Sojourns in east England and east Ohio

My true love has been off on a couple of research trips lately and I’ve been enjoying her food vicariously as she texts me pictures of what she’s eating.  For the last few days she’s been in a small market town about 100 miles northeast of London in Suffolk – a town that would be a perfect setting for an episode of Midsomer Murders or Foyle’s War.  Staying at a hotel that provides both breakfast and dinner, she’s been enjoying what can only be called stereotypical English food.  Consider the English breakfast that she texted me this morning (the feature photo).  It has it all – eggs, blood pudding, beans, sausage links, and fried bread.  Or the dinner shown to the right – roast beef in brown gravy, boiled potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and a sprinkling of parsley so you get some vegetables.

Over the course of her stay, she’s had fish and chips with mushy peas, asparagus with hollandaise sauce and a poached egg, roast lamb, and parsnips – all classic English dishes.  Incidentally, what I also noted was that nearly the entire category of vegetables are usually relegated to side dishes that need to be ordered separately.  This is true in many French and Italian restaurants as well.

What I find interesting, though, is that this isn’t an English-themed restaurant in London or some other tourist destination.  This is a hotel not too far from the east coast of England that is serving this homey cuisine to mostly locals and travelers from elsewhere in England.  You would find very little of this type of food in London, with the exception of fish and chips, a ubiquitous presence in every pub in the city.  Most pubs will also have either a roast lamb or roast beef on Sunday, but various international cuisines and a greater emphasis on culinary adventurism have pushed this conventionally English approach to food out of the limelight.

This trip contrasts nicely with another research trip she took in late August to east Ohio.  A hotel providing breakfast and dinner wasn’t an option, so she did the next best thing and drove to Applebee’s for dinner every evening. I know what you’re saying.  Applebee’s?  There are places, though, where casual dining chain restaurants provide the best dining out options and most of them (Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, etc.) provide decent food at reasonable prices.

What fascinates me about Applebee’s isn’t so much the food but the menu.  It actually does have an “American” feel to it with grilled steaks, ribs, maple-glazed sauces, apple chutney, and northwest salmon.  When people talk about American cuisine, they usually refer to American ingredients prepared in simple, flavorful ways and that concept is pretty apparent throughout Applebee’s menu.

However, on the same menu are several dishes with cavatappi pasta, a variety of stir-fry dishes (one with wonton strips), and our good friend, fish and chips.  The salads are based on Asian or southwest flavor profiles, with a  Caesar thrown in for variety.  In this case, it is too much to ask to avoid using the obvious melting pot metaphor, but what else can you say?  We have a stereotypically American family restaurant that presents an American menu that incorporates Italian, east Asian, Mexican, and English preparations and flavors.

But they go even further than incorporating other cuisine’s classics.  Is there a food more American than the basic burger and fries?  Applebee’s menu includes a quesadilla burger and a caprese mozzarella burger, along with the American Standard burger (not named, I hope, after the plumbing fixture company).  They are using international flavors and techniques to create varieties of an American classic.

I can’t claim to have definitive knowledge about all restaurants everywhere (and what international experience I do have is limited to major cities in western Europe) but this is something I see often in the US and have never seen anywhere else (with a special qualification in London).  In Paris, you see Chinese, Thai, Lebanese, Italian, Greek, and Japanese restaurants all the time.  Then you have regular restaurants, which means restaurants serving French food prepared in French ways.  I saw the same thing in Rome, Milan, Florence, Berlin, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Istanbul. In London, you also see a lot of international cuisines represented and, with pubs and fish and chip shops, there is an “English” presence. There are also, though, lots of restaurants (and these are the restaurants that get reviewed and talked about) where the chef starts off with a  more or less blank slate and begins creating based on her own inspiration.  That’s also true in the U.S. (or at least in Philadelphia, although I’d assume that other major cities are the same way.  It’s probably also true in some of the higher end restaurants in Paris and Rome and Berlin, but those would be establishments that we haven’t, as yet, frequented.

I’m not claiming that the U.S. and high end restaurants are the only places in the world that combine different cuisines.  That would be completely absurd, if for no other reasons that I’ve yet to travel to Beijing, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City, Tel Aviv, Bukhara, Kolkata, Nairobi, Montreal, or Buenos Aires.  And I have one more caveat – my experience may be influenced by language.  The options for where to eat and what restaurant to choose may be limited by being language challenged in non-anglophone countries.

Having said that, though, my observation is that there are a couple of ways in which cuisines can interact in metropolitan areas.  One is mosaic-like, in which the cuisines are self-contained but combine to create a beautiful whole.  The other is more fluid, and while there may be a dominant tone, the different elements often blend with the dominant and each other to create hybrids or potentially something new (like southwest style, for example).  Frankly, I’m curious about this and I’m also curious about why American restaurants seem so much more open to collecting and mixing cuisines than the restaurants in the countries we visit.

And now, I’m going to make lunch.  The last of my Portuguese inspired chorizo and fish soup with an Anglo/Indian beer brewed right here in Philadelphia.