English Cuisine

English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but is also very similar to wider British cuisine, partly historically and partly due to the import of ingredients and ideas from the Americas, China, and India during the time of the British Empire and as a result of post-war immigration.

Some traditional meals, such as bread and cheese, roasted and stewed meats, meat and game pies, boiled vegetables and broths, and freshwater and saltwater fish have ancient origins. The 14th-century English cookbook, the '' Forme of Cury'', contains recipes for these, and dates from the 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 the eighteenth century 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 1950 '' A Book of Mediterranean Food'' 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 cooking 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. Foods such as gingerbread are described. It was not at all, emphasises Clarissa Dickson Wright in her '' A History of English Food'', a matter of large lumps of roast meat at every meal as imagined in Hollywood films.

Instead, medieval dishes often had the texture of a purée, possibly containing small fragments of meat or fish: 48% of the recipes in the Beinecke manuscript are for dishes similar to stews or purées. Such dishes could be broadly of three types: somewhat acidic, with wine, vinegar, and spices in the sauce, thickened with bread; sweet and sour, with sugar and vinegar; and sweet, using then-expensive sugar. An example of such a sweet purée dish for meat (it could also be made with fish) from the Beinecke manuscript is the rich, saffron-yellow " Mortruys", thickened with egg:

Another manuscript, '' Utilis Coquinario'', mentions dishes such as "pyany", poultry garnished with peonies; "hyppee", a rose-hip broth; and birds such as cormorants and woodcocks.

Sixteenth century

The early modern period saw the gradual arrival of printed cookery books, though the first, the printer Richard Pynson's 1500 '' Boke of Cokery'' was compiled from medieval texts. The next, ''A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye'', was published sometime after 1545. ''The Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piermont'' was published in 1558, translated from a French translation of Alessio Piemontese's original Italian work on confectionery. The number of titles expanded rapidly towards the end of the century to include Thomas Dawson's '' The Good Huswifes Jewell'' in 1585, the ''Book of Cookrye'' by "A. W." in 1591, and John Partridge's ''The Good Hous-wives Handmaide'' in 1594. These books were of two kinds: collections of so-called secrets on confectionery and health remedies, aimed at aristocratic ladies; and advice on cookery and how to manage a household, aimed at women from more ordinary backgrounds, most likely wives of minor aristocrats, clergymen, and professional men.

English tastes evolved during the sixteenth century in at least three ways. First, recipes emphasise a balance of sweet and sour. Second, butter becomes an important ingredient in sauces, a trend which continued in later centuries. Third, herbs, which could be grown locally but had been little used in the Middle Ages, started to replace spices as flavourings. In A. W.'s ''Book of Cookrye'', 35% of the recipes for meat stews and sauces include herbs, most commonly thyme. On the other hand, 76% of those meat recipes still used the distinctly mediaeval combination of sugar and dried fruit, together or separately. New ingredients were arriving from distant countries, too: ''The Good Huswifes Jewell'' introduced sweet potatoes (from the tropical Americas) alongside familiar medieval recipes.

'' Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book'', compiled in 1604 (and first published in 1986) gives an intimate view of Elizabethan cookery. The book provides recipes for various forms of bread, such as buttered loaves; for apple fritters; preserves and pickles; and a celebration cake for 100 people. New ingredients appear; a recipe for dressing a shoulder of mutton calls for the use of the newly available citrus fruits:

Pies were important both as food and for show; the nursery rhyme " Sing a Song of Sixpence", with its lines "Four and Twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie. // When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing" refers to the conceit of placing live birds under a pie crust just before serving at a banquet.

Seventeenth century

The bestselling cookery book of the early seventeenth century was Gervase Markham's ''The English Huswife'', published in 1615. It appears that his recipes were from the collection of a deceased noblewoman, and therefore dated back to Elizabethan times or earlier. Women were thus becoming both the authors of cookery books and their readers, though only about 10% of women in England were literate by 1640. Markham's recipes are distinctively different from mediaeval ones; three quarters of his sauces for meat and meat pies make use of a combination of sweet and sour, and he advises:

Robert May's '' The Accomplisht Cook'' was published in 1660 when he was 72 years old. The book included a substantial number of recipes for soups and stews, 38 recipes for sturgeon, and a large number of pies variously containing fish (including sturgeon), meat (including battalia pie), and sweet fillings.

French influence is evident in Hannah Woolley's ''The Cooks Guide'', 1664. Her recipes are designed to enable her non-aristocratic readers to imitate the fashionable French style of cooking with elaborate sauces. She combined the use of " Claret wine" and anchovies with more traditional cooking ingredients such as sugar, dried fruit, and vinegar.

In 1699, John Evelyn published ''Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets'', considered to be the first book on salads. It explores the philosophical significance of salads, reflecting 17th-century beliefs that spiritual purity could be regained through knowledge of nature. Evelyn and his contemporaries saw Adam's wisdom as a model for enlightenment, inspiring early vegetarianism and meticulous gardening.

Eighteenth century

John Nott's '' The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary'' (1723), still with rather few precedents to go by, chose an alphabetical treatment for its recipes, from Al to Zest. The book covered everything from soups and salads to meat and fish, as well as pastries of many kinds, confectionery, and the making of beer, cider, and wine. Bills of fare are given for each month of the year.

The second edition of '' Primitive Cookery'', published in 1767 by an anonymous author, promoted budget-friendly, lacto-vegetarian dishes, though some recipes included meat.

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 were reasonably prosperous. To welcome some neighbours on 8 June 1781, he gave them for dinner:

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, from the Americas, had only been added during the reign of King George III:

Hannah Glasse's '' The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy'' was the best-selling cookery book for a century from its publication in 1747. It ran to at least 40 editions, and was widely pirated.

Nineteenth century

English cooking was systematised 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 Bee Wilson has called "the greatest cookery book in our language", but "modern" only in a nineteenth-century sense.

An example recipe from Acton's ''Modern Cookery for Private Families'' is her "Quince Blanc-Mange (Delicious)":

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 plagiarised from authors including Elizabeth Raffald and Acton. The Anglo-Italian cook Charles Elmé Francatelli became a celebrity, cooking for a series of aristocrats, London clubs, and royalty including Queen Victoria. His 1846 book '' The Modern Cook'' ran through 29 editions by 1896, popularising an elaborate cuisine described throughout with French terminology, and offering bills of fare for up to 300 people.

Three of the major hot drinks popular in England, tea, coffee, and chocolate, originated from outside Europe and were already staple items by Victorian times. Catherine of Braganza brought the Portuguese habit of tea to England around 1660. Initially, its expense restricted it to wealthy consumers, but the price gradually dropped, until by the 19th century its use was widespread. Introduced in the 16th century, coffee became popular by the 17th century, especially in the coffee houses, the first opening in Oxford in 1650. Hot chocolate was a popular drink by the 17th century, long before it was used as a food. Chocolate bars were developed and marketed by three English Quaker-founded businesses, Joseph Fry's (1847), Rowntree's (1862), and Cadbury's (1868).

Twentieth century

After the First World War, many new food products became available to the typical household, with branded foods advertised for their convenience. Kitchen servants with time to make custards and puddings were replaced with instant foods in jars, or powders that the housewife could quickly mix. American-style dry cereals began to challenge the porridge and bacon and eggs of the middle classes, and the bread and margarine of the poor. While wartime shipping shortages had sharply narrowed choice, the 1920s saw many new kinds of fruit imported from around the world, along with better quality, packaging, and hygiene, aided by refrigerators and refrigerated ships. Authors in the 1930s such as Lady Sysonby drew on recipes from a wide range of countries.

Rationing was introduced in 1940 to cope with the shortages caused by the wartime blockade. Foods such as bananas and chocolate became hard to find, while unfamiliar items such as dried egg, dried potato, whale meat, snook (a South African fish), and the tinned pork product Spam appeared in the national diet. Since butter, sugar, eggs and flour were all rationed, English dishes such as pies and cakes became hard to make from traditional recipes. Instead, foods such as carrots were used in many different dishes, their natural sugars providing sweetness in novel dishes like carrot fudge. The diet was less than enjoyable, but paradoxically, rationing meant that overall the population was healthier than ever before, and perhaps ever since. The Ministry of Food employed home economists such as Marguerite Patten to demonstrate how to cook economically. After the war, Patten became one of the first television cooks, and sold 17 million copies of her 170 books.

Elizabeth David profoundly changed English cooking with her 1950 '' A Book of Mediterranean Food''. Written at a time of scarcity, her book began with "perhaps the most evocative and inspirational passage in the history of British cookery writing":

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 was of enormous influence. The historian of food Panikos Panayi suggests that this is because David 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 which she wrote about. She deliberately destroyed the myths of restaurant cuisine, instead describing the home cooking of Mediterranean countries. Her books paved the way for other cookery writers to use foreign recipes. Post-David celebrity chefs, often ephemeral, included Philip Harben, Fanny Cradock, Graham Kerr ("the galloping gourmet"), and Robert Carrier.

English dishes

In 1953, Britain's first celebrity chef, Philip Harben, published ''Traditional Dishes of Britain''. Its chapter titles simply listed "the stereotypical stalwarts of the British diet", from Cornish pasty, Crumpet, and Yorkshire pudding to shortbread, Lancashire hotpot, steak and kidney pudding, jellied eels, clotted cream and fish and chips. Panayi noted that Harben began with contradictions and unsupported 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.

The sociologist Bob Ashley observed in 2004 that while people in Britain might agree that the core national diet consisted of items such as the full English breakfast, roast beef with all the trimmings, tea with scones, and fish and chips, few had ever eaten the canonical English breakfast, lunch and dinner in any single day, and many probably never ate any item from the list at all regularly. In any case, Ashley noted, the national diet changes with time, and cookery books routinely include dishes of foreign origin. He remarked that a National Trust café, whose manager claimed "We're not allowed to do foreign food ... I can't do lasagne or anything like that", in fact served curry, because "seemingly curry is English". Anglo-Indian cuisine has indeed been part of the national diet since the eighteenth century.

Some English dishes are relatively new and can be dated to the century, and sometimes to the year, of their introduction. Thus piccalilli was introduced from India in the 18th century, as recorded by Hannah Glasse who gave a recipe for it in 1758. Conversely, dishes and sauces still considered foreign, such as fish in sweet and sour sauce, have been in English recipe books since the Middle Ages. Other dishes took their present form only gradually, as with the so-called " full English breakfast". Breakfasts of this kind are indeed described in later editions of " Mrs Beeton", but as one of many variations. Thus her list of "Family Breakfasts for a Week in Winter" has for Wednesday something that looks fairly modern: "bread, muffins, butter, brawn, grilled bacon, boiled eggs"; but on other days less modern-looking breakfasts include mince, mutton cutlets, grilled kidneys, baked fresh herrings, and hash of cold game or poultry, while suggestions for "Family Breakfasts for a Week in Summer" included sardine toast, cold tongue, kedgeree and rissoles, and "Guests' Breakfast (Autumn)" included cold pheasant, game pie, and pressed beef.

Fish and chips