As a British person living overseas, you get to hear a lot of negative stereotypes about your country’s cuisine. Generally, people think that we eat nothing but fish and chips, washed down by copious amounts of tea, and that the rest of our food is bland, unappetizing and poorly presented. But this couldn’t be further from the truth – British people are actually crazy about food and cooking, we’re obsessed with celebrity chefs and cooking shows, and Britain has plenty of Michelin-starred restaurants to be proud of.

Still, there’s certain aspects of British cuisine that are hard to defend, like the disgusting fish dish known as Stargazy Pie, which one Japanese Twitter user recently attempted, to horrifying results and plenty of ridicule…

Stargazy Pie is a traditional Cornish pie which features a bunch of baked pilchards popping their heads out of the crust. It’s fairly indefensible as it looks completely disgusting and probably tastes worse (although I have to admit, I don’t think I – or any other Brits I know for that matter – have ever tried it).

Bizarrely, a budding Japanese cooking enthusiast decided to bake up their own version of this extremely niche, local English recipe in order to share the results online (really, they shouldn’t have bothered). Here’s what they came up with:

▲ “I tried to make a British Stargazy Pie, and it ended up looking like a scene from hell LOOOOOL”

On the left, a “textbook” Stargazy Pie. On the right, a monstrous mash of fish body parts and… wait… where’s the crust? Where’s the PIE? That’s just a rice cooker filled with fish!

It does seem that if you’re going to attempt a recipe, you might at least try to get some (if not all) of the ingredients right. Maybe they were going for some sort of Japanese/British hybrid fusion cuisine?

“That looks disgusting,” pointed out one commenter. To which the OP responded: “It tasted really good, though!” Hmm. We suspect there’s a bit of trolling going on here.

For the record, here’s what a proper home-baked Stargazy Pie should, apparently, look like:

You can even mix it up with different kinds of seafood and other fillings:

https://twitter.com/M1lkaSchokolade/status/554329485265223680

Okay, it’s still gross…

Source: Twitter @yamamoto_handle
Featured image: 
Twitter @yamamoto_handle