34. United Kingdom: Cooking a British Family Feast

Thank you joining Tooting Family Kitchen for Week 34 of our 52 Weeks Challenge. It gives me great pleasure to stay at home on this special festive week and cook up a Christmas Family Feast representative of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Whilst I am a proud and patriotic Englishman, I am also very proud of the union that exists between the countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and have had the pleasure and privilege to serve alongside soldiers from all 4 nations during my military career.

Whilst there is a strong rivalry amongst us it is usually good natured and we appreciate and celebrate each other’s successes, which is why I think it’s good to kick off this week with a mention of England’s World Cup win of 1966! If you are not from The UK and are planning your first trip to Scotland, this is a great icebreaker to get the locals into conversation. It is possible there may be a handful of people out there that may consider this to be ‘old news’ and irrelevant (ridiculous, I know)…in which case, if you are visiting Wales for the first time, be sure to ask the locals how Wales got on in the 2020 Six Nations…I’m not sure how England did so will leave it to them to fill you in on the details.

Rivalries aside, collectively the United Kingdom has given the world some of its best loved sports. Although sometimes it’s hard to pin point an exact start point for sports as we enjoy them today, there are strong arguments to suggest that football, rugby, tennis, golf, darts and rowing (amongst many others) were all invented in the UK. Rory McIlroy, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Fallon Sherrock, Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury, Paula Radcliff, Lewis Hamilton, Andy Murray, Chris Hoy, Dina Asher-Smith and Nicola Adams represent just a handful of sporting stars that have achieved success on the highest sporting stages over the last few years, but of course there are many, many more before we even get into team sports!

Of course in the UK we have experience of taking a good thrashing too, which is why we are armoured with something else I am extremely proud of, ‘The Stiff Upper Lip’, the ability to remain resolute when faced with adversity… to take things on the chin and crack on! Only in the UK could the most catastrophic scenario be described in a meeting as “a slight hiccup”. The optimism we carry around in our daily lives is displayed best in the summer when year after year, month after month, week after week, we will glance up at the sky and say “I think it’s going to be nice next week”…don’t give up hope! It also takes a lot to annoy us, but you know you are getting close to the mark when you hear such fighting talk as “I beg your pardon”, “well excuse me” and “steady on”…this is when things are really likely to kick off and if there is one thing that is almost certainly going to push us over the edge, it would be putting the milk in the cup BEFORE the tea…don’t, just don’t! On the subject of tea, whilst many will accredit the discovery of penicillin as having a profound effect on our wellbeing, it doesn’t come close to the power of tea for us Brits…your world is falling apart, you are in absolute despair, you are completely helpless…the British solution…”don’t worry, pop over and I’ll put the kettle on, we’ll have a nice cuppa!” In fact we can pretty much solve any issue we are faced with by just using the single but powerful words of “tea?”, “pint?” and “pub?”.

Despite our International presence on the world stage in numerous conflicts and World War’s over the years, we do like to avoid confrontation at all costs. Only a Brit could be absolutely convinced that someone is lying and say “maybe I am just remembering wrong”, only a Brit is going to have absolutely no idea what someone is talking about and say “yes, I think that rings a bell”, only a Brit is going to get the worst hair cut imaginable and when asked by the hairdresser, “how does it look?”, reply with “yep, spot on, thank you” for fear of upsetting the hairdresser. We take being polite to another level and never leave the house unless armed with a lot of “thank you’ s” and “sorry’ s” . We say thanks to drivers who stop at zebra crossings, we apologise for not being a smoker when asked for a light…sometimes we get so confused when someone bumps into us we thank them for it! But if there is one thing that is likely to get our backs up as much as ‘milk before tea’, it’s not getting a big ‘thank you’, in return for holding a door open for someone or letting a driver pass…in which case be warned…it is very likely that you will face our wrath with our preferred act of (passive) aggression…a loud and sarcastic “you’re welcome!” And God forbid we ever start a sentence with, “with all due respect”.

The UK’s place in history needs no introduction and for good or far bad our influence on the planet stretches far and wide. Some of the best known explorers, artists, composers, authors, musicians, pop stars and inventors hail from the UK and as a language, English is the mostly widely spoken in terms of number of speakers and the third most widely spoken native language, however, I don’t know if this is something we should be thanked for. Having worked as an interpreter, I have an understanding that the difficult thing is often not to remember the words, but understand how the native speakers put them together. Au revoir, Adios, Auf Wiedersehen and Addio…all pretty straight forward right? Feel sorry for the person who has to translate “right then, I suppose it’s about time to start thinking about making a move”.

Moving on to gastronomy and the food scene in The UK has been absolutely buzzing for years now, with London often be referred to as the food capital of the world. Long gone are the days when our cuisine was looked down upon and whilst the huge number of cuisines available through our wonderfully diverse communities makes for great eating, the general standard of cooking when it comes to traditional British fair has been raised significantly too. Steak and Kidney Pies, Fish and Chips, Cullen Sink, Fry-ups, Shepherds Pies, Hot Pots, Bubble and Squeak and Cawl are all things of beauty when cooked well, but of course there is only one dish which is truly part of our national identity, the British Roast Dinner! Every Sunday in the UK pubs are packed out, restaurants are fully booked and kids are fighting over who’s mum does the best roast, as family and friends gather to share the amazing feast of roasted meat and potatoes with vegetables and gravy. Such is the popularity of roast dinners that the French started calling us “rosbifs” in the 18th Century.

Alarmingly though, I recently discovered that everything in the garden is not rosy (to use a British idiom to describe a catastrophe of epic proportions), when my friend Matt broke the news to me that he hated roast dinners. Shocked, I dug deeper and found out that Matt is representative of a growing number of people, who despite being British born and bred, are not fans of a roast dinner. Nor will they be turned by people who say “well, that’s because you haven’t tried my Great-Auntie Gertrude’s yet”. Whatever next? Some may even question the Great British past time of complaining all afternoon about over-eating on roast turkey, potatoes and brussels sprouts, before falling asleep on the couch and waking up to watch an extra long edition of ‘The Vicar of Dibley’?! So to Matt and all you roast haters out there I say…“with all due respect…steady on!!!”