Book: Beef and Liberty
Author: Ben Rogers
Price: Chatto & Windus, £17.99
Cattle are among the greatest benefactors of European civilisation. For thousands of years they have given unstinting service both as beasts of burden and as bountiful providers of milk and meat. They were also one of the early harbingers of empire, hefty agents of Europe's colonisation of Australia and North and South America. They have created plenty of trouble recently, what with BSE and foot and mouth, but Europeans seem to love their cows as much as ever. In fact, they give each one of them a subvention of E2 a day, which is probably rather better than the pocket money they give their children.
When it comes to folk tales and symbolism, however, cattle are the most barren of all the farmyard animals. They have none of the biblical resonance of sheep and goats, for instance, and Christians are not about to start worshipping their saviour as the bull rather than the lamb of God. Nor do they enjoy the rich allegorical life of pigs. Porkers may lack poetry, but they have attracted more than their fair share of myth and lore. Until recently they lived as familiar companions at the family hearth, and for many generations their grunts, farts and polymorphous appetites have been observed at close quarters with indulgence and compassion. The fact that pigs were efficient contributors to the domestic economy must have contributed to their popularity too. Pigs will eat whatever you put in front of them, and when the time comes they will offer up their every bodily part, from snout and ears to trotters and tail, to the skills of the enterprising cook. No other animal is as versatile when it comes to being cut up, preserved with salt or smoke, or turned into pate sausages and pies.
Cattle are nothing like as interesting. Oxen, cows and bulls are celebrated for little except their strength, stubbornness and sullen stupidity. And while their meat appeals to certain tastes, the cuts that are worth eating should be cooked with as little artifice as possible. Good beef tastes best when grilled or roasted over open-air bonfires and barbecues: it is the province of beery blokes rather than epicures. And if beef offers little inspiration to gastronomes, it provides even less to philosophers and poets.
On the other hand, we should not underestimate the power of beef as a political emblem, at least within the British Isles. As Ben Rogers shows in his entertaining and informative book, the idea of England may be endlessly contestable, but those who make a point of their Englishness are sure to take pride in their beef as well. Rogers begins his story with the small band of English yeomen who wiped out masses of agile French soldiers at Agincourt in 1415. Tradition would have it that the English owed their victory to their distinctive diet. "Give them great meals of beef," says the Constable of France in Shakespeare's Henry V, and they will invariably "eat like wolves, and fight like devils."
But Shakespeare may have drifted into anachronism here. According to Rogers, food in France at the time of Agincourt was probably just as meaty and unsophisticated as it was in England. But in the 16th century a fashion for finely dressed viands started to spread north from the courts of Renaissance Italy, inspiring French cooks with a new repertory of tastes and techniques: sweet was now segregated from savoury, vegetables were treated as delicacies in their own right, and meat began to be dressed and spiced and doused in fancy sauces. From that point on, a refusal to eat the ragos and fricassee of French nouvelle cuisine became a stereotypical expression of English national pride.
In the central chapters of his book Rogers traces a fascinating lineage of beef-themed prints and paintings through William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson and a band of lesser masters of the English paunch and ruddy face. Fielding's rabble-rousing song about the "roast beef of old England" is part of the picture too, along with beefeaters and grid-iron clubs, bull baiting, bulldogs and, to round it off, the 19th-century figure of John Bull himself. The beef-gorged Englishman was never a pretty sight, but even when he became a disgusting grotesque, as in the prints of James Gillray, he remained a mascot of proud and defiant Englishness.
Rogers devotes a particularly interesting chapter to the four-square British butcher. Can there be any other country where butchers advertise their shops by placing larger-than-life models of themselves in the street outside? Are there any other languages that compress the delicate and complex crafts of preparing meat for the kitchen-the arts of charcuterie and fleischerei for instance-to the death-dealing brutality of the all-purpose English word "butchery"? If Rogers is right, then Britain's blood-spattered master-butchers and their exuberant apprentices played a leading role in the street politics of 18th-century Britain. They could rally a mob by ringing peals of rough music from their marrowbones and cleavers, frightening the kickshaws out of British politicians with their Frenchified gourmet tastes. It was a wise precaution when Lord Bute, the unpopular prime minister to George III, recruited a "guard of butchers and bruisers" to protect him from the crowd.
Rogers leaves his readers with lots of loose ends to toy with. He does not, for example, explore the possibility that beef-based tribalism has as much to do with masculinity as with nationality. Nor does he pay much attention to the much-discussed differences between Englishness and Britishness. He passes over the fact that much of the beef eaten in England comes from Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and he omits to mention that each of these countries could lay claim to a distinct cattle culture of its own. But of course the political point of English beef was always imperial rather than national: the raison d'?re of patriotic beef-eating lay not in rivalries with the Welsh, the Scots or the Irish but in the overriding imperative of despising the French. But here the gravy starts to thicken.
In a classic essay written half a century ago, Roland Barthes explained that a sizzling beefsteak, engorged with red blood, strikes the ordinary Frenchman as an exclusive "French possession." Barthes acknowledged the transatlantic threat of an "invasion of American steaks," but the danger of British beef seems never to have entered his mind. If Rogers is right to treat beef as the foundation of English culinary nationalism, then Barthes is equally justified in regarding it as a "fundamental element of Frenchness." I suspect that if you looked out for them, you could find similar national odes to the beef of Arizona, Argentina or Australia. Carefree cosmopolitans can get through lots of sushi and gumbo and imam bayildi in the meantime, while nationalists squabble over the national identity of the world's most boring meat. Nationalism, it seems, narrows the palate as well as the mind. The real tragedy of the nationalists, after all, is not their catty contempt for foreigners but their bovine love of themselves.
