I read an interesting article a while back. Rather long but one of the key points was previously spices were expensive and only available to the upper class, and were used in their foods fairly extensively. As spices became more affordable to lower classes they were used, but then the upper class haute cuisine stopped using them because they’d lost their exclusivity. Instead they focused on techniques to highlight a food’s inherent flavor, particularly with things like meat.
Interesting. Certainly tracks with other culinary trends, though! Like lobster, which had a reverse journey - in the 19th century, when it was dirt-common, it was fed to prisoners, and prisoners complained about it. Nowadays? There are people who’d gladly go to prison if it meant free lobster several times a week, lmao.
Probably an urban myth, though
https://www.boston.com/news/wickedpedia/2023/10/10/did-prisoners-eat-lobster-in-colonial-times/
Dunno, I’ve seen many more sources in support of the general thrust of the idea (if not necessarily the details that article claims to refute, like it being the primary food for prisoners)
https://www.history.com/news/a-taste-of-lobster-history
https://thekitchenknowhow.com/did-lobster-used-to-be-prison-food/
I mean, the History channel is a joke. And the thing about urban myths is, everybody repeats them. You just can’t ever find an actual source for the information.
Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners. In 1622, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, was embarrassed to admit to newly arrived colonists that the only food they “could presente their friends with was a lobster … without bread or anyhting else but a cupp of fair water” (original spelling preserved). Later, rumor has it, some in Massachusetts revolted and the colony was forced to sign contracts promising that indentured servants wouldn’t be fed lobster more than three times a week.
“Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation,” wrote John J. Rowan in 1876. Lobster was an unfamiliar, vaguely disgusting bottom feeding ocean dweller that sort of did (and does) resemble an insect, its distant relative. The very word comes from the Old English loppe, which means spider. People did eat lobster, certainly, but not happily and not, usually, openly. Through the 1940s, for instance, American customers could buy lobster meat in cans (like spam or tuna), and it was a fairly low-priced can at that. In the 19th century, when consumers could buy Boston baked beans for 53 cents a pound, canned lobster sold for just 11 cents a pound. People fed lobster to their cats.
https://psmag.com/economics/how-lobster-got-fancy-59440/
The urban myth overwhelmingly seems to be that prisoners were primarily fed lobster, and a recurring unsubstantiated story of servants refusing to eat it several times a week. Not in contestation is that it was a lower-class food, that it was cheap, or that prisoners in the period certainly were fed lobster oftentimes precisely because it was cheap.
Ah sorry, I actually misread your 1st reply to me. Yeah, I’m not disputing that lobster used to be cheap and low class. I’m just saying the story about it getting fed to prisoners as their primary diet.
No worries! Always good to combat urban legends, in any case!
I think the difference there is widely available large quantities of butter.
Mate, you should have some UK food that isn’t white man comfort food straight from the freezer. We’re a multicultural society now.
First of all, whilst everyone knows about the Anglicisation of Indian curry into the Chicken Tikka Masala, fewer know about the Indianisation of the Full English Breakfast and my GOD is it tasty.
Second; Roast Dinner. Enough said.
Third, if you find yourself in a UK city like London, Birmingham, or Manchester and want a simple meal, look for a Fried Chicken shop that has a huge queue that is ethically diverse. Guaranteed to be a thick chicken burger dripping with sensational spice.
Like seriously, we’ve had people from food tiktok travel all the way from London to try Miami Crispy in Manchester.
That’s just three examples.
There’s good and well seasoned food in the UK, you just have to know where to find it, and your best bet is looking for cuisine that is the legacy of empire and immigration that’s been adopted by the local population. You know, like how all the best food you can find in the US is either from Italian or Mexican heritage.
like how all the best food you can find in the US
I’m always saying the biggest argument for diversity is food.
Someone drove 200 miles? Laughs in American
Pretty far to get fried chicken though
Must be a Tuesday.
fewer know about the Indianisation of the Full English Breakfast
You have piqued my interest. What can I look forward to with a Full Indian and where can I find them?
You don’t get to claim the rights to dishes from cultures you forcibly subjugated.
To be fair, fish and chips is perfect just the way it is. And as for beans… Well this is Lemmy, is it not?
What really astounds me is bangers and mash with absolutely no spices in the sausage, not even pepper. And yet sometimes that really hits the spot. (caveat: I usually lay on the HP sauce.)
Potatoes demand pepper.
You need gravy thick enough to hold the fork up for proper bangers and mash
This ancient meme brought to you by the people who think their food tastes better simply due to the vast amounts of salt, butter and high fructose corn syrup
Fuckin brave way to eat when you can’t afford a heart attack 😂😂
This meme is older than the silk road.
This ancient meme brought to you by the people who think their food tastes better simply due to the vast amounts of salt, butter and high fructose corn syrup
You forgot the deep-frying 💪💪💪💪💪
Who replaced the chips with french fries???
Get out, and stay out.
We’ll 'ave none of that foreign muck round 'ere!
I (only having left the US once) thought that “chips” was the British word for french fries (or you could reverse that).
What’s the difference?
Chips are like fries American cousins.
The answer is appreciated but, unfortunately, I don’t know what that means.
Fatter and greasier.
Well, thank you for the edification.
They sound like fried yucca, so I’m in favor.
Chips for eating with fish should be substantially thicker, to the point of having a noticeably soft core while crunchy on the outside.
Chips ‘cut in the French style’ (as seen here) just means cutting them thinner.
Ah, that does indeed sound like steak fries. Thank you.
British chips are what I would call wedges.
I can see where your coming from, but wedges are the bigger fatter cousins of chips, usually with some potato skin still on display, and are excellently paired with some sour cream and sweet chilli sauce and I want some…
Obviously I’m not in a position to criticize anyone’s take on them, but perhaps steak fries would be a more apt comparison in your eyes?
Hmm… I can’t say I know exactly what steak fries are, but I imagine them to be similar to what I consider normal chips, which are thicker than fries. But, I grew up in Australia where McDonalds sells fries and hot chips are everything else
Steak fries.
Sadly, it appears that the Wikipedia article redirects to “steak frites,” which (based on the image for the article) appears to be a dish consisting of steak and what I would call “shoe string” fries.
To me, a steak fry would be thicker than a regular fry, but not as thick as a wedge; flat; and a rectangular prism, possibly with crinkles cut into it. A regular fry would be a shoe string fry, as shown in the original picture in this thread. A chip would be a very thin, flat or curved slice of potato that has been fried.
I always thought “chips” (in Britain) (and Australia) and “fries” (in the US) were the same thing by different names. Interesting to know that there are qualifiers, since I would call any of the cuts described above (and some others) “fries” and you, apparently, would not.
Also, I don’t know what word the British/Australians use for what I call “chips.”
edit: I think that waffle fries are the best cut.
I think fries amongst the younger generation may be more common, but fries to me has meant the really thin cut/french fries. Which I would still call chips, but I may be an outlier.
I think I know what you refer to as strak fries and I agree, however I would still call those chips, if you can see a trend, lol.
We also call potato chips/crisps chips. So, I often get asked by foreign friends how you distinguish between chips and chips. You simply add the word hot as an identifier.
But, I’m with you on waffle fries/chips. They’re amazing.
edit: I think that waffle fries are the best cut.
The only thing worse than a waffle fry is, may the Deep Fryer forgive me for saying this word, a crinkle cut.
Americans allegedly have access to the best education in the world, yet constantly post inane unoriginal shitposts like this.
Americans allegedly have access to the best education in the world,
What horrible lies foreigners tell!
Have access to in the sense that the schools are there, but so far out of your price range, you get heart palpitations standing near them.
Which triggers your health insurance premiums to rise.
Stop, you’re making my student loans ache
Ache as in like how your starving and poor ache for social services?
I live under the poverty line, so yes, that ache too.
They have brown sauce, whose initial purpose was as proof of having access to ingredients from both India and the Caribbean
it also contains the most flavour out of any condiment ever made
And some clown even got the flag upside down.
Easy to do that when the flag itself is designed by clowns
They were very good about not getting high on their own supply.
This is more historic than a meme, the majority of those “Spices” were addictive drugs.
A good dealer knows you never get high on your own supply.
Some of the spices that are used in ketchup and/or baked bean tomato sauce include: allspice, cayenne, cassia, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mustard, paprika, and pepper.
What do you think tea is made of? Rocks?
excellent chain jerking OP, you really got them riled 💪
original image appears to be from CNN which explains the french fries and upside down flag https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/classic-british-food/index.html?gallery=8
anyway WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETER 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅
A kilometer is a unit of length used by >96% of humanity.
Geeze, I knew you Americans had bad education, but I didn’t knew it was this bad.
I actually learned how to use the metric system so I could choose not to use it 🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅
Nice one OP, did you come up with that zinger yourself?
No, like all Americans, I just take the best from everyone else and claim it as my own 💪💪💪💪💪
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