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Brits meet French food

Team GB snub Olympic Village food after complaints of raw meat

You know, they don’t even boil their beef?

31 thoughts on “Brits meet French food”

  1. Nothing wrong with a bit of “Beef steak tartare with raw egg yolk” to get you going in the morning.

    That’s why European food hygiene is so demanding. Bad hygiene around the raw steak would kill half the French and the Germans in one go!

    Not a bad idea that.

  2. Yeah. But which members of Team GB? My guess would be the northerners. Northerners seem to prefer their meat “well done”. Incinerated or boiled to fuck to southerners. Civilisation ends at Watford.

  3. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” as we’re often told.

    Now, don’t know about you, but if the choice is between dipping a chocolate pastry into a milky coffee or a bacon roll (ideally two)?

  4. @John Galt re Boeuf Tartare.
    Very keen on it but France is the only place I’ll eat it. Most definitely not here in Spain. Yep, the hygiene thing. I don’t trust them.
    Best I’ve ever had was in a small restaurant by the Cathedral in Bordeaux. Delightful place to eat at a pavement table in the cool calm of a summer evening surrounded by all that great architecture. I think it’s the way it’s prepared. Seems to be chopped rather than minced so the meat isn’t bruised. First time I ate there, the waiter took us as tourists because we were speaking English. My companion was actually from Alsace so bilingual French/German with added English & a rather germanic blonde. So he insisted on warning me about what I’d ordered to which I was responding oui, oui, oui, d’accord. It was superb & he was duly complimented. He asked if I wanted more & duly appeared with another portion. Ever since then, when I go there & order I get a double portion for the price of one. That’s what I like about the best of French restaurants. The attitude that you are privileged to enjoy their food & they are privileged you’ve chosen to enjoy it.
    Paris? Rather not. The old Au Pied de Cochon was always OK. And the brasserie on Place Blanche serves the best soupe d’oignon in Paris. Requires an asbestos tongue to be really enjoyed. But Parisians.

  5. On French food stereotypes:

    tartare steak. No bit too Hannibal Lecter. I ain’t a fvckin’ tiger neither.
    croque madame or monsieur. No, not tasty and not impressed. UK equivalents better
    alsace food. With exceptions no – inedible Kelmut Kohl germanic crap
    snails. Yes
    frogs legs. No expensive and too little meat so can’t be arsed
    tripes, Yes please

  6. OT: but the fighters on both sides in the war in east Ukraine are the best fed in war time I’ve ever seen, yet you never see telegram footage of what they’re eating. It’s a long way from photographs of skinny americans coming home in 1945.

  7. Bloke in the Wash

    Steak Tartare? The Tartar way: stick it under your saddle, ride until it’s tender… Oh, wait, our horsey folk have been cancelled so that won’t work.

  8. @Brave Fart
    Croque monsieur is just Welsh rarebit done properly. Ira’s Bar opposite the old Stock Exchange used to a good one. But you were looking at a tradition went back to the coffee houses. However some croque monsieurs in some cafés can be vile. The come prepacked in cellophane & microwaved up.
    Both snails & frogs legs are very English. There was a fish ‘n chip shop in Burnham on Crouch, Essex used to do the frogs legs quite cheaply. Snails you run on oatmeal for a couple of days to clean them out. Funny enough, the outside metal fire escape of the Old Nursing Home in Burham had enormous clusters of prime ones, as well.
    I wouldn’t be the least surprised to find boeuf tartare is actually English. There were a lot of English cooks went over the France in the late C19th, adopted French names & taught the French haute cuisine. The French chefs were a bit rustic for the demand. English cuisine was always better than French. Far richer country so we could afford it.

  9. Person in Pictland

    “Civilisation ends at Watford.” That can’t be right: quite a lot of England north of Watford in uncivilised.

  10. I always find English trad cuisine interesting because it lacks many bulk & bits dishes other countries’ cuisines have. Like the beans & bits of French cassoulet in its many regional varieties. Or the Spanish rice & bits paella. Nearest we come is shepherds pie, I s’pose. But England didn’t really have a peasantry much past the Tudors. Far more meat was eaten, so we didn’t have to stretch it with bulker.

  11. There was a summer when we had, in reasonably quick succession, Tripe a la Mode de Caen and Tripe in the Lancashire style.

    The English dish was much superior.

  12. Depends which side of Watford your standing, PiP. If you’ve ever seen Watford of course & not just relying on rumours.

  13. The line is Watford Gap, which is the service station just north of Northampton. It’s not even the centre of England, but it is the border between south and Midlands on the M1. North of it, they speak more like Brummies, south of it they speak more like Londoners.

  14. BIS,

    “Snails you run on oatmeal for a couple of days to clean them out”

    The farmer next door to us in the Charente did this. Had a fish aquarium and put them in it.

    I don’t mind snails, but I get the impression they were once just a cheap source of protein. People treat them like a delicacy.

    And I think you’re probably right about more meat in the British diet, because it’s what we could produce. Like the Swiss are known for their cheeses, the Danes for their bacon. Because the land in these countries is not great for arable farming, so you keep animals on them.

  15. @WB
    It may be logistics. C17th & C18th London consumed vast amounts of meat. But it’s easier if your dinner walks to your plate on its own feet than needing to be carried there, no?
    C18th English army victualling lists show a meat ration of about 1lb of various meats per day. The army had herds of cattle following it. And that would have been supplemented by foraging. French army got little more than flour & beans & was expected to forage for its meat.
    But economics & law. Much of Europe was still doing subsistence farming when England was producing the agricultural surpluses enabled the Industrial Revolution. People know France will be familiar with pigeonniers. Look like little towers with tiled roofs. They’re a fairly recent phenomenon. Go back to law change that meant the French could eat pigeons rather than just watch them scoff their seed corn. Before that they were strictly reserved for the aristocracy

  16. I once did a university course in parasitology (The study of parasites like tapeworms, liver flukes and so on).
    After looking at some of the photographs that the lecturer showed us (and he was a sick guy who took great delight in this) I would be spewing like the girl from the exorcist if I even looked at a plate of steak tartare. I’m not even joking.

  17. Croque Monsieur is just a ham and cheese toasty, albeit fried not toasted, which can be a tasty snack if done well (add a fried egg for Croque Madame). Very little to do with Welsh Rarebit, except they both contain melted cheese. Lille’s local dish is “Le Welsh”, which is a rarebit made to local standards – I guess they learnt from the WW1 Tommies.

  18. Dennis, Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

    You know, they don’t even boil their beef?

    The most British sentence I’ve ever read.

  19. Steak Frites for me. Le Relais de l’Entrecôte in Geneva. Lovely meal. I’ve also been to the one on Rue Saint-Benoit in Paris.

    I have eaten andouillette. Once. Not recommended unless you are really into offal.

  20. Very little to do with Welsh Rarebit, except they both contain melted cheese.
    No that’s what Welsh Rarebit has become. Toast with mousetrap. What Brits do to cuisine. There are plenty of traditional recipes for it that are closer to croque monsieur. Which isn’t even particularly French but shared with English cuisine.
    https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/welsh-rarebit
    I haven’t the slightest idea why it’s “Welsh” though. On the other hand, nor why it’s monsieur?
    There’s something very strange happened to British food in the C20th. It can’t just have been war time rationing because much of Europe had it worse. My grandmother could seriously cook. My mother not so much. Most people now don’t seem to be able to. They can cook recipes out of books. But they don’t seem to really understand what they’re doing.

  21. @jgh:

    Thanks, I’ll think about it.

    Having spent many hours looking down a microscope at these kinds of things… Y’know… I’ll think about it!

  22. BiS said:
    “ There’s something very strange happened to British food in the C20th. It can’t just have been war time rationing because much of Europe had it worse.”

    We had it longer, I think than anywhere in Western Europe, thanks to our socialist governments.

    But I’m not sure that’s the reason; too many British seem to regard good cooking as immoral.

  23. Bloke in North Dorset

    “ Lille’s local dish is “Le Welsh”, which is a rarebit made to local standards – I guess they learnt from the WW1 Tommies.”

    When we were Esquelbecq, about 20km south of Dunkirk the restaurant we used had Le Welsh on the menu, they also had the Welsh flag flying on the church. I assumed they had a Welsh battalion stationed there.

    As for steak tarter, I enjoyed the one I had in Paris but it was in a restaurant that we’d been taken to by one of the ADL partners in the Paris office so he obviously knew the best places to go.

  24. Looking at last night’s Olympic opening ceremony travesty, French women are no longer rail-thin chic clothes horses who exist on cigarettes and dry Martini, but exactly the sort of obese land whales you can find in any British high street with a Greggs and a MaccyD’s…

  25. BIS,

    “Most people now don’t seem to be able to. They can cook recipes out of books. But they don’t seem to really understand what they’re doing.”

    The huge rise of working mothers means a lot of them don’t have the time to prepare food. But even in the years before motherhood, they aren’t bothering to learn to cook because they won’t be making a shepherd’s pie for the kids, they’ll microwave something.

    What really blows my mind is how many of these people eat out every week. So, the wife earns some money working. OK. And then, she gets taxed on it. Then, she has to run a car to get to the job (which is always going to be fairly new because women hate old cars). Then there’s childcare costs. And paying for a cleaner. And then, your family goes out to Pizza Express which costs £100, because the wife feels like someone else can cook as she’s been working all week, even though that’s probably the same as what she earned at work, after tax for the day.

    I swear that no-one opens up a spreadsheet (except Mrs WB and I) and crunches the numbers and asks if they’d be better off with the wife staying home.

  26. Welsh rarebit isn’t (just) cheese on toast. But I’d be interested in seeing any old recipes for it that include ham and cheese between slices of bread. Maybe that was the Cockernee version?

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