What English food would you serve a Pole?

There's still a lot of independent ones or ones that belong to very small chains. And some of the ones that belong to larger chains do nice food.


That's the tradition. They once almost all belonged to breweries and were rented to the pub landlord (actually a tenant) who could decide whether to do food or not. Some of them did very nice food. In the Thatcher years, they limited breweries to owning a maximum of 2000 pubs and since then, most larger breweries have sold their real estate.

The availability of food from the large chains has spurred smaller ones on to doing food to compete and this has had a positive effect. Pub food is very often of a type; filling, traditional and easy to make. Some pubs specialise in traditional roast Sunday lunches. If you haven't had a Sinday lunch with all its trimmings I recommend it. They always go down well with Polish visitors.

Hahaha!

I thought you lived in the UK?
Either you don't or you don't go out much.....


Exactly!When I was growing up I did tend to look down on British cuisine,but the more I learnt,the more I understood that it was much better than I had thought.And was actually very good.


There certainly is!
Some of them even have Michelin stars!

Burgers!My arse!

That's not why they close. It's basically just not profitable. The running costs are too high and there isn't enough custom to even break even, let alone earn a living. Very sad really because the British (and indeed Irish pub) is a place for people of all ages and social classes to socialize. It's a place for the community to gather, just lovely to have your 'local'.

The overheads are crazy and of course pub-going is declining. The days are long gone when it was cheaper for an older person to go to the pub and chat with people than light a fire at home, there's more entertainment available from Netflix or whatever and some urban areas have significant inward migration from countries like Pakistan and Poland which have zero pub culture.

That's one reason why the pubs that are doing OK have increased food provision as an extra income stream.

I'd not serve pub food to a Pole who'd not had British food though. There are many, many more dishes to choose from and you'd not generally see Glamorgan sausages, Lincolnshire haslet, cock-a-leekie or cullen skink, Halifax dock pudding (a delicious savoury dish and fits well to Polish tastes) or Suffolk pond pudding in many pubs.

I'd serve something like the ones mentioned above (apart from the pond pudding which is a swine to make). I did Lorne sausage once in Poland (rather like American meat loaf sliced and fried rather than baked) and it didn't go down well. Fishcakes do, since there's nothing really like them in PL and they are always nice.

So many British dishes sound like slang names for sexually transmitted diseases.... don't forget clotted cream, kippers or spotted dick....

Clotted cream is one of the great joys of British food. Kippers too, proper Craster Kippers, warmed up by putting them in a jug of hot water for a few minutes and served with brown bread and wedges of lemon.

Mind you, clotted cream is bad for the arteries. My doctor says I'm suffering from scrapple, grits, cornpone and chowder and need antibiotics so I'll stick to lower calorie stuff.

I've always wondered what Dr Nut tastes like though...

This is a true story Jon - one you'll like. A friend of mine back in the day, young guy, long hair, Afghan coat, popped into his local, which of course was also his father's local :)) His dad is up at the bar having a drink, my friend is sitting at a table with his mates. Dad overhears someone saying 'nice looking bird in the hippie coat' and Dad turns to him with 'that bird is my son, what are you having?' :))

England does have certain wines such as port and claret which, because of a colder climate for growing grapes, Poland doesn't have. If I lived in England and had a Polish house guest, I'd probably opt for typically English Stilton or Wensleydale and a nice claret:-) For an encore, perhaps some rare roast beef, maybe some shepherd's pie for a main course.

Port is from Portugal and claret is from Bordeaux. Some wines are associated with Britain (especially port and sherry) because they were (and are) very commonly drunk there. Both are very robust wines that could survive a traditional sea journey which most wines couldn't back then..

Britain grew wine in the warm period of the Middle Ages and climate change has brought this back. The wines now produced in England and Wales are among the finest in the world. Better Chablis than the Chablis region (the topography of the South Downs is similar to Chablis and France is getting hotter) and English sparkling wine beats Champagne in blind tastings.


Nice but not posh. Coverdale from the next valley down is good to serve guests.


A way of using up leftovers, traditional on Mondays. Usually actually cottage pie rather than shepherd's pie which uses lamb. A Polish friend went to England for a language course and she told me that her host had served pie as a traditional British meal. From her description, it was in fact cottage pie. I wanted to cry, since there are so many nicer pies. The host (in one of those seaside towns full of language schools) sounded a bit skanky and probably didn't want to go to much cost and effort. I do meat and tattie pie at home quite often (I like it) but for guests would probably do a chicken and mushroom pie or a fish pie. The Cumbrian version of fish pie that uses pastry rather than an ocean pie that uses spuds. Game pie is nice, however (like chicken and mushroom) it takes a little more skill and isn't cheap.

Corned beef pie (a Bradford speciality) is nicer than it sounds. Not really guest stuff, but still nice. Potato pie can be more elegant than it sounds too.

Nice post. Thanks, jon!
Why though need the offerings necessarily be "posh", unless of course one is trying to make a particular impression on wealthy company?

Agreed; they don't. it's good to make things nice though and shepherd's pie is for me a way of using up leftovers. People say you shouldn't serve stew to guests, though I have and do.

About Wensleydale; it's nice though not exceptional. It's mostly mass produced in factories all over the place now. If it's actually from the Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes (the small town in Wensleydale where they traditionally make it) it's on a different level in quality and sadly also in price.

If you ever come across Botton Village cheese (made for many years by a self-managing community of people with Downs' Syndrome) or Shepherd's Purse cheese, both also from North Yorkshire, buy it quickly; both producer's cheeses are excellent. Sadly, Google doesn't show anyone selling their ranges abroad.

General De Gaulle once said "'How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?". Britain has almost 900 varieties! I often bring different ones back to Poland and they always go down well.

....and they all taste the same...?

No. Why would you think that?

Perhaps you're confusing them with Polish 'cheese'.

Or German cheese. The only German cheese I can think of off the top of my head is Cambozola, factory-made stuff, weakly imitative of other countries' traditional products. That and Limburger which people make jokes about.

Beca@jon357
I thought they all tasted like cheddar.

No. Very few do. Only Cheddar tastes like Cheddar (which is mostly made a long way from Cheddar Gorge, often in other countries). The best Cheddar is however bnice, however most cheeses in the UK are very different.

Here's the wikipedia entry on British cheeses. If you think they lack variety, read it and be surprised: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_cheeses

Mate, why do you continue to expose your total ignorance on this forum?


Hahahaha!

Yeah, most, but not all, Polish cheese is bland and revolting.
Did you know that Britain now produces more varieties of cheese than France?

Sorry pal, but for me it's no comparison between Polish cheese and Englisch. Polisch tastes like cheese, English like soap or cheddar ( what is similar to soap ). But I still love GB.

It doesn't taste like anything much at all. Ser żółty is all factory stuff; in the UK it would have to be labelled 'processed cheese', not that anyone would buy it. As for ser topiony (a very big seller in PL), that's just the stuff that comes in foil-wrapped triangles in the UK and France and that we only give to kids, It's so full of chemicals and so devoid of anything natural that you don't even need to keep it in the fridge.


Have you actually had any English cheese (other than generic cheddar, probably made somewhere else in Europe)?

A basic one to start with is Blue Stilton. When I've put that on the table in Poland, people have always liked it to the point that there is never any left.

Polish people are polite, especially towards foreigner.

Not always. And when the lot's been eaten voraciously and people are asking where they can get it, that's not just out of politeness.

I'm polite too. I eat bigos if there isn't anywhere to discreetly dispose of it.

Buy something more expensive and in Poland. We have sometimes "Polish week" in Lidl in Germany. You can forget it, bad quality. It is always better to buy in Poland.

There isn't really any ser żółty that's more expensive; it all comes from the same few factories. In Poland? That's the only place I buy it.


Probably much the same products as in Lidl in Warsaw.

By Polish products I would prefer Biedronka.

Me too, however the ser żółty etc is still the same. That's going off-topic though, since we're talking about what English food we'd serve to a Pole.

There's quite a list above; and the contrast between the very poor quality of cheese in Poland and the very high quality and variety in the UK is significant; British cheeses always go down well in Poland and fancier shops like MiniEuropa etc do have a range of it among their premium cheeses. Expensive though.

OK there is my list what would you serve a Pole ( or my ).
1. No English cheese... but
Fish and Chips,
English Breakfast,
no Pie but Sunday Rost,
No Mars but Eccles cakes
and always Tea for two.
no English beer but biere blonde
no English wine but Porto...
have I forget something?

Good, since that's actually American.


Why not?

The list is IMO fairly boring, and misses out excellent cheese. Hard to know why 'tea for two' (why only two?) is there. That's just sandwiches and cakes.

British beer is very good too.

Alien, I'm sorry but Polish cheese is horrendous. It's like plastic. The texture, the colour and the complete lack of any flavour at all. I think the synthetic texture is the worst thing about it.


As Jon says, I don't think you've eaten real cheddar cheese. I remember Mafketis once saying that the cheddar you have in the USA is not the same thing as cheddar from the British Isles.

He's not in the US... he's in Deutschland. I don't think Germany has that many cheese traditions? Or am I crazy?

I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been much in the way of artisanal cheese in Poland (unlike say kiełbasa or bread where some traditional forms have been revived in recent years). There might be some nicer white cheeses but they were also generally better in the PRL...

Polish cheese is far superior to most of what can be found in the US (or abominations like 'cheese food') but it's nothing special by European standards...

I also only recently discovered 'reneta' apples (reinette) at a peasant market I go to at times.They used to be widely grown in Poland and are now mostly supplanted by reddish rocks in grocery stores. Very nice, soft but firm and mostly sweet with a very faint sourness in the mix.

I've never been on a stay in the UK so I don't have much to say about British food beyond the versions that make it to tourist hotels in places like Spain or Malta... and that is.... mostly.... not good.... fried tomatoes are just.... blech (why do that to a poor defenseless tomato.... why?) and the idea of beans for breakfast is still something I haven't come to terms with....

Yes I did, I was 15 years,1-2 weeks year for year in England and we have sometimes Kerrygold Cheddar in Lidl in Germany. It is edible but not my darling.

@Milo, mate you continue to expose yourself as little more than a troll!

@jon, Oh well, serving Shepherd's Pie to a guest's nothing to "stew" about, is it? LOL