The Shire is supposed to be Britain but with happy people who lives fulfilling life
Good one Tolkien
The shire has good weather though? I think the shire was just supposed to be as idyllic as possible.
Lol I spent some time in the UK in a friend's house and the food was just consistently abysmal. I wasn't even aware of the meme that Britain has bad food at the time so it didn't influence me, the food was simply terrible. Even the ingredients were bad for some reason, especially the vegetables, and extremely expensive too. Never before have I eaten tomato that tastes like stale cucumber.
On the other hand, the sweets were cute, so I guess not everything is bad.
I'm biased cos I'm an anglo but I genuinely love the food here. Maybe you just had brit food done badly. If it's done nicely I don't see how it can be gross. Sure it's simplistic, but because it's so boring and samey, it's quite hard to make taste gross.
i will give the brits this as an olive branch: fish and chips are fine like they could not fuck that up it is just fish and fries
Y'all are invited to my house where I will take you on a British culinary adventure to once and for all prove you wrong.
Last time I had a terrible time with food in the UK but I'm sure there's some really neat stuff that I didn't get to try so yes please feed me daddy
What stuff did you have that was gross?
I'm just sort of in disbelief - brit food is all so simple and samey - sure it's not gonna rock your world - but I don't see what about it can go wrong.
I don't remember exactly what I ate every day but I remember that everything tasted like bad cucumber even though none of it had any cucumber. The one thing I didn't try was fish and chips because I don't really like whatever that fish is called in English.
I honestly just think you are bad ingredients because I have never had food taste that bad.
Also, a lot of fish and chip stores give you a choice of fish. You can have cod, haddock, sole etc.
I honestly just think you are bad ingredients because I have never had food taste that bad.
Yeah, I said in another post that I think half of it was the ingredients being bad. It's true that most food was just very bland and it wouldn't be THAT bad if it had better ingredients. But, like, it seems like the UK in general has a problem with bad ingredients. I don't know if it's the fault of the climate or something. Like, we bought pretty expensive stuff from the supermarket and it was just bad and I asked my friend if it was always like that and she said "yeah, pretty much". I'm mostly referring to domestic vegetables etc here.
But honestly maybe you didn't think it tasted that bad because you were used to it? Idk, for me it was pretty startling.
It was also annoying how little variety there was. I genuinely expected cool stuff because I didn't really know English cuisine was famous for being bad... I remember how we also met some person in the airplane on the way back who also studies there and she said she takes some food together with her every time she returns to the UK lol.
You can have cod, haddock, sole etc.
Oh cod, that's what it is called. But yeah I like neither cod nor sole and I've tried fish and chips (outside the UK) and wasn't crazy, but not because it is bad or something but simply because I don't like cod.
I think from the countries I have been in the UK had the worst food. Italy and France were pretty cool (although France was a land of contrasts), Belgium was... Alright I guess but at least it wasn't horrible. Germany was weird as fuck. Like I'm not sure I would call it good but at least it was interesting. I remember I once ate some kind of massive ball of... I don't even know what the fuck it was, I think it was mostly made of bread and had some meat, and it was just this big sphere like an oversized meatball that spun around in a plate with some kind of fluid. It really wasn't great but it was different and it's kind of amusing to see how many different ways they have to do sausage and meatballs lol. Ireland was almost UK tier but very slightly better I guess. At least Ireland had better drinks. I'm not on the spice hype train, many people here for some reason think that if food doesn't have as much spice as possible it is bland which is not at all the case but idk, in England it really was...
Vegetables should not taste that bad, I've been having them for years. Climate shouldn't matter either as a lot of our fruit and veg is imported.
I genuinely would cook stuff for everyone here if it shut them up. Like, idk where all these people are going but I've also gone a lot of places all over the world and I've never felt like I had an absolutely miserable time with food anywhere.
If you know what you're doing then even traditionally peasant food like stovies can be made to be appetising for modern tastes.
But there's things like rarebit, Haggis, road-in-the-hole, black pudding, Sunday roast. I'd even count a lot of curries on that list as well.
I think the worst part of UK food is that a lot of it is just brown so I think a lot of people get put off by that straight away.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/sams-toad-hole
Maybe try make this one yourself? It's really basic but also pretty good, as long as you don't cheap out on the sausage. Also I personally add a bit of English mustard to the batter mix. That stuffs deadly, so if you do that don't add too much.
Vegetables should not taste that bad, I’ve been having them for years.
Perhaps you're just used to it? Like seriously I don't know, vegetables were super overpriced and just bad. I did think "hold up, is the imported stuff also bad?" and apparently a lot of it was?? Like I didn't try but I was told that the imported stuff isn't great either. I noticed that most of the imported wines weren't great either (although it was the only thing that wasn't overpriced). Perhaps people are less picky so companies don't export their best stuff to the UK? I honestly don't know. I only know I will never forget the tomatoes I ate there lol
Maybe try make this one yourself? It’s really basic but also pretty good, as long as you don’t cheap out on the sausage.
See that's the thing. There were 4 genders to English food: roast, chicken, sausage and cod, and they were all prepared in very similar ways (kind of dry and sad, best case scenario some kind of gravy, and also potatoes everywhere). Now, I don't want to diss English cuisine too hard, I also said that the sweets were actually really neat. Even stuff that should be pretty simple was very nice. For example I had... I think it was called sweetbread? It sounds really dumb from the name but it was pretty awesome.
The most disappointing thing beyond the really bad vegetables everywhere was that most things you could have had anywhere else, except it is mostly the stuff people would make if they didn't want to bother to make something more involved. Like, in France they have a billion different ways to make everything. In Italy they're gonna make your roast but they're also gonna prepare it with a bunch of onions or pesto sauce with pine nut etc. And you can have bangers and mash here but few people want to eat "plain" sausage, you can have sausage with orange bits in it which is pretty cool, or you can go to some of the more mountainous areas and they're gonna make sausage which has a bunch of wild greens in it, or they're gonna make your roast but also put a bunch of chestnuts and wild root vegetables in it. It's also kind of grating how almost everything has to do with meat.
I think this is kind of a general phenomenon in most countries which industrialised early and also had lots and lots of plains for cattle, because people had neither the time, the materials nor the knowledge to make something more involved so they just ate meat, bread, and potatoes. I think that's why most of northwest Europe has bad food but I'm not sure. Even back to the time my dad was a kid, meat was a luxury, and most of the population lived in the countryside as subsistence farmers or fishers. So they made use of every different thing they found (which was lots of things since mountainous areas tend to have more diversity), not to mention that for centuries there was lots of influence from the middle east etc. It's a similar case with Italy, Spain, the rest of the Balkans, etc. So I guess it was reasonable to expect that southern and Eastern Europe would have more variety than the northwest. Idk what happened with France, I think they just like to be fancy.
I think RNAi is from Chile or Argentina or Brazil or something like that, I don't remember.
No, British food is bland and disgusting, bottom tier cuisine. Our food may be unhealthy but at least it's tasty.
Yeah, while the food you see in shows where they go to a bunch of traditional diners across the US looks like it would kill you I'd be lying if I wouldn't want to gorge myself on all of it if I had the opportunity
Nah the US pretty much has equally bland and trashy food. It's mainly an issue with anglo food for some reason.
Yeah, but all the good American stuff is specifically from non-anglos
I'm sure there's some good American stuff but I'm not sure what it is in particular... I mean burgers are actually nice I guess and there's some neat sauces, I'll give you that much but burgers are also somewhat bland I guess. I think the issue with American food is that the country was built on massive virginal plains where you could raise huge numbers of animals so settlers did just that which meant American food just became generic meat.
Listen, I'm from Finland so I'm definitely not trying to get on some cuisine superiority soapbox here (Would you like some macaroni casserole)
Honestly I tried tikka masala in the UK and even that was kinda bland and surprisingly tasteless. I don't even know how they managed to make it tasteless. Maybe it was partly the ingredients at fault. But eventually I ended up eating just that or grabbing some falafel whenever I could because they were better than anything else.
American bbq is really fucking good. Texmex slaps. There is a part of me that will always want a burger, fries, and a milkshake.
Ore specifically that would be Cram which is made by men. Lembas is like that but good. It's not in the movies but both The Hobbit and until they get to Lorien in LOTR, they're mostly chomping Cram which is hard tack.
Also elves are immortal, so I'm guessing they don't like NEED to eat. Why did they make travelling food?
Was there ever much mention of dwarven cooking? And who's the "etc" here? Smeagol's people? The only mention we have of what he ate before he became Gollum was that his grandma taught him how to suck eggs
Dwarves typically didnt cook. They traded for food from whoever lived outside of their holds. I think thorin was racist against hobbits in the book because hobbits just chill, party, and make/grow food, which in his head meant they werent good enough for anything else.
I think the river folk or whatever they were called were related to hobbits but slightly different at least culturally
