The English have never had a cuisine. Even Yorkshire pudding comes from Burgundy. (Fanny Cradock speaking on the BBC television series "The Big Time" in 1976)British and Foreign Food
Although stereotypes of British food have tended to focus on two apparently endemic problems – its poor quality and its blandness – by the beginning of the twenty-first century Britain had apparently developed into one of the leading culinary centres in the world, counting the highest number of top restaurants. It has surpassed even France, regarded as the birthplace and home of taste and good cooking. Just as importantly, Britons, and above all Londoners, now have a bewilderingly diverse array of foods available to them both in restaurants and shops.
While the quality and range of British food may have changed recently, assumptions about quality and diversity need questioning in a historical context. But before dealing with these assumptions, we need to tackle more fundamental issues regarding the very basis of the concept of British food which, in turn, raises questions about the authenticity of all national cuisines. During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as nationalism developed into the predominant signifier of identity, it encompassed all aspects of life for individuals within specific nation states.
Most of the leading theorists of nationalism have spoken about imagined and constructed nations and nation states, even leading to the evolution of new languages, one of the most important signifiers of nationhood and identity in the modern world. Nationalism has led to ‘invention of tradition’ leading to ‘formalization and ritualization’. Traditions help the establishment ‘of social cohesion or the membership of groups or artificial communities’. The development of the British monarchy or the growth of the highland tradition provide examples of the establishment of particular traditions in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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| Gary Rhodes |
"So what happened to us? Was it that the traditions weren’t strong or numerous enough? Or was it that we just didn’t have the passion for food and cooking that we associate with the French and Italians? Probably, on reflection, a combination of all these".Rhodes claims that British, in contrast to French, food ‘had always been simple – with wonderful ingredients like our own beef, which didn’t need anything more fancy than just roasting’. He asserts that: ‘Our cooking by the early to mid-1970s consisted of well-done roast beef, soggy Yorkshire puddings, mostly served with over-cooked cabbage and thick, floury gravy’. Rhodes’s book on British food, which contains these extracts, provides a variety of recipes including those from ‘the culinary traditions of other countries’. A more recent volume on ‘English’ food, by Rose Prince, has taken a more complex approach to the subject in hand, asserting that:
"The national cuisine may be fossilised in people’s minds as pies, roasts and nursery puddings, but there is now no reason why it could not include the rice noodle dishes of Southeast Asia or the delicious food of the Mediterranean. This is after all a country with a five-hundred-year-old history of food piracy: borrowing ideas from other shores, importing their raw materials and learning to cultivate them in our soil".
Prince also emphasizes the role of ‘multiculturalism’ in changing the diet of Britain. The most significant aspect of Prince’s "New English Kitchen" is the acceptance of the complexity of food in the country, as well as an acknowledgement of foreign influences, although it still operates around the idea of English and foreign food. This dichotomy has evolved over the past fifty years and did not influence the outlook of Isabella Beeton, generally regarded as the founder of the modern concept of English cookery. Rose Prince writes, ‘True English Food has always gone far beyond the Mrs Beeton concept of plain food economically produced.’ But Beeton’s volume is not about English or British food but, as suggested in Prince’s statement and in the title of Beeton’s volume, "Household Management".
As Nicola Humble, the editor of one of the most recent editions of Mrs Beeton, has pointed out: ‘It is a remarkable fact (and tells us much about the constituents of national identity in the nineteenth century) that there are roughly as many recipes in the book from India as from Wales, Scotland and Ireland put together’.Beeton’s book essentially contains recipes for the middle-class housewife, without making an issue of their national identity or what they mean concerning Englishness or Britishness.
In fact, cookbooks published in Britain over the past century and a half divide quite comfortably into three categories: those which have overtly made a case about their Englishness or Britishness; ‘general cookbooks’ without any claims about the national origins of the food concerned; and those which look at the cuisines of specific countries or ethnicities. The last group, which has particularly taken off since the 1950s, has focused especially on Indian, Chinese and Italian food. The proliferation of these volumes in recent decades points to the increasingly accepted idea that foods have nationalities or ethnicities.
British Food
The concept of British food has developed partly as a reaction to the increasing popularity of what we might describe as foreign foods. Before the Second World War the idea of British food, like the concept of foreign dishes, remained relatively undeveloped. Few cookbooks before 1950 specifically focused on British food. One of the earliest of such volumes is Anne Bowman’s "The New Cookery Book: A Complete Manual of English and Foreign Cookery of 1867". Interestingly, the author begins with a statement about perceived Continental views of English cooks, suggesting that such images have a long history: ‘In the art of cookery it is well known that we are stigmatized by our lively and accomplished neighbours beyond the Channel. They believe that no amount of instruction and experience could make an English woman-cook produce a perfect dish.’
The book itself does not spend time distinguishing between English and French foods, but instead boasts six hundred pages of recipes with origins throughout the world, in a similar fashion to Mrs Beeton, "On Sound Principles of Taste and Science", to quote the subtitle of Bowman’s book. The next major volumes focusing on English food seem not to have emerged until the 1930s. Just before this a book appeared by P. Morton Shand mourning the death of English cooking; the author put this down to a variety of causes, including the ‘factory age’, which meant working mothers did not have time to cook, while ‘free trade sounded the death knell of regional cuisines’ as foreign imports entered the country, especially from the U.S.A. In addition, one of the more ‘particular causes of decay in English cooking [was] the worship of that Victorian golden calf, the joint’. Shand also complained that food was cooked too quickly in England. On the other hand, he particularly praised good English meat pies, as well as cheeses, but wrote that ‘sausage-rolls are simply horrible’.
One of Shand’s key themes is the richness of regional food, a theme taken up by Louise Nicoll in her "English Cookery Book" from 1936. Nicoll had no space for international dishes, particularly as she eulogized ‘farm housewives’ who ‘have inherited, or perforce have acquired, a tradition of good cookery, and it is not surprising that in England, where the best food is produced, the best cooking recipes can be found also’. She grouped her recipes according to the seasons (‘First’, ‘Second’, ‘Third’ and ‘Fourth’), each divided into ‘soups’, ‘fish’, ‘vegetables and salads’, ‘meats’ and ‘sweet things’. There is barely a foreign word to be seen in these recipes.While concepts of English and British food existed before this time, this appears to be one of the first cookbooks to specifically set out to eulogize the idea.
In fact, the publication of this volume came after the foundation of the "English Folk Cookery Association", which appears to have lasted less than a decade. Founded by Florence White, it described itself as ‘a learned society formed originally for purposes of research, with the firm intention of restoring England’s former high standard of cookery’. White’s 1932 volume on "Good Things in England", despairingly opens with the following sentence: ‘This book is an attempt to capture the charm of England’s cookery before it is completely crushed out of existence.’ The chapter headings in this volume include ‘English Breakfasts’, ‘The Roast Meat of Old England’ and ‘Savoury Pies and Puddings’. It contains nearly four hundred pages of recipes. Interestingly, White makes an assertion about foreign influences in the introduction:
"Many of the recipes for dishes and cakes, etc., may have been introduced from other lands – we have always been adventurers willing to admire others and learn from them and deprecate our own, but those we liked have become naturalized and suited to our constitutions, and represent – as far as ‘receipts’ and recipes go – our national taste in food, English cookery at its best".
During the Second World War, the Ministry of Food published hundreds of recipes aimed at making rationing more palatable, but while ‘British’ ones predominated, the Ministry did not have any overt aim to develop a native cuisine. In the middle of the 1950s, two British cookbooks appeared, one of which must be regarded as seminal. This is Dorothy Hartley’s "Food in England", a tour de force of nearly seven hundred pages. It boldly begins with the following assertion: ‘English cooking is old-fashioned, because we like it that way.’ She continues, ‘We do enjoy foreign dishes and admire Continental cooks, but when we cook the foreign dishes, the dishes, like the foreigners, become “naturalised English”.’ She asserts that ‘this book is for English cooks, and belongs to English kitchens’. The richly illustrated pages that follow are partly recipe book but also a history of English food.
Philip Harben’s "Traditional Dishes of Britain" preceded Hartley’s book by a year. By this time Harben had become one of the best-known celebrity chefs in Britain, a status emphasized by his television appearances. For believers in the concept of British food, this is a must-read book. The chapter titles simply list the stereotypical stalwarts of the British diet: ‘Cornish Pasty’, ‘Bakewell Pudding’, ‘Yorkshire Pudding’, ‘Shortbread’, ‘Lancashire Hotpot’, ‘Steak and Kidney Pudding’, ‘Jellied Eels’,‘Haggis’, ‘Clotted Cream’ and, of course, ‘Fish and Chips’ which, by this time, had become an important signifier of British identity. Harben tells us that, ‘This is a book about the fine food of Britain and of some of the associations – historical, geographical, traditional – that go with it.’ The first page is littered with contradictions and unsubstantiated statements:
"If Britain enjoys the reputation of providing the worst food in the world she has no one but herself to blame’; ‘Our repertoire of national dishes ...is the largest in the world’; ‘Our cooks ... for sheer technical skill are unmatched anywhere in the world’.Harben wants to remind the reader that ‘we in Britain can cook".
The individual chapters provide information on the origins (as far as Harben could discover them) of the dishes concerned as well as detailed recipes. The central chapter covers fish and chips, for it is here that every stereotype about British food (and, indeed, about food and nationality generally) reveals itself. Harben begins:
"What is the national dish of Britain? This book is full, of course, of national dishes which are all popular favourites; but what is the national food? The teeming millions of Asia subsist mainly on rice. Macaroni in its various forms is the staple diet of Italy. Germany and sausages are almost synonymous. When you think of Scotland you think of porridge. What, then, is the national dish of Britain? The Roast Beef of Old England? Not a bit of it! The answer is: Fried Fish and Chips."Interestingly, Harben does not delve into the origins of fish and chips. If he had, he would have discovered its rather exotic origins. Fried fish probably evolved from Jewish traditions, while chips had French origins. An article about ‘the fish-frying trade’ in the "Fish Trades Gazette' of 29 July 1922 claimed:
"Originally it started in Soho. In those days the frier used to buy all the scrag ends and left over pieces from the fishmonger’s shops, take them home, and fry them in open cauldrons over an ordinary kitchen fire. When the portions were cold they were hawked round the poorer districts. Later there was introduced into this country the frying and purveying of chip potatoes from France, and it was really the introduction of chip potatoes as a corollary of fried fish which had made the fried fish trade what it is today."Returning to Harben, had he visited some of the fish and chip shops which he describes in his chapter on the subject, he would have found that Greek Cypriots now owned increasing numbers of them. Yet by the 1950s even "The Times" had accepted the link between fish and chips and Britishness in an article, ‘Fish and Chips Still Frying’, about the success and popularity of this dish, again ignoring the ethnicity of its purveyors: ‘For a native invention, something that has gradually come to occupy a place on the national menu only a shade less secure than roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips is remarkably unsung in British literature or social history.’
The ‘Special Correspondent’ assigned to this story makes this assertion despite the fact that he reveals that ‘potatoes chipped and fried in the French manner were introduced in Lancashire with great success about 1871’. Gilbert Adair, who previously analysed this connection between fish and chips and British national identity, stated that ‘it may enable every Briton symbolically – if only for a while – to reassert his national identity, his oneness with a culture in decline’. Similarly, John Walton has also pointed out that the link between fish and chips and Britishness had begun from the 1930s, taking off in the post-war decades.
This connection still survives into the twenty-first century. During the early stages of the research for this volume, a press release calling for interviewees was taken up by the Press Association and turned into a story about the foreign origins of fish and chips, which led to media attention throughout the world. Even the "Financial Times" of 9 January 2004 carried an article entitled ‘Kosher French Connection with Fish and Chips’, while the "Daily Star" on the same morning ran a story under the banner ‘Le Great British Feesh and Cheeps: It’s Frog Nosh Claims Prof ’. The BBC asked a representative from Harry Ramsden’s fish and chip chain to comment on the story.
An official statement declared: ‘It’s very interesting to hear the professor’s findings on the origins of the ingredients that are still, and we’re sure will always be, a great British tradition.’ The press release attracted attention among the extreme right in Britain, so that my name appeared on a Neo-Nazi website, with numerous public figures, under the heading ‘Know Your Enemy’. What does this aside about fish and chips tell us about British food? In the first place, it seems clear that it has become an important signifier of Britishness since 1945, as indicated most clearly by Philip Harben, but also emphasized by the furore caused by my suggestion that it may have foreign origins.
Such attitudes suggest that public perceptions of food in Britain revolve around the concepts of native and foreign.
Nevertheless, apart from the extreme reaction and the rather fixed view of Harben, much of the press attention of 2004 did accept the possibility of foreign influences on British traditions. Yet the headlines of the "Financial Times" and the "Daily Star" clearly operate on the idea of British/foreign food, rather than the view that foods have no inherent national identities but are assigned them by food writers and journalists. The most relevant assertion here might be the previously quoted one of Dorothy Hartley that ‘foreign dishes ... like the foreigners, become “naturalised English”’, the view essentially put forward by the spokesperson from Harry Ramsden. Following this discourse, and placing it within the age of post-war nationalism when food, like everything else,must have a nationality, it is certainly possible for ‘traditional’ British foods to have foreign origins but, ultimately, there comes a time when the food itself has to become naturalized, just like foreigners, to repeat Hartley’s assertion.
"Yet this discussion precisely illustrates the complexity of foods that subsequently have nationalities assigned to them.Most dishes and cuisines evolve through a variety of international influences, as Rose Prince has recognized with regard to contemporary British food and as even Gary Rhodes, who prides himself as a supporter of the idea of British food. Since 1945 numerous cookbooks have appeared on the subject of British food with ideas somewhere between those of Harben and Hartley and the more enlightened volume by Prince.We can only glance at the most important of these. In 1965 Theodora Fitzgibbon published "The Art of British Cooking" which, with a brief introduction, contains nearly three hundred pages of recipes. Despite the title, she makes no grandiose statements and accepts that foreign ingredients have always influenced British food. She also makes the simple observation that ‘foreign dishes, such as curry ... have been adapted to suit British tastes’."
Two important books on British cooking appeared in the middle of the 1970s. Elizabeth Ayrton, in her "Cookery of England", plays with stereotypes of English cooking. She spends much time writing about what she sees as the historical battle between English and French food and concludes, ‘There is no longer gastronomic war between France and England; the French have long been acknowledged to have the victory. But the vanquished have largely recovered ’.While admitting that ‘many dishes came to England from the colonies and came to stay’, including ‘curries, pepperpot, kedgeree and turtle soup’, Ayrton also accepts the concept of a native cuisine. The greater part of her book is devoted to recipes. Jane Grigson’s "English Food" comes with a far more sober introduction pointing to the problems of the concept of national cuisines:
"No cookery belongs exclusively to its own country, or its region. Cooks borrow – and always have borrowed – and adapt through the centuries. Though the scale in either case isn’t exactly the same, this is as true, for example, of French cooking as of English cooking.We have borrowed from France. France borrowed from Italy direct, and by way of Provence. The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, and the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians and Persians. What each individual country does do is to give all the elements, borrowed or otherwise, something of a national character. The history of cooking is in some ways like the history of language."Some recent volumes offer interesting perspectives on the idea of British food. Colin Spencer’s "British Food" represents a fierce defence of this concept, which the author feels has ‘became a world-wide joke’. His book ‘is an attempt to revive our knowledge of the gastronomic importance of British cuisine, in the belief that we can be genuinely proud of it, and with a passionate hope that we can restore many of its past triumphs so that they will become familiar to us again’. Sybil Kapoor (whose surname comes from an Indian husband) published a book in 1995 entitled "Modern British Food", which included pizza and curry. Questioned by her friends about the Britishness of such dishes, she followed this up with "Simply British", which worked upon the basis of using ‘typically British foods’, which she listed alphabetically and therefore eliminated foreign impostors.
While this list includes impeccably British ingredients such as blackberries, elderflower and salmon, Kapoor seems unconscious of the origins of Mediterranean lemons and American tomatoes. Volumes by James Martin and Brian Turner also praise ‘authentic’ British food. A BBC book, accompanying a TV series, on the "Great British Menu" examines artificially constructed regions in the form of ‘The South East’, ‘The North’,Wales, ‘The South West’, Northern Ireland, ‘The Midlands and East Anglia’ and Scotland.
Any believer in the concept of British food can take heart, as there appears hardly a curry or pizza in sight; except in the chapter on the South East, partly written by the Indian-born Atul Kochar and therefore including dishes such as ‘Lobster Ke Panje’, ‘Hari Machchi’ and ‘Murg Ki Biryani’. What does this discussion of British food tell us about the evolution of this concept since the middle of the nineteenth century? In the first place, until recently, relatively few books on this subject had appeared. Instead, as we shall see, the vast majority of culinary titles had no particular geographical focus.
Those who have written about British food have taken a variety of approaches. Firstly, those who wholeheartedly believe in the concept and who have not delved into the complexities of how recipes and cuisines evolve. Philip Harben’s "Traditional Dishes of Britain" represents the best example of such writing. It is almost nationalistic in tone and views cuisines as fixed concepts, influencing and influenced by nationalism. It is partly from such writing that the idea of a food signifying national identity originates. Significantly,Harben focuses most directly on fish and chips, the quintessential culinary signifier of Britishness. However, Harben represents just one approach. Most of the writers quoted above accept that Britain has borrowed from abroad.
While Dorothy Hartley could argue that ‘foreign dishes ...like the foreigners, become “naturalised English”’, Jane Grigson’s assertion that the evolution of food cultures resembles languages seems particularly apt. By the time Rose Prince published her volume on English food, she could confidently welcome the ‘rice noodle dishes of Southeast Asia or the delicious food of the Mediterranean’ as fitting into this concept.We might say that such statements indicate the culinary aspect of the acceptance of British multiculturalism.
We need to be wary of making too close a connection between food, nationalism and national identity. Certainly, Ben Rogers has correctly focused on the symbolism of beef in British history. But we must not overstate this link because, if we focus more squarely on cookbooks, the national origins of food are not the main concern. We might suggest that, particularly in the age of Total War, when killing for the nation state became a daily activity in Europe, food was simply too irrelevant to matter in concepts of national identity. As we shall see, only after 1945 did foods in Britain become major signifiers of national identity.
By Panikos Panayi in the book "Spicing up Britain :The Multicultural History of British Food", Published by Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2008, excerpts from pages 12 to 21. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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