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English cuisine
English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but also shares much with wider British cuisine, partly through the importation of ingredients and ideas from North America, China, and India during the time of the British Empire and as a result of post-war immigration.
Traditional meals have ancient origins, such as bread and cheese, roasted and stewed meats, meat and game pies, boiled vegetables and broths, and freshwater and saltwater fish. The 14th-century English cookbook, the Forme of Cury, contains recipes for these, and dates from he royal court of Richard II.
English cooking has been influenced by foreign ingredients and cooking styles since the Middle Ages. Curry was introduced from the Indian subcontinent and adapted to English tastes from as early as 1747 with Hannah Glasse's recipe for chicken "currey". French cuisine influenced English recipes throughout the Victorian era. After the rationing of the Second World War, Elizabeth David's Mediterranean cooking had wide influence, bringing Italian cuisine to English homes. Her success encouraged other cookery writers to describe other styles, including Chinese and Thai cuisine. England continues to absorb culinary ideas from all over the world.
History
Middle ages
English cookery has developed over many centuries since at least the time of The Forme of Cury, written in the Middle Ages around 1390 in the reign of King Richard II. The book offers imaginative and sophisticated recipes, with spicy sweet-and-sour sauces thickened with bread or quantities of almonds boiled, peeled, dried and ground, and often served in pastry. It was not at all, emphasises the historian of cookery Clarissa Dickson Wright, a matter of large lumps of roast meat at every meal as imagined in Hollywood films.
Eighteenth century
James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson gives a good idea of the sort of food eaten in England in the eighteenth century by those who could afford to eat whatever they liked.To welcome some neighbours on 8 June 1781, he gave them for dinner "a Couple of Chicken boiled and a Tongue, a Leg of Mutton boiled and Capers and Batter Pudding for the first Course, Second, a couple of Ducks rosted and green Peas, some Artichokes, Tarts and Blancmange. After dinner, Almonds and Raisins, Oranges and Strawberries, Mountain and Port Wines. Peas and Strawberries the first gathered this year by me. We spent a very agreeable day". Another country clergyman, Gilbert White, in The Natural History of Selborne (1789) recorded the increased consumption of vegetables by ordinary country people in the south of England, to which, he noted, potatoes had only been added during the reign of King George III: "Green-stalls in cities now support multitudes in comfortable state, while gardeners get fortunes. Every decent labourer also has his garden, which is half his support; and common farmers provide plenty of beans, peas, and greens, for their hinds to eat with their bacon."
Nineteenth century
How English puddings should look, according to Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1861
English cooking was systematized and made available to the middle classes by a series of popular books, their authors becoming household names. One of the first was Mrs Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1806; it went through sixty-seven editions by 1844, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain and America. This was followed by Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families 1845, which has been called "the greatest cookery book in our language", but "modern" only in an eighteenth-century sense. Acton was supplanted by the most famous English cookery book of the Victorian era, Isabella Beeton's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1861, which sold nearly two million copies up to 1868. Where Acton's was a book to be read and enjoyed, Beeton's, substantially written in later editions by other hands, was a manual of instructions and recipes, to be looked up as needed. Mrs Beeton was substantially plagiarized from authors including Raffald and Acton.
Twentieth century
Elizabeth David profoundly changed English cooking with her 1950 Book of Mediterranean Food. Written at a time of food rationing and scarcity, her book began with "perhaps the most evocative and inspirational passage in the history of British cookery writing":
The cooking of the Mediterranean shores, endowed with all the natural resources, the colour and flavour of the South, is a blend of tradition and brilliant improvisation. The Latin genius flashes from the kitchen pans. It is honest cooking too; none of the sham Grand Cuisine of the International Palace Hotel
All five of David's early books remained in print half a century later, and her reputation among cookery writers such as Nigel Slater and Clarissa Dickson Wright is of enormous influence. The historian of food Panikos Panayi suggests that this is because she consciously brought foreign cooking styles into the English kitchen; she did this with fine writing, and with practical experience of living and cooking in the countries she wrote about. She deliberately destroyed the myths of restaurant cuisine with phrases like "the sham Grand Cuisine of the International Palace Hotel", instead describing the home cooking of Mediterranean countries. Her books "opened the floodgates" for other cookery writers to use foreign recipes. Post-David celebrity chefs, often ephemeral, included Philip Harben, Fanny Craock, Graham Kerr ("the galloping gourmet"), and Robert Carrier.
Stereotypes
In 1953, Britain's first celebrity chef, Philip Harben, published Traditional Dishes of Britain. Panayi observes that "The chapter titles simply list the stereotypical stalwarts of the British diet", from Cornish pasty and Yorkshire pudding to shortbread, Lancashire hotpot, steak and kidney pudding, jellied eels, clotted cream and fish and chips. Panayi notes that Harben begins with contradictions and uncited claims, naming Britain's supposed reputation for the worst food in the world, but claiming that the country's cooks were technically unmatched and that the repertoire of national dishes was the largest of any country's.
Foreign influence
English cookery has been open to foreign ingredients and influence from as early as the thirteenth century. The Countess of Leicester, daughter of King John purchased large amounts of cinnamon,[31] while King Edward I ordered large quantities of spices such as pepper and ginger, as well as of what was then an expensive imported luxury, sugar.[32] Dickson Wright refutes the popular idea that spices were used to disguise bad meat, pointing out that this would have been as fatal then as it would be today. She suggests instead that spices were used to hide the taste of salt, which was used to preserve food in the absence of refrigeration.
Panayi introduces his book Spicing Up Britain with the words of the English celebrity cook Fanny Cradock: "The English have never had a cuisine. Even Yorkshire pudding comes from Burgundy."[34] He cites Nicola Humble's observation that in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, there are about the same number of recipes from India as from Wales, Scotland and Ireland together.[35][36] Panayi created controversy by asserting, with evidence,[b] that fish and chips had foreign origins: the fried fish from Jewish cooking, the potato chips from France; the dish only became "an important signifier of national identity" from about 1930.
Curry was created by the arrival of the British in India in the seventeenth century, beginning as bowls of spicy sauce used, Lizzie Collingham writes, to add "bite to the rather bland flavours of boiled and roasted meats." Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (1747) contains what Clarissa Dickson Wright calls a "famous recipe" which describes how "To make a currey the Indian way"; it flavours chicken with onions fried in butter, the chicken then being fried with turmeric, ginger and ground pepper, then stewed in its own stock with cream and lemon juice, and served with boiled rice. Dickson Wright comments that she was "a bit sceptical" of this recipe, as it had few of the expected spices, but was "pleasantly surprised by the end result" which had "a very good and interesting flavour". The process of adapting Indian cooking continued for centuries. Anglo-Indian recipes could completely ignore Indian rules of diet, such as by using pork or beef. Some dishes, such as "liver curry, with bacon" were simply ordinary recipes spiced up with ingredients such as curry powder. In other cases like kedgeree, Indian dishes were adapted to British tastes; khichari was a "simple rice and lentil dish". Curry was accepted in almost all Victorian era cookery books, such as Eliza Acton's (1845): she offered recipes for curried sweetbreads and curried macaroni, merging Indian and European foods into standard English cooking. By 1895, curry was included in Dainty Dishes for Slender Incomes, aimed at the poorer classes.
Foreign influence was by no means limited to specific dishes. James Walvin, in his book Fruits of Empire, argues that potatoes, sugar (entirely imported until around 1900 and the growing of sugar beet), tea, and coffee as well as increasing quantities of spices were "Fruits of Empire" that became established in Britain between 1660 and 1800, so that by the nineteenth century "their exotic origins had been lost in the mists of time" and had become "part of the unquestioned fabric of local life".
Food establishments
Pub food
Traditionally pubs in England were drinking establishments and little emphasis was placed on the serving of food, other than "bar snacks", such as pork scratchings, and pickled eggs, along with salted crisps and peanuts which helped to increase beer sales. If a pub served meals they were usually basic cold dishes such as a ploughman's lunch.
In the 1950s some British pubs would offer "a pie and a pint", with hot individual steak and ale pies made easily on the premises by the landlord's wife. In the 1960s and 1970s this developed into the then-fashionable "chicken in a basket", a portion of roast chicken with chips, served on a napkin, in a wicker basket. Quality dropped but variety increased with the introduction of microwave ovens and freezer food. "Pub grub" expanded to include British food items such as steak and ale pie, steak and kidney pudding, shepherd's pie, fish and chips, bangers and mash, Sunday roast, ploughman's lunch, and pasties. In addition, dishes such as burgers, lasagne and chili con carne are often served.
Kedgeree, a popular breakfast dish in the Victorian era.
Chicken tikka masala, adapted from Indian chicken tikka and called "a true British national dish."
Indian cuisine is the most popular alternative to traditional cooking in Britain, followed by Chinese and Italian food.[46][47] The chicken tikka masala is now considered one of Britain's most popular dishes.
Indian food was served in coffee houses from 1809, and cooked at home from a similar date as Mrs Beeton's cookbook attests. There was a sharp increase in the number of curry houses in the 1940s, and again in the 1970s.
In the Victorian era, during the British Raj, Britain first started borrowing Indian dishes, creating Anglo-Indian cuisine. Kedgeree and Mulligatawny soup are traditional Anglo-Indian dishes.
Anglo-Indian fusion food continued to develop with chicken tikka masala in the 1960s and Balti in the 1980s.
Home-cooked curries by ethnically English people are often based on ready made curry powder sauces or pastes, with only a minority grinding and mixing their own spices. Curries may be home-cooked to use up leftovers.
In 2003, there were as many as 10,000 restaurants serving Indian cuisine in England and Wales alone. The majority of Indian restaurants in Britain are run by entrepreneurs of Bangladeshi (often Sylhet) and Pakistani origin.[51] According to Britain's Food Standards Agency, the Indian food industry in the United Kingdom is worth £3.2 billion, accounts for two-thirds of all eating out, and serves about 2.5 million British customers every week.
Indian restaurants typically allow the diner to combine base ingredients — chicken, prawns or "meat" (lamb or mutton) — with curry sauces — from the mild korma to the scorching phall — without regard to the authenticity of the combination. The reference point for flavour and spice heat is the Madras curry sauce (the name represents the area of India where restaurateurs obtained their spices, rather than an actual dish). Other sauces are either prepared from scratch, or are variations on a basic curry sauce: for instance, vindaloo is often rendered as lamb in a Madras sauce with extra chilli, rather than the original pork marinated in wine vinegar and garlic.
In addition to curries, Indian restaurants offer "dry" tandoori and tikka dishes of marinated meat or fish cooked in a special oven, and biriani dishes, where the meat and rice are mixed together. Samosas, Bhajis and small kebabs are served as starters, or can be eaten by themselves as snacks.
In recent years, some Indian restaurants have started aiming higher than the norm for ethnic food, two of them garnering Michelin stars in the process.
Other
Chinatown in Birmingham, England.
Chinese food is well established in England, with large cities often having a Chinatown district. Predominantly derived from Cantonese cuisine,[56] it may be so adapted to Western tastes that Chinese customers may be offered an entirely separate menu.[citation needed] Spare ribs in OK sauce is an example of crossover cuisine. South-East Asian cuisines, such as Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese are catching up in popularity.
Italian cuisine is the most popular form of Mediterranean food, vying with Chinese and Indian food as the most popular ethnic food. Greek and Spanish restaurants are well established. Turkish tends to be associated with the take-away sector in particular late night kebab shops. Whilst Middle Eastern cooking in particular Lebanese has grown in popularity from its traditional enclaves in London.
Apart from beefburgers and hot dogs, food from the Americas tends to be represented by Mexican or Tex-mex cuisine, although there are a few Creole and South American restaurants.
Caribbean and Jewish cuisine can usually only be found where there is a concentration of the community in question.
In England, French cuisine stands somewhat apart from other generally less expensive cuisine, although there are some inexpensive French bistros.
English Food Recipes
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English Food Recipes
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