Modern British (or New British) cuisine is a style of British cooking that emerged in the late 1970s, and has gained increasing popularity more recently. It uses mainly high-quality ingredients local to the British Isles, preparing them using methods that combine traditional British recipes with modern innovations, and philosophically has an affinity with the slow food movement. Although it has consistently excelled in its desserts and puddings, in terms of its savoury dishes, British cuisine still suffers from a relatively poor international reputation, being typically represented by dishes consisting of heavily cooked meats and vegetables that need to be accompanied by bottled sauces or heavily seasoned after... ... The Slow Food movement, coined in reponse to fast food , claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion. ...

However, it is not generally a historicist movement, although there are some efforts to re-introduce pre-twentieth-century recipes. Ingredients not native to the islands, particularly herbs and spices, are frequently introduced to traditional dishes (echoing, perhaps not always intentionally, the highly spiced nature of much British food in the medieval era). A herb (pronounced hurb in Commonwealth English and urb in American English) is a plant grown for culinary, medicinal, or in some cases even spiritual value. ... A spice is a dried seed, fruit, root, bark or resin substance used in nutritionally insignificant quantities as a food additive for the purpose of flavouring. ...

Much Modern British cooking also draws heavily on influences from the cuisines of the Mediterranean and, more recently, southeast Asia. The influence of northern and central European cuisines is significantly slighter.

The Modern British style of cooking emerged as a response to the perceived poor quality of British cuisine following the Second World War, and the resulting popularity of foreign cuisine in Britain in decades that followed. Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ...