When it comes to British food, evenJohn Olivercan admit that some dishes are “bad.”
“Traditional UK cuisine often gets a bad rap. Warranted? Depends when,” Oliver said. “If you’re talking about my childhood, the ’70s? Yeah, warranted. Warranted in a way you wouldn’t f—ing believe. It was bad.”
He went on to blame how rations during his parents generation led to lack of access to “exotic food or spices or what you might refer to as, ‘flavors.’ "
“If you go into Britain and you’re going to order one thing, go and have some Indian food cause the Indian food there is incredible,” Oliver said, teasing, “I was literally about to say we have the best Indian food in the world, but I stopped myself because that kind of imperial assertion from a British accent is riot inducing. We have excellent Indian food. It’s basically — I was going to say it’s basically Britain’s national dish. ‘Why is that John?’ There’s a lot of history there…”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Elsewhere in the segment, Oliver weighed in on popular British dishes like sticky toffee pudding, scotch eggs, and figgy pudding (“The very concept of that sounds like a digestive hand grenade”).
Asked if the quintessential British dessert Spotted Dick was offensive, Oliver admitted, ‘It’s not great as a meal.”
“It’s not going to be a pleasant experience for you or your body for about 4-5 hours afterwards but you do your best. We got through the Blitz, we can get through eating Spotted Dick. It made me who I am today, which is 60% sad.”
He also answered burning questions like, “Is the term pudding used too loosely?”, “Tea, is it a drink or a way of life?”, and “Is Yorkshire pudding just bread in a muffin tin?”
“Come on, no it’s not,” he said to the latter. “It’s batter in a muffin tin. But it’s actually very good. You have it on the side of roast dinner and put gravy into. And don’t get all judgmental about that, I’ve seen your soup in a bread bowl, so I don’t want to hear any s—.”
The video put Oliver put a full English breakfast up against a full American breakfast, picking his favorite items in a head-to-head smackdown.
Sausage patties won out over black pudding, while he also chose crispy bacon, grilled tomatoes, and fried mushrooms instead of back bacon, pancakes, and home fries.
As for the idea of having beans in the morning, as Brits often do, Oliver admitted that while he’s “always had beans with breakfast,” he now sees “it is madness.”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbertairs weeknights (11:30 p.m.) on CBS.
source: people.com
