Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table

The Kitchen Fusspot

They are, in the kitchen at least, late developers. Often genteel, effete, with a little too much time on their hands. Meals emerge from their kitchens with a sense of expectation, each ingredient having been painstakingly sourced, every direction in the cookery book followed to the letter, and inevitably late. The meal has something of the theatrical production about it, albeit amateur dramatics, as if it has all been so, so much trouble. Which of course it has. And don’t we know it.

The kitchen fusspot prepares dinner – a charming though slightly too creamy soup, meat with a syrupy, over-reduced sauce, a dessert as elaborate as an Ascot hat and probably just as indigestible – while his guests get more and more hungry, not to say a little pissed. The kitchen, once tidy enough to appear in the pages of World of Interiors, now resembles a bombsite of stacked roasting tins, sauté pans and sieves.

Fusspot is almost always male. He only cooks once a month, if that, and needs endless encouragement and ego massage. The production starts several days before, with working out what to cook with the aid of a pile of cookery books of the celebrity-chef variety, and a shopping list, often taken to bed. There may be a tasting of the wines to be served, many of which have come from his own cellar. The menu will be changed every day, each dish chosen for its ability to follow its predecessor perfectly, to match the wines, to show the cook at his most competent.

The directions will have been analysed in a way the poor cookery writer never dreamed of, each line dissected and filleted and then given a jolly good roasting. The kitchen fusspot – let’s call him, say, Julian – is a follower of orders, and a cookery writer’s nightmare. He cooks without any ability other than that of doing what he is told; a cook incapable of using the merest pinch of invention, imagination or intuition. One wonders – briefly – what he would be like in bed.

Perversely, the fusspot likes nothing better than recipes that ‘don’t quite work’. ‘I think it needs something, don’t you?’ is his knee-jerk response to every recipe he tries. A little more balsamic, a touch of white pepper, a little Béarnaise sauce on the side. The idea that it might be fine as it is is unthinkable.

Black Pudding

Be it in the form of berries, loops or horseshoes, or maybe sliced from one long, charcoal-coloured dong, the black pudding remains adored and loathed in equal measure. As with tripe, gooseberries and junket, there is no middle ground. Modern squeamishness has led to those of us who turn misty-eyed about such treats being thought of as carnivorous beyond redemption, if not long-lost members of the Addams family. True, our holy grail is a sausage made from the blood of an ox, thickened with pig fat, pearl barley, oatmeal and rusk, but no one should let a little thing like blood and guts get in the way of good eating. What makes the black pudding so delectable, so deeply savoury, so toe-curlingly satisfying, is partly down to good taste, and partly to the pleasure of knowing that our respect for an animal’s life extends to the point where we refuse to let even its blood go to waste.

Of course, there is black pudding and there is black pudding. At its worst it is dry, sour and solid. At its best, moist, crumbly and herbal, with a perfect balance of sweetness and deep savour (not to mention being grilled to just the right crispness). I would list a good black pudding as one of the dishes I would want at my last supper, but then it would have to be the very best, and that is where one gets into deep, and very hot, water.

Black pudding fanciers are fiercely loyal, ever ready to challenge anyone who dares to suggest that their butcher’s pudding is tastier. The national contests to find the best are always controversial, and cause heated debate. There could even, after a celebratory drink or three, be what used to be called fisticuffs. (A drop or two more of spilled blood is neither here nor there when you consider that it can take ninety litres of blood to make a decent batch.)

Those who trawl southern shops looking for a good pud may wonder if this piece of charcuterie, or perhaps one should say porkery, is about to disappear from the planet, but northerners, particularly those living around Bury in Lancashire, know better. Despite the occasional closure of an outlet here and there, the blood pudding is showing signs of a renaissance, partly due to its being the current darling of many top chefs, who make the most of its savoury qualities as a garnish for other porky or even piscine delights. Black pudding and scallops is much, much more interesting than one might imagine, and is no more strange than bacon with scallops, better known as angels on horseback.

While the notion of a butcher’s kitchen awash with blood and rusk may appeal to the more deeply carnivorous, it should be noted that a certain number of sausages are actually made with dried blood, and this certainly seems to pacify the health inspectors. Whether such practices have an effect on the finished article remains a subject for debate. It should go without saying that most recipes remain a closely guarded secret, especially in the crucial and delicate matter of seasoning. And while thyme, marjoram and winter savory are often mentioned, the actual mix of herbs is something most pudding-makers would fight tooth and nail, and no doubt blood and fat, to keep in the family.

I suspect that those who have tried and disliked Britain’s proud answer to France’s celebrated boudin noir may not have eaten one of the first order. To do so is to experience a piece of craftsmanship that extends beyond sheer cookery. A good black pudding is nothing short of a work of art.

Cake Forks and Sticky Fingers

The Continental cake is slim, shallow, understated. It may be flavoured with almond, pistachio, bitter-orange or rose, and its sugared-almond-coloured box will be tied with a loop of the thinnest pink ribbon, from which it can dangle elegantly from a begloved Parisian hand. English cake is fat, thick and cut in short, stubby wedges; there will be sticky cherries, swirls of buttercream, and sometimes royal icing. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in enthusiasm.

A French madeleine is a petite almond cake delicately ridged like a miniature scallop shell. An English madeleine is a dumpy castle made out of sponge, doused in raspberry jam and sprinkled with desiccated coconut. It then gets a cherry on top, and if it’s really lucky, wings of livid green angelica. It’s a case of Proust versus Billy Bunter.

British cakes have a certain wobbly charm to them, and what might be missing in terms of finesse is there in lick-your-fingers stickiness. Fruit-laden Genoa, chunky marmalade, Irish seed cake and glorious coffee and walnut are not delicacies you eat politely with a cake fork, they are something you tuck into with the enthusiasm of a labrador at a water bowl.

Shopping on the Internet – Couch Potatoes

You wander down the virtual aisles plucking your supper off the virtual shelves and dropping it into your virtual basket. No wonky trolleys, no kids throwing tantrums by the iced low-fat doughnuts, no sleazy music sending subliminal messages to get you to buy two instead of one (not that you even wanted one, anyway), and no one at the checkout fiddling to find the right change (Oh, for God’s sake, just hand over a twenty, will you?) Add to that the fact that there is no one to peer disapprovingly at your fun pack of assorted crisps, or to look down their ecologically superior nose at you because you have chosen Persil over Ecover, and you have the perfect shopping environment.

Once you have found in which section the kitchen foil and cling film lives, and worked out which of the seventeen sizes of bin bag is the one that actually fits your bin, and eventually mastered the checkout process, you could, in theory, save hours, giving yourself more time to spend with the family, or finally to take up pilates. Pity you can’t put petrol in the car online too.

To every up, however, there must be a down, and internet shopping has more than a few. Your inability to find the right dishwasher tablets; the accidental ordering of the wrong colour loo roll (what exactly DO you do with nine apricot-coloured bog rolls?), and the table-thumping, expletive-ridden stress that you suffer when your perfect shopping trip crashes thirty seconds from the final ‘Thank you for shopping with Tesco’ are usually enough to get even the most fervent net-head making for the nearest Sainsbury’s. Add to this the niggling fact that Big Brother now knows how many bars of milk chocolate you get through in a week, or that you haven’t needed to buy condoms for a month, and your twenty-first-century shopping trip begins to look a little less like retail Nirvana.

But it goes deeper than this. The occasional online shopping list won’t do that much damage to the continued existence of your local shops, but the regular delivery of all you need and more to your door will indeed have a disastrous effect on your cheery local grocer’s till. Eventually he will have to shut up shop and move to a cosy flat by the sea, leaving room for a tacky Southern Fried Chicken takeaway to open in his place.

Frankly, you deserve it, and when you come to sell up yourself, you may find your would-be buyers less than keen to move into an area whose local shopping street is littered with polystyrene cartons and tomato-sauce sachets with the corner bitten off. And where do you run to when you need that emergency loo roll?

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