Pete Brown - Pie Fidelity: In Defence of British Food

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First published 2019

Copyright Pete Brown, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover illustration after Eric Ravilious

ISBN: 978-1-846-14960-3

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For Liz,
who eats

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin,
The Physiology of Taste, 1825

The only thing the British have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease. You cant trust people who cook as badly as that. After Finland, its the country with the worst food Thats where our problems with NATO come from.

Jacques Chirac, G8 Summit, Gleneagles, 2005

Food is everything we are. Its an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. Its inseparable from those from the get-go.

Anthony Bourdain (19562018)

Pete Brown is a middle-class north London foodie, who grew up working-class in Barnsley. He may well now speak fluent ramen and conversational kimchi, but he does so with a thick fish-and-chips accent.

He is an author, journalist, blogger and broadcaster specialising in food and drink, especially the fun parts like beer and cider. He has written several books including Man Walks into a Pub, Three Sheets to the Wind, and The Apple Orchard. His discriminating palate has led him to be a judge in the Great Taste Awards and the Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards, and a frequent contributor to Radio 4s Food Programme.

You wouldnt think we were just five miles outside industrial Barnsley is said by someone every single time a group of people from Barnsley visits Cannon Hall. It became such a clich among my friends that we would battle to be the first to say it when we saw any vision of outstanding natural beauty, including, but not limited to the Lake District, the Cornish coast, the central massif of Mont Blanc in the French Alps, and my proudest moment a safari lodge overlooking herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains of the Masai Mara.

Meat is sometimes generic in Barnsley. I once took Liz to Oakwell to watch Barnsley FC lose at home to Port Vale, and at half-time she went to the pie stall. What kind of pies do you have? she asked. Meat, came the reply. She just had some chips.

Each of which, individually, has its own terroir, which has just as much impact in its contribution to the finished beer as the grapes in wine.

I re-created this journey, with a barrel of beer brewed to a nineteenth-century Bass recipe in tow, for my 2009 book Hops & Glory. The voyage transforms the beer. When I opened some at a trade show in Delhi, it went down a storm with everyone, apart from one man, who stormed up to me and said, Why are you trying to trick us? You claim this is beer, but it is obviously wine! before asking for a refill.

Your aborted duck foetus should always be boiled, dipped in salt and eaten whole, washed down with cold beer, according to the Filipinos who consider it an everyday delicacy.

The term was originally applied to Jesuits and to the Dutch and was affixed specifically to the French only during the Napoleonic Wars.

Elsewhere in Britain, where there are no caves, heavy stone farmhouses and barns designed to withstand British weather were a fine substitute for other styles of cheese.

Its a popular myth that wine and cheese are natural bedfellows, but even some wine writers grudgingly concede that its a struggle to find a pairing that enables both to shine. In Normandy and in Somerset both famous cheese regions cider is considered a superior match. Beer, too, with its carbonation, counteracts the fatty build-up of cheese, refreshing the palate and keeping the flavours alive. In the best pairings, they entwine around each other until you cant tell where one ends and the other begins, each greater than it is on its own.

To be fair to the mean old bastard, his argument was given credence when, in the week the new campaign launched, with a new line I can guarantee you do not remember, a new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was published which included refreshes the parts, describing it in roughly the same way Sir Frank did in that phone call. Although, thinking about it now, he probably made that happen somehow, just to make a point.

Another time at Lowe, all the strategic planners went for a departmental away-day in Brighton. I suggested we went to the chippie on the pier for lunch. It was only when we arrived there and I joined the queue that I realized several of my colleagues had assumed I was joking.

Or, as Edwina Currie put it a hundred years later, I get very, very troubled at the number of people who are using food banks who think that it is fine to pay to feed their dog but they never learn to cook, they never learn to manage and the moment they have got a bit of spare cash they are off getting another tattoo.

Im born and bred in the city and its Caroline Street or Chip Alley, definitely not Chip Lane, he added.

Niacin and thiamin are essential B vitamins that are present in many different foods. However, they are very prone to being destroyed by modern food-processing techniques. The more your food goes through between its natural state and the state it reaches you in, the more likely its vitamins will have been destroyed. So manufacturers who heavily process their food add them back in as supplements.

When I searched to see if there was any credible reference for this story, I discovered that in 2016 Campbells did re-create the century-old first soup recipe on which the company was founded, using only locally sourced tomatoes and no artificial additives. Employees described it as the best day theyd ever had working for the company, and the president of Campbells American division said the experiment was part of rethinking who we are and how we want to show up in this world.

I dont know why she was so shocked: a Google image search reveals that the sandwiches arent even cut diagonally.

There are some of them I really dont want to know, but not for that reason.

My mate Steve was a vegetarian. He had to pay extra for his meals because of the inconvenience he caused. More than once he was handed the same meal as the rest of us and, when he reminded the catering staff that he was vegetarian, they simply scraped the meat off his plate and handed it back to him.