The Tragedy of English Cooking

Commonplace Newsletter #85

In all the essays I have written there are two themes, two tropes that run through them all and unify them:

Firstly, it is the small, overlooked everyday aspects of life that hold the answers and must be attended to.

Secondly, in doing so- and in treating received opinion with scepticism- this can lead you to learn to think for yourself, and so live for yourself.¹

Which, brings me to the empty plate I pushed away just ten minutes before beginning to draft these opening lines. It now contains nothing but a few sunburst expressionist smears of egg yolk, but at the height of its glory some 30 minutes ago it held a perfect meal of bacon, eggs, and black pudding. The bacon was streaky, brine-cured and air dried with rich and creamy bands of fat, The fried eggs had intense orange yolks, and the handmade black pudding was prepared with a touch of cream and a drizzle of cider brandy. All this came from a local farm, just a handful of miles away². It may have been among the best breakfasts I have ever had, and I would put the quality of those ingredients against any that can be procured anywhere on earth, certainly within the same relatively expensive but still affordable price bracket.

But, if the infinite hall of mirrors and misinformation that is the internet is to be believed, English cuisine³ is among the worst in the world. If not the worst. The discrepancy between my own lived experience (and the breakfast that I can still smell and taste) and popular online opinion is that English cuisine is a vast chasm. And so I must write about it.

The problem isn’t the ingredients, at least in principle. Climate-wise, England isn’t radically different from Northern France (and is only separated from it by a 20 mile or so long stretch of water) and so has the same capacity to grow much of the same produce to much the same standard. In the South West of England where I currently live, we have local cheeses, clotted cream, custard, fish, meat, as well as local gin, real ales, and wines. My nearby fishmongers teems with fresh catches from the nearby Atlantic and the butchers- well I have already rhapsodised enough about streaky bacon for now. You could say I’m cherry-picking as I have chosen to live in an area which is particularly inviting to the gourmand⁴, yet even my parents who live in a concrete grey post-industrial town that has never bounced back from The Great Recession of ‘08 have access to a great butchers and several excellent farm shops which are just a short drive away. The ingredients are there but you have to be willing to pay more than bare minimum prices and you have to know how to cook and spend time building a relationship with the food you are cooking⁵. And therein lies the problem.

Photo by Bao Menglong on Unsplash

Rationing

The talk of England having the worst food in the world used to bother me. Not just out of some residual national pride- which the upper-middle classes who speak through the media have told me for the entirety of my life is invalid, and should be replaced by an abiding sense of shame- even though many of these shameful historical crimes were probably perpetrated by their privileged forebearers and probably not my peasant then factory working ancestors… it is because it speaks to a greater problem which is very much real.

The ingredients are available, but few know how to spend time and live with them. Or seemingly care to learn. 

The dishes of ours’ that other nations sneer at- the sallow pies and greasy chips and myriad other forms of beige- are all products of modernity. They are all lazy forms of sustenance for those who have either never learnt how to cook (beyond pressing a button on a microwave) or are at present too inebriated to safely attempt to do so. I am convinced- and have vague recollections or conversations with late grandparents affirming this- that it wasn’t like this before the Second World War, an event which seems in retrospect to have been something of a culinary apocalypse that we as a nation have not fully recovered from. Prior to the Blitz (and certainly prior to the Industrial Revolution) l suspect that we were a nation of small holders, back garden vegetable growers and home brewers. Not to idealise such a hard-scrabble, from-the-earth existence, but it is from such circumstances that folk cultures and traditions and roots grow⁶. And our roots have been pulled out by the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century march of modernity and progress and profits.

Liverpool during the Blitz. This was one of many cities/towns/manufacturing areas bombed by the Luftwaffe during WWII. As you can imagine, this bombing campaign intentionally disrupted the supply chains of many industries, including food.

Where you find great food you will find people who know who they are and where they are. Where you find crap food you will find people who are alienated from their own past and environment, only to be blown around by the day-to-day forces of whim, appetite, novelty, and advertising.

The state of day to day English food is not a cheap joke but a costly tragedy. It shows how separated so many of us are from our own past when a ‘traditional’ aspect of the proper English breakfast is baked beans, which have been termed the Exxon Valdez of the fry up, spreading forth and contaminating everything touched. Imported, a military then ration food, a food that was pushed post WWII alongside the reinvention of many aspects of life that followed on from such widespread devastation, a wartime food that has become a part of our culture because culture doesn’t seem to exist beyond living memory anymore. I could stretch that baked bean analogy to breaking point I’m sure, but I think you get the point. And besides, there is only so long I can sustain a rant with baked beans as the throughline.

It's just sad ultimately. I’m all for bottom-up culture and the working man and having unpretentious tastes and a sense of humility, all can be fine and noble attributes. But what I don’t understand is an attitude of ‘that’ll do’. I don’t understand the lack of holding yourself and the world around you to some sort of baseline standard- whether it be in terms of quality, aesthetics, functionality, or anything else. Why settle for bare minimum? Food is such a fundamental part of life. How have people been convinced to settle for mediocrity many times per day, whenever they sit down to eat? This of course is assuming they actually sit down to eat and not just eat a prepacked sandwich while on the move or at a desk.

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But this is only one aspect of our culinary situation. Everything implies its opposite, and for all the bland, mass produced, generic, unhealthy, uninspiring meals you see people shovelling into their faces, we of course have world class chefs and world class restaurants. The celebrity chef (those still respected by their industry peers) is seemingly a British invention and our pretentious big city foodies can go toe-to-toe with anyone in the pronouncing of French dishes with gusto and approaching gastronomy with due reverence. Sure there’s a fashion-chasing, mimesis-driven aspect to all of that, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d rather someone be a little pretentious in the pursuit of crafting a good life than to let fear of judgement keep them locked into a life of supermarket lunchtime meal deals, and baked beans on toast (or baked beans on or with anything).

That’s the root of the problem. It’s not that English food is the worst in the world (the fact that Marco Pierre White was born in Leeds singlehandedly invalidates that assertion) it’s that for some reason we don’t care about food, about commensality and the preparation of good food as much as we should. We simply accept things with a shrug that the Parisian or the Basque or the Tuscan would not. Which speaks of a strange sense of defeat and defeatism, of the stiff-upper-lip stoicism- which is useful is so many contexts- atrophying into apathy. Which then in turn becomes the grudging acceptance of ever-lowering standards.

But there’s still a vestige of hope outside of those big city foodies. Modernity, globalism, late capitalism, whatever you want to call it might march on but it can never dominate fully. The light of the pre world wars, pre industrialisation, ancient folk ways can be dimmed but never extinguished entirely. And this can be seen every Sunday, every Christmas day. See, the roast dinner is the antidote to all that food-as-mere-fuel, ‘that’ll do’ nonsense. The roast embodies pretty much everything that is good in life in my mind- family and friends, laughter, conversation, a little drinking maybe- and all I’m saying is that we should try and make more of our lives in that image. It doesn’t cost much more, but it does take a more care and more effort. But these everyday things are what define our lives and if we aren’t living towards trying to create and to cherish and to enjoy such occasions, then what is the point of working and earning and toiling at all?

Anyway, it’s probably time for me to head out to the local shops, to see if I can find something good to cook for this evening.

Until next time,

Live Well,

Tom.

1. Which will then lead you to live for others in a non-transactional, non quid pro quo way. But this is a subject for another time.

2. Which I refuse to name out of selfish principle.

3. Throughout this piece I am referring to English cuisine as it is what I know. British cuisine (meaning including the food of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) have similarities but also differences which would be longwinded to get into here. The countries are distinct and using the homogenising term British (which I’ve only ever heard Americans use as interchangeable with English) is to pander to the globalising forces that have led to some of the culinary problems enumerated in this essay.

4. I was going to say foodie but I dislike the term. Foodie implies mimetic one-upmanship and the never-ending quest for Instagrammable gastronomic novelty. Gourmand, like epicurean, implies that one simply prioritises the well made, well prepared good stuff, the local stuff done right. This is what I am most interested in. 

5. I should note that this isn’t just about prioritising money for food. It’s also about prioritising time to source it, prepare it, cook it, and to sit down and really enjoy it.  And as it’s come to mind, I’m going to recommend a book called Why French Women Don’t Get Fat as a good guide to all those vital life-skills. It has a particular focus on the understanding of, and practise of pleasure in regard to our relationship with food and drink.

6. Whenever I see a (admittedly romanticised) film or TV show set in Appalachia I feel a specific and peculiar twinge. It’s as if I’m seeing a divergent stream of my own history where the ancient ways have been preserved, rather than flattened and replaced with grey concrete brutalism.