Season 1 : Eating Europe
Episode 3
26 minutes – England
In this third episode of the podcast I am talking about food in English pubs. Why should you eat in pubs, and the evolution of pub food over the past decades. I talk about how to order, and what to order and how to spot a good pub lunch. Sunday lunch is a special case where pubs are concerned, so I talk about what that means to you as a traveller.
The pubs in the New Forest are The Turfcutters Arms and The Filly Inn
If you are interested in making your own Yorkshire puddings I can recommend this recipe from the BBC goodFOOD site
Transcript of the European Compass : a food and travel podcast : Episode 3
Episode 3 transcript | The European Compass, Eating Europe series
I love living in France, but one of the things I miss most about England is the pubs, and specifically the pub lunches. I remember the place we used to go when we lived down in the New Forest. We used to go to a place called the Turf Cutters Arms, and it was the sort of pub you imagine: it’s got low beams, it’s got leather sofas, and it’s got a roaring fire. They used to do the most amazing individual beef Wellingtons, and we’d go for a walk and then we’d come to the pub. We’d normally have friends with us, and we’d sit and eat these beef Wellingtons, massive portions, and we’d spend the afternoon talking and chatting in this cosy environment. It’s something that you really don’t get anywhere else. This is not a restaurant; this is a pub, and there’s an important difference.
What Puts Travellers Off
So what do you imagine when you think of a pub, an English pub? You might have an image of a cosy place with low doorways and beams and a log fire. Or maybe what you’re imagining is more like EastEnders, where it’s the hub of the community with Victorian furniture and everybody knows everybody else. Or maybe it’s even the image of An American Werewolf in London, where if you walked into the pub and opened the door, all the locals would stare and look at you and everything would go silent. That’s not really what pubs are about these days. There is an image, yes, and you probably will find an EastEnders-type pub somewhere, but most pubs aren’t like that.
Most pubs do really good food. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the best ways of eating well in England, and particularly in London, for not too much money. Good value, good prices. And yet there’s still this image somehow that that’s not what you go to a pub for. Maybe you think that you go to a pub to drink. That’s true; you do go to a pub to drink, there’s no getting around that. Pubs are still very much there to serve alcohol. Maybe that’s why you don’t want to go in a pub. Maybe you think that you’ve got to drink. Actually, that’s not at all the case these days. There are so many different options if you don’t want alcohol, and no one will bat an eyelid if you go in and order a Coke, or a fruit juice, or any of the plethora of different non-alcoholic drinks there are these days, even non-alcoholic beers. All pubs will have them, so don’t let that stop you.
How a Pub Actually Works
Most pubs these days serve food and it can be very, very good food. You might also feel that somehow going into a pub isn’t your place, that maybe they’re not there for tourists, that maybe you need to have some sort of invitation to go in, or that somehow if you’re not local you won’t be welcome. Maybe you’re just confused; maybe you think, well, if I go in a pub, then what do I do? How do I deal with this? I can understand that. It’s not the same as a restaurant. You don’t go into a pub in the same way as a restaurant; you’re not given the menu when you first arrive and shown to your table. Some pubs are like that; some pubs do have a restaurant side and those act more like a restaurant. But other pubs are a pub that serves food, and that can be a bit confusing.
I’ve heard of travellers, French travellers and Italian travellers, who go into a pub, sit down and wait three quarters of an hour, and then complain that they haven’t been served. You won’t get served; you have to go to the bar. The premise of a pub is that it stays as a pub, so there is a bar. Quite often when you go in, the bar will be in the middle with seating around it. Sometimes it’s off to one side. Depending on the pub, sometimes there are several rooms and the bar is in one room, but there will always be a bar. And it won’t just be like a little counter; it’s a long bar. In order to be served, you have to go up to the bar and ask. Quite often you even have to ask for the menu. So go up to the bar. I generally will go in, go up to the bar, ask for my drink first, ask if they’re doing food, get the menu, go and find myself a table, look at the menu, and then when I’m ready to order, go back up to the bar. You place your order and normally you have to pay at that point. So you pay when you order, in the same way as with drinks. In some places you can run a tab, keeping everything in one place and then paying at the end, but in most places you’re going to be paying as you order. Then you’ll sit down and someone will bring your food to you; generally your food will be brought to your table, though sometimes you might have a number called out.
There’s no reason not to go in these places, generally. Honestly, pubs are just happy for your business, they really are, they’re just happy to see customers. It’s pretty rare to find a pub these days where it’s just for locals, where you’re going to be treated as some sort of outsider. You might get a bit of banter, you might not. There might be some locals there, there might not. But there’s no reason for that to stop you.
Honestly, it’s somewhere I feel that as a woman, if I’m travelling on my own, I would far rather go into a pub and eat in a pub on my own than I would a restaurant. It’s far less intimidating. You’ve got someone to talk to straight away. You go up to the bar and you’ve got someone to talk to straight away, and then you can find yourself the table of your choice. You don’t have to rely on a waitress putting you in a corner somewhere. You get to choose, whether you want to sit near the bar or even at the bar itself. Most bars have bar stools. And there’s always someone on their own in a pub, always. There’s always someone who’s come in for a quick drink, or a bite to eat, or whatever. So honestly, if you’re travelling on your own, it’s a good tip: go to the pub.
What You’ll Find on the Menu
What are you actually going to get to eat in a pub? That’s a question. There is a different type of food. It’s probably the place you’ll find what might be described as classic British food, compared to other restaurants. It’s one of the few places where classic British is still the norm. There’s a classic type of food that might be called pub grub, and if you say that to an Englishman, they know exactly what you mean. What they’re thinking might be pie and chips. It might be scampi and chips. It might be Hunter’s chicken and chips. Chips feature quite a lot on pub menus, though you might get mash as well. These days you’re nearly always going to get a vegetarian option, that’s pretty standard. And quite often you’ll have a lighter option for lunch: some sort of club sandwich, or a toasted sandwich even, or a Ploughman’s. A Ploughman’s is a good option. You get bits of things: a bit of pork pie, a bit of cheese, a bit of salad, some bread and some butter. It’s a sort of compilation dish. Ploughman’s are too rare these days, but they’re a good option and they’re often very good. However, they’re often very bad.
How to Find a Good One
Quite a lot of pubs get their food brought in frozen. They order it from a company called Brakes Brothers or another company, and they have a classic list of pub grub that you can order from. They keep it in their freezer and defrost it whenever someone orders food. Obviously that’s not going to be the best food. It can be fine, it can be OK, it can be perfectly edible, and sometimes that’s what you’re looking for, just something quick, eat and then get on. But there are other pubs that go the extra mile, making homemade pies, making homemade soups, really delivering great food. Those are the ones you want to look out for, though they’re not always easy to find.
If you’re looking on Google Maps for somewhere to eat and you search for ‘restaurant’, the pubs won’t show up in a lot of cases in England. That means you’ve cut out more than half the number of places you can eat. I would say even probably 75% in some places, because that’s where the food is. It’s in the pubs. So when you’re looking on Google Maps, you’re going to need to look for ‘pub’ as well as ‘restaurant’. I’m not sure you can really use the review scores as a guide in terms of numbers. Anything between four and four and a half is your standard pub, most things. You’re going to have to be pretty bad to get below a four, because most people are going in, having a pint and leaving; they’re not necessarily going to review the food in the same way as they might with a restaurant. However, if you see places that are routinely getting 4.8, 4.9, then the food is good, because you don’t get that from a normal pub. So that’s one place to start. Obviously, anywhere that’s winning awards for pub food is another good place to start.
One thing that’s actually interesting these days is that they’ve brought in a rule in the UK that means that anywhere where there are more than 250 employees has to display the calorie content of each item on the menu. This is reasonably new; it certainly wasn’t there when I lived in the UK. Because the 250-employee threshold applies across the whole company, pub chains, and I’m thinking of things like Wetherspoons, which is a big pub chain and not great food, or other pub chains, are classed within that, and so they have their calorie content on their menu. In my experience those are quite often the ones that have been bringing in their food. Your individual pub that doesn’t have very many employees, or a small chain, doesn’t have to put the calorie content on the menu. So this is a little trick: if there is no calorie content on the menu, then maybe you’re in for a better meal. I’m not saying that the ones with calorie content on are all bad. I’m just saying this might give you a little tip.
A Brief History: From Basket Meals to Gastropubs
Has it always been like this in the UK? No, it hasn’t. When I was growing up, pubs didn’t really do food in general. Pubs were places where you went to drink, mostly men went to drink pints. My dad would go to the pub after work and he’d have three pints before coming home, and that was fairly standard. It was not an unusual thing for men to do. Certainly on payday, in a lot of places, mining communities and things like that, that’s where you would find the men.
And then little by little, in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, things started to change. A few pubs started to offer food. One of the first things they used to offer was food in plastic baskets. You used to get scampi and chips in a basket, where your chips would go in the basket and then your scampi would go on top. It was one of the first things I remember getting in a pub. You could also get chicken, a chicken leg that had been deep-fried, put into these baskets. And that was where things were in the 1980s.
Then pubs started to develop and to realise that actually food brought people in, and food meant that people stayed longer and spent more money. So more and more pubs were doing food. Then there was a step change, probably in the early 1990s, when something called the gastropub started. A gastropub was basically a pub that was focusing on the gastronomy rather than the pub itself. It was there to serve food as its primary purpose rather than drink. The idea was to get rid of the old image that was stopping lots of customers coming in for the food, and to say: look, we can do really good food, come and eat. And it did make a massive swing towards the quality of food you could get in pubs, the number of people who would go to pubs, and the type of food you could get in pubs. It really made a difference.
The Sunday Lunch
And one of the things where pubs now really, really shine is Sundays. The Sunday lunch. This is another subject entirely. Sundays, from a French perspective, are strange in England in that all the shops are open: your supermarkets are open, your high streets are open, and it looks like a normal day. It looks like a normal day, until you push the door of a pub. Because pubs on Sundays are not the same as pubs during the week, and certainly the food that is served in a pub on a Sunday is not the same as the food you get the rest of the week, because of the Sunday lunch.
The Sunday lunch is a tradition in England that goes back centuries, where people would put their meat on to roast, go to church, come back and have a big meal. Every Sunday you’d have a Sunday lunch. When I was growing up, Sundays were sacred. You had your Sunday lunch: your meat, your roast potatoes, your vegetables, your gravy. Pubs realised this and started serving Sunday lunches. As time’s gone by and women have got busier and really can’t be bothered with spending all day in the kitchen cooking Sunday lunch for everybody, it’s almost become the case that a pub is where you eat Sunday lunch. If you say to someone ‘are we going to go for Sunday lunch?’, they mean in a pub. This is now a ritual. It really has become a cultural identity that maybe travellers haven’t realised. Maybe travellers haven’t experienced this, but you should. If you’re in England on a Sunday, go to the pub.
What I will say, though, is that you need to book. If somewhere does a good Sunday lunch, it will be fully booked, so you have to book in advance. Some people will book from one week to the next to make sure they get their table. Even if you’ve booked, you’ll still go in, say you’ve booked, but you’ll still generally have to order at the bar.
What’s on the Plate
The menu will be different; it will be a Sunday menu. You won’t have the normal things you get on the menu during the week; you will have your Sunday lunch menu. Sometimes that will include pies and some of the other things, but it will always include a Sunday roast. With a Sunday roast, you are going to have meat. Quite often you’ll get a choice: quite often you’ll have an option of either beef, lamb, pork or chicken. You’ll have your roast potatoes, you’ll probably have some roast parsnips, you’ll have carrots, you’ll have maybe another green vegetable, broccoli, peas, something else. You will have gravy. And you will have Yorkshire pudding. Guaranteed, wherever you go in a pub on a Sunday, you will have Yorkshire pudding on the menu.
Yorkshire Pudding
Now, Yorkshire pudding. I think the name confuses people because of the word ‘pudding’. I think people think it’s a dessert. It’s not. I’m from Yorkshire, so I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to Yorkshire pudding. For me, Yorkshire pudding should be served with beef; it’s the traditional accompaniment to roast beef. These days it has become the accompaniment to any roast dinner, be it a Sunday lunch or a Christmas dinner. My family complain at me because I am very, very strict with my traditions and only serve Yorkshire puddings with beef. But no one’s going to look at you strangely if you order a roast lamb and put a Yorkshire pudding on top, honestly. It’s fairly standard these days.
So a Yorkshire pudding, what is it? It’s basically a pancake batter, the same batter that you’ll get in a pancake or a crepe, and it’s then cooked in an oven dish with very, very hot fat. Traditionally it would have been done with beef dripping. I tend to use lard. Most pubs these days use oil because it’s easier and safer, but you don’t get the flavour. Beef dripping is where you get the real flavour. And they puff up. Sometimes they’re smaller, like a muffin size, but the best ones are big, and they come up the sides with a crater in the middle, and that’s where you can put your gravy. You can get your gravy inside and it soaks up all the gravy and the meat juices, and it’s absolutely delicious.
The quality of a Yorkshire pudding can make or break a pub lunch. If somewhere does a good lunch but not a good Yorkshire pudding, they won’t get the customers in the same way. People will go to places because they serve a good Yorkshire pudding. Some places base everything around their Yorkshire pudding. You can get stew inside: they make a bigger Yorkshire pudding and then put stew inside it. This is the centrepiece of a Sunday lunch, and it’s the centrepiece of a pub Sunday lunch.
Pudding
If you want to experience this, as I say, you do need to book. Check out where you can get your best Sunday lunches. I like a country pub for a Sunday lunch, preferably one where I can have a walk first and then sit in the pub for the rest of the afternoon. But there are plenty of city pubs that do good lunches, and you can always walk around the park first. Generally it’s served between noon and about three PM, so don’t think you can turn up at five PM and get Sunday lunch, you won’t. Quite often the kitchens will close after Sunday lunch and that’s it for the day, because frankly the portion sizes are big. These are big plates and they are piled high. It’s rare to come out of a Sunday lunch and not feel totally stuffed.
And of course that’s just the main course. After your Sunday lunch main course you generally have a pudding option, a dessert option. The dessert option will usually involve custard. It will have something like a sticky toffee pudding with custard, one of my favourites, or a treacle sponge and custard. It might be a chocolate sponge with a chocolate custard. You may see other things: you might get crumbles, crumble and custard.
I know when I moved to France, I was always surprised because they’re quite keen on crumbles in France, they call it ‘crumble’. It’s very strange. The first time I ordered a crumble in France, you get this kind of dish with some stewed fruit and a bit of a biscuity topping, cold, and maybe a little bit of cream. That’s not what a crumble is in the UK. A crumble in a British pub, you are talking about something hot. It’s got fruit, and then it’s got a decent portion of this kind of biscuity topping that ends up being both stodgy and crunchy at the same time, and then a custard to soak it all up. They can be apple crumbles, the classic, but you can get a rhubarb crumble, or a plum crumble. Plum crumble is very good. You don’t see it very often, but it is very, very good.
And that’s the classic. You’ve had your big Sunday roast, and then you end up having your pudding, and by this time it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and you are not moving for the rest of the day, because you can’t.
Why Travellers Miss Out
I just feel that most travellers miss out on this, and I think it’s maybe why people don’t understand British food. Because this is British food. When I think about British food, this is British food. A pub during the week is serving you fish and chips, it’s serving you pie, a steak and ale pie or a steak and kidney pudding, it’s serving you the British classics. And then on a Sunday it serves you the most classic British thing of all: a Sunday lunch.
So this is what I do when I go back to the UK. One of the first things, if I go away with my friends in the UK or if I go back to see family, the first discussion is: OK, where are we having Sunday lunch? The last time I was with my friends, we were back down in the New Forest as it happens, and the Turf Cutters was closed for some reason, because I did look and it is still open, it does still exist, but it was closed this particular time. So we ended up in a pub called the Filly, which does have a slightly separate section for its food, but it was an excellent Sunday lunch. Really, really good Sunday lunch, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, very, very crispy. The roast potatoes should be crisp on the outside and then when you bite in, they’re soft and fluffy on the inside. It’s not a big chip; this is not the same as a big chip. A roast potato is a fine thing on its own.
And then I had the sticky toffee pudding. Sticky toffee pudding, if you don’t know it, it gets its toffee flavour from dates. You mix up dates to get the sweet, toffee flavour, and then it’s a sponge with a toffee sauce over the top, and then custard. It’s just divine. Divine.
So that’s my tip for today: if you are going to England, make sure you eat in a pub at least once. Make it a regular thing, make it a daily thing, honestly, you won’t regret it. I always include, when I do my travel plans for the UK, at least one, probably several, pub recommendations as to where you can eat, so you will get that as part of your travel itinerary.
So thanks for joining us on the European Compass podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it with a fellow food traveller and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Until next time, bon appétit and happy travels.