Best British Recipes

After decades at the bottom of the culinary league table, British food is cool again. While even five years ago a "British restaurant" would have been an oxymoron like ''low fat butter'' or ''barbecue summer'', now chefs are falling over themselves to proclaim themselves anglophiles. Trendy restaurants have ditched the French and Italian classics to serve up dishes that sound as if they belong in granny's kitchen: potted shrimp, pork scratchings and Scotch egg.

Home cooks may feel justifiably irritated by all the fuss. While professional chefs would love us to believe that British food is their great new discovery, for most of us it never went away.