We want change but we want nothing altered – William Cobbett
I was shocked today to discover that I have a bit of an obsession with food. My shock was brought about by the sheer number of food photographs I’ve taken while I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post on the subject of what’s come to be known as Regional Food after reading a piece in the Guardian about a recently published book by the Italian academic Alberto Grandi called La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist). He argues that in reality there was no substantial Italian cuisine (the choice of the French term ‘cuisine’ rather gives the game away). What we know as the rather mythic pasta + nonna idea came into existence when so many utterly impoverished migrants left italy and arrived in America where they experienced an abundance of food for the first time. I’ve seen that happen myself. Back in the eighties I was on a course with students from all over the world and one of them was from Eastern Europe. He kept going missing but we could always find him gazing into the window of a local butcher – he’d never seen anything like it. He was so overwhelmed with the abundance of our food that we would take extra each meal and pass it to him. Grandi describes that cultural collision as you might describe an F1 hybrid. Two less productive strains interbreeding can bring about fantastically productive offspring. He’s not saying that there is no Italian food tradition, but that – real as it may be today – it’s not very old. It got me thinking about other so-called traditions that you would never have found in their alleged countries of origin – Balti and Korma owe more to Birmingham than to India; most French haute cuisine can be attributed to the unemployed chefs of the post revolutionary vanquished rich. Fusion cooking to the collision of Australia with Japan; Chinese cooking which came to be known and popularised by waves of immigrant chefs in chip shops but which barely scratched the surface of the diverse cultures of such a huge nation. And then there’s the great unwashed – the tradition of english cooking.
My mind travelled back almost immediately to William Cobbett, radical, grumpy and outrageously opinionated pamphleteer as well as hilariously funny writer. In Cottage Economy he tried to set out the proper diet for an Englishman and got very indignant about potatoes which he thought made farm labourers weak and lazy, and the drinking of tea which he said made women into gossips and made men become effeminate. For Cobbett, the only proper diet was based on bread, bacon and beer; grown, fattened and brewed by the happy labourer. The two books, “Cottage Economy” and “Rural Rides“; written in the shadow of poverty and starvation after years of war are still worth reading if only for a glimpse of his burning indignation. Bacon and eggs, Sunday Roast, good bread and plenty of meat became the iconic staples of the English diet, especially in the wake of wartime rationing. Meat and two veg was at least factually accurate even when it became a snide insult. It was the diet I grew up on.
Madame had more contact with an alternative tradition because one of her aunts had married into money, and she spent holidays as a companion for a cousin. It was whilst staying there (just the once) that I read Mrs Beeton and wondered at the extravagance of some of the recipes – “take a dozen eggs and three pints of best cream” – that kind of thing. I didn’t laugh at it – I wanted some of it for us too. After we got married and realized that neither of us could cook, a friend gave us some Elizabeth David and so now my list of inspirational writers extends to dozens, and they fill bookcases in the flat.
As for English cuisine; looking through the photos I’d say there is still a very diverse history of English cooking. After Mrs Beeton; Eliza Acton, Jane Grigson, Dorothy Hartley are among many more food writers who kept the tradition alive and many others have carried on to the present day. Even if there never was a properly understood traditional cuisine, there was always an uncollated mass of good recipes made excellent with fresh vegetables, meat and fish. As ever, cooking and eating what’s to hand and affordable – fish or lamb, pork or beef depends on a wealth of non-culinary variables and the lazy journalistic trick of listing the best of everything from trifles to testicles is just silly. Even a bucket of offal, like the one below, when respectfully and creatively prepared and cooked, can be a feast. (It can also be terrible – trust me).
Patés, cakes, puddings, toad in the hole, cheeses, faggots and bread with all manner of vegetables are still on the Potwell Inn menu. In the last three days we had Sunday roast; liver and onions and then – classical leftover food- cold chicken with bubble and squeak and home made chutney. Shopping and cooking, then sharing a meal with friends and family is one of the great creative joys of being alive. Slow food needs to be accompanied by slow eating.
But food – like every other aspect of culture in the UK – is deeply influenced by social class. Back in the 80’s we were living (as ever) in a block of flats and upstairs there was another tenant who came from a profoundly different and bourgeois background. We got on pretty well in general but one day she came down to see us about something just as we were making some food for my parents. Later her husband came down in fits of laughter and told us that she’d rushed upstairs and said “R – You have to go down and see Dave and his wife, they’re making a real working class tea! It was the tinned salmon sandwiches that did for us, I think. Major class signifier!
The problem today is not so much which recipes people cook, but that so many people don’t cook at all. The traditional meat and two veg diet was pretty boring, but properly cooked it’s still a nutritious meal, unlike the ultra processed foods that are slowly poisoning a whole generation and inexorably lowering the quality and life-expectancy of the life of the poor but also the well paid but chronically overworked people in the middle . The challenge is that when you’re struggling to pay the rent there just isn’t time to bone a breast of lamb, let alone grow an allotment and when you’re working 12 hours a day and six days a week like many professionals have to do; then time, not money is the limiting factor.
But eating out can be a far more dispiriting experience even than a takeaway – what with the virtual extinction of properly trained chefs. Two of our sons are chefs and they tell us that many young people looking for jobs have never eaten good food, and are unaware that kitchens are dangerous places in which hot fat, slippery floors and sharp knives can cause serious injury.
So I’m not saying that regional cuisines don’t exist, but that in the hands of skilled and well read cooks and chefs, a miracle can happen in which local English foods, like lamb, bacon, thyme, potatoes and carrots with the addition of a glass of wine and some garlic , can be inflected with the flavours of Provence and become carbonnade nimoise. Regional food is a dance performed by a skilled and knowledgeable cook, a selection of local fresh produce and a well equipped kitchen informed with wisdom and love.
