Food and drink to try while you’re in the UK

From the weird to the wonderful, the delicious to the disgusting English food really does cover a massive range. You want to eat like a local? Try some of these English classics..

• Beans on toast
• Cucumber sandwiches
• Chip Butty - a sandwich full of fries, usually served with lashings of ketchup
• An English ‘fry-up’ breakfast - eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, toast, and lashings of English tea
• Cheese. There are hundreds of different varieties, and it's some of the best in the world. Try the sharp Shropshire blue or crumbly Lancashire, the creamy Cheshire or Cornish Yarg. Serious Cheese fans should visit the Fromagerie in Marylebone or one of the International Cheese Centres at Victoria, City Thameslink (near St Paul’s Cathedral) or Marylebone
• Ales, ciders and beers – all the details about these in my section how to find a traditional English pub.
• Curry – from the red hot Chicken Tikka Masala to the delightfully creamy Korma, from Bhajis to Poppadoms, British Indian food is now virtually the national dish and is incredibly different from any other Indian food anywhere – even India!
• Cornish Pasties – Meat and Onion stuffed bits of pastries designed as the perfect snack that tin miners could eat without getting them covered in soot (they held the crust). Not a big fan myself, but lots of people are!
• HP Sauce (brown mustard) – a condiment.
• Crisps – weird and wonderful flavored potato chips – From Salt and Vinegar to Prawn Cocktail to Thai Curry to Smokey Bacon flavor!
• Chocolate: Cadbury’s chocolate bars: KitKat, Boost, Double Decker, Crunchie
• Cakes. Bread and Butter Budding, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Carrot Cake, Lemon and Ginger Cake, Rhubarb Crumble, spotted dick.
• Shortbread (which isn’t a bread at all)
• Scones and clotted cream
• Marmite - you spread it on toast. You'll either adore it or feel quite sick after trying it.
• Beans
• Fish and Chips - harder to find good ones than you would think: though if you look hard there are good fish and chips in London
• Steak and Kidney Pie
• Lamp chops and mint sauce
• English fudge - a sugary sweet desert. It's so rich you can only eat a bit of it!

All of these foods are totally authentic and totally English. You can get most of them in any food store you see - supermarkets or otherwise. If you want to take home something really special, try the food hall in the Fortnum & Mason store near PIccadilly. Or you can get all sort of tasty goodies, many organic, at Borough Market near London Bridge - a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning.

 

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This page is updated annually. Last updated Autumn/Fall 2009.