British culture: Traditional British Food

Traditional British dishes have had competition from other dishes over the years. Despite this, if you visit England, Scotland or Wales, you can still be served up the traditional foods we have been eating for years.
This page contains some of England's most popular traditional dishes.

"Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. K. Rowling

Main meal dishes in England

Roast Beef	Yorkshire Pudding	Toad-in-the-Hole
Roast Meats	Fish and Chips	Ploughman's Lunch
Cottage Pie	Shepherd's Pie	Gammon Steak with egg
Lancashire Hotpot	Bubble and Squeak	English Breakfast
Bangers and Mash	Black Pudding	Bacon Roly-Poly
Cumberland Sausage	Pie and Mash with parsley liquor

Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding

This is England's traditional Sunday lunch, which is a family affair.
Recipe

Yorkshire Pudding

This dish is not usually eaten as a dessert like other puddings but instead as part of the main course or at a starter.
Yorkshire pudding, made from flour, eggs and milk, is a sort of batter baked in the oven and usually moistened with gravy.

The traditional way to eat a Yorkshire pudding is to have a large, flat one filled with gravy and vegetables as a starter of the meal. Then when the meal is over, any unused puddings should be served with jam or ice-cream as a dessert.
Recipe

Toad-in-the-Hole (sausages covered in batter and roasted.)
Similar to Yorkshire Pudding but with sausages placed in the batter before cooking.

Recipe

Roast Meats ( cooked in the oven for about two hours)
Typical meats for roasting are joints of beef, pork, lamb or a whole chicken. More rarely duck, goose, gammon, turkey or game are eaten.

Roast Gammon

Traditional accompaniments to roast meats
roast beef

With beef:

Horseradish sauce
English mustard
Yorkshire pudding
Gravy

With mutton and lamb

Onion sauce
Red-currant jelly
Mint sauce
Savoury herb pudding

With pork

Apple sauce
Pease Pudding
Roast apples

Sunday Roast

Fish and chips

Fish (cod, haddock, huss, plaice) deep fried in flour batter with chips (fried potatoes) dressed in malt vinegar. This is England's traditional take-away food or as US would say "to go". Fish and chips are not normally home cooked but bought at a fish and chip shop ("chippie" ) to eat on premises or as a "take away"

Ploughman's Lunch
This dish is served in Pubs. It consists of a piece of cheese, a bit of pickle and pickled onion, and a chunk of bread. text taken from and copyright of projcetbritain.com
See a sample menu of food served in pubs

Shepherds' Pie

Made with minced lamb and vegetables topped with mashed potato)

Cottage Pie (pictured right)

Made with minced beef and vegetables topped with mashed potato. (Pictured right)

Gammon Steak with egg (Gammon is ham)

Lancashire Hotpot projetbritain.com

A casserole of meat and vegetables topped with sliced potatoes.

Pie and Mash with parsley liquor

A very traditional East End London meal.
The original pies were made with eels because at the time eels were a cheaper product than beef. About fifty years ago, mince beef pies replaced the eels and have now become the traditional pie and mash that people know.
The traditional pie and mash doesn't come without its famous sauce known as liquor which is a curious shade of green and definitely non-alcoholic. The liquor tastes much nicer than it looks (it's bright green!).

Jellied eels are also an East End delicacy often sold with pie and mash

Chicken Salad

Bubble & Squeak

Typically made from cold vegetables that have been left over from a previous meal, often the Sunday roast. The chief ingredients are potato and cabbage, but carrots, peas, brussels sprouts, and other vegetables can be added. The cold chopped vegetables (and cold chopped meat if used) are fried in a pan together with mashed potato until the mixture is well-cooked and brown on the sides. The name is a description of the action and sound made during the cooking process.

English breakfast text taken from and copyright of projcetbritain.com
Eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, mushrooms, baked beans

A Full English Breakfast

Bangers and Mash (mashed potatoes and sausages).
Bangers are sausages in England. (The reason sausages were nicknamed bangers is that during wartime rationing they were so filled with water they often exploded when they were fried.)

Cornish Pastie with chips, baked beans and salad

Black Pudding (Blood Pudding)
Looks like a black sausage. It is made from dried pigs blood and fat). Eaten at breakfast time Recipe
Black pudding recipes vary from region to region, some are more peppery and some are more fatty than others. text taken from and copyright of projcetbritain.com

Bacon Roly-Poly (made with a suet pastry)