'History might well record that this moment, or some time near it, was a turning point in British food. Until then, it was one of two kinds: high church or low. The low is legendary and perplexing: how, for two centuries, has a country with so many resources—creams and butters and handmade cheeses, a practice of grass-feeding sheep and cattle, wild fish, abundant game—produced such a spectacularly loathsome fare? “Try harder than ever for quality,” Elizabeth David wrote in the 1977 edition of “French Provincial Cooking.” “A little fine olive oil, or true, clear stock, or double cream from Jersey herds, or a few fresh eggs laid by decently-fed, humanely-reared hens.” The simple good ingredients were there: why weren’t people using them? Why did they seek out the substandard, the industrial, and the unhealthy: prawn cocktail crisps, say, or fish fingers with Birds Eye peas (a “traditional” Sunday supper), or a “spag bol,” that horrific canned imitation of a classic Bolognese pasta? The implicit complaint—that the English don’t care what they put in their mouths—was evident in how it got there: by scooping up most of what was on your plate and eating it in one bite. Using your knife, you crushed what you could onto the back of your fork, one item after the other, your starches (like that perennial favorite chips and mash), your green-gray veg, a modest protein, calculatedly overcooked, unless it was fish, in which case it was just outright obliterated, and then—bang!—into the mouth, fork upside down. “I really don’t know what English food is,” Ramsay told me. “Spotted dick? Toad-in-the-hole? Curry is the national dish, and people still fry Mars bars for dinner.(yeah real weird food)” '




'that's the toad-in-the hole'


And the 'Haggis' that's once fooled a friend believing that is actually meat cooked with local scotland beer... (laugh)

Contributed : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_buford?currentPage=all