Having just returned home to the U.S. after a long trip to Britain, I am naturally consoling myself with frequent readings of the expat section of the Daily Telegraph website. This appears to be designed to lull far-off anglo-nostalgists into believing that the UK is still a green and pleasant land, give or (preferably) take the odd immigrant. But all is not well: classic British dishes are dying out.
Traditional British dinners are being replaced by ‘foreign quick fixes’ as they take too long to cook. Classic dishes such as toad in the hole, bubble and squeak and hot pots are dying out are diasppearing from the family dinner table, a survey shows.
Researchers found almost one in three people now opt for pizza or spaghetti bolognese at the majority of meal times. And more than a quarter of adults polled named Italian as their favourite type of food.
However, not all British classics are disappearing as the research found that roast dinners and jacket potatoes are still firm favourites.
Kathryn Race from The Potato Council, which carried out the poll, said:
“It’s a shame to see that some of our country’s best loved foods are no longer seen on UK dinner tables – they are our heritage and something we need to keep. We are travelling the world more than ever now, and it seems we are trying to recreate the dishes we sample abroad once we get back home. Foreign foods and the ingredients needed to make those dishes are readily available in supermarkets making it far easier to cook them back at home, although this is, it seems, at a price.”
