The traditional foods of Britain.

1. Look at this restaurant menu. Which of these dishes conic from Britain? Do you know where the others come from?

2. Make a list of typical dishes from your country. Do they have any features in common (similar ingredients, cooking methods, etc.)? What about the British dishes from the menu? Do they have any features in common?

3. Can you name the foods in the picture? (Some are in the menu.)

Starters	Melon with Parma ham Smoked salmon Vegetable samosas Kipper pale with toast Taramasalata Oxtail soup
Main courses	Seafood Deep fried rod or haddock and chips Herrings in oatmeal with mustard sauce Paella' Fisherman's pie Curried prawns with pilau rice Moules mariniere Meat Beef goulash Roast sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding Steak and kidney pie Shish kebab Spare ribs Tex-Mex style Peking duck Wiener schnitzel Roast pheasant with bread sauce Osso buco
Desserts	Apple and blackberry crumble. Crime caramel Apple strudel Rhubarb pie and custard Treacle sponge pudding

4. What experience do you have of food in Britain? Do you think people cat well or badly?
Choose some appropriate words from the list below, and add some of your own.

exciting
cheap
tasty
well-prepared
international
surprising

dull
expensive
bland
poorly prepared
traditional
predictable

5. Here are sonic comments on the quality of British food - some positive, some negative.
Place each one on this scale.

Very good [A]
We Britons are internationally famous for our gardens, our clogs, our beer, our cloth, our cars, our villages, our whisky, our public schools, our monarchy, our democratic institutions, our cricket - umpteen books have been written explaining their glories to those unfortunate enough to have been born outside these islands. But nobody has yet written a book about the bad food for which we are equally famous overseas.

Derek Cooper.
The bad food Guide

The idea that the Puritans with their miserable diet of pickled herrings had any permanent influence on English cooking is as false as the French delusion that we only had one sauce. In the early eighteenth century we ate more and we ate better than people in the rest of Europe. Travellers said that nowhere else could you find such tender juicy steaks, such luscious thick-cut mutton chops and huge prime cuts of beef done to a turn on spit or gridiron. Our pies were famous and the cooking in our taverns and chop houses was renowned throughout Europe.

Sheila Hutchins. English Recipes

Mixed good and bad [B]
Sausage. Even the word has a sizzling, succulent sound, and what memories it evokes. It could form the framework for an autobiography, starting with sausages for breakfast on Sunday, which is one of the first things I can remember. Then, during World War 1, when I was about four years old and living in Hampshire, my grandparents provided refuge for a displaced Belgian family. Monsieur Schoof was a charcutier and he soon found a job with a butcher in the nearest town. On his first free day he bicycled eight miles simply to tell us that on no account were we to consider buying sausages from the shop in which he worked. They were a travesty ... the ingredients utterly deplorable….. the abysmal ignorance of his master beyond comprehension ... etc. etc. At that age I was amazed that sausages could arouse such .vehement passions in a man.

Antony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe,
Book of Sausages

In England, especially in the big towns, fish and chips and hamburgers have gradually replaced the traditional lamb and mint sauce, while an impressive arsenal of sweets and snacks takes care of those 'peckish' moments between meals. Bad eating habits start very young: chemists sell pots of spaghetti with bolognese sauce for babies, and you often see one-year-olds with hamburgers in their mouths. Yet for many Britons, Sunday lunch remains sacred: British families still enjoy their famous roast beef or roast pork, accompanied by the traditional Yorkshire pudding (a kind of souffle), not forgetting roast potatoes of course, and perhaps some peas, green beans or, in winter, brassels sprouts.

Guide Bleu: Grande Bretagne –
(translated from the French)

6. Using Text A or Â as a model, write one of the following.
a) A sentence about your country, beginning, 'We ……….. are internationally famous for ……. , but………….. .'
b) Your most vivid childhood memory of food.

7. CHANGING HABITS
Which of the following statements do you think are true?
a The biggest owner of pubs in Britain is a Japanese bank.
b People in Britain are buying 20% less food from supermarkets today than they did ten years ago.
ñ The British spend about 1.26 billion pounds a year on hamburgers, double what they spend on medicines.
d Over five million kilograms of crisps are eaten in Britain every week.
e There are more Chinese take-aways than there are fish and chip shops in the UK.
f One of the most successful food programmes on TV recently was called Two Fat Ladies'.
It celebrated some of the richest, heaviest, fattiest foods in British and world cooking,
g In 1997, a frozen food company started selling chocolate-flavoured carrots and pizza-flavoured
sweetcorn to encourage children to eat fresh vegetables,
h Just over half the restaurants in Britain are fast-food outlets or takeaways.
i Every person in Britain eats a ready meal from a supermarket at least five times