If you were hosting foreign visitors, where would you take them to experience a “Taste of Britain”? The local pub? A fish and chip shop? Greggs? I suggest the latter only because Madame Tussauds has recently made a waxwork of their “iconic” sausage roll, although Lord help us if this really is the best we have to offer!
Last month I wrote about the demise of regional specialities, and there is no doubt that things are changing, but here are some of my suggestions for food that still shouts “Britain”.
Breakfast
W Somerset Maugham wrote “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day”. The Great British Breakfast is known throughout the world, although sadly often because Brits abroad want to be able to eat it at any hour of the day rather than try the local food. We do love a “Full English Breakfast” although I would say that Somerset Maugham’s quote is even more apt in Scotland than England – the breakfasts are even better and the other meals of the day even worse! Recently there has been an increase in places offering brunch – a term often thought of as American, but which was actually first coined by a Brit in 1895. The author Guy Beringer wrote a piece entitled “Brunch: A Plea” that suggested a meal between breakfast and lunch eaten in convivial company was the perfect antidote to a Sunday hangover. “It is talk-compelling” he wrote. “It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.” I’m not sure that many partakers of brunch have already eaten breakfast, I think it now replaces it, and may include many traditional breakfast foods, but taken at a more leisurely pace. One of the reasons for its growing popularity may be a rise in followers of intermittent fasting. If you can put off eating breakfast until you have finished the school run or walking the dog, you can relax and take more time over brunch, in company with others, and alleviate the need for lunch. Whatever the reason, you should more easily find a choice of places open to serve brunch but breakfast purists should visit https://englishbreakfastsociety.com/full-english-breakfast.html to learn how to score the authenticity of an offering (hash browns a definite no-no). What remains authentically British is our commitment to a proper meal in the morning, no grabbing something on the go!
Sunday Lunch
The tables are turned when it comes to lunchtime. Now it is we Brits who sadly eat a sandwich at our desk whilst our continental counterparts down tools for a proper lunch lasting a couple of hours. We may have given the world the sandwich, and some can be inspiring, but the reason for its very existence, to ensure that eating does not get in the way of whatever else you are doing, is deeply flawed. The one lunch where we do excel is Sunday Lunch, the Great British Roast, which gave us our French nickname of Les Rosbifs. Now it is the saving grace for many pubs. Once we might have met in the pub for a drink before going home for Sunday Lunch, back in the days when pubs shut at 2 pm and children were barred, now it seems that almost no-one cooks a roast at home. The Great British Roast is almost always served at lunchtime and on a Sunday. This causes a problem if you want to showcase both our Breakfast and our Roast – they can’t feasibly be done in the same day.
The Pub
Of course, pubs used to be more about the drink – Real Ales and cider, than the food, which was in the form of a bar snack. You may be very fortunate to live near a drinking rather than an eating pub, but few can survive financially on drink alone. Where they do exist, a visit to one of these pubs is a treat that should not be missed.
Via Clarkson’s Farm and his own pub, The Farmer’s Dog, Jeremy Clarkson is doing a fantastic job of raising awareness of the difficulties that pubs face and the reason that so many are closing. At the same time, he is championing British produce (no Coca Cola or lemonade) and showing farmers that they need to find markets for their produce.
See also https://camra.org.uk/pubs/ for recommendations particularly regarding real ales, cider and perry.
Beyond where to take your foreign visitor to sample the Best of British food, what are the foods to look for?
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages
Despite the lack of support our government gives to the producers of alcohol, it remains high on the list of the things in which we do excel. Wine is the latest success and a beneficiary of climate change. Our south-eastern counties of Sussex and Kent have become a prime location for sparkling wines that frequently win prizes over champagne. A visit to a vineyard is now an option, but you will also find distilleries, previously associated mainly with Scotland and whisky, are now popping up all over England and Wales. Gin is by far the most popular alcoholic drink south of the Scottish border, but several also produce vodka, rum and even cider brandy. We have also not been slow to recognise that non-alcoholic drinks are increasingly in demand. Over 50% of Gen Z recently surveyed said they have not drunk alcohol for over a year. There are some fine alternatives to most of the traditional spirits as well as some quality soft drinks and mixers. They are a saviour for the hospitality industry and cocktails and mocktails abound.
Wild foods
The botanicals used in most of the alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks is one obvious example of the greater interest in wild food. Although we are a long way behind most other countries with regard to our foraging knowledge, our interest is definitely increasing. Chefs lead the way even if they are not actually the ones doing the foraging.
Some wild foods, such as fungi, have been over picked in places. However, the food that has most potential for sales growth is wild deer, which are still breeding at a much faster rate than they are consumed and in need of control. The issues that need to be addressed have been covered in a previous blog but please buy it when you can.
Artisan Cheese
This year’s Artisan Cheese Awards (restricted to those who produce 400 tons or less a year) received a record 650 entries from 123 cheesemakers across the UK (including 21 from Ireland). This sector of UK food is flourishing despite an overall decline in dairy consumption. In addition to the revival of many of our traditional territorial cheeses, modern cheesemakers now make styles inspired by foreign cheeses, often with results that surpass the originals. The best example of this is Baron Bigod, made in the style of a brie (but better). Try it if you haven’t already.
Great cheese depends on great grass. A quality cheesemaker will always want to have this under their control and so use milk only from their own cows. Pasteurisation kills not only any harmful bugs but also the good ones and although there will be less consistency in unpasteurised cheeses it is here that greatness lies. Certainly, producers of unpasteurised cheeses have to be ultra vigilant in their hygiene standards but isn’t that what you want anyway? A similar debate is had regarding chlorine washed chickens from America – it tells you something about the production regime. If you want to test the taste difference between pasteurised and unpasteurised cheese, I suggest trying Stichelton versus Stilton (which can now only be made with pasteurised milk).
Honey
There has been a huge increase in the number of beekeepers. I hear that taking up beekeeping is considered the modern equivalent to buying a sports car or motorbike for mid-life men. This is wonderful news for the bee and nature.
You should now easily be able to buy a locally produced honey, and this local element is supposed to be critical if it is to act as a deterrent to hay fever, although I don’t know how effective it is.
However, I still struggle to buy single varietal honey produced in this country. The exception is Heather honey, but if I want Lavender, Linden Flower or Chestnut it usually has to be imported. Our nearest Pig Hotel has a wonderful avenue of Linden Lime Trees with beehives adjacent. Although The Pig is part of a now quite large chain, their USP is that each one sources the majority of its ingredients within a 30-mile radius. However, when I asked to buy honey produced from those Linden flowers, they told me that it gets merged with the honey produced by all the other Pig hotels before it is sold! Last year, I had to buy Linden honey imported from Romania, but this year I have just found that Fortnum and Mason stock one produced in Banbury, Oxfordshire, so that’s great news.
Bean-to-Bar Chocolate
Britain has a long association with chocolate with the discovery of how to turn the beans into a bar rather than a drink being made by Fry and Sons in 1847. In 1866 Cadbury introduced a Van Houten cocoa press into their factory and made a bar that was far less bitter than previously and one that would be recognised as “edible” by today’s standards. Both of these Quaker companies continued to innovate, with Cadbury’s introducing the first box of chocolates in 1868 and in 1873 Fry’s made the first ever chocolate egg. All chocolate at this time was dark, it wasn’t until 1879 that the idea of mixing in sweetened condensed milk to produce milk chocolate occurred in Switzerland.
Not only does Britain have a historical role in the manufacture of chocolate but these early Quaker families also brought a strong ethical element, which initially only affected their workers but later extended to being active in the movement to abolish slavery which was prevalent in the growing of the beans.
The best of the craft sector will buy directly from producers to ensure not only higher control over every step of the process of turning bean to bar but also addressing the concerns of child labour, even slavery, still involved in mass production.
Mike Longman, founder of Chocolarder, Cornwall’s only bean-to-bar chocolate maker, says
“Sourcing is the most difficult part of chocolate making and is an absolute minefield. The only way to source effectively is to form solid relationships with the growers themselves. Other chocolate makers, and friends who have travelled to South America, have helped me massively along the way. I’m yet to set off on my first trip but hope to be out in Ecuador later this year to go shopping and friend making.”
Understandably not every chocolate maker can dedicate this amount of time to sourcing, but establishing who are trusted producers is vital. You can find helpful information and buy from cocoarunners.com.
Summarising A Taste of Britain
Whilst my personal selection might not be typical of what everyone is eating in Britain in 2025, I believe we can claim to be producers of delicious, sustainable and ethical foods. In Slow Food parlance we would use the terms Good, Clean and Fair.
Our farms have never been more under threat than we are seeing at this time but there are people maintaining these standards and it is they who I would choose to illustrate the taste of Britain.
Recipe
My recipe for Fresh Peppermint Truffles below uses a Heritage variety of Peppermint and ethically sourced chocolate.
FRESH PEPPERMINT TRUFFLES
You will be aware, even if just from choosing toothpaste or chewing gum, that there are two main types of mint – Spearmint (Mentha spicata) and Peppermint (Mentha piperita). Spearmint, the one that nearly everyone has in their garden, in also known as Common Mint or Garden Mint.
Peppermint is the one from which the essential oils are extracted to make confectionery and is the one that earned England its reputation for producing the best mint in the world –as evidenced by the Italian, French and German names for it of Mentha d’Angleterre, Mentha Anglais and Englisheminze respectively. There is no record of peppermint being used before the English naturalist John Ray published a description of the plant in 1696. The medicinal qualities were quickly appreciated and from the 1750s up until the Second World War, when only essential crops could be grown, an area of south London specialised in growing Black Mitcham peppermint. Following the war, it was completely lost to the UK and was only reintroduced, from Montana in the United States, in the mid-1990s. Sir Michael Colman, of mustard family fame, is the person responsible for its reintroduction and distilling on a commercial scale. The oil can now be bought from some food stores or online at www.summerdownmint.com.
Makes about 20
130 ml double cream
1 tbsp chopped Mitcham Black Peppermint leaves (or use oil)
200 g good dark chocolate in small pieces (I used Menakao from Cocoa Runners, alternatively Willies Cocao Chefs Drops are widely available)
2 tbsp cocoa powder
Heat the cream in a small pan just to boiling point. Remove from the heat and stir in the chopped peppermint leaves. Leave to infuse for at least 20 minutes.
Strain the cream into a clean pan, slightly larger than the first, to remove the mint leaves. Put the pan back on a very gentle heat and stir in the chocolate pieces with a wooden spoon. As soon as all the chocolate has melted place the pan in a bowl of iced water and continue stirring as the mixture cools and thickens. When it is sufficiently cool to hold its form, place teaspoonfuls of the mixture on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with a second sheet of paper and place in the freezer for about half an hour to set more firmly.
Remove the top sheet of paper and sieve half of the cocoa powder onto this. Sieve the other half over the truffles then turn them onto the other sheet of paper so that the bottoms are now also coated in cocoa. Use the palm of your hand to gently roll them into a ball. Don’t spend too long on this as the chocolate soon melts and it all gets rather messy; to me it doesn’t matter if the truffles are rather roughly shaped.
Store in a container in the fridge and eat within a week.
Share this article:
Leave a Reply to Iain Climie Cancel reply