Hedgehog flavoured crisps, ‘fluorescent’ parmos and Holy hot dogs – discover what REAL British food is

For Ben Benton, British taste can be traced through crisps. Small, fried discs of potato tell us everything we need to know about the nation’s appetite. In the 1980s the five best-selling flavours were Ready Salted, Salt and Vinegar, Cheese and Onion, Prawn Cocktail and Beef. Basically, anything that came in a Walkers multipack.

However, by the 1990s, Cheese and Onion took the throne, followed by Salt and Vinegar, BBQ Beef, Worcester Sauce and Pickled Onion.

Today, shelves are filled with flavours such as Black Truffle, Sour Cream and Chive, Olive and Manchego and Iberian Ham. Modern seasonings make the Sweet Chilli ‘Sensation’ seem humble. But none seem as experimental as a 1980s attempt at a hedgehog-flavoured crisp, a short-lived flavour based on the misguided assumption that Romani people ate hedgehog.

Armed with this light-hearted style, chef, writer and podcaster Ben Benton takes us on a culinary tour that spans the length and breadth of Britain.

Beginning in Cromarty, a small seaport north of Inverness, and ending in London via the North, Midlands, Wales and the Southeast and West, Benton’s book, if used discerningly, could be seen as a more approachable and more realistic version of the Michelin guide.

Famous for Middlesborough: a parmo is ‘a fluorescent piece of breaded meat [normally chicken], bathed in bechamel and melted Cheddar’

Benton’s intention when setting out on his journey was to get to the heart of what British food really is and what local food means to each region.

We glimpse the finest Scottish produce available; supreme fish cookery at Riley’s Fish Shack, Newcastle; the soulful Caribbean spices of Aberystwyth’s Mamma Fay’s; and the unquestionable skill of chefs and bakers at Coombeshead Farm, whose bread is sent to London’s top restaurants from Cornwall on a daily basis.

But more often Benton finds British food still bogged down in a flavourless, rationing mentality, and feeding tourists.

Middlesbrough is famed for its undoubtedly delicious but equally heart-attack-inducing parmo, ‘a fluorescent piece of breaded meat [normally chicken], bathed in bechamel and melted Cheddar’. While on Holy Island, famed for its Viking massacre and Lindisfarne oysters, all that is available are overpriced ‘underwhelming’ crab sandwiches, chilli dogs, bacon and brie sandwiches, and tuna melts.

This is an easy-reading tour of both our landscape and our food that will leave you as stuffed as Benton most certainly is.

His biggest bugbear is the repeated lack of local products being used in kitchens, and a lack of care for what’s produced.

All You Can Eat by Ben Benton is available now from the Mail Bookshop

He does allow that often people don’t want to eat the most refined things. Yes, sometimes we just want chicken wings. 

But he doesn’t seem to consider that not everyone wants to be an exceptional chef, nor have they been trained to produce exquisite food, or paid enough to try.

When reading this book it becomes clear that often the problem with British food is not a lack of imagination or care but a lack of training. But then not everyone has to be Clare Smyth or Gordon Ramsay.

So in the end, what is British food? It is a happy combination of the dishes and flavours traditional to almost every other culture and a little bit of British laziness. 

We ‘take the ingredients we love, the cooking skills we’ve learned and our idea of a dish from somewhere else, and create a new version… so that with a squint it might be similar to the original inspiration, but more often than not it is something entirely new.’