Olivia Potts

Sometimes, when it comes to culinary history, Britain is its own worst enemy. For a long time, British food has been seen as a joke among other nations, but also nearer to home. Even when the dishes are near indistinguishable, we’re still happy to poke fun at our own fare: we love panna cotta but laugh at blancmange; we cringe at stew but revere boeuf Bourguignon. They’re the same, but that doesn’t stop us. Where better to showcase the unsung hero braised beef mince than in a beautiful short-crust pie? Mince gets the worst of our inward-turned opprobrium, a leitmotif in our national food anthem. A pot of stewed mince speaks to all that is wrong with British food: staid, bland, brown, probably overcooked and definitely stuck in the 1950s.

I often think of the first time I ate brown bread ice cream. I know how that sounds: it’s the exact sort of pretentious nonsense a food writer would say if they were about to press a recipe for brown bread ice cream on you. But it was long before I became a food bore, and it’s true. I really do think about that first time a lot. Using leftover bread or stale breadcrumbs is the basis for some of our finest puddings I had just moved to London to study law after university, and was about to train as a barrister. I was living in a small flat and surviving on pesto pasta, bowls of cereal and crisps. At that point, going out for dinner probably meant a McDonald’s at the end of a night out. I knew next to nothing about food.

There’s nothing more intriguing than a closely guarded secret recipe. Coca-Cola and KFC are two famous examples, with the precise ingredients for the soda syrup and special coating kept in guarded vaults: the story is that those who hold the information aren’t allowed to travel on the same plane in case of disaster. Lea & Perrins, Angostura Bitters and Chartreuse all keep their products’ make-up secret. Making sure the butter is the brightest of greens is as important as any of the individual components Nobody knows the recipe for oysters Rockefeller – or at least nobody knows the original recipe. It was created in 1889 at Antoine’s restaurant in New Orleans, which still stands today, serving the same classically French food it did back in the 19th century.

When it comes to traditional recipes, there are few things we love more than an unlikely origin story, ideally one born out of clumsiness or forgetfulness. The bigger the kitchen pratfall, the more delicious the product. Setting pancakes on fire? Accidental crêpe Suzette! Nothing in the restaurant apart from lettuce and some pantry ingredients? The Caesar salad is born! Muck up a cake you’ve made hundreds of times and end up with a squidgy mess? The St Louis gooey butter cake is even more popular than the original recipe! There are few bungling origin stories neater than that of the tarte Tatin But there are few bungling origin stories neater than that of tarte Tatin, the upside-down caramelised apple tart.

I am sure there are beloved British dishes that inspire horror in those from different cultures, that are truly unappealing to the uninitiated. I can quite imagine that the bright green eel-gravy that traditionally accompanies the East End pie and mash could be figuratively and literally hard to swallow for a visitor. Or that our predilection for Yorkshire puddings – glorified pancakes – on our very savoury roast dinners and a desire for strong cheese served with fruitcake make us seem as mad as a box of frogs. Vitello tonnato might be called the original surf and turf.

Standing in the biscuit aisle of my local supermarket, I’m overwhelmed by possibilities. This isn’t unusual for me, but normally it’s fuelled by greed, and resolved by buying them all. Today I have to make a choice. I am making an American icebox cake, which requires a lot of one type of biscuits, and the structure and flavour of the whole cake depends on them. As befits a no-bake dessert, the process of making it is a cinch The problem is that the three most popular biscuits for the pudding are not easily available here: graham crackers, Oreo thins and Nabisco chocolate wafers. I almost feel relief when I discover that the classic icebox biscuit, the Nabisco chocolate wafer, was discontinued last year.

The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in sweet jelly. It is a hangover from the middle of the last century, when – in a perfect confluence – canned goods, especially otherwise unavailable fruit, and mass-produced gelatine simultaneously became easily available. The American housewife ran with it, and inexplicably called it a salad. Salad can be maximalist, with everything thrown at it. Bacon! Anchovies! Grapes! Marshmallows!

There are many old dishes in the UK that are hyper-regional, whose reach has never extended beyond geographical boundaries but remain much loved where they originated. Yorkshire curd tart is a good example: it is barely known beyond God’s own county (or God’s own four counties, which now technically make up what we think of as Yorkshire). There is no good reason for this – Yorkshire curd tart is just a delicious well-kept secret. The tart enjoyed its heyday in the 17th century, when most families would have kept their own cow It was traditionally baked for Whitsun, or Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s disciples. Curd tart is literally a moveable feast, as its date depends on that of Easter itself.