"It is a truth universally acknowledged that, generally speaking, English meals are bad." So begins Nozomu Hayashi's best-selling 1991 treatise on British food, "Igirisu wa Oishi" ("England is Delicious").
As comments go, this one is relatively mild. After all, it has long been fashionable in Japan to deride British cooking, to the point where it's practically a requirement for anyone who wishes to be seen as having good taste. My wife's family believes that more or less the entire stock of British cooking is bad — and they're not alone. They also suspect that my own affection for it is due to either willful ignorance or deeply ingrained cultural associations.
It's not that I haven't tried to change their minds. I've mentioned the fresh blackberries and strawberries, crumbly Wensleydale cheese stuffed with apricots, plump oysters from the coast, the delights of smoked mackerel, and the wonders bestowed upon pork belly when it is roasted low and slow on top of apples and eaten alongside its curly roof of crackling.