When Jamie Oliver lamented what he called “the new poverty” in Britain last
week — a lifestyle laden with widescreen televisions, cars and mobile phones
set against an ignorance about food and a diet poorer than that in some
African slums — it was easy to agree. What seemed startling was his
assertion that in times gone by, British cuisine was close to Italian food
today “without the pasta and risotto”.
Well, he is right. When the culinary arts began to flourish across Europe in
the Middle Ages, British courts were as self-consciously enthusiastic as
their Italian and French counterparts. Instead of wasting money on foreign
wars, Richard II’s court was conspicuously lavish when it came to food and
drink. In fact, the earliest extensive British culinary manuscript to
survive was penned by his master cooks back in 1390.
The 196 recipes in this rare scroll include instructions for hearty soups,
slow-cooked stews and complex dishes of boiled and roasted meats. They use a
wide variety of fresh and saltwater fish, a dizzying array of herbs, and
promote dishes rich in root vegetables and pulses — just as the Italians do
now.
Among King Richard’s recipes is even our earliest one for salad. It uses only
the smallest leaves of parsley, sage, borage, mint, fennel, cresses,
rosemary, rue and purslane mixed with minced garlic, small onions and leeks,
decorated with slivered, toasted nuts and pomegranate seeds.
What Oliver clearly doesn’t realise is that we did have our own version
of pasta. A recipe for macrows — proto-pastas made with wheat flour, then
boiled and layered with butter and cheese, sound not unlike modern macaroni
cheese. Pizza, though, appears never to have made it across the Channel.
Being an island has always made magpies of the British, encouraging our
openness to new plants, new spices and imported luxuries. Although conquered
by foreigners (twice), we have in our kitchens, at least, always welcomed
the new, changing our dining habits as often as our economic and political
fortunes have been in flux.
According to William Harrison — that great chronicler of Elizabethan England —
the late Tudor fashion for fricassees thickened with eggs, cream and
marrowbone, was introduced by the highly paid chefs who cooked for many of
the nobility. Elite chefs were sometimes derided as “musical-headed
Frenchmen”, but the little books of printed recipes put about by many of the
queen’s courtiers included recipes for sophisticated dishes such as “leg of
lamb cooked in the French fashion” — if you wanted to make an impression,
this is where you turned.
Britain’s lush, fertile meadows made our crops among the finest in Europe and
our soft, mellow meat the envy of every visitor. British meat was roasted
pink at the centre until well into the 19th century when the Victorian
distaste for blood temporarily reversed the habit. Tougher, dryer French
beef was, until the same period, cooked to the core and lifted with rich
sauces, or stewed slowly for hours to make it melt. Sauces, above all, were
the tools of the French chef’s trade, marking the great dividing line
between elite professionalism and the poorer English domestic cook.
But it was not just to France that British cooks looked at the end of the 16th
century. In fashionable society there was a rage for the Spanish olla
podrida, or “hodge podge” so beloved of Cervantes’s Sancho Panza — a
casserole whose merit seemed to consist of throwing as many things as you
could put your hands on into the largest pot available.
Down through the centuries the pattern was endlessly repeated: wholesome,
tasty, boiled, grilled, stewed and roasted meats, vegetables, clear broths,
velvety soups, a lavish use of herbs and cream and the ever present
influence of the Continent. In Georgian times, cooks prided themselves on
knowing how to cook vegetables to preserve their colour and crunch.
Add to that an almost unique way with pastry and pies, a thriving regional
baking tradition and a particularly fine way with cream and puddings and, in
the 1700s, our culinary future seemed assured. Yet while our neighbours
managed more or less to preserve their centuries-old culinary traditions,
ours began to collapse. Why?
In a word: industrialisation. Britain industrialised far earlier and faster
than its continental cousins. Rural labour was sucked into the swelling
cities. Great swathes of the population became divorced from the land and
separated from the mothers and grandmothers through whom culinary tradition
flowed.
Later on, notions of politeness encouraged ladies to flee from the kitchen;
young women of the most inconsequential standing were more likely to know
how to paint a picture of a lamb than roast a joint of mutton. The prickly
journalist William Cobbett noticed the trend as he rode round the country in
1825, fulminating that even the farmer’s wife was “stuck up in a place she
calls a parlour”, ignorant for the first time of the hands-on business of
managing a household.
There was hope: by the 1930s, along with a fashion for Riviera chic, came a
new appreciation of Italian and French cooking, of red peppers, pungent
garlic, risotto and fresh melon. However, the war put paid to all that and,
despite the example of Elizabeth David in the 1950s and Jane Grigson in the
1970s, British traditions of agricultural and culinary quality fought a
losing battle.
We put men on the moon and dreamt of robots that could vacuum and scrub. The
technological revolution gave us Teasmades, freezers and microwaves and the
new reality was self-service supermarkets flashing with an endless array of
convenience foods, from packet mash to Vesta beef curry. Conversation and
family gathering gave way to the TV supper.
After two centuries of industrialisation, driven by concerns about where our
food comes from, how safe it is, what impact its production has had on the
planet and how much is thrown away, we are finally beginning to retry
“traditional” recipes: simple pies, slow-cooked stews and dishes rich in
pulses.
Yet we remain a magpie nation, never far from a source of Middle Eastern
spices, Asian herbs, crème fraîche, olive oil or a chilli or two. In this
respect we live as did the medieval aristocracy, with the tasty bounty of
the world at our feet. Jamie, much of our cooking ain’t that bad; it’s the
conversation that’s missing.
Kate Colquhoun’s Taste: The Story of Britain Through its Cooking, is out
now in paperback, Bloomsbury £8.99
