Exploring closer to home

I’m currently reading Pie Fidelity by Pete Brown. A fascinating book that looks into the strange relationship we British have with our food. It’s not that we don’t like food, don’t obsess about food in many cases. It’s that we seem to find it so important where it originates from. He argues that most of us want our food to be from anywhere but here. We all like British-grown or produced food. What we don’t seem so keen on is British cuisine.

Walk down any UK high street and you’ll inevitably find restaurants offering Italian, French or Chinese food. Explore a little deeper and there’s probably Thai, Japanese and Spanish as well. In the bigger cities, the options will go on and on. But what you will struggle to find is a restaurant claiming to be traditional British. He isn’t being jingoistic in his arguments and isn’t saying that we should be eating British food as part of some daft Brexit exercise. Just that amongst our foodie obsessions with kimchi, sourdough, miso and whatever that latest trend is (black bean rayu in my case) there’s a whole world of British food out there.

The further I get into the book, the more it’s making me think about how I cook and eat. My cookbook shelves are like a world tour. The fridge contains hot sauces from far and wide, the spice rack leans well towards North Africa. SousChef is my go-to website, and it can be a dangerous place to go, if like me you’re inclined to buy first and then think ‘now what do I do with this?’

When we had lunch out last Saturday, my eyes got stuck halfway down the menu. Unable to move beyond the hot and sticky Korean chicken dish. The sort that leaves your lips slightly numb and your fingers with a dark sriracha stain. The other dishes sounded good, and yes there were pies and fish which could be classified as British. But they didn’t grab me in the same way. Didn’t excite the tastebuds.

I’m not for a moment saying that reading this book is going to stop my culinary instinct from roaming all over the world. I’m too far gone for that. More, that it’s made me stop and realise, I should be exploring closer to home as well.