How did we go from being the indigestible joke—British cuisine? Ha! It’s an oxymoron!—to arguably the most dynamic multifarious cooking country in the world? In two generations we’ve moved from bland and boiled to pad thai in the pub, from a nice cuppa to chai latte and bubble tea. We still eat fish and chips, but we are just as likely to eat our fish raw as sushi. We were the people of meat and two veg, who awkwardly speared peas on the tines of the forks and shunned garlic like vampires. Now we can’t decide whether to try the new Malaysian bistro or the Vietnamese street food noodles place or embark on Peruvian-Japanese fusion. A friend of mine in Egypt asked me recently what was a typical meal in England and I realised I didn’t have an easy answer. After a while I said: “The funny thing is, we eat everything.”
When the cook, restaurateur and food writer Prue Leith first came to England from her native South Africa in 1960, she recoiled at the sameness of every restaurant menu. “The food was awful,” she told me. “I remember the chefs would have a big pot of demi glace brown gravy and it went on everything. It was all slices of meat reheated in gravy and served banquet style, with a procession of waiters dolloping a selection of vegetables on your plate. Beetroot in white sauce, braised celery. If you were very posh you got tinned asparagus.”
When Leith started catering in 1961, the first thing she did was to banish the canteen-style stainless steel serving dishes. Thus began a life of more than five decades in the food business. In the late 1960s she founded a restaurant in London, Leith’s, that went on to gain a Michelin star; in the 1970s she opened a cooking school; in the 1980s she was on the board of Safeway; in 1991 she co-wrote the bestselling Leiths Cookery Bible, a compendium of modern recipes for the home cook; in the first decade of this century she was Chair of the School’s Trust, set up to improve food in schools. These days you can see her on the telly on the The Great British Menu, judging some of Britain’s finest chefs. It’s a career that has spanned the revolution in the way we eat.
Now she has written Laura’s Story, the first volume of a trilogy entitled The Food of Love, that will track this national culinary journey as a multi-generational family epic. It begins on a farm in the Cotswolds amid the privations and make-do of the war years. “The food was dull as ditch water,” Leith recalled. Rationing was designed by the Ministry of Food to deliver optimal nutrition. “You lived on potatoes and there was a lot of tinned food, dried egg, tinned ham.” Her characters eat sandwiches made with heavy brown national loaf and salted pork fat; an occasional treat is a Fray Bentos meat pie.
By the end of the war the daughter of the family in Leith’s novel has married an enterprising Italian POW who sets up a business selling deep fried cheese sandwiches, lamenting he has to use cheddar because mozzarella can’t be found. He wants to diversify, but the English aren’t quite ready. His English business partner admits, “I’m sorry to be so ignorant, but I don’t know what a pizza is.”
I talked to Leith about what had brought about the change in British attitudes to food. Was it Elizabeth David’s seminal A Book of Mediterranean Food that was published in 1950 and called for ingredients like aubergine and basil that were unheard of at a time when olive oil was bought in chemists and used for cleaning ears? (Even in 1957 the British were still ignorant enough to be taken in by the BBC’s famous April Fool’s documentary showing Italian peasants harvesting spaghetti from trees.) Or was it the immigrant Italians with trattorias and Indians opening curry houses that added spag bol and chicken tikka masala to our national favourites?
The evolution was slow. At first the change was not so much in what people ate, but in the technology of preserving food and the way it was sold. In the 1960s, frozen food arrived and supermarkets replaced independent fishmongers, butchers and greengrocers. The trend was for fish fingers, frozen peas. “People started eating ready meals on trays,” Leith said. “Beef in gravy, frozen mashed potatoes in another compartment, Angel Delight.” A new world was offered that was all about convenience. She remembered watching a Tomorrow’s World programme from the mid-1970s when a presenter held out two nutritional tablets that would replace food altogether, excited to suggest that in the future the housewife wouldn’t have to shop or cook or wash up at all.
"In 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium, along came Jamie Oliver. This was a watershed"In France, meanwhile, the rebellious generation of May 1968 was tearing down all the old authorities, including the old fashioned tenets of Auguste Escoffier, the grandfather of French cuisine whose heavy cream sauces had dominated menus since the 19th century. A new crop of chefs, led by Paul Bocuse, put the emphasis on freshness and creativity, cut cooking times and the ladles of clarified butter and invented “nouvelle cuisine”. It was much mocked for its twee portion sizes. Leith pointed out that it was the first time chefs began to “plate” their own dishes, rather than sending out components to be served table-side by waiters. The new chefs took pictures of their food from above, and made pretty, colourful designs on the plate, all circles and swirls and coulis. The glossy cookbook was born.
Throughout the 1980s the changes to British food were still largely focused in restaurants, and the influences and innovations were still coming from abroad. “I think it was television that really changed everything,” Leith said. First there was Delia Smith, no nonsense, everywoman. When, in 1990, she demonstrated a recipe for a truffle torte that included liquid glucose syrup, every chemist in the country promptly sold out of liquid glucose.
Then, in 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium, along came Jamie Oliver. This was a watershed. “Suddenly,” Leith recalled, “all these boys who would have been mechanics or something and never would have thought of going into the service industry—cooking was for women or foreigners, not for the men of England!—a lot of these young men went to cooking college.”
Oliver, like Smith before him, encouraged people to cook at home. Lovely jubbly, mash it all up together, fresh herbs by the handful, bish bash bosh. TV cookery was suddenly everywhere. “It’s cheap to produce,” said Leith, “it fills the screen, it’s like wallpaper.” Soon there was also Nigel Slater with his simple suppers, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on his smallholding enthusing us with the new buzzwords, “local” and “seasonal,” and Nigella Lawson enticing us to come hither, back into the kitchen for some naughty but nice. We all duly followed her into a national obsession with The Great British Bake-Off.
At the same time Britain became home to people of more than 150 nationalities, many of whom opened restaurants.
Ethiopian injera anyone? Argentine BBQ? Fancy some Georgian khadjapuri? Where else would it seem possible that a Palestinian and an Israeli could get together and create an Ottolenghi empire out of chopped salads scattered with nuts and drizzled with pomegranate molasses? British people went on holiday to Europe and got to know chorizo. They went to Thailand and brought green curry paste back in their rucksacks. We were becoming more adventurous. Our palates were globalising, and at home around the dining table, things were changing too. For a start, it was quite likely that there wouldn’t be a dining table. According to one study, a quarter of British families don’t have one any more.
In 1980, the average home-cooked meal took an hour to prepare. Now it’s down to half an hour. (In 2010, Jamie Oliver’s 30-Minute Meals became the fastest selling non-fiction book ever; he followed it up with a sequel, 15-Minute Meals). In the 1960s we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner, and for most the main meal was in the middle of the day. Today we spend less time sitting at a table, we eat at all hours, we snack constantly, and are more likely to tuck into our big meal in the evening. We now spend almost as much money eating outside the home as on buying food to cook inside it. According to statistics from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, over the past decade we are eating less beef, milk and cream, and fewer biscuits. We eat a third less bread than we did in the mid-1970s. Potato consumption has gone down steadily since the 1940s, when they were a staple, slumping 21 per cent in the last decade alone, as we replace them with other starches such as rice and pasta.
There has been a rash of social science studies and tabloid headlines lamenting the decline of the family meal and the traditional Sunday roast. Fingers are wagged. We should not be eating so many ready meals and take-aways laden with salt and sugar and fat, we are warned. Some of the message is getting through—demand for sugary fizzy drinks is falling, but god knows it’s virtually impossible for us to give up our crisp habit; we eat six billion packs of crisps a year; a third of children eat crisps every day.
The big food conglomerates have spent decades carefully designing their products to provide the perfect “bliss point” of sweetness and most delectable “mouthfeel” of the right fattiness. Maybe it’s an evolutionary need for fat and carbs that makes Pringles so more-ish. Or perhaps it is more to do with decades of laboratory research by the industrial food giants that have finely calibrated processed food into morsels of addictive cravability in the same way that cigarette companies got us hooked on their nicotine delivery devices. As much as we have discovered flavour, we have also fallen in love with the easy flavour hit. I don’t eat much junk food, but I cannot resist a packet of Frazzles.
In the last ten or 15 years we have also seen a reaction to the short-cut packet convenience of the 1970s and 80s. Ingredients have proliferated, quality has improved. Farmers’ markets and Waitrose Finest, Prince Charles selling sausages, single-estate chocolate from Madagascar, artisanal cider, new cheese makers and home-cured charcuterie. But the new foodiness is expensive. Britain’s wealth divide is also a food divide. “Middle-class food has improved,” said Leith, “but at the other end it’s worse and worse.” She said she can understand how difficult it is for a mother living on a housing estate far from the nearest supermarket to feed her children cheaply without relying on Pot Noodles from the inadequate corner shop. People are buying less meat and fish and fruit, in part because these have become relatively more expensive since 2008.
"Amid all the polyglot flavours and fusions and fashions, Britain is finally producing chefs with ideas that are influencing the rest of the world"If there’s a glimmer of hope, according to Leith, it comes from the next generation. These are the kids who are now benefitting from legislation mandating nutritional standards in school meals that Oliver’s school dinners campaign and the School’s Food Trust helped to bring about. In addition, primary school children are being taught about cooking and healthy eating, and lottery money has gone to fund 7,000 cooking clubs around the country which parents attend with their kids. “It’s extraordinary the influence children have on what’s eaten at home,” Leith said. “They get quite bossy: they say, ‘We’ve got to have that Mum! If it’s green it’s for good you.’”
So are we eating better? Are we cooking better? Or has consumption just become another form of consumerism? Are all the pretty pictures of icing swirls and piping hot pies served up in fictional TV kitchens to rent-a-guests clinking mulberry mojitos to a canned laughter track just aspirations that we feast on while munching a bowl of cornflakes on the sofa? Leith sighed at the question. Probably. A bit. “It’s quite a narrow band of foodies who can afford good food and are interested in cooking.” So, I asked the judge of Great British Menu, what is modern British food? “It’s hard to say. In our constantly evolving multi-ethnic country, I think it’s something different for everyone.”
One thing, though, is clear: amid all the polyglot flavours and fusions and fashions, Britain is finally producing chefs with ideas that are influencing the rest of the world. Take Fergus Henderson who reinvented British food at his restaurant St John by paring down traditional dishes to bare-boned sheer deliciousness. His roast bone marrow is just that, on a plate, bread and salt and a little parsley salad on the side. Mince and tatties, sloppily sublime. Grilled sardines, roast partridge, Eccles cakes with Lancashire cheese for pud. Nothing gussied with sauces and garnishes. Henderson’s menus echo Leith’s descriptions of good old-fashioned country cooking on her fictional farm in the Cotswolds—roast pork after a pig killing, gooseberry ice cream for dessert. He reminded us we didn’t need to be ashamed of what we eat and his nose-to-tail philosophy today shows up in offal dishes in Europe and the United States.
Then there is Heston Blumenthal, our culinary apotheosis, a mad genius and autodidact who didn’t have to throw out the rule book because he’d never read one. He is the whisk to our culinary mix. At his restaurant in Berkshire, the Fat Duck, he is at the forefront of experimental gastronomic alchemy, turning dinner into theatre with clouds of liquid nitrogen. He mines historical recipe books for inspiration at his London outpost, Dinner, resurrecting medieval spice combinations and Tudor sweetmeats. He also turns up on the shelves of Waitrose with his own food line of odd and inspiring products—high quality stocks, mustard ice cream and the famous hidden orange Christmas pudding. And he’s on television all the time, entertaining us with crazy feasts or reinventing the full English breakfast for the Little Chef.
In one series, In Search of Perfection, I watched Blumenthal go about making the perfect cheeseburger and spend hours trying to reproduce the satiny plastic finish of processed cheese slices to melt on top of it out of premium ingredients. An English chef making an American classic with a French brioche bun, using chemicals normally found in food science laboratories in a three-star Michelin kitchen. Here was the perfect summation of how we cook and what we eat—a combination of our conflicting desires for the old and the new, the salty and the creamy, nostalgia and the future.
