A casual place for banter and anything that doesn't fit in anywhere else.
Have chat and a natter. Talk about anything and everything.
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I've realised recently that sauce is a general UK crutch. I knew like 5 ketchup kids growing up who ate everything with ketchup. Might be why we're known as a having bland food because we drown everything in sauce or gravy
Our national dish is literally dried toast with some saucy beans
All food is merely a medium for sauce.
Me when I was told hummus is a condiment
This is the way
This is the way.
Isn't toast normally dried?
On a more serious point, beans on toast is not the national dish on any list I've seen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_dish#U
Looking up UK or England gives Chicken Tikka Masala, Fish and Chips or Sunday Roast. Scotland has haggis, Wales has Crawl and NI has Ulster Fry.
Not officially but unofficially Beans on Toast is most recognizable other than Fish and Chips or and Full English Breakfast
Official National Dishes are always suspect. For example, the US has Turkey in general, and Apple Pie, which is an English dish
Realistically, Pies should be the national dish of the UK (Mince Pie, Shepherds Pie, Pork Pie, Pasty, Fish Pie, Many Dessert Pies) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:British_pies
Does pork pie fall into the realms of local delicacy?
Only if made in Melton Mowbray.
Does a pasty count as a pie? I think they should be on our list of national delicacies too.
Cornish pasty is definitely distinct from a pie, in my opinion.
Full English is just beans on toast with extra steps.
I would agree that pies are very much a national treasure.
It's amusing watching the Americans try and claim pies because they make fruit pies.
Of even the dessert pies, that's only a small subset!
Made next to a certain barber's shop.
Beans on toast is probably less of a "national dish" and more an affordable comfort food. I guess the American equivalent would be biscuits and gravy?
What? Our national dish is stuff like the Sunday roast. We didn't even have baked beans until the last century and beans on toast is a comfort food not a national bloody delicacy.
The reason our more traditional dishes from the pre imperial era weren't highly spiced is because we simply didn't have access to them. We used things like sauces, chutneys, pickles, etc to account for that.
The problem with British food is that you rarely season it. Gordon Ramsey shouts at you from all the screens to add a bloody pinch of salt, but you still ignore it. Season your beans properly and they will be bloody amazing!
Never been. Am I missing out?
IMO, no. There are a billion good places to eat while in the UK but I don't think Nando's is one of them.
It always struck me as a triumph of hype, rather than the quality of the food.
I always thought of it as some halfway house to fast food. You order at a the counter, but its brought to your table, and it takes them like 15 mins. It's certainly not fine dining, but it's not McD or KFC.
I think it's decent for what it is though.
It's to KFC what Wimpy is to McDonald's.
Nandos used to be good for quick and easy fast food that was satisfyingly spicy to the average persons pallet (personally I find their top level sauce is only warm to me). There's nothing wrong with that, people like and want fast food when they're in a rush or on the lash, or the like. These days it's prices are too high to meet that criteria due to various factors.
I swear the extra flavour in their extra hot sauce makes it less hot than the hot one. Or maybe the extra hot burned my tastebuds to a crisp.
None of their sauces are particularly hot. They only use birds eyes chillis that cap out at about 100k on the scoville scale.
Pfft, garlic medium sauce FTW.
It's a tasty sauce! But I need extra hot for the chicken / meal and garlic in addition with some bites, in the plate or mixed into the perinnaise.
Just to be clear, the image is depicting not only that the sauce is a crutch but also that Nando's only barely limps along even WITH the sauce.