England a country which has been inhabited by successive waves of different peoples, a long list with which schoolchildren are more likely to be familiar than their parents: Celts, Picts, Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Angles, Normans, and that only takes us up to 1066. All these, some of them in ways which are too indistinct to perceive at this distance of time, have left their marks on the English kitchen. In more recent times the beneficial immigration of W. Indians, and Asians, especially from Pakistan, has very obviously changed the culinary scene. This same scene has also been enlivened by numerous refugees in the mid-20th century (Jews, Poles), and by the arrival in its closing decades of smaller but influential groups such as Americans and Australians and people from the Middle East, mainly clustering in the London area, and new arrivals in the category of refugees (many from Africa). Nor is this all. For centuries both the Scots and the Irish have descended on England in large numbers, bringing not only their great talents in business, literature, etc. but also their foodways.
