Restaurants James Pembroke
The synchronicity of the pandemic with the 75th anniversary of our great escape from invasion – as invoked by HM the Queen – is the sort of dream coincidence that not even Boris and Dominic Cummings could ever have conjured up.
It has been easy for them to tap into our national sense of ‘triumph over adversity’. The message is clear: if we could suffer the austerity of wartime rationing under the terror of the Blitz, we can certainly dig our way to victory now. Albeit with the help of Ocado.
Yet our innate Protestant predilection for austerity was actually reignited in the First World War, when the ascetic, stamp-collecting George V taught us that it was not just undignified to care about good food; it was unpatriotic and morally reprehensible, given that our boys were being mown down at the front. He not only abstained from alcohol for the duration but forbade it at all court dinners, allegedly in sympathy with the munitions workers, who had seen pub licensing hours reduced from 19½ to 5½ hours a day.
King George revelled in the new propriety, sending out royal proclamations, whether urging us to stop eating bread and pastry or instituting meatless Tuesdays, at home and in restaurants. A Simpson’s menu of 1917 warned customers that potatoes were available only on Tuesdays and Fridays, again by royal proclamation.
Dowdy Queen Mary was his partner in virtue. She opened the first National Restaurant in 1917 in Westminster Bridge Road, dutifully serving up the rhubarb jelly herself. Even ice cream was stopped. They must have welcomed the deprivations of rationing when it was introduced in 1918, restricting people to 8oz sugar, 8oz bacon and 5oz butter a week.
Although there was good reason to fear we might run out of food – at one
point in 1917, German U-boats ensured we had only three to four weeks of food supply left – one can’t help thinking that there was an underlying delight in this rebuke of the excesses of the belle époque, over which his father had presided. In 1900, thanks to Ritz and Escoffier, London had been the European capital of haute cuisine, home to 5,000 French chefs.
The standard eight-course menu of the Edwardians never returned. Our latent puritanism was adopted by the press under the slogan ‘Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight’. Journalists were on the lookout for the wealthy breaking the new rule of eating only three courses at dinner and two at lunch – which some people evaded by counting fish, poultry and game as halfcourses and not counting cheese at all.
The lasting damage to British gastronomy was that we learned how to make do. A new spirit of accepting second- and third-rate cooking, of not making a fuss, had crept in and didn’t go away until the 1960s or later. Rather like prisoners of war, we developed ingenuity that knew no bounds. We learned how to make imitations of mayonnaise and to pronounce it to be as good as the real thing. Lord Devonport, the first ever Minister for Food, suggested polenta and rice cakes as substitutes for bread rolls.
Our monarchs have always set the tone for our gastronomy. Charles II’S restoration saw our first restaurant boom. This ended with the anti-jacobite cries of John Bull for plain beef under the Georgians, who outlawed any produce from France. Queen Victoria was more interested in quantity than in quality. And here we are now with our own dear Queen, a champion of Tupperware. And chocolate cake.