British Cuisine: British Cuisine

A lot of people around the world insist that us British have the most uninteresting cuisine. I disagree. It is very interesting, but utterly awful.

There is a thing in the north of England called black pudding, which is a sausage made from dried pigs' blood. Now, if you weren't any wiser, "black pudding" sounds like something you might like to try. Just those two words put neatly together like that conjure up images of sweet sticky chocolate cake or some such. I personally feel that black pudding should legally be called "yucky cholesterol-packed congealed pig's blood sausage with nasty white fatty lumps in it", reduced to the acronym YCPCPBSWNWFLII, which coincidentally is the sound your throat makes while forcing this stuff down. If it were labeled so, perhaps less people will try black puddings and therefore be spared taking the memory of the horrid things to their graves. When I was a young 'un my mother tried to get me to eat them once... but only once.

Misleading people with prettified words for nauseating dishes seems to be a nefarious habit of the British. If someone was to say to you, "Here, try this sweetbread, it's delicious." you would salivate like a Pavlov hound and pop some of it into your eager beak, knowing not at all that what you were eating was in fact miscellaneous animal glands. Yum!

Breakfast. For the rest of the civilized world, this has got to be considered the least nasty meal of the day: cereal, bacon, eggs, toast, that kind of thing. Not for the Brits. Liver and kippers are a common English morning repast. Yup, smoked fish and internal organs with your orange juice before heading off to work. Who started this and why is it carrying on?

Then you have the crown prince of all sadomasochistic recipes from the land of kilt and thistle. The haggis. This little beauty was obviously invented by an ancestor of the sick bastard who dreamt up "Fear Factor". This Scottish dish has to be the most abominable victual known to Man. It is a boiled sheep's stomach stuffed with oats and every inedible bit of offal that has been cast away by the local slaughterhouse. It is my personal opinion that this meal was in fact concocted as a punishment for criminals of yore. I strongly believe that Macbeth was fed haggis a few hours before he was decapitated. His last living thought must have been, "Thank God I'm not attached to my stomach anymo..."

I have seen people gobble down tripe, the lining of a cow's stomach, another British delicacy my parents tried to force-feed me. This stuff not only looks and tastes ghastly, but has the texture of the outside of a very old tennis ball. Whoever first ate this repugnant stuff was either very brave, extremely hungry or an irredeemable lunatic. There is so much cow that is nice to eat! Why eat the bits that make you vomit?

So now you know. British food is extremely interesting. Just make sure you stay away from it.