that sends them to customers’ doorsteps all around the world explains: ‘As ex-expats ourselves, we fully understand your frustrations in obtaining a taste of Britain in your new country. It seemed like Christmas when we did find a shop selling British products.’ Frequently, these much-missed British foods are on show at social events run by Britons living abroad. Bemused local guests might be invited to British ‘curry suppers’ or parties where a common offering is the nominally Mexican chilli con carne, made in the British style using mince and served with rice, to be eaten from a bowl while standing up – followed by mini Mars bars.
Back in the UK, those intent on promoting the idea that Britain has lately undergone a food revolution and developed a food culture that can hold its head up, not only in Europe but in the world at large, would hasten to point out that many of these products are reminiscent of the stock list of a 1960s convenience store, and not at all representative of the way most British people now like to eat. If this is the case, then what exactly is ‘British food’ nowadays?
In reality, this is a bit of a puzzle, both to the British and to other nationalities. Up until the 1970s, we had something that amounted to a national cuisine, a repertoire of commonly eaten dishes which most citizens would agree were British; toad-in-the-hole, roast meat with roast potatoes, Lancashire hotpot, boiled beef and carrots, mince and potatoes, bangers and mash, tripe with onions, boiled ham with parsley sauce, broths and hearty soups, shepherd’s pie, oxtail stew, cauliflower cheese, potted shrimp, steak pie, kippers, raised pies, steak and kidney pudding, jellied eel and any number of stick-to-the-ribs puddings. Depending on who you listen to, this cuisine was either a) monotonous and almost invariably badly cooked or b) straightforward, appetizing and wholesome. Either way, at least it was based on native raw ingredients – give or take a few billion packets of gravy powder.
Even then, a certain confusion reigned. In countries with consolidated eating traditions, ‘national’ is the sum of the ‘local’ parts. In Britain, on the other hand, what was once ‘local’ – Cumberland sausage, York ham, Melton Mowbray pie – becomes a ‘national’ dish, which may be a reflection of the absence of regional food pride, or perhaps a sign of desperation about the thinness of Britain’s food culture.
In 1998, the food writer Sybil Kapoor made a valiant attempt to map out a newer, more relevant definition for British food in her evocative book Simply British. She abandoned any attempt at classification based on a body of popular dishes or culinary techniques, in favour of a collection of intrinsically British ingredients. ‘In my opinion,’ she wrote, ‘there is only one thing that unifies and defines British cooking and that is its ingredients.’ But while the book was an appetizing and much-needed reminder to the British that good cooking starts with fresh, indigenous materials, any territorial claim to ingredients is bound to be subject to counter-claim. For all we may try to assert the gastronomic equivalent of intellectual property rights over ingredients such as lamb, beetroot, lavender and greens, neither the Greeks, the Russians, the French nor the Chinese, respectively, will accept it.
In 2004, the author and chef William Black set out on a tour around Britain to seek out the country’s traditional specialities for his book The Land That Thyme Forgot. He wanted to taste ‘enigmatic, mysterious dishes’ like Hindle Wakes (boiled fowl stuffed with prunes served with a rich lemony butter sauce and herbs), Clanger (a suet crust pastry with meat in one end and jam in the other) and Salamangundie (a sort of salad made with eggs, anchovies, onion, chicken and grapes). At the beginning of his journey, Mr Blake was ‘absolutely convinced that somewhere there was a vibrant regionalism just waiting to blossom’, but he never did get to taste most of the dishes he wanted to because they had simply dropped off Britain’s culinary map. In the spirit of an archaeologist hastily excavating a site before the developers move in, he catalogued a list of British specialities or GODs (Great Obscure Dishes), appealing to readers to adopt a dish as a contribution towards nursing British food back to culinary health. Into this sanatorium he put regional specialities that one might have expected to be in a more healthy state, such as Yorkshire Fat Rascals (a fruit scone/rock cake hybrid), Syllabub (wine sweetened with whipped cream) and Liverpool Scouse (meat and potato stew). His conclusions made gloomy reading:
‘As I travelled around the country I did get a sense of a revival in regional food but it seemed a very one-sided, haphazard affair indeed, Yes, farmers’ markets are springing up all over the place, and these arenas at least allow us to talk to producers and begin to amass a degree of awareness about food, nutrition and seasonality, but at a price. Much of the produce seems so insanely expensive to most of us when compared to the mass-produced pap we are accustomed to buying in the local supermarket that we often find it hard to get it into perspective. In other words, any good food movement is perceived as elitist … Is it too late for us ever to revive this disappearing gastronomy? Quite possibly. But we can nag. And rootle around and search for this golden grail, a renascent food culture that has to be more than just the ability to buy carrots with mud on them, and the odd farmhouse cheese.’
Slowly but surely, over the last 20 years, as our food shopping tastes have been shaped and increasingly dominated by supermarkets, Britain has abandoned its native gastronomy and become the culinary magpie of the world, raiding other countries’ gastronomic heritages and stockpiling their offerings for its nest. Although we live in a globalized age where true diversity is ever more elusive, most countries, both rich and poor, can still point to dishes that are more or less uniquely their own and perceived by outsiders as such. Germans eat sauerkraut; Vietnamese enjoy pho; Czechs are loyal to goulash and dumplings; Sri Lankans won’t go long without eating a stringhopper. The British? Well, that will be lasagne, moussaka, chicken kiev, pizza, fajitas, baltis, Thai red curry, hummus – basically, anything other than British.
The British actively project this magpie persona abroad. Every two years, different countries proudly showcase their cutting-edge food wares at the Anuga trade show in Germany. In 2005, smiling staff at the ‘Best of British’ section were pictured by The Grocer magazine standing proudly in front of displays, not of Lincolnshire chine or Bakewell tarts, but of pot noodles and crisps with ‘authentic British flavours’. What the word ‘authentic’ meant in relation to laboratory flavourings was not made explicit, but it was evidently thought to be a selling point that these crisps offered six months’ shelf-life, and labelling in eleven foreign languages. Britain’s weakness for junk food is now so longstanding, that our taste for it can almost count as traditional. In the same article, The Grocer noted that while other countries focused on traditional products normally associated with them – pasta and olive oil from Italy, cheese from Holland, and so on – ‘the 63-strong Food From Britain section was a real cornucopia of world cuisine with Indian and Oriental brands putting on a strong show’. This is what Britain’s food industry does best these days: snack-bar sushi, instant noodles, frozen pizza, gloopy stir-fry sauce, long-life Peking duck wraps … We are now the international specialists in making inferior industrial copies of other countries’ favourite foods.
No one jumped to contradict the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001 when he hailed chicken tikka masala as the most popular British dish. Chicken tikka masala is a British ‘Indian’ dish, unrecognized in India, invented by a Bangladeshi cook. Mr Cook hailed it as ‘a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences’ on the grounds that the masala sauce was devised to ‘satisfy the desire of British people for gravy’. But this dish is really a symbol of the weakness of the indigenous cuisine in Britain, and is a demonstration of the British tendency to fill this vacuum by importing and traducing misunderstood foreign dishes.
At a more nostalgic, emotional level, the British do still want to cling on to a more coherent, traditionally British food identity.
