British Food
British catering tangles together so many separate strands that it's to be expected that our food history is complicated and contradictory. It has evolved because of the tensions between plain and ornate cooking, imported and home-grown produce, town and country, and the differing aspirations of rich and poor.
By carefully unpicking the story of our food in his book British Food, Colin Spencer goes a long way to explaining why it can be so good and so bad, why it doesn't have the clarity of neighbouring European cuisines and why it will go on changing.
In every era (Saxon, Norman, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian, Victorian) the rich, who can afford to choose, have set the agenda. Medieval nobles, as Crusaders, introduced spices from the Middle East. Pepper, mace, ginger, cloves and cinnamon were brought back from the lands east of Constantinople to create a kind of proto-fusion style of cookery. Victorian upper and middle classes aped French haute cuisine, because France's culinary imperialism suited the British Empire's own pretensions.
Until the overpopulated 20th century the British Isles were largely self-sufficient. Society's poorest members may have starved, but those who had money or property lived well off the land. Spencer paints the gentrified country folk of Georgian England as enjoying a golden age of fresh produce and practical but wholesome cooking allied to a healthy interest in good food.
Towns led to the creation of cookshops, street food and inns - the forerunners of our catering industry. In 1280, Norwich (which probably had a population of 10,000) boasted 19 cookshops. At the same time York's guild of cooks numbered 34 members. They sold sausages, pies and pasties, but also cooked meats and fish, wafers, cakes, flans and tarts.
Six hundred years later, the list of popular food in shops or on stalls had expanded to include oysters, sheep's trotters, pea soup, savoury puddings, ham sandwiches, cod and chips and ice-cream. This flourishing commercial sector fed the urban working classes. It didn't cater for the well-off, who had their own cooking staff. Restaurants didn't take off until rich men went out on the town at night.
Our native cookery throws up plenty of surprises: dill was already popular at William the Conqueror's court; pasta (known as macerouns, from which we get macaroni) was fashionable by the reign of King John - as was refined sugar, imported from Sicily; London was once the asparagus capital of the world; and orange trees used to grow in Devonshire.
British Food is probably the first book to give a complete and accurate account of our nation's eating habits. As such, anybody working in the food service industry should take the trouble to read it. Chefs can learn where their historical roots lie. Managers will gain a deeper insight into the reasons underpinning trends and changes in fashion. An industry that can often seem overly self-critical will discover how much eating habits have changed for the better since the end of the last world war. n
By Michael Raffael, food writer
British Food
Colin Spencer
Grub Street, £25
ISBN 1-904010-16-4
