Simon--

I have heard others voice your complaint about South Asian food in Britain,
and I am sure there is something to it.  But my own experience eating
(often) in cheap Indian restaurants in Britain (most nondescript and a few
highly recommended such as one I went to on Brick Lane with a bunch of
people, at least one of whom is on this list) is that I have almost always
enjoyed the food and found it to be a very good value for the price.  Maybe
I have an unsubtle palate or am accustomed to horrifically bad food (since I
am an American, after all :-) but I don't think so.  You are right that the
food in British Indian restaurants is not very subtle and that it often
consists of meats in heavy sauces.  But it actually tastes pretty good.

I also do a substantial amount of home cooking (in Upstate New York) using
Indian recipes, often vegetable recipes (I hate to say "vegetarian" because
that conjures up images of tofu burgers and mock duck for me, although many
Indians are vegetarians) and you are quite right that we never get to taste
these recipes in restaurants.  The vegetable dishes I know how to make are
far more varied than the meat dishes in the cookbooks.  They are easier to
make in many cases and are almost always faster to cook.  On the other hand,
home cooked (in my home) versions of Indian meat recipes often result in
very strong-tasting pots of meats in thick, oily sauces.  Often these are
tasty, but they lack the subtlety of the vegetables, in much the same way as
the meat dished in restauarnts do  Also, many meat recipes in the books I
have are far more modified for Western tastes than the veggie recipes appear
to be, because (just a few examples) not many Indians cook beef so anything
with beef tends to be an altered lamb recipe, most Indians prefer meat to
have bones and bigger chunks, different cuts of even the same animals as we
use here are available in India etc. Finally (and here I see your point)
there is a Western idea of "curry" that the meat dishes, even in pretty good
Indian cookbooks, seem to adhere to and Western restaurants never escape.

This whole thread is off-topic so I suppose I should stop contributing to it
and certainlty not beg more people to participate, but it is characteristic
of the digital life in that it involves people from many different parts of
the world speaking together and also past each other because of the fact
that we don't have a culture in common (this is even true of several
different posters from the UK, who seem to come frrom culturally distinct
families) and cannot therefore agree on matters of taste.  Without the
internet, this kind of conversation could not happen.  Without the
technology which feeds globalization, the facts we are discussing would not
have happened.  Anyway, what I'd really like to know is what South Asians
think of the South Asian food in the rest of the world (if they have tasted
or seen it), and I know there are some people from India on the list though
I don't know if we have any South Asians living in Britain.

On the subject of French food:  All the good stuff you describe is certainly
there.  I had a sort of adopted French great-grandmother who made things
like lapin aux pruneaux (rabbit with prunes) as an ordinary dish and I have
fond memories of her cooking.  She taught me a few dishes (though mostly I
was too young at the time she died -- at 94 in the mid 80's).  I also know
some people who cook and eat simpler food (and who are from other regions;
my grandmothery person was from the Nievre but lived in Paris most of her
life) which is quite good, from fresh salady things in the cuisine of Nice
to just eating cheese and charcuterie (cold meats, usually pork products
like salami or pate) and bread, which can be very, very nice if the items
are bought at real charcutiers and boulangers (in my experience, the cheese
is rarely bought from an actual artisan and you can only buy a small number
of local artisinal cheeses in one region anyway, so you might as well buy
your cheese at the supermarket where there are many cheeses as at the market
where the cheese seller is not a cheese maker anyway and charhes more).

However -- I have been exposed a lot to food eaten by young families in
France and also by young people (such as college students) because I was a
student in France and also spent time there as a child, and the food was
usually ghastly.  I have also eaten a lot of French institutional food
(mainly childrens' summer camp food, both at subsidized garderies day camps
where the children were poor and at expensive camps, also university and
lycee food, and it was ghastly).  I have also been to "restaurants" such as
the chain "Flunch" (for French lunch) where you get terrible food cafeteria
style.   These places do a lot of business.

This experience suggests to me that my generation in France may be the last
who actually tasted good French food as children (even in restaurants;
families are not that welcome in the many starred haute cuisine places and
the prices are too high to waste on a child who wants his jambon puree...)

Millie

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