Garmey - Great British cooking : a well-kept secret

FOR STEPHEN AND EDWARD Contents Its certainly unfair to say that the English lack both a cuisine and a sense of humor, I said, as we were about to leave for Jane Garmeys house to try an authentic English meal. Their cooking is a joke in itself. I suppose youve prepared for this dinner party by polishing remarks like that all day, my wife, Alice, said, using the voice she employs to indicate that she is resigned to being embarrassed by my behavior yet again. Only partly, I said. I have also taken the precaution of eating dinner. Do you think theyll have a crane? A crane? Alice said.

Ive never heard of anybody eating crane. Not that sort of crane, I said. A hydraulic crane for lifting the dessert. Havent you ever seen them serve one of those trifles at an English caf? A little to the left, Alfie. Thats it. Lower away.

Steady as she goes. Why do you think I try to avoid restaurants in London where the waiters are wearing hard hats? Im sure this meal is going to be a lot better than you expect, Alice said. Well, I was definitely encouraged by the fact that the date was agreed upon only two weeks in advance, I said. Jane really hasnt had time to give the vegetables a proper English boil. Well brought up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth. You know very well that Jane is a marvelous cook, Alice said.

Shes planning to publish an English cookbook. Has she exhibited other self-destructive tendencies in the past? The kind of food you hate so much in England is not really English food, Alice said. Its true that I find the English version of continental cuisine particularly loathsome. It consists of stuffing something with something else and covering the resulting atrocity with a viscous goo. I call it Stuff Stuff with Heavy. I wouldnt be surprised to learn that someone in the Stuff Stuff with Heavy crowd had at some point stuffed a crane with something else or even stuffed something else with a crane.

I always say that with their own food the English are at least fair-minded enough to label the crime, I said. In a way, anybody who eats something called Toad in the Hole or Bosworth Jumbles deserves what he gets. Yes, you always do say that, Alice said. Maybe you could avoid saying it just for this evening, and then begin saying it again early tomorrow morning. Well, at least we might find out from Jane what Priddy Oggy with Scrumpy Sauce is, I said, trying to look on the bright side. Once, while driving through Somerset, we found ourselves within a few miles of a restaurant that was identified in the guidebook as specializing in something called Priddy Oggy with Scrumpy Sauce.

Hurrying in that direction, I was tormented with thoughts of how we might be denied the opportunity of at least seeing what Priddy Oggy with Scrumpy Sauce looked like on the plate (I was not committed to eating any). The waiter, I feared, might say The Oggys finished or We no longer do Priddy Oggy or The only Scrumpy Sauce weve got is the tinned. We arrived to find the restaurant closedmeaning that we seemed fated never to know even whether Priddy Oggy is a main course or something requiring a hydraulic delivery system. You love Cornish pasties, Alice said. You love scones. You love the hogs pudding we buy at the Barnstaple market.

You love those huge English breakfasts. I do cherish breakfast in England. In fact, I have always assumed that the English seem so down in the mouth all the time because they have to go through life realizing every morning before nine that breakfast is over and the rest of the day is bound to be downhill. You dont think Jane might serve breakfast, do you? I asked Alice. I mean with the time difference and all. Theres something wrong here, I whispered to Alice when we were halfway through the meal.

The main course did indeed have one of those English namessomething like Aunt Beckys Kneecapbut it was delicious. Although I was loath to accuse Jane of not having an English sense of history, the vegetables did not, in fact, taste as if they had been cooking since the Wars of the Roses. The hostess herself, a mere slip of a thing, easily carried dessert to the table with one hand. Maybe its not really English, I whispered, as we were eating dessert. Was it possible that Jane Garmey had simply given real food an English namethe way someone might fit out a Rumanian with a regimental blazer and call him Nigel? In the weeks following our dinner, that suspicion faded as reports came in from others who had sampled and loved dishes with names like Cullen Skink and Soles in Their Coffins. I have finally been forced to face the possibility that Jane Garmey knows how to make English food that tastes good.

If hidden away in some cupboard in the Garmey household is a French cookbook that has a recipe for something called La Rotule de Tante Becky, Ive been had. Otherwise, my conclusion about Jane Garmey and English cooking is this: She doesnt really know what Priddy Oggy with Scrumpy Sauce is, but she knows everything else. It is widely held that British cuisine is a dubious affair. As Mrs. Ramsay said, in Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse, What passes for cookery in England is an abomination.... It is putting cabbages in water.

It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. In which, said Mr. Bankes, all the virtue of the vegetable is contained. And the waste, said Mrs. Ramsay.

A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. This view, while not entirely unwarranted, is nevertheless a caricature. British food like British weather has, in fact, been much maligned. Most visitors to Britain do manage to regard the weather with a kind of benign tolerance, believing, despite the rain, in those famous bright periods forever scheduled for some other part of the country. The same visitors, on the other hand, become quite vitriolic about British food, reporting it to be generally inedible, turning it into the helpless target of their scorn and the butt of endless jokes. British cooking has acquired what might be termed a serious image problem.

This is particularly unfortunate because it is often quite superb. What presents the real problem for the foreign visitor is that it is hard to find. British cooking is a phenomenon of the home, not generally available in hotels and restaurants, and the British home, be it castle or cottage, is definitely more impregnable than its American counterpart. The British, for the most part, are not quick to make new friends; they distrust strangers, feel more at ease with formal introductions and prefer to break the ice gently. This makes it difficult for most foreign tourists ever to gain entrance to an actual home and discover that there is more to British cooking than frozen cod steaks, stodge and overcooked cabbage. Few visitors have ever tasted the delights of a Bakewell Tart, of Cornish Pasties, Marbled Veal or Angels on Horseback.

The British, for their part, have now taken so much abuse for what passes as their native cuisine that they have become defensive and self-conscious on the subject, and many have even come to believe that enjoyment of their own cooking is an ethnic eccentricity. In addition, having what is generally regarded as the worlds most sophisticated cuisine at their doorstepthe coast of France is less than twenty miles from the cliffs of Dover has done nothing to help the matter. It goes almost without saying that in this century the French have established preeminence in the art of cooking, but this was not always so. A spirited rivalry between the cooks of England and France dates back to the Middle Ages. At a banquet dinner given by Cardinal Wolsey in 1527, George Cavendish, who was his usher and later his biographer, wrote in his diary: I suspect the French never saw the like. so much is the blind folly of this age that they would rather be imposed on by a French booby than give encouragement to a good English cook. so much is the blind folly of this age that they would rather be imposed on by a French booby than give encouragement to a good English cook.