English meals

The English are very particular about their meals and strictly keep to their meal times. The English usually have 4 meals a day: breakfast, lunch, tea (5 o'clock) and dinner.

Breakfast is from any time until 8 o’clock in the morning. Breakfast is generally a substantial meal, not just rolls and coffee. Many people like to begin it with porridge. English people eat porridge with milk or cream and sugar, but no good Scotsman – and Scotland is the home of porridge – would ever put sugar on his porridge. For a change you can have eggs boiled soft or hard or scrambled, and sometimes fish, e.g. herring, haddock, or kipper is served.

Breakfast can be a full «English breakfast» of cornflakes with milk and sugar, or bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, tea or coffee. Some people, however, have just a cup of tea or coffee with a toast or something similar. This is usually called a «continental breakfast».

Then at midday everything is stopped for lunch. Most offices and small shops are closed for an hour and the city pavements are full of people on their way to cafes, coffee bars, restaurants. Factory work­ers usually eat in the canteens. For many people lunch is a quick meal. The businessmen in London have no time to get home for lunch and take it in a cafe or restaurant. It never happens that English people miss a meal or put it off until a more convenient time. Those who are at home generally take cold meat, e.g. beef, mutton, veal, ham, with boiled or fried potatoes, another vegetable or salad, pickles and a sweet dish e.g. an apple pie, a hot milk pudding, cold fruit salad or ice-cream. With the lunch they prefer to drink water or light beer.

The English like what they call «good plain food». They must be able to recognize what they are eating. Usually they like beefsteak, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and fish and chips. There are usually two courses in the midday meal – a meat course with a lot of vegetables, a sweet dish, perhaps fruit pudding with tea or coffee to finish. English mutton is a treat, and it is prepared in such a way that you wouldn’t know it is mutton. Salad is a little different from ours. You only get the clean green leaves and the so-called “salad-dressing”, a mixture of oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and mayonnaise that you may take according to your taste.

Afternoon tea is taken at about 5 o'clock, but it can hardly be called a meal. It is a cup of tea and cake or biscuits. Tea is very strong and mostly drunk with sugar and cream. It would be an offence to take lemon in your tea. This is not generally a formal meal. Instead of sitting round the table you have tea brought to you, and you balance a cup on your knee or in your hand as you take thin buttered bread, pastries. It is common knowledge that the English are very fond of tea. They like to have «a nice cup of tea» 6 or 8 times a day, sometimes even more. At the weekends afternoon tea is a special occasion. Friends and visitors are often invited to have a chat over a cup of tea.

Dinner is usually eaten at 7 o'clock. It is the biggest meal and is in many families the last meal of the day. The whole family eats together. The first course may be soup though the Eng­lish don't like it very much. One should not be misled by the word “soup”. British soup is just thin paste and a portion is three times smaller than in Russia. The main course will often be fish or meat, perhaps the traditional roast beef of old England, and a lot of vegetables. The next course will be something sweet and often cooked, such as a fruit pie. Last of all there may be cheese, often with biscuits. On Christmas Day a roast turkey is traditionally cooked for dinner. It is usually followed by Christmas pudding. Long before Christmas housewives begin to plan what cake to make for Christ­mas. Usually they make fantastic Christmas cakes.

On Sundays many families have a traditional lunch. They have roast meat, beef, lamb, chicken or port with potatoes, vegetables and gravy. A lot of British prefer to eat out. “Fish and Chips” shops are very popular with take-away food. The more sophisticated public goes to Chinese, Italian, seafood or other restaurants and experiments with prawn, inedible vegetables and hot drinks.

The English like the food from other countries too. There are a lot of Indian, Chinese, French and Italian restaurants in England. In London you can find Indonesian, Mexican, Greek restaurants. But they are very expensive. People often get take-away meals – you buy the food at the restaurant and bring it home to eat. The English don’t often go to restaurants. It is difficult to find a good English restaurant with reasonable prices. For dinner you may go to a hotel and have the real old English food – roast beef. In London there are hotels to suit every taste and every purse.

When outing, that is, on a picnic, the English load their luncheon baskets with all sorts of sandwiches made of thin slices of bread as thin as a sheet and butter with meat, ham, raw tomatoes or even cucumber in between. The latter are, of course, more refreshing than nourishing. There in the basket you would likely find, besides cakes and biscuits, some bottles of gingerbeer.