but the French have developed such a fantastically positive attitude to their product that we,as consumers,are convinced. The best example of this is Champagne.The French have taken what,in most cases is an ordinary,acidic sparkling wine and marketed it with such genius that it is known throughout the world as a luxury product,worth the money charged and to be associated with the best moments in our lives.They've also done it with cognac(rarely drunk by the French). Where I disagree with Steve P. is that I don't think this has been engineered by the Governing classes.More it is the Governing classes having to respond to local agriculturalzed interests in order to appease those powerful lobbies and maintain power. Steve's point is well made if you look atBritain's fishing industry.It is almost a cliche to wonder how,when we're an island nation surrounded by fishing grounds,there are not hundreds of small fish restaurants dotting our coasts selling good value fish and seafood meals,how we are really only interested in eating our fish battered and fried and how vast proportions odf our best fish and seafood are exported to France and Spain.

Humbug,Steve,The French governing classes never "agreed" to do any such thing.France is a much more agriculturalized country than Britain. The number of people living off the land and producing food (and wine)is far higher.In rural France people lived off of the surplus that they produced.That is why the regional cuisines are so distinctive.If you lived in areas suitable for raising geese and ducks etc-that is what you lived on.Sheer quantities produced meant enough to feed people well,but if your crop,or whatever,failed,ot there was a sudden shortage- make no mistake-you starved.Throughout the period of the Belle Epoque poverty was as desparate in many areas of rural France,especially in the South,as any in Western Europe and you only need to read Zola to see how desparate urban poverty could be . No government "taught the populace what good food was". The populace never did and never have eaten the type of food you've been talking about on this thread. Yes they took their locally produced ingredients and turned them into delicious dishes,but French country cuisine is a product of French country people living in communities largely unaffected by industrialization,the Great Depression of the thirties and the second world war.