Spencer - British food: an extraordinary thousand years of history

How did the mixture of peoples that became the British come to have such definitive culinary tastes? This, of course, is a question we can ask of all nations, but of the British we can also ask: why did their particular style of food decline so direly that it became a world-wide joke, and how is it now climbing back into eminence?

I first became excited by the history of British food when I read some of the earliest known Anglo-Norman recipes that have come to light only in the last 20 years, and realised not only how Lucullan early medieval food was (for that was to be expected with an oppressive, affluent elite intent on ritual and ceremonial), but how extraordinarily stylish, tasteful and contemporary the dishes were. This was food designed to please and satisfy very sophisticated palates, it was food that we would now consider to be the height of gourmet elegance. It was food full of exotic ingredients and Mediterranean influences, with spices and flavourings from all over the then civilised world. As the historian Christopher Hill wrote:

Each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors. obviously considered the recipes to be thoroughly unpleasant; what is more, not having worked out the amounts of spices per person, he seriously thought that an excessive amount was used and that this must be because they were necessary to mask rotting food. Thus began that particular canard which, though eminent historians since have considered it nonsense, has been difficult to destroy. When there is an amount given for a particular recipe which also states how many people it is meant to feed, the resulting flavour can be worked out; as readers will see on pages 50 and 80, the spices would have bequeathed a subtle sub-text to the finished dish and not overpowered it at all. My own view of this period is that Anglo-Norman cooking reached the heights of gastronomy, which it shared internationally with the courts of Europe, but that its cooking was influenced more by Persia (now Iran), as were the countries of the Mediterranean, than by Paris.

Because we all enjoy food, and there is little debate that it is one of the greatest delights in life, my view about what we ate in the past is a simple one. I think the food of the past was just as delicious as the food of the present. I dont believe people who have any choice in the matter bother to eat gunk. Because of poverty, the majority of people throughout our history were reduced to a very small range of subsistence foods; because all they had to eat was bland and monotonous, they searched for ways to brighten it up into something greatly more appetising. They did that because thats what people are like now and people do not change. Human beings in the past were basically ourselves, driven by the same needs, hopes and desires; though born at a different time and given a different set of cultural influences, notions and beliefs, the palate as a sensual receptor had the same requirements as today, to be satisfied and stimulated.

So I differ from many food historians who have written disparagingly about the food of the past, either considering it gross, such as roasting whole carcasses which they ate till the fat ran down their chins and into their beards, which subscribes to a Hollywood view of the banquet as orgiastic pigswill; or, as I have mentioned above, as rotting meats which only a ton of spices could make palatable. There were hundreds of bye-laws which were used to prosecute cooks and butchers if they were discovered attempting to sell rotting food. Such erroneous impressions also ignore the fact that large carcasses were valued as live creatures which were labouring hard in the fields. You did not slaughter them until they were too old to work. Nor, as meat was so precious, did you cook them without great care and skill. Besides, the wide variety of recipes for sauces to have with different meats would delight any gastronome of whatever era and must surely impress us with the culinary expertise of the medieval cook.

Throughout the period of the first part of this book there were ceaseless struggles between the princes, the church and the nobility for their share and control in the produce of the land. In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a further group emerges: the privileged town-dwellers, the traders who were to become the bourgeoisie. In England they played a particularly influential role at an early date on our food and cooking. Food was to play a part as a visible celebration of power and affluence in the struggle between the various elites, and food was also the source if not an integral part of the wealth of the new bourgeoisie. When the sumptuary laws began and stopped tells us much about bourgeois affluence and pretension. See, for instance, page 49 on the spicers in the City of London in the twelfth century under Henry II. These traders provide an important clue to how much the new Anglo-Norman nobility treasured the use of spices in their cooking, which meant how much they cared about the flavour and the recipes. Fashion is also a guide: in ages where male courtiers were concerned about the length of hems, shoes and hair, that same aesthetic selectiveness operated at the table. It is unimaginable that such an immaculate and perfumed society sat down to eat coarsely while the fat ran down their chins.