I want to cook an English style dinner for my SO....we are going to England next year, as a teaser for the holidays, I thought I would prepare a dinner that stars English type fare! (PS...I also bought her an England Tee Shirt...corny)

Would anyone have any recipes you would recommend?

Any help would be sooooo appreciated!

Toad in the hole!! My favourite. With onion gravy and peas.
(In case you don't know, it's a kind of Yorkshire pudding with sausages in).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/da...ni_74201.shtml

Trouble is- what do you mean by 'English'?? In a recent survey of people in the UK, 'chicken tikka masala' came nunmber 1. Yet if you ask overseas students what they consider to be a typical English dish, they always say 'fish and chips'. English food tends to be regional e.g. typical Lancashire food (Northern England) fish and chips; Lancashire hotpot; Rag pudding
typical London dishes- eel and mash; pie and chips; jellied eels
Still the idea's a good one. Do tell us what you do cook! LOL

She's talking about dinner, not supper.
I'd start with some smoked salmon (in England, it would probably come from Scotland ;-))

I'd follow it with a roast, probably beef, with yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes.
You could add roast parsnips if you wanted to.
Go to Delia online http://www.deliaonline.com/
and search under "roast".

Now, if there's something that English cuisine is really good at, it's puddings.
My Scottish husband says forget Common Law, Parliamentary Democracy and the Industrial Revolution, England's contribution to civilisation is sticky toffee pudding.
If you go to Delia's site and search under "sticky toffee", she has a nice recipe for little puds.

I rather like Bakewell Tart/Pudding
There's a recipe at http://thefoody.com/pudding/bakewelltart.html
I use shortcrust pastry myself.
You can always used frozen pastry if you want to cheat.

If you go to http://thefoody.com/pudding/index.html
there are lots of good puds.
If you want something lighter after your Sunday roast, try syllabub

When I was in America, I found that treacle tart wend down well too.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/da...art_8191.shtml

You can get golden syrup in some American supermarkets

MissPrism - I thought dinner was supper? Well down South it is. It's the evening meal.

cwojo99-
Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is very English but I must warn you, Yorkshire pud is very difficult to get right! Believe me I have tried unsuccessfully for years.

Now, an easier dish would be English Beef Pie. Made properly - totally delicious! Recipes vary on the net.

I think that there is a difference between dinner and supper.

To me, supper is more like high tea.
It's a two course meal probably without wine.
Our usual evening meal is supper.

I'd say that dinner is a more formal meal with three courses and wine.
Lunch is at mid-day.

Of course in some places dinner is the mid-day meal.
Yorkshire puds aren't that difficult.
Perhaps your oven isn't hot enough. The fat has to be really sizzling before you pour in the batter.
I make the little ones in bun tins.

Supper is a very light meal taken before you go to bed.

2 courses it ain't

I always thought that supper is a late meal, as AlanRow said.
I've heard people refer to dinner as tea; as in "we're having fish fingers for tea tonight". That used to confuse me when I first moved to the UK.

Delia Smith is a good recommendation; the best English food, easy to follow recipes. Potted shrimp for starters perhaps. Roast beef for main course. Trifle is another good one for pudding.

My favorite to fix is steak and ale pie, which we love to order in pubs in Britain.

I used this recipe as my inspiration: http://www.toomanychefs.com/archives/001180.php I bought top sirloin steak and made it in a tall round pie dish instead of the individual dishes. I didn't do the baby onions (just chopped onion) but used two kinds of mushrooms. For the ale, I used Newcastle Brown Ale from England.

This is a great do-ahead dish. I serve it with mashed potatoes and a vegetable. I need to find a sticky toffee pudding recipe for dessert!

Kathy

>>>>>>
I've heard people refer to dinner as tea; as in "we're having fish fingers for tea tonight".
<<<<<

very common...especially as you go north and/or into council estates.

IIRC, the English have

Breakfast about 08:00
Elevens's about 11:00
Lunch about 12:30
Tea about 16:00
Dinner about 20:00
Supper about 23:00

correct?

Also familiar from the reputed Scottish greeting "You'll have had your tea..?".

But this doesn't help cwojo99 much.

I'm tempted to say, batter some frozen fish, deep fry it with chunky potato chips, and serve it wrapped in pages from a scandal-mongering newspaper whose most salacious stories are on the pages you haven't got.

But try instead:
http://www.toweroflondontour.com/recipes/index.html
http://www.brianturneronline.co.uk/recipes.asp
http://www.justuk.org/uk/recipes/

Traditional English style dinner:

Opener: can of sardines

Main: cold roast mutton with overcooked Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes with cold glutinous gravy

Dessert: some sort of a pudding that has been allowed to cool (if not actually cold) topped with a thin whitish sauce that tastes almost, but not quite, like creme anglais.



Ducking

For Christmas dinner my ex Grandmother in law would put the vegetables on the boil a few days before and serve up a luke warm joint of pork, that had seen the inside of an oven for about 20 minutes.

Geez, if someone said they wanted to fix a really American dinner for an SO, would we be subjected to the history of hours and styles of American dining or would people just say "hamburger" or "fried chicken"?

Go with the roast beef if you can figure out how to make a Yorkshire pudding. Or do a steak pie of some sort (kidneys optional). But if you don't look up and follow a recipe for sticky toffee pudding, you've missed the best part.

Roast Lamb is also very popular, and a bit more out of the ordinary than roast beef. But be sure to serve it with mint sauce NOT mint jelly which is horribly sweet. I second the suggestion for trifle - I have made it for several American friends and they love it. Heavy on the sherry!

>if someone said they wanted to fix a really American dinner for an SO, would we be subjected to the history of hours and styles of American dining or would people just say "hamburger" or "fried chicken"?<

There is more to American cooking than hamburgers and fried chicken.

Traditional American Meals:

Breakfast 07:30
Orange juice
Toast and/or biscuits and/or pancakes.
Hot or cold cereal
Eggs with bacon or ham or sausage or steak.
Salt
Coffee or milk
In the South, grits.

Lunch at 12:00
Soup, sandwich (tuna fish, chicken salad, egg salad seem to be preferred), cake or pie, iced tea or soft drink.
Salt

Dinner or supper at 18:30
Salad - iceberg lettuce and "vine ripened" tomatoes with dressing from a bottle.
Steak with baked, French fried or mashed potatoes. Ketchup or canned gravy. Vegetables are optional. Ketchup may be substituted for vegetables.
Salt
Cake or pie.
Iced tea, coffee and or sugary soft drink.

About 4400 calories per day
Included are 3x the fat, 3x the sugar and 4x the salt needed.

....nd serve up a luke warm joint of pork, that had seen the inside of an oven for about 20 minutes...

Does your tapeworm have a name?
There are regional and class differences about what you call meals and courses in such meals.

For example, I was always taught that the sweet course is called "pudding" whatever it consists of.
"Dessert" is a course of fruit and nuts which is served after the main meal.

Sorry, Ira..but for some of us that "traditional" breakfast hour is waaaaay before 7:30.

The "typical" American meal? How about thick grilled steak and either a baked potato or fries?

And when I say "thick" I am not talking about those skinny "steaks" one gets in many parts of Europe.

Cwojo99....you would have gotten slighly fewer diverse answers if you had asked a much easier question such as:
"Should I go to Paris or Venice?"