In defence of English food
I write this on the eve of the day on which we Londoners find out whether we are to be saddled with a bill which will take generations to pay off, or to sit comfortably across the channel while the French hold the big party and lap up the tourism revenues from people who go to the games in 2012 and then make a trip across the Channel – or come here just to avoid Paris. It seems our leaders actually want to get the games, and tempers have become a little bit frayed, and the president of France has taunted us about supposedly having the worst food in Europe. The biggest contribution we have ever made to world cuisine, he says, is Mad Cow Disease.
Now, Mad Cow Disease hasn’t been the awful disaster people thought it would be – people were predicting at one point that hundreds of thousands of people would die of it. If anyone is in the firing line, our family are – I remember those beefburgers we ate on a Saturday evening – the thought of eating such junk would make me gag today, probably even if the beef was halaal. But the food I most associate with England is not the junk food which you can get anywhere. It’s the Sunday roast.
Sunday roast consists of a leg of lamb (which feeds at least four, with meat to spare), potatoes, various other vegetables (as many types as you like), and gravy. My favourite English vegetable is the parsnip, because of its texture and its sweet taste. A proper Sunday roast is eaten later than the usual mid-day meal, because it takes several hours to prepare properly. It’s not something you can do in an hour or less. (When I was little I had some sort of problem with gravy; I can’t remember what led to this now, but the family had a special cup of “meat juice” for me, until such time as they could tell me that meat juice and gravy were the same thing.) The French call us rosbifs, but we most often ate lamb.
Some of our other foods get laughed at by foreigners, particularly English-speaking foreigners, notably spotted dick (a sort of sponge cake covered in raisins, with custard) and toad-in-the-hole (sausages in batter). Like Adrian Mole’s American pen-pal in True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (one of a series of comic diaries by Sue Townsend), a lot of people think this is “some sexual disease”. I’m not sure where they come from, but they certainly pre-date any sexual connotations – let’s face it, Dick is still quite a common corruption of Richard. I always preferred my mother’s stuffed peppers, a recipe I still do myself once in a while. My college flatmates certainly liked it. Oh, and I also remember my mum’s stews fondly, although I think I hated them at the time. They consisted of vegetables, pulses and meat in some sort of stock, eaten with bread.
Now, a lot of our food is actually foreign in origin, because we do get out a bit and a lot of people come round our way. We eat quite a bit of pasta, we cook omlettes and natives of Liverpool are known as Scousers after a dish that’s actually of Norwegian origin. And there is that famous “Indian” dish, the chicken tikka masala, thought to have been invented off the cuff in an Indian restaurant when an English customer ordered chicken tikka, and then wondered why he didn’t get any sauce.
The distinctive thing about English food is that it isn’t spicy – you can actually taste the food. (That’s the main reason why I prefer Moroccan food to the more commonly available Indian and Pakistani food – the latter can be painful to eat due to the copious amounts of chilli used in it.) And the French have a reputation for being snobby and faux-arty about food. I once heard this BBC reporter describe having scrambled egg in some French restaurant, where the chef did it the “proper” way which sounded rather convoluted, and the customer wasn’t entirely satisfied. The chef responded, “it’s not supposed to be nice – it’s supposed to be perfect“.
British chefs, according to the Guardian, are less than impressed with Chirac’s remarks. Anthony Worrall Thompson says the langoustines they eat all come from Scotland, while Egon Ronay says that “a man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food”. Remember this is the man who said that the “noise and the smell” of immigrant neighbours is enough to drive a French worker insane; perhaps this is because they cook proper food, rather than “nouvelle cuisine”, the defining colour of which is that of the plate, rather than what’s on it.
