On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners

It's a snide comment on England's native cuisine. They are saying that the rest of Europe has good food, and then, by not mentioning the cooking in England, but rather the table manners here, they imply that the English don't have good food.

It's a subtle dig at British cuisine.

Admittedly there are some things that I couldn't stomach like jellied eels, but British cuisine is far more cosmopolitan now.



http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/01/why_was_british.html

But does that mean British foods taste terrible? Why they say that? I mean Why on the Continent people have good food while England people don't
Thanks for your replies

The bad food in the UK was processed stuff fed to the proletariat, not the stuff eaten by the gentry. Follow the link I posted above for a more in depth discussion.

As Izzy has pointed out, that's no longer true. However, at one time, the food in England was boiled, fried or roasted, had little in the way of spices, and often included heavy, farinaceous dishes called puddings. The author is just being rude.

It's an quote from a 1946 book "How To Be An Alien" by a Hungarian who went to live in Britain, George Mikes (pronounced Mikesh). He wrote it at the end of World War 2, while food was rationed, and "traditional" English cuisine was still dominant. This is not the case today. Mikes later wrote a series of books poking fun at various nations and topics including: Japan, Israel, the U.S.A., the United Nations, Australia, the British again, South America, God, his cat, wealth and philosophy. They were popular when I was a boy (a long time ago) but seem quaintly dated nowadays, as Izzy notes. Another similar quote is "Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles." I see with a certain amount of surprise that his books figure in the the English curriculums of a number of countries around the world. From Pearson Education's notes for teachers:

"How to be an Alien was first published in 1946 – just after the conclusion of the Second World War. The British were in an introspective mood, wondering about their status in the world after enduring a devastating war that had shaken their self-confidence to the core, and into this inwardlooking nation came Mikes’ satirical view of their strange habits. Never hesitant to laugh at themselves, the British thought that the book was highly amusing, and they were flattered at being depicted as peculiarly unique. Far from being upset by the rudeness of the pictures that Mikes painted, the British thought that they were wonderful."

If, as I suspect, the OP is stdying the book as part of a course, he or she may find these notes interesting, so here is a link:

http://www.penguinreaders.com/pdf/downloads/pr/teachers-notes/9781405879095.pdf

I've read some article recently about, uh, classic british cooking that made some good points re the original development of certain foods and their being worth saving. Being a sieve brain and not local to the british isles, I've forgotten a lot of it, but I'll post the link if I managed to save it. I used the "uh" in there in that I spent a lot of years hearing how bad the food in England is from friends who went there and from some articles. I've not been there, but I've read a lot about the place over the years.

Nowadays (I use that word as one brought up recently on a2k, that I like), the food sounds to me greatly enhanced in recent years, partly because of johnny-come-lately interest by chefs in other than the usual, and partly because of the influx of immigration almost forcing a new look at different possible things to do with food, probably from new items in markets.

I read a book by Monica Ali a few months ago featuring an immigrant family from Bangladesh who lived in an estate in the London area with other mostly poor and immigrant folks. Somewhere in the book the protagonist went on about coveting all the english type treats, and I've seen similar in the comments section of Guardian articles. So there has been cross-pollination that I think is all to the good. At least cross-appreciation is.


I'll add something I'm almost embarrassed about - after several years of reading the Guardian, I clicked on the feature Blind Date, and read the reports in the Blind Date Index.
That was something of a revelation for the level of politeness in the descriptions of the dates, to me amazingly high.