Modern British cuisine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Modern British (or New British) cuisine is a style of British cooking which emerged in the late 1970s, and has become increasingly popular since. It uses high-quality ingredients local to the British Isles, preparing them in ways which combine traditional British recipes with modern innovations, and has an affinity with the Slow Food movement.

It is not generally a nostalgic movement, although there are some efforts to re-introduce pre-twentieth-century recipes. Ingredients not native to the islands, particularly herbs and spices, are frequently added to traditional dishes (echoing, perhaps not always intentionally, the highly spiced nature of much British food in the medieval era).

Much Modern British cooking also draws heavily on influences from the cuisines of the Mediterranean and, more recently, Southeast Asia. The influence of northern and central European cuisines is significantly slighter.

The Modern British style of cooking emerged as a response to the perceived poor quality of British cuisine following the Second World War, and the resulting popularity of foreign cuisine in Britain in the decades that followed.