Pub food restaurants: menu guide

Bangers & mash: a great British dish and staple pub food restaurant fare, perfect with onion gravy. The name "bangers" dates back to cheap wartime sausages with a high water content, given to exploding during cooking.

Cornish pasty: called an oggy if you're actually Cornish. Originally a convenience food for tin miners, found to be the most hygienic way of having lunch when covered with dirt, deep underground. Now eaten in the pleasant surroundings of pub food restaurants!

Cottage pie: a time-honoured way of using up the minced leftovers of a roast beef dinner. Originally, mashed potato would line the dish as well as providing the topping. Of course, if your pub food restaurant is serving shepherd's pie, it's likely to be filled with minced mutton or lamb.

Fish & chips: popularised by the introduction of trawling in the late 1800s. Up until then, fresh fish fillets were something of a luxury, especially away from the coast. Now no pub food restaurant menu could be without fish and chips.

Lancashire hotpot: from the days of heavy industry before the modern pub food restaurant, the idea here was to prepare the most food with the minimum effort, leaving lamb or beef, onion, veg and sliced potatoes to bake all day in a big heavy pot. Nowadays done with the utmost care in pub food restaurants north and south.

Ploughman's lunch: chunks of English cheese and bread, dollops of pickle and a smattering of salad. Was this pub food restaurant classic invented to promote cheese in the 1960s? It remains the subject of some debate!

Steak & kidney pudding: a pastry-lined pudding bowl filled with diced beef and lamb and pig or ox kidneys. A symphony of suet and sauce, steamed for hours and served piping hot in almost all pub food restaurants.

Yorkshire pudding: baked batter, eaten with lots of gravy, and hopefully roast beef too, on Sundays in pub food restaurants throughout the land. Traditionally cooked beneath the roast, so as to catch the dripping fat. If made with sausages it's toad in the hole.

Did you know...

Over a billion meals are eaten every year in pubs and pub food restaurants throughout the land? Bottoms up and down the hatch!