Early on you developed your preference and it will NEVER change. It’s believed that our taste buds have a north-south divide. If you’re from the north, then you like brown sauce. From the south? You opt for red, obviously. Either way, you know which you like and there is no changing your mind.
Like the adverts say, you either love or hate this yeasty spread. If you love it, it gets packed in your suitcase every time you leave the country. If you hate it, you literally cannot wrap your head around what people like about it.
We are a crisp-loving nation, and we have the best flavours. You probably grew up thinking that you knew exactly what roast chicken and prawn cocktail tasted like, but then you tried the actual food and realised you had been duped. Salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, roast beef and pickled onion are just some of the many flavours that you can’t live without.
We love potatoes with everything. Pop some mash on some meat, bake it, and you have a pie. Pop some sliced potatoes on meat and you have a hot pot. Chips, roast potatoes, jacket potatoes with beans and cheese, the potato is king!
Cod and chips, and mushy peas eaten out of newspaper wrapping…this is what Friday nights were made for. Don’t forget the salt and malt vinegar.
It doesn’t feel like Sunday unless you eat a roast dinner. Whether home cooked or enjoyed at the pub with the Sunday papers, that roast meat and potatoes served with a whole pile of veggies and a Yorkshire pud or two will make your day complete. And don’t forget, lashings of gravy — no roast is complete without a pool of rich gravy goodness.
You learn from an early age that mint jelly goes with lamb, cranberry sauce with turkey, horseradish with beef, bread sauce accompanies chicken and apple sauce compliments pork, right?
Two sausages, two bacon, fried eggs, baked beans, and fried mushrooms plus toast with lashings of butter, and a cup of builder’s tea. Yep that greasy concoction can cure even the heftiest hangover.
There is nothing quite like sweet, tomatoey beans to accompany a good sausage and mash, or egg and chips. It is the taste that makes you feel most at home when abroad.
You will likely have grown up with the idea that lunch basically means a sandwich. English sandwiches come in all shapes and sizes and always involve butter on the bread — it just isn’t a sandwich without the butter, right?
No butter in the fridge is a disaster. Your toast and jam depends on it, as does your mash, your fish, and your bread-and-butter pudding. Being without butter can be a devastating loss to your day.
Be it apple crumple, sticky toffee pudding, spotted dick, or treacle tart, it isn’t complete if you don’t add a big dollop or two of thick, hot custard. It doesn’t matter how old you get, this will always be the truth.
Forget Belgium, forget Switzerland — there is nothing quite like a bit of Cadbury’s. Dairy milk, Fruit n Nut, Double Deckers and Curly Wurlies, you’d take any of these over Lindt. Maybe it’s that glass-and-a-half of milk that does it?
There is nothing quite like a cuppa accompanied by some English baked goods, Bakewell Tarts, Custard Tarts, Lemon Drizzle Cake. French and Italian master bakers move over, we got Mr Kipling and he makes “exceedingly good cakes.” 