Britons embrace cottage pie over salad in 'reverse comfort eating' amid heat and uncertainty

The thermometer climbs past thirty degrees. The kitchen is stifling. And yet, across Britain, people are turning on their ovens to make cottage pie.

It sounds counterintuitive—even perverse. During a heatwave, you'd expect the nation to reach for something cold and light: a salad, perhaps, or a glass of chilled rosé. Instead, Waitrose has watched cottage pie sales double in a single month. South African red wine is up sixty-eight percent. Searches for toad-in-the-hole have jumped sixty-seven percent. People are standing over hot stoves in sweltering heat, deliberately choosing the foods their grandmothers made.

The supermarket chain calls it "reverse comfort eating." The data tells a consistent story: chicken, bacon and leek pie up forty-one percent. Chicken korma up sixty-seven percent. Chicken and ham gratin up sixty-eight percent. Strawberry trifle—that most 1950s of puddings—has seen sales double year-on-year. Even spaghetti bolognese and mac and cheese with rarebit are drawing searchers to recipe sites in numbers that would have seemed unlikely in July.

Seren Charrington-Hollis, a food historian, found herself catering for a music festival during a heat wave. She brought cottage pies and lamb hotpots, expecting them to sit untouched. Instead, guests devoured them. "They were all fed up of salads," she recalls. The heat was unbearable, yet everyone wanted home-cooked meals. She sees something deeper at work: a psychological pivot toward the familiar when the world feels unstable. The cost of living crisis, wars abroad, political upheaval at home, and weather that doesn't behave as it should—all of it creates a kind of vertigo. Food becomes a reset button. "We're completely out of sync," Charrington-Hollis says. "What better way to connect with ourselves and get back to our roots than through food?"

Simon Wood, the 2015 MasterChef winner, points to economics. Eating out has become a luxury many can no longer afford. Cottage pie and lamb hotpot are pub classics—dishes people once paid for when they went out. Now they're making them at home, chasing that same sense of occasion and comfort without the bill. There's also the practical matter: salad doesn't last a week in the fridge, and many households shop only once. Hot, hearty ready meals solve a problem.

Rebecca Earle, a food historian at the University of Warwick, situates this within a longer human pattern. People have always used food to soothe distress. What's interesting here is what the data reveals about Britain itself. Yes, there are the postwar classics—the toad-in-the-holes and cottage pies. But chicken korma sits alongside them. "It's not all 1950s, trad wife stuff," Earle notes. "Amid all those white British dishes, we have a little glimmer of a multicultural Britain coming through." Even in retreat toward the familiar, the nation's palate has shifted.

Stephen Parkins-Knight, Waitrose's senior innovation chef, offers a final observation: raw salads and chilled plates lose their appeal when heat drains you all day. What people crave instead are rich, grounding staples—foods that feel substantial, that anchor you, that taste like something solid in an uncertain time. The heatwave is real. The economic pressure is real. The political turbulence is real. And so people cook. They choose warmth over coolness, substance over lightness, memory over novelty. In the middle of summer, they reach for winter.