Fellow English Speakers and Their Beans
“Beans on toast,” a sort of national glory
The “Times” of London – (here), if you want to see the whole thing – revealed yesterday that the British have astonishingly boring taste in food. Though that was the 1st of April, we consider the news as very plausible and are going to assume that it may have some distant relation with the truth.
At any rate, to quote from the piece:
“Just six dishes account for the most frequent meals in 98 per cent of British households… A group of more than 1,400 families were questioned on the meals they cooked most often. Almost a third (30 per cent) prepared roast chicken most regularly, with spaghetti bolognese (27 per cent) and stir fry (12 per cent) the next most popular. Then came sausage and mash at 12 per cent, followed by curries (10 per cent) and pork chops (7 per cent).
“Only 2 per cent of the families said that they cooked another dish most often.
“Asked why they did not try out new recipes, 37 per cent said they were worried their family would not like them, 32 per cent said that they could not remember how to cook any other meals and 31 per cent said that they ‘couldn’t be bothered’.”
We do have independent confirmation of a kind. This is from the always reliable “Sun” of March 19, 2007, just over a year ago:
“Spaghetti bolognese was yesterday named Britain’s favourite food, eaten on average 2,960 times in a lifetime… Spag bol is served up more than twice a week in six million homes. The total is the equivalent of having it every day for more than eight years.”
Vile cooking in the UK is of course a treasured national institution and we are not even going to try to be funny about it. We see though that our many British friends on the whole appreciate decent food when they can get it. For this reason we have sometimes wondered why they bother so little to prepare it or to consume it at home.
Though “Upper Italy” doesn’t actually worry about this on a daily basis, we have looked into the question and have a theory, one which has to do with the fact that Brits don’t rinse! That is, standard UK dishwashing practices do not contemplate the rinsing of dishes and crockery after they have been scrubbed in soapy water.
British washers-up apparently, if they think about it at all, believe that drying – with or without a cloth? – is sufficient to neutralize detergent residues. This leaves us with three questions:
• What do British mothers tell their daughters about the virtues of not rinsing?
• Is it possible that in spite of the widely held contrary belief, British food in itself is actually excellent and there is just a problem of detergent contamination?
• and finally, are they by chance right? Is the rest of the West daily wasting time and untold billion of gallons of scarce water resources by uselessly rinsing its dishes?
Readers may wonder what this has to do with Italy, though “spag bol” would probably already bring the matter into our honest purview. The point is that, living as we do in the midst of imperial ruins – you can hardly step out the door here without tripping over an ancient brick – Upper Italy cares deeply about theories of decline. Rome, it is said, may have declined and fallen due to lead poisoning from water pipes. Did the British Empire do itself in with Fairy Soap and doubtful dishwashing habits?