Sorry Brits, American food really IS better! Scientists map the key ingredients of 23 popular cuisines - and confirm UK cooking is blander than US

In the debate whether British or American food tastes better, Blighty has just been dealt an almighty blow.

A landmark study reveals that American cuisine typically features a greater range of ingredients compared with British. 

Scientists studied a data set of recipes covering 23 cuisines around the world – ranging from British and American to Thai and Eastern European.

While Britain opts for carb-heavy comfort foods like meat and dairy, the US adds more in the way of herbs and spices. 

However, neither British nor American cuisine use spices and herbs at the same level as Indian cuisine. 

Globally, Indian leads the way in the use of spices, while Italian and Thai rank highest for use of herbs. 

Study author Iacopo Iacopini, an Italian professor working at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, says 'ingredient fingerprints' emerge in each food tradition. 

'British cuisine uses more dairy and cereals than average, and does not show a particularly high use of spices,' he told the Daily Mail. 

For the study, Professor Iacopini and his colleagues studied a data set of recipes covering 23 cuisines around the world.

The representative sample included American, British, African, Chinese, French, Indian, Korea, Japanese, Scandinavian, Spanish and Thai. 

The dataset contained details of 45,661 recipes made up of 604 ingredients, which were separated into 20 categories including spices, herbs, meat, dairy and fungus.

Overall, Indian and African food scored highest for use of spices, while Caribbean scored high for fruit, Thai for fish, Italian for herbs, Japanese for plants, Chinese for maize and Chinese for nuts and seeds. 

India stood out as the cuisine that uses meat the least, reflecting cultural restrictions on meat consumption, especially among its vast Hindu population. 

Scandinavian cuisine, meanwhile, ranked high for relative use of dairy just like Britain but had significantly lower usage of vegetables, herbs and plants. 

'The harsh climate of Scandinavian countries creates unfavorable conditions for the cultivation of most vegetables, resulting in a distinct culinary approach that relies on other ingredients,' the authors say. 

But the study also revealed some intriguing findings when comparing Britain and America – known for a frenzied debate when it comes to who has the tastiest cuisine. 

Of the two nations, American cuisine ranked higher for the use of 12 ingredient categories – spices, herbs, fruit, vegetables, plants (a category that includes honey and soy sauce), nuts & seeds, essential oils, legumes, bakery, fish, seafood and maize.

Meanwhile, British only ranked higher than American for the use of six ingredient categories – meat, dairy, cereals, fungi, additives and alcoholic beverages. 

On two other categories (beverages and flowers), British and American food ranked about the same. 

Herbs and spices in particular are typically what gives food its flavour, so a cuisine with lower use of spices and herbs can be considered blander. 

However, Professor Iacopini stressed that complex flavour profiles are created by other ingredients in the mix too. 

'Cuisines rely on different sources of flavour (fat, acidity, fermentation, broths, etc.) that don't necessarily involve spices,' he told the Daily Mail. 

Out of all the 23 cuisines, American ranked highest overall for number of recipes and total number of ingredients, while Portuguese, Korean and Scandinavian ranked lowest.  

The research team also analysed the data set to find recipes with the largest number of ingredients for each cuisine. 

Ranking top was vegetable korma from India with 31 ingredients, including star anise, sunflower, bell peppers, buttermilk and chili pepper. 

The second most ingredient-heavy recipe in the dataset was found in American cuisine – a turkey, sweet potato shepherd's pie (29 ingredients).

Also ranking high on this list were nachos from Mexico (27 ingredients), grey cup chili from Canada (26 ingredients) and green chicken curry from Thailand (also 26 ingredients). 

The British dish on this list was 'Scotsman's shepherd pie' with 21 ingredients – packed with comforting staples like butter, cream, egg and potato. 

Interestingly, the representative cuisine with the fewest ingredients was South American – a Peruvian menestrón soup with only 18 ingredients. 

According to Professor Iacopini, so-called 'new world' countries such as the US, Canada and Australia have cuisines that are 'more homogenized'. 

'This could be due to the strong immigration cultural blending that has been going on in those places,' he said.

The paper, 'The networks of ingredient combinations as culinary fingerprints of world cuisines', has been published on the arXiv preprint server, meaning it's yet to be peer-reviewed.