Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The Truth about Pub Food Recipes

By KC Kudra

You will expect different types of food from different restaurants - pub food, caf food, fast food, and fine dining all fall under the category of meals from food outlets. We all expect there to be a world of difference between a meal from a fast food joint and a dinner from an award winning restaurant, both in quality and price, but what about pub food? Is pub food freshly made or mass-produced? Just how healthy is this kind of food?

Pub food in Britain is also known as "pub grub." At the turn of the twentieth century, you could expect to see shellfish vendors outside public houses selling whelks, mussels, cockles and the like, or you could get a cold snack like a salad at the bar.

In the 1950s, most pubs offered "a pie and a pint" and the landlord's wife would make steak and ale pies for the workmen who came in for lunch. In the 1960s, dishes such as scampi or chicken in a basket appeared. In Ireland, Irish stew with soda bread was common pub food.

What is Modern Pub Food?

These days in Britain, you can expect meals like bangers and mash, fish and chips, Sunday roast dinner, hot pot and pasties. International recipes such a lasagna and curry feature on many pub menus. In Australia, popular pub dishes include pub-style hamburger, steak, or chicken schnitzel served with mashed potatoes, wedges or chips and a salad.

Since the 1990s pub food has become a more important part of the pub experience and most public houses, serve lunch and dinner at the table instead of bar snacks at the bar. Some pubs serve top quality food, which can rival that of a good restaurant and the pubs at the far end of this scale call themselves "gastro pubs." This word is a combination of the words pub and gastronomy and it was coined in 1991 when The Eagle, a pub in London, opened and started serving fine food.

Pub Food versus Homemade Food

Not many pubs offer the type of food found in The Eagle and most modern pubs use cheap ingredients, easy cooking methods such as microwaving and they have a cook who might or might not have any culinary skills. Rather than fresh pub food, you can expect something that has been made in a factory, packaged in plastic wrap, boxed and deep frozen for a year.

The chicken Marsala recipe you ordered might not be a freshly made dish, but rather something that was mass made a year ago and been sitting in the pub freezer all that time. Two minutes later, the microwave pings and your order is ready. We know of one famous British pub chain with only two dishes on the menu, which are cooked to order. The rest are frozen dinners but the menu descriptions obviously hide that fact.

Eating pub food might be fine occasionally but there is no getting away from the fact that homemade food is better for you. Not only does it work out much cheaper but also you know exactly what ingredients are going into your homemade recipes and you will not add all the colorings, preservatives and other chemical additives found in a lot of pub food.

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