Curated playlist
British cuisine
- Lamb and muttonIn most of South Asia, mutton on a menu means goat. Mutton curry in India is made from goat meat.
- French friesFrance, Belgium, Spain and Chile each claim to have invented french fries. Historians have never fully settled it.
- BiscuitBiscuits were cooked twice on purpose, so sailors could carry them. The word comes from Latin for "cooked twice."
- Fish and chipsFish and chips, the battered fried fish with thick potato pieces that many call the national dish of the United Kingdom, still has one kitchen where an 1860s method survives untouched. That kitchen is not in Britain. It is in northern…
- PancakeA pancake, also called a hotcake, griddlecake or flapjack, once sent a woman running to church with her frying pan still in hand. Tradition places the scene in Olney, England, in 1445. A housewife was frying pancakes to eat before the…
- Fried chickenFried chicken appears in a diary entry from 1773, and the place is not Georgia or Tennessee. It is the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland. The writer describes a plate of chicken fried in fat, a dish most people now link to the…
- BarbecueBarbecue first shows up as a noun in 1697, and it was a place to sleep. The English buccaneer William Dampier wrote that his party lay down for a night upon their "Borbecu's, or frames of Sticks". Three centuries later, the word names a…
- Black puddingBlack pudding is a blood sausage from the United Kingdom and Ireland, and one 15th-century English recipe for it called for the blood of a porpoise. That version was eaten exclusively by the nobility. Today the dish belongs to far more…
- CurryCurry was a category the British invented, not a dish India named. Indians used specific names for their dishes.
- Full breakfastThe full breakfast, also known as the fry-up, is a substantial cooked meal made across Great Britain and Ireland. Depending on the kitchen, it may be called a full English, full Scottish, full Welsh, full Irish or Ulster fry. The meal's…
- SandwichThe sandwich went before a court in Indiana in 2024, and the court ruled that "tacos and burritos are Mexican-style sandwiches." That is a surprising verdict for a food most people feel sure they can recognize. At its simplest, a sandwich…
- HaggisHaggis, the Scottish savoury pudding, has a reputation that confuses some of the people who come to eat it. In one poll, 33 percent of American visitors to Scotland believed haggis was an animal. The joke behind that belief describes a…
- Sunday roastThe Sunday roast came second. In a 2012 poll asking Britons what they love about Britain, this plate of roast meat, potatoes and gravy was beaten by only one other item on the list. The Sunday roast goes by several names: Sunday lunch,…