40 Traditional English foods you must try in England

Sausages (Cumberland, usually) mashed potatoes and onion gravy, and a side of peas is the ultimate pub grub comfort food. Why bangers? During World War I, water and other fillers were added to sausages to make up for meat shortages – which caused them when cooked to explode with a bang!

That little black disc that often appears with your full English breakfast is a dense, highly-flavoured sausage made of pork and beef blood mixed with fat or suet, oatmeal, or oat or barley groats. Stornoway black pudding from Scotland’s Western Isles is the best of the best.

Stale white bread never goes to waste with this beloved dessert. Generously buttered slices of bread are mixed with raisins (or other dried fruit) and topped with egg custard, double cream, vanilla, spices, and sugar, then baked until golden. It’s delicious served warm with a dollop of cream or custard.

Whenever there are leftover cooked potatoes and cabbage hanging about the kitchen, the English know exactly what to do (and have since 1762, when the recipe was first recorded): chop and mash them up and fry them in butter, then watch the mess bubble and listen to it squeak.

Traditionally made weeks before the holiday, when every member of the family should have a stir for good luck, Christmas Pudding consists of dried fruit, suet, black treacle, spices and alcohol (usually brandy). On Christmas day, it is steamed for hours, then set alight, and served with brandy butter.

Going to Devon and Cornwall means heading out for a cream tea, starring their famous clotted cream with scones and jam. It’s made of the thick cream that rises to the surface after steaming full milk, and with a minimum of 55% butterfat, a deliciously decadent special occasion treat.

Invented for Cornish tin miners unable to surface for lunch, traditional pasties combine diced beef, onion, swede (rutabaga) and carrots, encased in thick pastry, and are best eaten hot from the bakers, sitting on a Cornish beach. Other flavours – including veggie and vegan – can be found, but traditional is the best.

Two doctors invented digestive biscuits in 1839, believing that bicarbonate of soda and coarse wheat flour would aid digestion. Today McVitie’s Chocolate Homewheat Digestives are Britain’s best-selling biscuits —although today people are less concerned about digestion and more about keeping the biscuit from dissolving when dunked in tea or coffee.

Eccles in Lancashire is the birthplace of these little flat round cakes made from flaky puff pastry and filled with dried currants, candied lemon, orange zest, sugar and spices and baked until golden – delicious with tea and a slice of Lancashire cheese to balance their sweetness.

Queen Victoria made tea a thing after trying a cuppa in 1892 in Balmoral, and her subjects duly followed suit. Foreigners struggle to understand the Brit’s addiction to this comforting brew, but the secret’s in the water. Hard water is needed to extract the rich flavour of the tea – hence why the same drink can taste completely different in other places. Brits serve it with a splash of milk, and usually a spoon of sugar.

Still a national favourite, usually battered cod or haddock, set on top of a pile of deep-fried chips, smothered in salt and vinegar. Served up by countless fish & chip shops (aka ‘chippies’) up and down the country. Best eaten straight from the paper, preferably in front of a sea view.

In England fish have fingers, or they have since the 1950s when frozen food companies introduced sticks of breaded white fish (cod, hake, haddock, coley or pollock) advertising  ‘No bones, no waste, no smell, no fuss’. Children love them, and now chefs are transforming them into gourmet delicacies for adults.

There’s no better way to start the day than with a full English fry-up; bacon, sausages, eggs, fried bread, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, black pudding – and mugs of strong tea. Available everywhere – increasingly there are good veggie and vegan options too. Clean your plate and you won’t need any lunch!

Hot Cross Buns are a Good Friday tradition: made with dried raisins or currants and spices, they are topped with a cross symbolic of the Crucifixion. Henry VIII found them too Catholic and banned them, but Elizabeth I allowed bakers to make them again. And they do taste best hot.

Every British child who ever ate a school lunch knows all about Jam Roly-Poly, although these days most cooks replace the traditional suet in the pastry with butter. Filled with jam, rolled into a spiral the baked or steamed,  this favourite dessert is usually served with a puddle of custard.

Once plentiful in the Thames, eels were a staple in London’s East End; cut into rounds and boiled with vinegar, nutmeg and lemon, then served in the fish’s natural jelly. Seek them out in London’s historic eel, pie and mash shops, accompanied by a minced meat pie and mashed potato.

A kipper is a strong-tasting salted herring, split down the middle and smoked, and often served for breakfast with a fried egg. The home of the kipper is the Northumberland coast, where traditional smokehouses still produce the best and tastiest fish.

Knickerbockers were traditionally red and white striped, which is the origin of the name of this deluxe red and white ice cream sundae, always served with a long spoon. Vanilla ice cream and whipped or clotted cream supplies the white; the red comes from layers of fresh fruit and syrups.

Lancashire gave England its classic lamb casserole, a ‘hotchpotch’ (hence Hot Pot) of chunks of stewing lamb (and often lamb’s kidneys), mixed with onions, carrots, and Worcestershire sauce and topped with sliced potatoes and meat drippings, and baked in the oven until it melts in the mouth.

‘You Either Love it Or Hate it’ is the motto on the cauldron-shaped jars of this strange black paste made from brewer’s yeast. Brits (who mostly love it – science says it’s a genetic thing) spread it thinly on buttered toast. Children make ‘Marmite soldiers’ to dip in soft boiled eggs.

A classic picnic snack, the pork pie originated in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire (where the best ones are still made) and consists of chopped pork, surrounded by a layer of pork-stock jelly, seasoned with a special mix of salt and pepper and encased in a thick hot-water crust pastry.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without warm mince pies, filled with mincemeat – a mix of dried fruit, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. It’s rare these days that they also contain meat (as they did in the Middle Ages) and it’s also rare that people have the patience to make them from scratch!

Often seen on pub menus, this is a great sharing plate; an open sandwich of crusty bread, complimented with a hunk of cheddar cheese, butter, pickle (this is usually some kind of chutney) and slices of apple. More elaborate versions may include ham, hardboiled egg, or pâté.

Ian Fleming (and his alter ego James Bond) loved these little brown shrimps fished from Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. They are cooked in seawater with spices (mace, ground ginger, ground nutmeg and paprika) then potted and sealed with butter; they make a delicious lunch with toast and salad.

A favourite starter since the 1970’s, de-shelled prawns are slathered in a tangy, pink Marie Rose sauce made of mayonnaise, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice and horseradish,  served in a cocktail glass on a bed of lettuce with brown bread and butter on the side.

Sausage rolls – puff pastry wrapped around sausage meat, glazed with egg and baked until golden – are so popular that there are never any left in the shop by the late afternoon. The pie chain shop ‘Gregg’s’ sells 140 million a year! Mini ones are always a hit at a party.

A scone (it rhymes with ‘gone’ or ‘tone’ depending where you are in the UK) is slightly sweet pastry, speckled with currants or raisins. Ideally, eat your scones warm from the oven, cut open and smothered in jam and clotted cream, along with a nice cup of tea.

The ultimate bar snack and picnic food, the Scotch Egg has become something of a gastro treat in recent years; a hard-boiled egg, wrapped in sausage meat and breadcrumbs and deep-fried. In spite of their name, they aren’t Scottish: they are named after William Scott, the Yorkshire firm that invented them.

Shepherd’s Pie evolved to make use of the beef or lamb leftover from a Sunday Roast, and it still is, although mostly it’s made with fresh minced beef, along with onion, peas, carrots and gravy, then topped with mashed potatoes. The vegetarian version often uses tofu and walnuts.

It may sound like a disease, with a name has given rise to countless double entendres, but the ‘spots’ are raisins or currants, and ‘dick’ is a dialect word for pudding. Other ingredients include suet, flour, sugar and milk; it’s steamed and usually served in a lake of custard.

Pub grub at its heartiest: diced beef, kidneys and onion and sometimes mushrooms and carrots, cooked together in a rich gravy and topped with a lid of flaky puff pastry. Crack it open and get a full face of steam and heavenly aroma – perfect on a cold winter’s day.

It’s so sweet it will make your teeth hurt, but it’s worth it. This exceedindly sticky pudding is a rich sponge cake made with dates and black treacle, baked in individual tins, then smothered in a hot gooey toffee sauce made of double cream, muscovado sugar, butter and treacle.

The most famous blue cheese in the UK, Stilton is tangy and salty and goes well with a glass of port, although there is also white stilton, which has a milder taste and smell. Only blue cheeses made in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire can be called Stilton.

The ultimate weekend treat, pubs up and down the country will serve a traditional roast lunch; usually a choice of beef, lamb or chicken (and a veggie option) with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings (with beef), vegetables and a thick, unctuous gravy.

Sausages are a staple British food – often served simply with mash and gravy – but this dish surrounds them with Yorkshire pudding – a crispy batter. The English do have a knack for funny names – this one comes from the relatively small piece of meat ‘the toad’ hiding in the golden batter.

There are many versions of this 16th-century English dessert, but the essentials are a base of sponge cake soaked in sherry, topped with fresh fruit or jelly then crowned with custard or whipped cream. In 2022, a trifle recipe was chosen as the Platinum Pudding for the Queen’s Jubilee.

Made with eggs, flour and milk, and baked at a very high temperature, fluffy golden Yorkshire Puddings were originally served with gravy made from meat drippings as a first course to fill diners up so they would eat less  meat afterwards. Today they are a fixture of a Sunday roast.

Although sponge cakes lightened with egg whites instead of yeast go back to the Renaissance, the invention of baking powder in England in 1843 allowed cooks to add butter to the recipe and create the classic Victoria Sponge. It’s very versatile, and nearly always used for making fairy cakes (cupcakes).

Fresh juicy English strawberries are at their peak of lusciousness in July, which is why this popular dessert is famously associated with the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. Take sliced strawberries and clotted or double cream ideally infused with a bit of vanilla, and swirl them together in a glass – it’s a combo made in heaven.

Harry Potter’s favourite dessert may sound like pure sugar shock to the uninitiated, but treacle tart is seriously delicious. It’s a short crust filled with golden syrup (caramelized buttery light treacle) mixed with lemon juice and zest, eggs and cream, and served with custard or clotted cream.