Food in the UK

Vocabulary

Stir-fry: a typically Asian dish containing vegetables, meat or fish and served with noodles

Pie: a pastry shell containing vegetables, fruit, meat or fish, covered with a pastry lid

Baked beans: beans in a tomato sauce, served hot

Battered: covered with a mixture of flour and water and then fried

The United Kingdom has a bad reputation for its food. It is like an international joke that British food is bad food.

A very stereotypical British meal is meat with vegetables and potatoes. These days, very few British families eat ‘meat and two veg’ every day. So what do British people eat?

In the UK, we have a lot of international cuisine. Pasta, pizza, curry and stir-fry are all very popular. There is a large Indian and Pakistani community in the UK. Because of this, there are a lot of Indian restaurants which serve lots of different types of curry.

For breakfast, British people usually eat cereal and toast. On weekends, it is common to have a cooked breakfast. The simplest cooked breakfast is bacon or sausages served with eggs and toast. A large cooked breakfast includes bacon, sausages, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans, hash browns (made of shredded potato) and toast. This breakfast is very popular and is almost always served in British hotels.

Pies are also very popular in the UK. Popular pies include meat and potato, cheese and onion, and steak and kidney. Lots of bakeries sell one-portion pies which are popular to eat at lunch time. At dinner time, popular pies include chicken pie, fish pie and Shepherd’s pie, which is made using lamb and vegetables.

Another famous British dish is fish and chips. Fish like haddock or cod is battered, fried, and served with a large portion of chips. Fish and chips is not healthy because it contains a lot of fat.

So, British food may seem quite boring and unhealthy, but in reality British people eat a lot of international food. Traditional British meals like fish and chips, pies and cooked breakfasts are not eaten very often. However, if you visit the UK, you should definitely try them! 

Questions
1. Name three things you might find in a cooked breakfast
2. What kind of fish is used to make fish and chips?
3. Why does the UK have a lot of Indian style restaurants?
4. What kind of food from the UK would you like to try?
5. Does British food deserve the bad reputation that it has?

Helen Ullock