In Praise of Modern Britain
Our new columnist celebrates the great British food revival.
The British food revival
We are a nation marinated in nostalgia, but let’s face it, there’s sometimes far too much treacle in the marinade. To offer another kitchen metaphor, the England of our memories has been trimmed of all the gristle, leaving only the tastiest bits. Really, that’s what nostalgia is.
Take food. Like most people over 50, I think back joyfully to the stuff I ate in my childhood. The quarterpound bags of pear drops, the Zoom and raspberry Mivvi ice-lollies, the macaroni cheese on toast, (Heinz and Hovis in perfect synthesis), in front of “The Generation Game”.
But when I trawl a little further through my memories, I arrive at boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce and marvel at how it passed, circa 1975, for sophistication.
At that time, my favourite treat was to be taken by my parents to The Boulevard, easily the swankiest restaurant in our North-of-england seaside town – unless there was somewhere else my mum and dad didn’t tell me about.
I still remember the list of four starters: tomato soup, prawn cocktail, egg mayonnaise and avocado pear.
(We said things in full in the 1970s. That racy new import from Scandinavia was known not as a duvet but a “continental quilt”.)
My choice at The Boulevard was always avocado pear. Doused, of course, in “vinaigrette”, which, aged 12, was the sexiest word I knew.
These days, every spit-and-sawdust pub can stump up a Portuguese pork and black bean stew, heavy on the chilli and coriander.
And if your town doesn’t have a literary festival, then sure as eggs is soft-boiled quail eggs rolled in toasted sesame salt, it will have a food festival.
Truly, the gentrification of England
is a wondrous thing, and the rise of the food festival is one of the most wondrous things about it.
As with so much else that we think is modern, however, it is part of an ancient lineage.
We might think there’s something satisfyingly 21st century about shuffling from stall to stall, sampling a sliver of oak-smoked goat’s cheese here and a thimble of damson vodka there, but really it can all be traced back to medieval gatherings such as the Nottingham Goose Fair, where you might once have spotted Robin Hood chewing the fat with Will Scarlet.
But what giant strides we have taken since the 1970s, all the same. That word “foodie” used to have a distinctly pejorative ring, and understandably so. Foodies, preaching the gospel of Elizabeth David, could be a pretentious breed.
Yet consider how many words we all now have for bread, and how many for coffee. That’s true even of my late mother’s generation, who came of age at a time of rationing.
By the time she was in her nineties, she would cheerfully dither between a flat white and an Americano, before changing her mind again with an “Actually, dear, I’ll have a double macchiato”. We’re all foodies now.
I poke fun at what we’ve become, but really I think it’s marvellous. A few decades ago I lived for a while in the United States, and had to suffer the condescension of all those Americans who thought that England was full of terrible food, knowing in my heart that they weren’t wrong.
Scotland at the time was even worse. In the mountains of North Carolina I went to a Highland Games where the food stalls were laden with wonderful Scottish produce, from smoked salmon to malt whiskies.
Not long before, I’d been to a Highland Games in Aberdeenshire, where everyone ate greasy hamburgers and drank warm Coke. Somehow, in the cultural exchange, we’d been well and truly diddled.
That’s all changed. Now, some of the worldlier Americans I know are quite happy to concede that New York and Los Angeles are eclipsed by the restaurant scene in London, from where ever-burgeoning quality and variety continue to percolate out to us in the provinces.
Unsurprisingly, it is said to have been a Frenchman, Brillat-savarin, who coined the expression, “You are what you eat.”
When I was growing up, that idea was enough to make any Englishman gulp. Who wants to be boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce, still less a Pot Noodle?
These days, however, it’s a notion for us all to cherish.