All articles
Britain’s favourite takeaway was born from two separate traditions: fried fish brought by Jewish refugees, and chipped potatoes sold in the industrial north. They met in the second half of the 19th century.
Medieval feasts featured boar’s head, goose and even peacock. The turkey arrived from the Americas in the 16th century, but it took Victorian Britain, and Charles Dickens, to put it at the heart of the nation’s Christmas.
Long before refrigerators, vinegar kept vegetables edible through the winter. Trade with India then added chutney and piccalilli, and a Staffordshire village gave its name to Britain’s best-known pickle.
The word comes from Portugal, the oranges come from Seville and the most famous legend comes from Dundee. Here is how bitter orange marmalade became a fixture of the British breakfast table.
Canned food began with a French prize and a British patent. Within a few years, a factory in Bermondsey was supplying the Royal Navy, and, eventually, Britain fell in love with beans on toast.
Bacon, eggs, sausages and beans: the full English has roots in the grand breakfasts of Victorian country houses, but it was working people and roadside cafés that turned it into a national institution.
Afternoon tea is credited to a hungry duchess in the 1840s. Here is how a private snack became a social ritual, why “high tea” is not what it sounds like, and why Devon and Cornwall still argue about scones.
Two Worcester chemists, a disappointing batch left in a cellar and a famous legend about a nobleman back from Bengal: the story of one of Britain’s most distinctive sauces.
For centuries British cooking meant an open fire. Cast-iron ranges, gas cookers and finally the Aga transformed the kitchen, and the working lives of the people who cooked in it.
Roast beef was a symbol of English identity long before it became Sunday lunch. Here is how the joint, the Yorkshire pudding and the family gathering came together.
Medieval cooks baked meat in thick pastry “coffins” that were never meant to be eaten. From those humble cases came the pork pie, the Cornish pasty and a nation of pie lovers.
Tea arrived in Britain as an exotic luxury in the 1650s. Within two centuries it had become everyone’s drink, thanks to a royal fashion, rampant smuggling, a dramatic tax cut and plantations in India.
