It is common knowledge that in great Britain table manners are more important than the food on the table, and that Britons consider it nobler to have a perfect etiquette than to find the time to cook. Someone could argue that people busy with the building of an Empire have little time to waste on such refined pastimes, but it is only a stereotype, like the one saying that Latins give great importance both to food and to the ways of sharing it. Bernard Shaw once observed that since the English can endure their own cooking, then they can endure absolutely everything.
Although the English cuisine may not be a perfect example of culinary arts, according to the author, it can certainly become an emblematic case of the variety of ‘pan-culinary arts’. Being the coloniser, the British Empire brought raw materials and food from the colonies, and dedicated little time to cooking as a way of conquering the world, but it was indeed the colonised who ‘conquered’ the English population by tempting their taste buds. The cuisine resulting from these encounters is presented in the papers of the issue.
