With Food Like This, Who Needs Teeth?
“PRINCE CHARLES SAYS BAN McDONALD’S FOOD”
I share Charles’ indignation. McDonald’s fare is not authentically Scottish. Not one of their restaurants offers oatmeal or sheep entrails, which happens to be the total cuisine of Scotland. You can understand why the natives would require 80 proof beverages to help them forget what they are eating.
Nonetheless, how dare an Englishman criticize any restaurant that wasn’t serving botulism? England’s culinary achievements never progressed past boiling and burning. Think about it: the Spanish techniques of torture were the English methods of cooking. The English might actually be immune to taste. They spent a 100 year war in France without gaining any culinary hints; Joan of Arc obviously was overcooked.
And imagine what Napoleon could have done for English cuisine. After all, he was Italian and French! The man instinctively knew how to cook. Instead of exiling him to St. Helena’s, he could have been confined to a trattoria in London.
Of course, the prospect of appetizing food in England might have undermined the whole premise of the British Empire: going out for a decent meal.
A British royal complaining about the quality of anyone’s food supplies not merely a day’s, but an entire week’s recommended allowance of irony.
There is no cuisine on the planet more uniformly bland and vile than food from the British Isles. Those people boil beef, for pity’s sake.
I might trust Nigella Lawson with corned beef. Her family (actually the Levinsons) knows that you don’t use corn.
Before flunking out of Cambridge, Edward VII made friends with some boys named Rothschild. (They could afford to lend the Prince a bob or two.) Although he never dared suggest a kosher kitchen at Buckingham Palace, Edward acquired a fondness for Jewish food.
what can be said about a race that flavors its national drink with peat?
Beign of Scottish descent, and having been to the family’s ancestral hometown, I must disagree with one point:
There is no proof on earth strong enough to make one enjoy haggis. This dish was contrived solely to inspire beserkers to do their worst against the vile Sensenech from the south.
And it worked — Scotland gave England the Stuarts. After that, they have pretty much left us alone, except when they needed someone to move in and kick the Irish out.