England Food & Traditional Cuisine

English cooking is older, plainer and better than its reputation: roasted and stewed meats, pies, cheese and bread, boiled vegetables and river and sea fish, the repertoire of the fourteenth-century Forme of Cury and of Mrs Beeton's two-million-selling book of 1861, refreshed after rationing by Elizabeth David's Mediterranean of 1950 and by every immigrant kitchen since. The canon is short and real: fish and chips, born in the 1860s of Jewish fried fish and French chips, sold from 25,000 shops by 1910 and about 10,000 now, with salt, vinegar, mushy peas or curry sauce; the Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding (a "dripping pudding" in print by 1737) and gravy in the pub at one o'clock; the full English of bacon, sausage, beans, eggs, mushrooms, tomato and toast; the Cornish pasty of beef, potato, swede and onion, protected since 2011; the cream tea of scones, clotted cream and jam in Devon and the Cornish peninsula; cheddar, half the country's cheese by sales, from the Somerset gorge, and Stilton from six licensed dairies in three counties.

The other half of the national diet came from the empire and stayed: curry has been cooked in English kitchens since the eighteenth century, chicken tikka masala is a British invention, balti was born in the Midlands in 1977, and about 8,000 Indian restaurants remain from a 2015 peak of 12,000, the oldest, Veeraswamy, open in London since 1926. Tea arrived with a Portuguese queen in 1660 and chocolate bars with three Quaker firms; beer is the drink, and real ale -- cask-conditioned, hand-pulled, 420 million pints a year -- is the pub's reason for being, with the West Country's cider making the UK the largest producer in Europe, and English sparkling wine now beating Champagne in blind tastings.

Fish and chips

Battered cod or haddock and thick chips from a "chippy", salted and vinegared, with mushy peas, curry sauce or a pickled egg; eaten from the paper by the sea.

Sunday roast

Roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken with roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and a risen Yorkshire pudding, the pub's Sunday-lunch institution.

Full English breakfast

Bacon, sausage, fried or scrambled eggs, baked beans, mushrooms, grilled tomato, hash browns, black pudding and toast, with tea.

Cornish pasty

A crimped shortcrust turnover of beef, potato, swede and onion, protected by geographical indication since 2011 and 6 per cent of the Cornish food economy.

Cream tea

Scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam and a pot of tea; Devon puts the cream on first and the Cornish the jam.

Ploughman's lunch

Cheddar or Stilton with bread, pickle, an apple and an onion, the pub's cold plate with a pint of ale or cider.

Chicken tikka masala

The British-Indian curry of grilled chicken in a spiced tomato-cream sauce, with rice and naan, on every high street.

Sticky toffee pudding

Date sponge under hot toffee sauce with custard or cream, the pub dessert of the Lake District and everywhere else.

The pub is the institution -- Pepys's "heart of England", one for every 187 people in 1577, 39,404 left in England and Wales in 2023 -- and the place to eat: the roast, the pie, the ploughman's, the quiz on a weekday night, last orders now often after eleven since the 2003 licensing law, no smoking indoors since 2007, and the gastropub since 1991. The chippy and the caff serve the working day. Afternoon tea is the hotel ritual and the cream tea its country cousin.

Markets: Borough Market in Southwark, on a site traded since at least the twelfth century in 1850s halls; Bath's Georgian market; Bury's and the northern covered markets; farmers' markets in every county town on Saturdays. Cheese is regional and named -- cheddar from the Somerset gorge, Stilton from Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, Wensleydale from the Dales, Double Gloucester rolled down Cooper's Hill each spring bank holiday. Curry houses line the Midlands' balti triangle and every town's high street.

Drink: real-ale festivals, the West Country's cider farms, the Kent and Sussex sparkling-wine estates open for tours, gin distilleries in old mills, and tea, always tea.

England has made wine since the Romans and had 139 vineyards when Henry VIII was crowned in 1509, lost the habit for centuries, and rediscovered it in 1936 when George Ordish planted vines in the south; the twentieth-century revival ran on German crosses -- Seyval Blanc, Reichensteiner, Müller-Thurgau, Bacchus -- and peaked at 400 vineyards in the 1980s before a third gave up. The second revival is sparkling wine on the same chalk that runs under Champagne: in 2004 a panel judging European sparkling wines gave most of the top ten places to English bottles, and there are now more than 1,100 commercial vineyards, concentrated in Kent, Sussex, Essex and the southern counties, with Chapel Down in Kent the largest producer and Denbies in the Thames-side hills the largest estate at 107 hectares. Production hit a record 21.6 million bottles in 2023 and fell to 10.7 million in 2024's wet season -- the climate, with few summer days above 30 °C, is still the gamble.

The grapes are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier for the traditional-method sparkling that carries the country's reputation, with Bacchus the signature still white and Dornfelder and Pinot Noir the reds; the protected designation requires English grapes grown below 220 metres. Visiting is easy from London by train to the Kent and Sussex estates, most of which run tours and tastings in season; no tasting fee is stated here because no estate page was opened.