Need some insight into British cuisine

[hitmouse]

Welsh cuisine is not particularly different from the rest of the uk. Trad Welsh cuisine is mainly quite humble:
Cawl - a type of lamb/ veg soup
Laverbread - a kind of seaweed snot fried up with oats and cockles for breakfast
Welsh rarebit aka cheese on toast
Welshcakes

There is some really special Welsh meat: Gower saltmarsh lamb, for example.

might be easier to co-opt the menus from some high-end Welsh restaurants:

Y Polyn
The Beach House
The Walnut Tree

 

[HoopyFrood]

beans and toast

That's beans on toast, you tea-tipping upstart!

 

[CupofJoe]

For a high-class menu at the captain's table you could have:
Canapes: Cheese cubes and pineapple chunks on a cocktail stick
Starter: Prawn cocktail
Main: Chicken-in-the-basket/Beef Wellington
Afters: Black Forest Gateaux/Spotted Dick/Arctic Roll
Drinks: Babycham/Snowball

For those of us that remember the 70s

Add in an all-you-can-eat salad buffet and it looks like a great night out at a Schooner in!

 

[Mouse]

My state mandated hatred for all things pertaining to the the British Crown demands I remain ignorant of your customs...

You keep saying this and I'm wondering how you intend to write a Welsh character if you know nothing and hate everything? It's not just the food, it'll be the way your character speaks and everything - are you familiar with Welsh accents and words?

 

[Ursa major]

are you familiar with Welsh accents and words?

Words both in the sense of how the Welsh use the English language and how they speak the Welsh language (for the increasing number of people who do).

However, I had a boss from Cardiff who very occasionally put on a thick Cardiff accent that, to my untrained ears, sounded not that different from a Liverpool one. Either he was pulling my leg (which can't be ruled out), or the similarity I noticed was a result of both Liverpool and Cardiff lying close to the language border between England and Wales and so they were mixed together in a similar way.

Note that I'm ignoring regional differences in Wales, mainly because I wouldn't be able to describe them. I'm also ignoring that many people in the UK change their accents deliberately: people here can be prone to reading a lot into another person's accent, not always to the speaker's benefit.

 

[HareBrain]

a filthy colonial who despises the crown

First two seasons were OK.

That's beans on toast, you tea-tipping upstart!

Amazed you were the first to notice that!

That might seem trivial, but I remember how irked I was by a single mistake in Declare by Tim Powers, which was set in the British intelligence** community during the 60s. "Math" was used instead of "maths", and it was enough to take me partially out of the story for the rest of the book.

**Any comment about this being a contradiction in terms will be removed as being political, in current circumstances.

 

[HoopyFrood]

I was reading a book by someone from the US who had American characters going to Wales and one of the British folk used the phrase "are you taking a piss?" and I was all immediately, nope, can't take this seriously now.

 

[Toby Frost]

It depends how comically British you want to make it. My instinct for Wales is to say roast lamb, but there are many options. Leeks are stereotypically Welsh as a side vegetable.

Welsh cuisine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

However, some dishes like that are seen as for special occasions or big family dinners. "Normal" food in the UK is often quite like normal food in the US, although a few oddities remain. If you wanted something standard but distinctive, I'd go for fish and chips or chicken tikka masala. An Asian person (as in of Indian or Pakistani descent) once told me that having naan bread with curry is quite a British thing but I'm not sure.

The one thing I'd recommend is that someone drinks tea. Many British people drink pretty large quantities of this stuff, and it isn't linked to a particular time of day (confusingly, "tea" is also sometimes used to mean a lighter, earlier evening meal). The important thing is that tea is made with boiling water and uses milk, not cream.

Funny you mention the "math" thing, Harebrain. I read a book by a Canadian guy who'd lived in London for years, which was entirely convincing except that the characters gave directions in "blocks" rather than "streets".

(Surely it's "having a piss" for urinating, "taking the piss" for making fun and "getting pissed" for getting drunk.)

 

[Venusian Broon]

There are plenty of adults in the UK who haven't even heard of eg plum duff or spotted dick let alone eaten them.

I think I might have had two or three puddings or desserts in the past five years in total, and frankly not many more in the decades before that. I might have had a sweet biscuit in 2018, but I can't remember exactly when. I had switched at the start of the millenium to being more of an antipasta/starter person with dinner. savory>sweet IMHO.

However I do think it was definitely the case that 20th Century UK was the land of stodgy, thick, sweet puddings, usually covered in thick custard/cream and I'm sure that tradition is still reasonably strong. I argue, though, that it is probably not the thing to serve people golden syrup sponge or clotty dumpling if you wanted to do a posh meal.

 

[HoopyFrood]

(Surely it's "having a piss" for urinating, "taking the piss" for making fun and "getting pissed" for getting drunk.)

As any good British person would know, but this was being used for 'making fun' and it was like mental nails on a chalkboard.

 

[Aquilonian]

Cornwall has from the 19th century onwards produced a large diaspora especially in mining areas such as South Australia and Western USA. And there are plans for a spaceport near Newquay in Cornwall. So the Cornish Pasty is an obvious choice. For authenticity it should be made with short-crust pastry (not flakey pastry), and bit of low-quality meat, potatoes onions or maybe turnips, and plenty of black pepper.

 

[Harpo]

Cornwall has from the 19th century onwards produced a large diaspora especially in mining areas such as South Australia and Western USA. And there are plans for a spaceport near Newquay in Cornwall. So the Cornish Pasty is an obvious choice. For authenticity it should be made with short-crust pastry (not flakey pastry), and bit of low-quality meat, potatoes onions or maybe turnips, and plenty of black pepper.

And sturdy enough that it can survive being dropped down a mine shaft.

 

[Dan Jones]

@Deke Don't forget we're an island nation, so if your captain wanted to offer a taste of the UK then what better place to start than the sea? British seafood is among the world's best, from salmon, langoustines and lobster from Scotland, oysters from Mersea, eels from Northern Ireland, while bass and mackerel are delicious and plentiful pretty much everywhere. Meanwhile, the kings of fish are monkfish, John Dory and turbot, any of which would be fit for a captain's table.

 

[Deke]

That's beans on toast, you tea-tipping upstart!

Apologies m’lord.

You keep saying this and I'm wondering how you intend to write a Welsh character if you know nothing and hate everything? It's not just the food, it'll be the way your character speaks and everything - are you familiar with Welsh accents and words?

No, sadly I am not.

However society is rather homogeneous in most every space opera, and the crew of my ship is Terran, meaning they aren’t just going to be a bunch of Americans. I have a Nigerian XO, German helmsman, Chinese sensor tech, etc.

I don’t really bring up anyone’s national origins unless it’s to insert a fun cultural tidbit like the captains mess or some such, and when I do I will go online and crowd source it.

@Deke Don't forget we're an island nation, so if your captain wanted to offer a taste of the UK then what better place to start than the sea? British seafood is among the world's best, from salmon, langoustines and lobster from Scotland, oysters from Mersea, eels from Northern Ireland, while bass and mackerel are delicious and plentiful pretty much everywhere. Meanwhile, the kings of fish are monkfish, John Dory and turbot, any of which would be fit for a captain's table.

Good point. I think I’ll try to keep it all simple, lamb, monkfish, beef Wellington etc. Stuff that any reader is going to recognize without too much trouble while still carrying the theme of the whole tradition being rooted in British culture.

I would like to throw something odd in that could just be a fun learning experience, something that only someone from Wales would really recognize as a local favorite, food does evolve and we are talking about a book set four hundredish years in the future, but that doesn’t mean I can’t toss in some stuff here and there, food, music, what have you. And might as well teach my reader some obscure tidbit about traditional Welsh cooking while I’m at it.

 

[Bagpuss]

if it helps here is a menu for what they serve on British submarines.

 

[Dan Jones]

That's brilliant!

 

[HareBrain]

if it helps here is a menu for what they serve on British submarines.

"Ye Old Chicken Pie"

Good to see they're not chucking stuff out before its use-by date.

 

[Deke]

if it helps here is a menu for what they serve on British submarines.

Good point. A spaceship is basically just a fancy submarine.

 

[Abernovo]

if it helps here is a menu for what they serve on British submarines.

Good old franks 'n' rav! I also like the Chef's Pasta Bake of the Day, aka, better put these in, before they go off, and this is the left over meat from yesterday's roast, etc. And, it will taste great!

If you're looking for a good, special dessert, for the Wardroom, maybe go with cranachan: raspberries, oats, cream and whisky, mixed gently. Bit expensive, so only for senior officers, invited guests, or a special treat. You can find the recipe online.

 

[Deke]

If you're looking for a good, special dessert, for the Wardroom, maybe go with cranachan: raspberries, oats, cream and whisky, mixed gently. Bit expensive, so only for senior officers, invited guests, or a special treat. You can find the recipe online.

Thanks I’ll check it out.