Our taste for haute cuisine could make French eat their words

Their reputation as the world's greatest food lovers is well earned. They have, after all, given us such gastronomic delights as bouillabaisse, coq au vin and beef bourguignon, to name just a few.

I fondly remember childhood holidays in France where meals were enjoyed over a leisurely few hours, usually in some ridiculously picturesque village overlooking a river. It was here that I first discovered a love of langoustines and moules marinire – food that was both delicious and exciting.

Contrast this with England where 25 years ago a meal out at a Berni inn was about as glamorous as it got for most people, and the few posh restaurants that did exist usually served French cuisine. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the French have long considered us rosbifs to be inferior when it comes to cooking.

But their "you can't do better than us" attitude is perhaps starting to change. A cross-Channel study, published today, shows that we Britons spend longer in the kitchen than the French and cook a wider range of dishes. The survey, which questioned 2,061 readers of BBC food magazine, Olive, and 1,345 readers of Madame Figaro, suggests we have a more worldly approach to eating, with 72 per cent regularly cooking Italian food and 45 per cent making Indian dishes. On the other hand, the only food the French will cook with any regularity, apart from their own, is Italian.

According to the study, Britons spend longer in the kitchen, with half of those questioned spending more than 30 minutes cooking each night, compared with 27 per cent of French readers – although our Gallic neighbours might argue this is because we're slower than they are. When it comes to dining out, provenance and seasonality appear more important to the French than the British, who favour ethics and price. French people are also more likely to push the boat out for a meal with 42 per cent having visited a Michelin-starred restaurant in the past year, compared with 14 per cent in the UK.

All of which makes for interesting reading. There's certainly no denying that over the past 15 years, or so, the standard of British restaurants has improved dramatically, driven by the plethora of TV cookery programmes, a growing understanding of the importance of home-grown produce and our increasingly discerning palates.

These days, you can't move for farmers markets, while celebrity chefs are feted in a way that used to be reserved for rock stars. There's still some way to go before our culinary reputation matches that of France – it's hard to imagine fish and chips becoming a Parisian favourite – but British cooking is far from the laughing stock it once was.

Yorkshire TV chef Brian Turner believes there's been a gradual culture change in this country. "It's been an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one," he says. "Attitudes towards food and what people eat have certainly changed in Britain and France over the last 30 years, and because we've come from a lower base we have moved forward faster.

"I've been going to Lyon every year for the last 24 years to judge a food competition and when I first went there were no big conglomerate food chains, but now they're on nearly every street corner in Lyon which is one of the gastronomic cities of Europe."

He says that while many French dishes are rightly regarded as classics, we have our versions that are just as good. "The difference between spring lamb stew and ragout d'agneau printanier, is one sounds nicer than the other. But the only real difference is 22 miles across the Channel."

Turner believes that one of Britain's culinary strengths is its diversity. "We have great produce in this country but we also eat food that our parents and grandparents would never have dreamed of eating. We're smaller than France and consequently our diversity is more concentrated. We make great curries and use all kinds of different ingredients, but the French tend not to travel around Europe as much as we do and as a result they aren't exposed to the same influences."

Olive editor Christine Hayes says British food has come a long way in recent times. "Although the French have an enviable food heritage, it's fascinating to see how much British people have embraced home cooking and international cuisine over the past few years."

As Raymond Blanc might say, voil.