BRITISH FOOD: AN EXTRAORDINARY THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY
By Colin Spencer
Columbia University Press, $35, 416 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY CLAIRE HOPLEY
Some people still joke about British food, but for the last 20 years their raillery has been way off the mark. The British have been luxuriating in a food revolution that has stocked their supermarkets with a cornucopia of good things and brought them an array of splendid (if expensive) restaurants. All this has been partly powered by immigrants, many from Asia, who brought new foods with them.
But it has also been fueled by the British themselves. They love vacationing in the sun, especially on the Mediterranean, and they return eager to cook and eat foods discovered there. Culinary historians have nurtured their interest in cuisine, reminding them that Britain was long admired for the quality of its meats, that its desserts are unequaled in variety and lusciousness, and that their love of spicy foods goes back hundreds of years.
The latest historian to survey the annals of food in Britain is Colin Spencer with his aptly titled “British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History.” While Mr. Spencer offers little in the way of new information, he ably covers a millennium and more, reflecting intelligently on the dramatic, and often sudden, dietary developments wrought by political and economic change.
Noting that “Good food is the successful infusion of the living ingredients … and human artistry and skill,” Mr. Spencer begins with the land itself. He points to its mild climate, the fertility and diversity of soil types and terrain, and the strong tides that created the beaches and estuaries that have made fishing and trade easy.
They also made invasion easy. The Romans arrived 2,000 years ago seeking salt and oysters and minerals, eventually turning England into one of the breadbaskets of their empire. They were followed by the Anglo-Saxons, who raised a variety of vegetables, grains and animals and had a formidable knowledge of medicinal herbs.
Then came the Normans. “Acquisitive, greedy and ambitious,” they impoverished the English by confiscating their land, reducing most people to serfdom, and enforcing onerous taxes that enabled the Norman aristocracy to feast but left slim pickings for the English.
Ironically, Norman depredations led to a flowering of English cooking. Mr. Spencer claims, “Few cultures before or since have ever been so deeply influenced by a tyrannical regime it longed to defeat.” While this may be exaggerated — one thinks of the effect of Turkish cooking on Greek, for example — the Normans introduced elements of Arabic cooking, which they had discovered in Sicily, one of their other conquests. They also led the Crusades, bringing new fruits and spices back from their forays into the Holy Land, and learning new ways of teaming them with meat and fish.
When the Norman Henry II ascended the English throne in 1154, his territories stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees, and his court had access to wines from France and Italy; oranges, pomegranates, lemons and almonds from Sicily; and pepper and ginger from the Moslem merchants who had set up shop in London. Cumin, saffron, cloves, sugar and rice from the East were all listed in the royal accounts.
Court cooks had a repertoire that included noodles flavored with ginger, ravioli stuffed with sage, parsley and cheese, and mawmenny made of minced chicken or pork poached in wine and flavored with spices and fried almonds. For dessert they confected nut tarts or rose pottage made from rose-flavored almond milk. Afterwards there were delightful “subtleties” made of marzipan and sugar.
None of this made its way down to the peasants, but merchants and tradespeople prospered, and London and other cities had cookshops ready to provide them with ready-made meat pies, fried fish, and roast meat and poultry.
The affluence that supported such a cuisine ended in the 14th century with a series of devastating famines followed in 1348 by the Black Death — an epidemic of bubonic plague. Half the population died, as did much of the livestock. Further outbreaks of plague followed, and protracted war with France exacerbated economic problems.
But the good news for peasants was that the resulting labor shortage enabled them to obtain better working conditions, and thus more food. As Mr. Spencer notes, “The Black Death, in fact, instigated rural cooking, the beginnings of a peasant cuisine based on baking, and the produce of the small farmhouse had now begun.”
This deft exposition of the effects of the plague exemplifies Mr. Spencer at his best. He is equally good on the effects of the Reformation, of industrialization, of two world wars, and finally of the convenience-food bonanza of the late 20th century.
Interestingly, at a time when Britain, like America, is worried by the obesity epidemic, he shows that the stringent food rationing of the 1940s and early 1950s actually created a healthier population. “Child mortality rates had never been so low, fewer mothers had died in childbirth, fewer babies had been stillborn, children were taller and sturdier; this was a reflection of their daily milk, orange juice and halibut liver oil, and added to that trio I recall a most delicious bottle of rose hip juice,” the author writes.
On the other hand, the exigencies of rationing took their toll on gastronomy, thus dumping Britain into an era when its food truly merited criticism.
Mr. Spencer often tries to explain such culinary ebbs and flows. He also focuses sharply on who ate what. The Normans were not the only aristocracy that guzzled while others toiled and starved, and as much as Mr. Spencer loves describing the delicacies of the rich, he always tracks the rough fare of the poor — a more difficult task since their food rarely featured in cookbooks or in the commentaries of visitors to Britain.
But while Mr. Spencer keeps class differences in diet clearly in view, he scants regional differences. Only one of his book’s 13 chapters deals with the food of Ireland, Wales and Scotland; otherwise these countries are rarely mentioned. As for the food of England, most of Spencer’s examples are drawn from the South and Southeast.
Yet as he notes in his prologue, England’s varied terrain and rainfall translate into farming and therefore dietary differences. Many of these have now been ironed out by modern storage and transportation, but regional preferences are still evident in bakers’ and butchers’ stores, and were much more dramatic in past centuries. Take the Southwest, where people drink cider rather than beer, and glory in local specialties such as pasties, clotted cream, and saffron breads rarely made elsewhere in England.
Then there is the North of England. More mountainous than the South, it is colder, wetter, and in many places, less fertile. For centuries its diet was based on oats, not wheat. When the Industrial Revolution made the North the economic powerhouse of 19th-century Britain, its mill workers could afford more meat than southerners could, and its butchers developed a range of specialties such as black puddings, savory ducks and pork pies made from cheap cuts, which are still favorites today.
Nonetheless, as Friedrich Engels’ description of Manchester in 1844 and Seebohm Rowntree’s analysis of York in 1901 show, the working class was often undernourished.
Although attention to the regions is lacking, Mr. Spencer does not shirk some of the knotty questions of English culinary history. He is exercised over its apparent indebtedness to French cooking, for example, and takes pains to point out the strength of Britain’s home-grown culinary arts.
Of particular significance is Britain’s strong tradition of women food writers. Some were mistresses of large manors such as the 17th-century Lady Elinor Fettiplace, who recorded the recipes cooked for her household. Others were housewives and housekeepers such as the 19th-century Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton, who created encyclopedic volumes of recipes for the aspiring middle class.
Mr. Spencer’s teasing out of what vegetables the British ate and when, his discussion of the origins of traditions such as fish and chips and afternoon tea, all make “British Food” immensely readable. The book’s editors could have made it even more so had they insisted Mr. Spencer introduce quotations by naming the source, rather than simply giving an endnote that the reader must chase to the back of the book.
This gripe notwithstanding, Mr. Spencer’s rich lode of information about British food justifies his subtitle’s claim that its present vigor caps off “an extraordinary thousand years of history.”
Claire Hopley is a writer in Amherst, Mass.
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