British food ranges from excellent to terrible, and the differences are usually based on the quality of the ingredients and the care that went into cooking it rather than the things they’re making. Sausage and potatoes can be delicious food with appropriate spices, whether delicate or stong-flavored. They can also be absolutely horrid bangers and mash, with the flavor boiled out of the meat and soggy lumpy potatoes. Beers can be anything from Real Ale to total swill. Marmite (yeah, ok, maybe you have to be British for that to work well.) A lot of the reputation is from the war years and after, when Britain was dealing with food shortages and starker-than-usual poverty, meat was rationed and what you could get was bad.
I didn’t grow up with mushy peas, but they’re better than the canned peas we used to get in elementary-school cafeteria lunches, and it’s not hard to make good pea soup from almost the same ingredients. I’ve never had really bad canned beans, just uninteresting ones, and while I think of them as lunch food rather than breakfast, they do go well with toast.
