“In every social class,” Purkiss says, her point hardly needing the extrapolation she declines to give it, “men eat better.” Women feeding their families still typically eat last, and least, of all. (“Oh, I’ve already had mine.”) If there is a pullulating mass of dining options on the high street and the Uber Eats app, there is still an ingrained suspicion of expertise in eating, in the expression of evaluative opinion about food, the lucubrations of the newspaper restaurant critic. For this, the Protestant refusal of Catholic festive opulence was once blamed. Then it was the coming of cooperative socialism and its ethical revolt against luxury. Then it was the privation of the world wars, especially the war against Hitler, when Britain nurtured the myth that everybody, including the royals, was subject to the same carefully measured allocation system. As rationing dragged on for the better part of a decade after the victory, Purkiss notes, “[i]t had become patriotic not to care what you ate.”


A bottom-up approach English Food, then, is not another retelling of the path from Neolithic groats, through roast swan and stargazy pie, to the beetroot-and- goat-cheese wrap. It takes a bottom-up approach to what England ate and why. And when; the ingredient-led chapters are interspersed with essays on the four ritual feeds of the English day—breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner.


The evolution of the cookbook— from bundles of handwritten receipts, perilously light on detail as to quantities and cooking times, to the coffee-table glossy picture books of today’s TV gurus, none of whom is worth their Maldon sea-salt if they don’t also espouse an ethical stance to the food of the underprivileged—gives one highly imperfect account of the changes in culinary fashion. This may be the first food history of England that doesn’t have a good word to say about Elizabeth David, who floats through these pages on a


There is no chapter on beef here, but there is one on its luckless successor, the battery chicken. There is a fair bit on tea, the high taxation of which in its early career as the restorative hot drink of choice saw it become as much of an illicitly traded commodity as today’s cocaine. William Cobbett thought it neither use nor ornament, “a weaker kind of laudanum,” but had no final say in the matter. Purkiss gives a somewhat exaggerated account of the decline of tea, which suggests that she has trained the visiting plumber to accept the exuded froth of the cappuccino machine. Despite its ghastly reputation, the cheap sausage, she assures us, is much more about breadcrumbs, rusk, meal, and flavorings than it is about dubious pig bits. Occasionally, her cultural semiotics, though lightly worn throughout, ferment into the Lévi-Straussian: “The pig-meat feast announces that we have decided not to eat one another.”


supercilious cloud, a Bloomsburyite more at home in the benign climes of Provence, her recipes a hashed version of the foodways of the Mediterranean paysannerie, haplessly half-adapted to the postwar London kitchenette. If David clutched about her like an old shawl her reputation for restoring English cooking after World War II, her distant descendant Fanny Cradock wore her distaste for the masses in the visible scintillation of the evening gown and chandelier earrings in which she barked contempt at her studio assistants and also, by extension, at her viewers.


English Food, then, is not another retelling of the path from Neolithic groats, through roast swan and stargazy pie, to the beetroot-and-goat-cheese wrap. It takes a bottom-up approach to what England ate and why


The thought is predicated on the notion that the naked pig, especially the whole roasted suckling pig, looks uncomfortably like a human baby, as Alice was to discover in the Duchess’s house. Purkiss wonders whether food is ruined by sympathizing with the labor of those who produce it. This may be a more pressing question even than what’s in it, which in itself becomes more urgent the greater the ethnic variance. Rumors that the freezers of Chinese restaurants might contain whole dogs persisted at one time. Who knows what’s in the kebab? “Chablis, sir?” asks the Veneerings’ sepulchral butler in Our Mutual Friend. “You wouldn’t if you knew what it’s made of.” But who made it, who cooked it, who served it, and what they lived on assume an unaccustomed centrality in this history. If some reviewers have found the book’s structure disorganized and digressive, that seems best to suit the story of a food culture that has always assembled itself equally from dire northern necessity and the easiest and most appealing parts of what everybody else—continental neighbors, to subject peoples—was eating. 


THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023 | 61


Photography courtesy of William Collins


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