LOCAL LONDON FOOD

Shoreditch is the going-out area north of the City. A bit north from that, on Kingland’s Rd, you have clusters of Vietnamese eateries. All very cheap and potentially good…potentially. That Vietnamese Place had a convincing chicken soup, with chicken flesh in strings and lots of fresh coriander and lemon grass. A day before, same road but a little closer to the junction with Commercial Street, I had a fake sour Vietnamese soup at a place called Hanoi Garden…

Fake because authentic sour soup is made with a vinegar or tamarind while what I got was “tom yam” sauce (which is actually Thai) from a jar, diluted in water.

It is strange how local London food, the simple, cheap, home food you find in cities around the world, is actually associated to very exotic recipes from India, Vietnam or China. The mental set-up towards food is naturally oriented toward an “outside” made of colonial hitory and recent immigration waves. Even what is perceived as quintessentially British, such as fish and chips, was actually brought to Britain by poor Italian immigrants who took to frying the cheapest available foods and began selling them.

from Wikipedia: Deep-fried fish and deep-fried chips have appeared separately on menus for many years^{[citation needed]}, though potatoes did not reach Europe until the 17th century. The originally Sephardi dish pescado frito, or deep-fried fish, came to the Netherlands and England with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries.^{[citation needed]} (History credits the Portuguese with introducing the dish to Japan: see tempura.)

…in common with the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland experienced a wave of immigration from Italy toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the new Scots Italians set up friggitoria or gelateria businesses, catering for their own communities as well as for the native population. Such Italian traders in Scotland originally hawked their wares from carts selling mostly ice-cream, but with the abundance and wide availability of seafood in Scotland, fish and chip shops soon became common. TheDundee City Council claims that “…in the 1870s, that glory of British gastronomy — the chip — was first sold by Belgian immigrant Edward De Gernier in the city’s Greenmarket.”^[17] Brattisani’s in Edinburgh’s Newington district promotes itself as the oldest operational chip shop in Scotland, having traded since 1889.

 

My most British findings were desserts: Eccles cake from St.John’s restaurant (an adaptation by chef Fergus Henderson of the 18th century treat from the town of Eccles, puff pastry with a filling of raisins in a thick caramelized sauce) and spotted dick: