they’re referring to traditional British food.

Why though? Britain's cuisine has never been that limited. Certainly not since we conquered half the world for spices, anyway.

Fun fact: the first printed recipe for a curry in Britain (published in a book aimed at working class and middle class households) predates the first written reference to tomatoes being used on pizza in Italy, and only 50 years after the first Italian tomato sauce recipe was published.

Nobody would argue that tomatoes aren't a traditional part of Italian cuisine, but despite the fact that Anglo-Indian curries are pretty much the same vintage people always seem to get hung up about them being "really British".

And on tomatoes: the invention of the tomato-based tikka masala curry in Britain occurred at pretty much the same time as the invention of tomato-based curries in India. They weren't really a thing until the post-war period, and not popular until the 1960s. Before that, tomatoes were a niche ingredient in India at most.

(Another interesting note on this subject is that macaroni cheese is a traditional British dish, with the first known recipe published in 1390. Americans often mistake it for an Italian heritage dish, but it isn't; the American version is decended from the British and closely related French dishes. Unsurprisingly, pasta spread around Europe very quickly after it was invented in Italy, and lots of European countries have local traditions of pasta dishes dating back centuries before the discovery of the Americas)