As delicious as pies, hotpots and Sunday roasts are, a bit of variety at the dinner table is always welcome. We’ve always been a nation of magpies, incorporating foreign techniques, international ingredients and flavour combinations into our own dishes. Chicken tikka masala is often billed as Britain’s national dish; we often turn to pasta when we’re after some comfort food and rice is starting to replace potatoes and bread more and more.
We have two things to thank for this change in British eating habits. It’s never been easier to travel the world, seeing and tasting first-hand the food of other nations and cultures. It’s also never been easier to find the ingredients needed to cook these dishes back in the UK. Supermarkets now have whole aisles dedicated to international cuisines, and there are specialist food shops in every city offering more unusual or rare ingredients.
We wanted to find out just how significant this shift in British eating habits is, which is why we asked over 5,000 foodies based in the UK how they view British food and what they cook and eat at home. We looked at Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese and Korean in particular, as these are cuisines that require a lot of specialist ingredients to cook from scratch at home. The results showed that while British cuisine is cooked by 99% of home cooks, less than half of all meals would be described as what we think of as classic British. This certainly ties in with the recipes on Great British Chefs – over 90% of the 4,000 recipes on the website represent global cuisines.