Here in the Vendée Napoleon has a bad rep. During the Revolution the Vendéens supported the Catholic church and priests so he marched in with his armies and "quieted" them. Loads killed or imprisoned and he abandoned Fontenay-le-Comte as departmental capitol and built up La Roche as a military base and capital.
Fonteany-le Comte is a beautiful old town with gorgeous buildings and riverside gardens. La Roche is not pretty altho they're working on it and are turning some of the old military barrack buildings into modern apartments and shops. There's a statue of Napoleon on horseback in the main square that has been so badly vandalised it's under scaffolding and wraps for repair.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
...what defines the 'nationality' of a dish? Kedgeree was a product of the Raj wasn't it? And aren't certain 'curry' dishes that we take for granted here, unheard of in India? Isn't it a bit like Spaghetti Bolognese? British variants on potentially local dishes that become popular here in their own right?
I thought CTM was the number one dish in the UK. It is reputed to have been invented by Bangladeshis in Britain in the 1970s. How long does it take for a dish to become traditional.
..that's my point NB - Kedgeree as eaten here, is not the Indian dish at all that it was based on. It was a bastardised version that appealed to the British palate in India and then came back to the UK in its own right. So is it Indian or British? To me it matters not what 'nationality' a thing is or it's origins. A bit like Obelixx stating that British cuisine started with the Romans - what?! What did Britons (or should I say a bunch of disparate tribes) eat before then? All food migrates and morphs as people do. That's one of the the beauties of multi-culturalism.
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Fonteany-le Comte is a beautiful old town with gorgeous buildings and riverside gardens. La Roche is not pretty altho they're working on it and are turning some of the old military barrack buildings into modern apartments and shops. There's a statue of Napoleon on horseback in the main square that has been so badly vandalised it's under scaffolding and wraps for repair.