Andrews Colman - The British table: a new look at the traditional cooking of England, Scotland, and Wales

For Terence, who changed the game

CONTENTS

TO TASTEFUL PALATES, KEEN APPETITES, AND HEALTHFUL AND CAPACIOUS STOMACHS.

WILLIAM KITCHINER,Apicius Redivivus: Or, The Cooks Oracle(1817)

INTRODUCTION

... ENGLISH FARE I WOULD DEFINE AS BEING THE VERY BEST NATIVE MATERIAL, COOKED IN THE PLAINEST POSSIBLE MANNER.

LIEUT. COL. NEWNHAM-DAVIS,The Gourmets Guide to London(1914)

TRADITION IS ONE OF THE MAINSPRINGS OF INNOVATION; WE USE THE PAST AS A SPRINGBOARD TOWARDS THE NEW.

HESTON BLUMENTHAL,Historic Heston(2013)

I n 1965, living in my native Los Angeles, I became an Anglophile. This had nothing to do with my partially English and Scots-Irish genealogy, but rather was inspired by my love for the music of the so-called British Invasion (led by those four mop-topped lads from Liverpool) and, probably more so, by my attraction to one of my coworkers in the bookshop of the newly opened Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an English girl named Ann.

Ann seemed to me the very embodiment of Swinging London (as Time was soon to dub the British capital). She introduced me to Mary Quant (she had the miniskirts), the art of Allen Jones and Bridget Riley, the films of Richard Lester and John Schlesinger. We listened to LPs of The Goon Show and got the tissue-paper airmail edition of the Observer every week. She taught me how to make a proper pot of tea (shed get so cross if I forgot to warm the pot first).

And when we went off to Europe for a month that summer, my first trip across the Atlantic, she took me straight to Manchester, where her parents lived. It was perhaps an unconventional introduction to EnglandId heard the commonplace by then that Manchester was famous most of all for sausages and rainbut I was enchanted: by the bold red telephone boxes and double-decker buses, by the little stone cottages trellised with climbing rose canes in the villages we visited, by the dank gothic churches where plaques named every pastor in succession for the past five hundred years, by the sugary petits fours and crumbly scones we ate with our inevitable afternoon cuppa.

Unfortunately, I dont remember anything else about the food I encountered on that trip (I dont think I ever got the sausages), but I do have memories of things I consumed in London on my next few visits to the U.K. They are not fond memories. I ate glutinous spaghetti with ketchupy tomato sauce in hotel dining rooms around Victoria Station; meat pies with dense, lard-soaked crusts bought cheap from street vendors in Soho; scrawny gray Wimpy burgers on damp buns. Occasionally, when I could afford it, I did what everybody said, in those days, was the only sensible thing to do in London if you had a discerning appetite: ate Indian foodusually in brightly lit restaurants with flocked wallpaper and piped-in Ravi Shankar (I still recall a meat phall I ate at one of these places as being quite possibly the spiciest food Ive ever tasted).

That was the secret of dining well in England in those days: Eat foreign. I did admittedly have some delicious meals in London in the 1970s, sometimes at Indian restaurants, but more especially when I was taken out to dinner by my parents friend Tony, the Viscount Furness. Thats because we always went to places serving some non-British cuisine or otherLe Coq dOr for tournedos Massna, the White Tower for taramosalata and moussaka, the Gay Hussar for cold pike with beetroot sauce and gulys. I dont think we ever had anything British at all, other than an occasional pint of Bass Ale or tumbler of Glenfiddich.

Today, of course, its a very different story. London is widely acknowledged as one of the worlds great food citiesas the prolific London chef-restaurateur Mark Hix puts it, France has gone backward, weve gone forwardand chefs in nearly every corner of the country are winning acclaim (the Guide Michelin awarded 181 stars around England, Scotland, and Wales in 2015), often for food strongly based in local traditions and almost always employing the rich bounty of their regions. And rich is the right word. With almost twenty thousand miles of coastline, counting the larger offshore islands, the country boasts a great wealth of seafood, some of which (Colchester oysters, Scottish Salmon, Dover sole; cured fish like kippers and finnan haddie) is famous worldwide. Its land is blessed with many kinds of soil and numerous microclimates, variously well suited to the raising of livestock (including many so-called heritage breeds), the ranging of hooved and feathered game, and the cultivation of everything from wheat and rye and oats to ancient varieties of tree fruit, from onions and asparagus and carrots to savory herbs and even wine grapes, supplying a British wine industry that is beginning to be taken seriously even in France. The countrys cheeses are renowned and widely copied around the world. Its beer is legendary. Its pickles and chutneys and sauces are sold in shops across the globe.

An Indian restaurant and Union Jack in Londons Soho

The mystery isnt so much why British food is so good today, but why it ever wasnt, why a once diverse and abundant cuisine degenerated for more than a century to the point of becoming an international punch line. As recently as 2005, French president Jacques Chirac, following a visit to Scotland for a summit meeting, cracked that, after Finland, [the U.K.] is the country with the worst food. He was perhaps channeling his countryman Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who, in the early 1800s, when British food was probably not bad at all, dismissed Britain as a nation of beef-eaters and beer-swillers.

And yet... ancient cooking in the British Isles was probably as sophisticated as it was anywhere else in northern Europe, and the Romans, who arrived in 43 CE, improved it further, bringing at least the spirit of Mediterranean fare to Britain, along with a host of new ingredients, including walnuts, cherries, pears, onions, leeks, cucumbers, radishes, turnips, fennel, peas, mint, thyme, rabbits, pheasants, and partridges, as well as the arts of making sausage, rennet-based cheese, and possibly wine, and the technique of baking bread in ovens rather than cooking it on griddles. They even imported olive oil.