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<\/a><\/p>\nNew year, new read. Save 40% off an annual subscription this January.<\/p>\n
Time for some unfashionable victim blaming. I have often wondered what it is about the self-infantilising nature of the English culinary lexicon. Jacket potato, pigs in blankets, bubble and squeak. The latter is an 18th-century onomatopoeic interpretation of what cabbage \u201csounds\u201d like. While \u201ctoad-in-the-hole\u201d is called that because the sausages supposedly look like toads, in a hole. My knowledge of frogs and holes is good enough to declare this is an unusably abstract visual analogy. Meanwhile, once a man three years my senior \u2013 no, not two children in a trench coat \u2013 offered me \u201cdippy\u201d eggs and \u201csoldiers\u201d for lunch.<\/p>\n
And so, with a combination of poor eyesight and overactive imaginations, Brits marched into the world, conquered a quarter of it, then came back with nursery rhymes to describe dinner. And now (screw the great literary tradition of this nation) the descendants of Dickens and Eliot are instead forced to speak a language yoked to their least serious forbears. It is no wonder why the good people at the New York Times were so quick to patronise. Take your own food as a joke and the whole world will too. I do not know how many perfectly balanced eel and pickle sandwiches Quo Vadis must sell to offset the destructive forces of a single mention of \u201cspotted dick\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Paddington Bear Department of the Great British Psyche has taken over the culinary landscape \u2013 hiding behind whimsy for fear of sincerity, indebted to the spurious and the twee. Restaurateurs can rail against the unearned primacy of French and Italian cooking all they like in 2026, but so long as we insist on talking about lunch like toddlers, that project will only get so far. The seriousness of the entreaty should not be doubted, by the way. Basic patriotism demands it. And no, I don\u2019t want \u201cspag bol\u201d for dinner, thank you. I\u2019m 30. <\/p>\n