TWENTY years ago I wrote an article about national dishes, a piece which attracted one or two complaints from people who didn't have a sense of humour. Or at least that's how I dubbed them. The piece was engendered by a letter in a national newspaper from a man who said that never once in all his years of travelling had he ever enjoyed the supposed local, regional or national food speciality in any village, town, county or country. I had initially thought he was a bit of a pompous ass, but on reflection I realised that in most cases he was right and that quite often the much vaunted national dish was, in fact, quite dreadful, usually when reproduced commercially by restaurants and hotels. At the time I think I was suffering from an overload of tartan, having just returned from a holiday in Scotland where it rained every day, Loch Lomond, on whose shores we stayed, was just a rumour and finding anywhere for a family to eat and drink was a huge problem because of Scotland's strange (at the time) licensing laws. On occasions we resorted to haggis and chips, the haggis usually being a tasteless time bomb full of grey matter which didn't invite closer examination. Since then I have eaten very tasty haggis, but the memory lingers on. The other national dish of Scotland is Scots Broth, which is basically a stew but with the inconvenience of barley, which can give it a slightly gravel-like consistency, total murder for anyone with dentures. Over in Ireland you find another stew, Irish Stew, which if cooked properly is a noble dish but when it appears in supermarket packets is just another boring stew with a few desultory carrots and a bit of fatty lamb floating in tasteless gravy. Back over the water you find the Welsh consuming with apparent relish the national broth which is pronounced 'cowl'. I don't know what it is in Welsh, but it probably has more than one 'l'. Welshmen and women, my own former in-laws amongst them, talk of it with misty eyes but when you finally get to eat it you find it's just another stew. In fact nearly all national dishes tend to be stews, inherited as they are from the poor who basically just chucked what was available into a pot and boiled it up. The Welsh are among the very few people in the world who eat seaweed voluntarily. The Japanese do it because they are surrounded by sea and don't have much land to grow things on, the Welsh do it for some unknown reason, perhaps because they are Welsh, but they call it laverbread and eat it for breakfast. When I was first presented with a plate of it I though they were playing one of those practical joke they practised on English people who have strayed over the border and want to marry one of their sons. A dollop of what looked like black liquid porridge was slowly spreading over the plate to meet up with two rashers of streaky bacon and a small pile of cockles. The black stuff was studded with what looked like Quaker Oats (and was Quaker Oats, I later discovered) and everyone else sat down and ate it with relish. My usual ruse, when faced with food I don't think I'll be able to eat is to neatly transfer it to a handy pocket or handbag wrapped in tissue, but laverbread defeated this treatment. So I had to try it, but I can't say I enjoyed it particularly and still don't. Even today my former sister-in-law will, at the drop of a hat, bring a packet of oozing black with her when she comes to visit because she thinks she can still convert me. Leaving Britain aside and travelling across the channel you found and still find, that in France almost every tiny region has its own speciality and still does. Some are always delicious but others, such as Tripe a la mode, may be liberally doused in cider and lots of etceteras but quite frankly if you cooked tripe with Beluga caviar and champagne it would still taste like little boiled flannels. My grandmother used to cook it in milk which didn't improve it either and just looked like little bits of flannel floating in whitewash. Because the French never waste anything regional favourites tend to incorporate bits of animals which never in your wildest dreams would think of eating. Stuffed intestines, cream of calves brains, lambs' testicles, raw sea urchins or chicken gizzards. Best known in France, to tourists at least, are frogs' legs and snails. We British, brought up as we were on Wind in the Willows, wouldn't dream of eating a toad even if it does taste like chicken. I've noticed, in fact, that all hideous ingredients from snake to crocodile, are supposed to taste like chicken. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that if you want something that tastes like chicken, eat chicken. The first time I ate snails I though they tasted like little bits of India rubber, but I loved the garlic butter sauce. I still do on both counts and quite frankly if you want to experience the Escargot experience you could always substitute winkles, which are free, cook them, make the garlic butter sauce and then chuck away the winkles. In Germany, the favourite is still sauerkraut, which is fermented cabbage. Fermented cabbage taste just like you think fermented cabbage would taste like and no doubt explains why Germans drink out of six-pint glasses instead of pint mugs. Italian cooking is now one of our favourites, perhaps because we were brought up on spaghetti hoops, and although we still haven't quite got the hang of eating pasta without having to suck it up, we love lasagne which is almost our own national dish, perhaps because it doesn't fall off the fork. The Spanish national dish is surprisingly not paella, a dish which is glorious when it contains the right ingredients but not when made with American long grain rice containing one shrivelled shrimp per person, it's another stew which comes from Madrid and contains chickpeas. Next door, Portugal's speciality is made from something called morue, which is salted cod which has to be soaked and rinsed numerous times until it is edible. One wonders why they bother. The Swiss love fondue and I suppose sitting round a steaming dish of melted cheese and dipping your bread in it is fine when you're mellow from a day on the ski slopes but not advisable to anyone prone to indigestion. And so on. The Japanese love raw fish and tofu, and if they're rich can sample the puffer fish which is sometimes deadly poison. It's a kind of Russian roulette with Captain Birds Eye cod steaks and probably brightens up a dull Friday evening when one of the guests keels over. The Chinese eat rice gruel for breakfast, which is tasteless but good for you, like porridge, and although I don't know what their national dish is I know it isn't Chicken Chow Mein. Breakfasts, while not necessarily national dishes, although perhaps the British grand fry up should be, are always interesting. On a boat trip a couple of years ago I was amused to watch a mix of various nationalities helping themselves from the breakfast bar. The Germans and the Dutch chose fruit, cold meat and slices of cheese; a party of Indians had cornflakes, yoghurt and mixed salad; the Greeks had bacon, fried eggs and yoghurt with honey; two Americans had cornflakes, fruit and yoghurt and the British manfully ate eggs, bacon, sausages which in fact were rather nasty frankfurters, and baked beans. Everyone ate the croissants. The English national dish used to be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, a dish best cooked at home unless you really like thin slices of grey meat and artificially puffed up batter puddings. I suppose steak and kidney pie is another contender or its counterpart steak and kidney pudding, both needing care to make. Other favourites are nursery food, including tapioca pudding, spotted dick and faggots. All should be avoided unless made by your mother, and even if cooked by your mother, still avoid tapioca. National dishes have always been, as I've said, the food of the poor or the opportunist. The more remote and poor the area the more likely you are to find things at the top of the menu you would rather not know about, things with eight legs, suspiciously long backbones or whiskers. Never mind if they taste like chicken, you know they didn't start out with feathers. Our own national dish is, of course, the pasty. Nobody who lives in Cornwall insults the pasty without expecting retribution (as an American found out a few years ago). Everyone knows, however, that the best pasty is always made at home and remembered from childhood. Insult a man's pasty and you insult his mother. There was a time when stargazy pie was a contender to the pasty as a national Cornish dish. Today expensive restaurants produce it but I'm not keen. Personally I like looking at my food, but I don't like it staring back at me.