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Food history from the perspective of those who made, cooked, and served it


English Food: A People’s History Diane Purkiss


Published by William Collins 549 pages; £30


REVIEWED BY STUART WALTON


T


he notion of an English food culture, one whose history might be told in ravishing, palate-whetting detail, usually evokes something akin to Mahatma Gandhi’s dry observation when asked what he thought of Western civilization: that it would undoubtedly be a good idea. If there was an English culinary style, it raged and faded through Roman occupation, medieval exigency, and the acquired mannerly style of the Georgian era. It then lost itself in the uneven embrace of the food cultures of the countries Great Britain colonized in the 19th century, and those cultures by which it was in turn colonized in the 20th—principally that of its wartime ally, the United States, and then the latter-day vogueishness of a reimagined Mediterranean, peasant food turned bourgeois or classless food turned proletarian. In the 21st century, what England has in place of a culinary identity is a culture of eating out, which survives, if in straitened form, even in economic extremis. The food of the English is no longer the Sunday roast, the leaking meat pie wolfed at the football ground, the fish and chips in that newspaper wrapping that practically nobody has heard became illegal in the 1980s, the sponge pudding steaming in a cloth, the glass-bowled trifle assembled with infinite pains hours before afternoon tea. Come to that, didn’t we invent afternoon tea? Wasn’t it Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford, who willed it into existence in 1840, along with an elaborate code of drawing-room


60 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023


etiquette to frame it? What there is now, above and beyond the international regimen of burgers and pizza, donuts and chocolate, is Italianish restaurant chains, Punjabi and Bangladeshi curry houses, Chinese takeaways that span the national repertoire under Cantonese supervision, the gastronomic Esperanto of high-street brasseries and bistros, pub catering that is often aspirational, though largely not, the hot pasty eaten on the railway station concourse, the refreshment trolley on the train…


What the development of eating in England reflects—apart from the global turn to instant food, fast food, the readily serviced food brought to the door by Deliveroo, and supermarket ready meals that ping in less time than it takes to read the ingredients list— is the theoretical breakdown of class, which has allegedly created the same homogenous purée of once-stratified food tastes as it has in all other cultural manifestations. When they have rap artists at the BBC Proms, those patrons who tend to stick to the Brahms nights are more than willing simply to stand and eat a cinnamon swirl before taking their seats; those same types may even read a trashy thriller while on holiday. There is no longer any discrimination in taste, the finest calibrations of which were one of the defining social traits of England. And no overseas tourist has even noticed the disappearance of them, any more than they have registered that London is no longer


What the development of eating in England reflects is the theoretical breakdown of class, which has allegedly created the same homogenous purée of once-stratified food tastes as it has in all other cultural manifestations


blanketed in so-called smog. For this, the English are obscurely grateful, even as they continue to celebrate the indelible cultural markers that have been preserved for the ages precisely through their extinction. Diane Purkiss concludes her monumental history of English food with a reflection on the cultural significance of tinned food—as good a marker as any of the nation’s uncertain progress through modern times. Invented in the 1820s in France, canning became an indispensable asset with the expansion of the European empires. To the British in particular, chary of embracing wholesale the local cuisines—those of India, in particular— of those territories they began to officiate, then rule, tins were a reliable taste of home, easily assimilable into cooking that gave the air at least of being fashioned from scratch. By the interwar period, they had become hopelessly déclassé, despised for the very quality—instantness—that once recommended them as a precious resource in the restive tropics. Eliot’s tawdry typist in The Waste Land “lays out food in tins,” the shameless drab, prior to the visit of her unlovely paramour. Orwell, as finely versed a social snob about the consumption habits of the poor as he was officially their compassionate champion, seethes with distaste in The Road to Wigan Pier at the “hideous rows of tins” on the grocer’s shelves. Even an impoverished student will turn up her nose in the Taj Mahal when the waiter confesses that the mango on the dessert menu is from a tin.


Purkiss shows that differentiation


in eating habits, ostensibly abolished by the bland democracy of the global palate, has no more gone away than economic inequity, which has been honed to razor-sharpness in the era of financial speculation and the privatizing of all social provision. The poor eat a worse diet than ever before. The old and tired eat more frugally than the young and greedy.


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