An Italian chef says:
“There have always been beautiful British ingredients but, after the war, the country was hungry and poor so American-style convenience food came in. Meanwhile, in Italy, people were starving and fell back on traditional recipes. In Italy, we pass recipes down from generation to generation and in the UK, that historical chain is broken. So now you have your TV dinners, which are a disaster.”
Quite possibly an entire century out in that. As an economist writes:
Maybe the first question is how English cooking got to be so bad
in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early
industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of
people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional
ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of
urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had
well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-
drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes,
were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!),
preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t
need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).
But why did the food stay so bad after refrigerated railroad cars
and ships, frozen foods (better than canned, anyway), and eventually
air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become
available? Now we’re talking about economics–and about the limits
of conventional economic theory. For the answer is surely that by
the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they
no longer knew the difference.
I’m not insisting that Krugman is wholly and totally correct here but would insist that here’s something to it. British food was famously bad before the war too – G. Orwell talks about that at some length.
Another data(?) point: in PG Wodehouse’s stories the people to dine with are the ones with French cooks.
Yes, we industrialised early with a lot of trial and error. Other countries were able to learn from us what worked. So they were able to industrialise faster and retain more connection with cucina povere.
Another data(?) point: in PG Wodehouse’s stories the people to dine with are the ones with French cooks.
Ah, but are they French? The pinnacle of La Belle Cuisine is the Paris Exposition of 1900. But the French didn’t actually have much in the way of competent chefs. However England had a surfeit. So a lot went over to Paris & assumed French names.
The why of it: England was a lot richer than France. It hadn’t been through the Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, The Franco-Prussian spat etc etc. It had an aristocracy with attached heads. So England had the wealth & tradition to produce great cooks & great cooking. Many of the renown French dishes are actually English in origin.
And of course some of those miraculously French chefs may have found their way back to England still hiding under their assumed French names. Wasn’t it Wodehouse penned a story constructed around exactly this scenario?
How industrialised was Italy pre-war?
Long time since some since some c*nt (literally) borrowed it & didn’t return it but I had an excellent book of trad English recipes. I’ve a feeling it was a Penguin. It’s some of that I base my cooking style on. The custard made with ground chicken breasts honey & spices is a particular novelty. That comes from a recipe from about 1500. Medieval cooking doesn’t have the dividing line between savoury & sweet, meats & fruits we’re accustomed to. Also one has to see pies & puddings as cooking utensils, not necessarily dishes. One eats the contents not the pastry. The underlings get that.
Interestingly, there’s a list of stuff an ancestor of a pal needed when he hosted QEI & her court on one of her perambulations. Several oxen, one score sheep, a dozen pigs, two score swans, gross of partridges… That sort of list. Now the family were Catholic at the time. Still are I think. And having the monarch visit you could be a political move at the time. It was likely to bankrupt you if she hung around. Nevertheless, last time I dined at the ancestral pile, John still set a fine board. Everything either shot or grown on his land.
The reasons including 1) the pastry could be (deliberately) extremely salty so it kept the meaty contents moist during cooking; and 2) the wood-fired ovens were heated by lighting a fire in the cooking space, then when it had burned down and heated the stonework, removing the embers and placing the food there instead. The bottom of the food got covered in ash. See also, upper- and lower-crust.
A friend of mine earned a few bob one autumn by going into a house of some gentry three times a week to cook their dinner. They ate only what they’d shot: pheasant, partridge, snipe, …
One evening she was presented with lamb to cook. She inferred that they had got drunk earlier in the day than usual, namely before going out shooting. Corroborative evidence: the lamb had not been hung.
So they were able to industrialise faster and retain more connection with cucina povere.
It’s certainly informative that most of the foreign dishes that Brits enthuse over are actually cheap shit for the poor.
I’ve actually eaten a real paella (name of the pan it’s cooked in as well as the dish) Since it was on the coast, the kids hunt around the rocks on the beach for shell-fish. Prawn traps are emptied. A chicken gets strangled. It’s rice ‘n bits. Valencian, because they grow rice. The bits are whatever you’ve got to give the rice some flavour. Inland it might be rabbit. The men stand around the open fire, stirring the pan, drinking beer, discussing football. The women sit around in a circle preparing salad & discussing the faults of the men. Paella costs around 25 cents a platefull. Here on the the Costa del Sol restaurants flog a poor imitation at 45€ for two diners. It’s certainly not Andalus cuisine.
And so for the rest of it. Chow mein. Rice ‘n bits. Risotto. Rice ‘n bits. The pasta dishes. Wheat dough & bits. Cassoulet. Beans ‘n bits. Poor people shit. The wealthy in those countries wouldn’t have been seen dead eating it. Serving it to them would have been an insult.
English cuisine doesn’t really have anything ‘n bits in its repertoire, does it? Shepherds pie? Too wealthy a country. The peasant ‘n bits cuisine died out.
It is a utensil thing BiW. But cooking in the ashes is a bit earlier. Most big houses had two things. An oven & an open fire with a spit & cauldron. And not much else. Meat would be encased in dough, put in a cloth, hung in the boiling water to cook. When finished, it’s be pulled out & unwrapped, the pudding opened & the contents served. The underlings would get the pudding bit. The oven could be used for bread, pies & covered pots like the classic marmite.
You really need kitchen ranges to use more sophisticated utensils like saucepans etc.
bis:
One ‘bits dish was probably frumenty, or (in Hardy’s Wessex) furmity. Wheat boiled up, sometimes in milk, with odd bits of meat or spices and raisins mixed in. I tried making it once. Not highly recommended.
One of the interesting technical things about cuisines is they’re all answers to the questions raised by what food materials you’re starting with & the facilities for cooking it. And most cuisines come up with the same answers to the same questions. If you’re starting from the same place, you’ll end up in the same place. There’s nothing particularly British about roast beef. Apart from being able to afford the beef. Most of what we call foreign cooking isn’t particularly foreign. Although the materials might be. It’s like Italian pasta. You can see the origins of it in those boiling cauldrons. Just that Brits gave it to the dogs.
” I’ve a feeling it was a Penguin”
Probably tastes like chicken.
@Sam Vara
Which wheat did you use? British wheat’s been bred for grinding into flour. Probably not what they would have been using at the time. Something similar to bulgur?
England had the wealth & tradition to produce great cooks & great cooking.
Och Mrs Bridges I’ll have another wee slice of your songbird and truffle pie, if ye dinnae mind…
Industrialised Italy
My late missus’ parents lived in Italy . The father went there at the time of the Anschluss and the mother from the mid fifties until his death in the late 90s.
Unlike his colleagues, he did not go home at lunchtime for three hours, preferring to grab a sarnie and get home early in the evening. She described her neighbours spending the whole morning hand making pasta, while she sat in their kitchens glugging their wine. Apart from ogle the man delivering ice, they had precious little else to do.
Otto…
‘Wid ye like a wee scone Dr Cameron?’
‘Och away wi ye Janet, canna nae have a crap in peace?’
Industrialised Italy
Norph vs sarf. Northern Italy builds F35 stealth jets while the south is still a bit medieval.
I wonder if the cuisine reflects this.
Bloke in Spain.
“One of the interesting technical things about cuisines is they’re all answers to the questions raised by what food materials you’re starting with & the facilities for cooking it. And most cuisines come up with the same answers to the same questions. If you’re starting from the same place, you’ll end up in the same place. There’s nothing particularly British about roast beef.”
There’s also the thing about how much energy you need. Like northerners eat a lot more pies than southerners. Dutch, Belgian and Northern French cuisine is a lot more meat and two veg, casseroles than the south of France. The decline of manual labour changed our cuisine.
And that Britain isn’t much of a food growing nation, so it has to be imported. And seafaring, so we got Chinese and Indians coming here and then opening restaurants. And then that we go abroad on holiday more than the Italians or French, so we get kleftiko and paella.
As for TV dinners this is always an accusation thrown at the Brits. What the French used to do was to go to the Charcuterie and buy something that just had to go in the dinner. Lots of British wives still prepare dinners. Sometimes, TV dinners are fine. I have microwave curries because no-one else in the house eats curries and I think they’re about as good as the ones I cook.
My great-grandfather joined the army as a cookhouse boy. I have his hand-written recipe book. It lists things like: 1cwt potatoes, 4lb onions, 1oz pepper, 1 sprig parsley….
TV dinners vary by country. UK has a load of frozen stuff. France it’s all canned. It’s absolutely amazing what they sell in tins in French supermarkets. Good as you’d get in a restaurant. Spain doesn’t seem to do either. Some vegetables come in jars. Oddly, the folk out in the campo seem to prefer the stuff from jars but sell the fresh.
Meat & two veg? It isn’t particularly a french thing. Traditionally, they tend to be separate dishes. Spain, when I first came down here in the 60s, was very much that. You asked for meat you got meat. You asked for potatoes you got them separately & possibly half an hour later. Spanish vegetables we’d better not discuss. They boil them to death.
I wonder when the English started doing the meat ‘n two veg thing? It’s certainly not in any way traditional. C19th we were more like the French. And why? It’s cheaper on serving staff…?
Something of interest to those dining in France. Those deep French plates with the rim on the underneath. You use the same plate for the entire meal. Soup & then the various savoury courses.So you don’t put your eating irons together on the plate to signal you’ve finished a course. You put them on the table at the sides of the plate. And you turn the plate over to eat the dessert course on the reverse. Why the rim. A lot of older people still eat like that in their homes but there’s certainly a restaurant in the Tarn serves like that. Probably a lot more where they haven’t had a tourist infection.
Wine glasses. Here the preferred are those bloody fishbowls on stems they pour a puddle into. There’s Brit places indulge that tosspottery now, aren’t there? No doubt where the suburbanites scoff. The french thankfully use tumblers in the home & the brasserie. With or without the Mickey Mouse decals. And proper wine glasses in restaurants. Unless tourists are threatening. But then the french understand wine.
@Sam Vara. As remarked above, there may have been an issue with the wheat involved. Get the wrong stuff, and you get a completely different, and often less palatable result.
Same as you have to be careful which rice you use in which dish, lest unpleasant surprises happen..
As far as frumity goes.. the cloggie variety is “balkenbrij”, which uses barley ( specifically winter barley ) as the base grain.
Depending on how poor you were, it could be anything from thin gruel to something you could put knife and fork into.
Officially, besides the boiled (and drained/cooled!) barley, the broth is made from a pig’s head ( which in and of itself was further processed into (preservable) food), and depending on taste/region could have pretty much anything available tossed in.
Real good winter stodge if you’re looking for Calories.. 🙂
Ah! Head Cheese (aka brawn) filled out with grain. ‘Cept, instead of making the brawn it’s the meat goes elsewhere, the juice that goes with the grain.
One of the home town specialties is “Bath Chaps” which is a ham made from the cheeks. Very, very, good when done well. Best I’ve had were, well, from Bath Market actually.
If you go there, do get some. It’s just wondrous ham.
Amusingly, – or oddly, to taste – where I am in Portugal chaps are also a specialty. Lots of the “black pigs” that make the Spanish jamon are actually raised here. Feed off the acorns from the cork oaks etc. When butchered the legs go back across the border – from whence the piglets came – to be made into the ham. Which leaves varied cuts here. Secretos (a belly cut) and the chaps being two of them. Yum Yum.
It would be fun to read an economic analysis of the rise of veganism in Europe in 100 years time. People might say the UK surrendered first and worst to the trend by developing Simple Root and other such smelly sauces, but when the trend got momentum in Italia it worked ok because they waited until the products were already tasty and smelled like real food.
I have microwave curries because no-one else in the house eats curries and I think they’re about as good as the ones I cook.
#metoo. M&S do a couple of ‘curry for one’ in a box that includes a chicken curry, aloo, bhaji and pilau. Very good, and I haven’t come across them elsewhere.