British Food Culture

I know that to some people the term British Food Culture is an oxymoron, but that's a stereotype that is just as unfair as all stereotyping is. If you read sections of the media, Britain is full of overweight people who never cook and rely upon take out food to eat. While there is a growing number of people who have problems with their weight, often it is the hidden calories in processed food that causes the problem. At a latter date I will be posting on that issue. But no matter how good anyone is as a cook at home, we all enjoy take out food. It may be that its an occasional treat
or something that time constraints mean folks have to do to ensure that there is a hot meal on the table. As with all foods it is a matter of balance.


One of the wonderful aspects of modern Britain is the range of different foods and cuisines that are now available. However in Britain we have always borrowed cuisines from other parts of the world, you only have to think of the spice trade of the 15th and 16th Centuries. Further it was the access to the spices from the east that drove the creation of the British Empire. Yet as logic dictates these exotic foods were the preserve of the rich.


Thus the majority of the British people did not have access to these spices. Further, the foods that the lower classes ate were considered poor quality. This created the illusion that British food and cooking was low quality and bland. When we move towards the 17th and 18th Centuries, with the nobility doing their grand tours of Europe, continental cuisine became seen by the upper classes as being the hight of taste. This excluded and denigrated British foods even more. This cultural attitude also had the effect of stopping the Scots from harvesting the Herrings from the Scottish coast, yet the fishermen from Norway, Holland and Denmark seeing that we did not want our own fish, established their own fleets to harvest the Herrings.


As when Britain became the first industrial nation and people started to move from the land to the city the link to the land, the farmer and producer was lost for some, it was never lost entirely. While the attitudes towards the foods that the lower classes ate was even further disregarded, among the people who lived in the towns and the industrial areas, this “Peasant cuisine” developed.


This dismissive attitude of British food as tasteless and bland was reinforced in print in Mrs Beeton's book of Household management. Where, for example, was the instruction to boil cabbage for thirty minutes. This reflected the upper class attitude that vegetables were bad for you. Mrs Beeton and her husband (who was the driving force behind the publications) were writing for a market. And a major part of this attitude towards the British cuisine was simply that the upper classes indulged in the continental foods and food styles from Europe and ignored the indigenous ones.


This continued until the first world war, when the appalling waste of human life, lost Britain many of the people who knew how to cook and grow good food. This loss of skills reinforced the myth that British cooking was poor. As simply people turned to books like Mrs Beeton's and cooked to death vegetables and undercooked the wrong cuts of meat.


Further, the lack of respect for food meant that between the first and second world wars there was a decline in Agriculture and Horticulture. The solutions to this from the British government was to import food and further undermine the production of good food in Britain.




The second world war helped highlight the danger of relying on importing our food rather than growing our own. While one of the effects of rationing ensured that the nation ate a balanced diet, it was far from exciting.


Therefore by the 1960s when rationing was over and trade was allowing food to be be imported again, the old standard model was back reinforcing the same stereotype that only French food was worth eating. By the 1960s and 1970s it was still presumed that French food was the hight of gastronomy, this was to ignore the great foods that were always here.


But even during the last few hundred years of this potted history, in local communities and across the regions that form the tapestry that is Britain good regional and local food thrived. Additionally because of the Empire, people were returning from far flung parts of the world bringing back dishes borrowed from many diverse nations. This was happening long before many people assume, and there have been curry houses in Britain for over one hundred years. While Chinese communities have been here for many centuries influencing our foods too.


Therefore Britain has always had a good food culture, it is just that it has been hidden and ignored. While I personally despair of the people that travel to Spain and insist that they will only eat British foods, half the fun of travelling is the discovery of great new foods, flavours and dishes, the increase in mass travel has enabled the growth of the world cuisine that is now available in Britain.


However, while this great food revolution has gone on in some sectors of the community, in other parts of the nation, peoples diets have become even more limited. Personally I am baffled by the attitude that views food purely as fuel. Food is and should be a pleasure and it is not that great flavours are only available to those with money, as good food can be cheap too. After all a good hearty vegetable soup is very easy and cheap to make. So it is not poverty that has created these culinary wastelands.


But if you just base the view of British food upon the “Cant Cook, Wont Cook” Brigade, then the view of our national cuisine will be distorted. However in this last decade there has been a growth of the “Gastro Pubs”, pubs that have developed food that goes beyond the Stake and chips or Fish and Chips menu. The growth of Farmers Markets, a wonderful import from the United States, and an explosion of ingredients from across the globe in our shops.


I do like using many of the wonderful ingredients available, most I had previously been sourcing from different stores. Indian spices from Indian stores, as often you can get great advice on using them too. Equally I love the farmers markets as there you can get good ingredients direct from the farmer and producer. While there are times when I do feel that some of the producers are expecting to much for their produce, most are reasonable. Now reasonable does not mean cheap, but good value. That said, I often find that good quality items like sausages will be cheaper than the premium ranges that are in the supermarkets and are better tasting too.


The last time I made a Lancashire Hot Pot, I bought the neck of lamb and the kidneys at a farmers market for less than I would have paid for the cheapest cuts in the supermarket or even my local butchers. And it was good meat too.


Using potatoes and a cheap cut of meat like neck of lamb, herbs and onions and you have a main meal that takes little time to prepare and is slowly cooked so that it does not prevent folks doing other tasks or jobs, and can feed a family. The irony is that if you visit one of the “Gastro Pubs” this is likely to be one of the dishes on the menu that will prove very popular, yet it is so easy to cook at home. As I personally maintain, good food is not about having lots of money.


However there is an irony here, as on television there is a plethora of cooking programmes that have developed over the last ten to fifteen years. In the same period there has been a growth in the sales of cookery books, yet also an apparent decline in the number of people cooking. Yet foods and dishes that were once disregarded as being “British Peasant Food” has become the mainstay of these programmes and books.


This is just one example of the food that forms part of the diversity of British food culture that is alive, well and creating great meals across the nation.