solacekames:

I actually know a lot about why white British food is so miserable. In Shakespeare’s time, it used to be a lot better, and there was a peasant culinary tradition comparable to France and Italy. There were a lot of wine-based and savory elements to the cuisine.

From what I’ve read, it was killed by the Industrial Revolution. Since the working class had to work in factories 16 hours a day, including women, they were urbanized so rapidly they just couldn’t keep up the tradition and it died out within generations. The upper classes were OK, and probably hardly even noticed, because they simply imported cooks from the continent.

So the death of good British food was a sort of Faustian collective bargain. The UK jumped ahead of other European countries in terms of technology and wealth and colonial resource extraction during the Industrial Revolution, but lost their indigenous good cooking, and nowadays the only good food there comes reimported and reintroduced from their former colonies.