As a Brit (and a fairly useless chef myself), I can say this is all too true... but it wasn't always that way, at least not quite so much. A fair amount of modern British cooking uselessness goes back to the Second World War (yay, we can blame the Nazis again! *cough* ). Specifically, rationing.
See, something that's often overlooked nowadays is that rationing in Britain went on much longer than the war itself. Indeed, it actually got WORSE after the war for a while. We were broke, basically, and to boot we were losing our empire, which was great for the colonized peoples we'd been oppressing (and so definitely a good thing overall, don't get me wrong) but for us meant we suddenly didn't have a convenient internal market that covered major argiculture regions like India. Spices in particular became and remained pretty scarce. So an entire generation of Brits just didn't have the ingredients to make nice food on a regular basis. And that meant our cooking skills as a nation atrophied.
Is that the only reason? No, obviously not, because other European nations had rationing and lost empires around the same time, and they still have reputations as great culinary cultures. Some of it is still are culture's emphasis on thrift and convenience over quality, along with a lingering puritanical distrust for pleasures of the flesh such as eating. But before WW2, British cuisine was a lot more interesting than it was afterwards, with a great variety of pies (sweet but particularly savoury) and stews as well as the more familiar roast beef and fish and chips. We're starting to recover a little of that now, and also embrace overseas influences again, but it's a slow process, and cooking remains daunting to a lot of people (like me) who simply never learned properly.
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As a Brit (and a fairly useless chef myself), I can say this is all too true... but it wasn't always that way, at least not quite so much. A fair amount of modern British cooking uselessness goes back to the Second World War (yay, we can blame the Nazis again! *cough* ). Specifically, rationing.
See, something that's often overlooked nowadays is that rationing in Britain went on much longer than the war itself. Indeed, it actually got WORSE after the war for a while. We were broke, basically, and to boot we were losing our empire, which was great for the colonized peoples we'd been oppressing (and so definitely a good thing overall, don't get me wrong) but for us meant we suddenly didn't have a convenient internal market that covered major argiculture regions like India. Spices in particular became and remained pretty scarce. So an entire generation of Brits just didn't have the ingredients to make nice food on a regular basis. And that meant our cooking skills as a nation atrophied.
Is that the only reason? No, obviously not, because other European nations had rationing and lost empires around the same time, and they still have reputations as great culinary cultures. Some of it is still are culture's emphasis on thrift and convenience over quality, along with a lingering puritanical distrust for pleasures of the flesh such as eating. But before WW2, British cuisine was a lot more interesting than it was afterwards, with a great variety of pies (sweet but particularly savoury) and stews as well as the more familiar roast beef and fish and chips. We're starting to recover a little of that now, and also embrace overseas influences again, but it's a slow process, and cooking remains daunting to a lot of people (like me) who simply never learned properly.