When I first came to England in the nineties for my post-graduate studies, I was offered accommodation at a large international hall-of-residence [hostel] in the heart of Bloomsbury. There were no cooking facilities and so I would be dependent on the hall’s kitchens. My husband, who had himself come to England as a university student, issued a grim one-word warning about hall-of-residence food: ‘Inedible,’ he said.
I didn’t believe him, of course. Standing on the threshold of an exciting new life in England, such pronouncements were to be dismissed outright. ‘Oh, I love western food. Maybe more than Indian, you know. And I can manage bland too. I’ll have no problem, don’t worry.’
Less than a week into my course, I was scouring Bloomsbury for Indian restaurants and flew through the door of Chutneys on Drummond Street as though entering the gates of heaven.
Another week later, when I began to feel as though I would never be able to get the smell of boiled cabbage out of my nostrils, I visited the accommodations office to ask if they could possibly find me a flat with kitchen facilities: ‘Please?’ I said.
Many years down the line, analysing that first brush with British food, I can understand better that the problems I was having were not to do with flavour, nor even the taste or lack of spices.
It was texture. When a platter of food containing some form of meat, potatoes and vegetables is placed before a blindfolded person and they find it difficult to identify the component parts by the feel, and not taste, of what is in their mouths, then a large part of the enjoyment of food is lost. Traditionally, that was what was wrong with British cooking (I can get away with such a sweeping statement safe in the knowledge that few would attempt contradicting it) – everything was boiled to the consistency of mush, and the only hope of flavouring was by drowning one’s platter in gallons of gravy.
Thankfully all that has changed and British food has undergone something of a sea-change in the past decade or thereabouts. The rise of chefs like Jamie Oliver, Pru Leith, Angela Hartnett, Gordon Ramsey and Jack Munroe, most of whom have their own TV shows, best-selling recipe books, cookery schools and vastly successful restaurants, have between them transformed the landscape of British cuisine. The seeming simplicity of a Cordon bleu meal whipped up on a television screen by a chatty chef has made amateur cooks in homes across the country gain confidence like nothing before. As a result, present-day
British households are eating a variety of world foods, many of which have passed into what is now considered ‘British cuisine’, be it lasagne, chili con carne or chicken tikka masala.
Into this, of course, must also be factored the able assistance of giant supermarket chains, each of them vying with the other to sell sauces and condiments imported (at least in idea form) from far shores: pesto, tarmasalata, humus, harissa … one would be hard-pressed to find many foods on the shelves that have direct origins in hoary English soil.
Eating out in modern day Britain offers a similar story. Except for a few provincial examples tucked away here and there, the meat-and-two-veg pub is mostly gone and in its place has come the gastro-pub – essentially a pub with a very good restaurant attached. These are now commonplace in most towns and some, like Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in Bray, are proud owners of Michelin stars. London, of course, abounds with gastro-pubs and, last week, we took friends visiting from India to one in our neighbourhood called The Anchor & Hope. There wasn’t a Beef Wellington in sight and, for about 15 pounds per head, we had the most delicious and eclectic meal, including one that was fully vegetarian.
Was this the most typical British experience to offer our friends? From the warm, noisy pub ethos, the casual and friendly attitude of the waiting staff, the clamour of the kitchen that was largely visible from the dining room and, dare I say, the food itself, there was nothing un-English about the evening, in my opinion. But I’m aware that, even 10 years ago, it would have been impossible to eat duck confit, slow-braised pork cheeks, beetroot with goat’s cheese and marrow stuffed with ragu at any self-respecting pub in Britain. For that we would probably have had to ‘go French’.
And what of that other major change visible on every high street? In times past, a coffee connoisseur would have to traipse across to the docklands of East London to sample the worlds’ coffees in establishments like the Jamaica Coffee House. Now coffee shops are, of course, ubiquitous across the world. Not just the big American chains like Starbucks but happily thriving alongside them in Britain are small, family-run establishments that sell cakes sourced from old English recipes. Previously, for the famous English cream tea, one would have needed to visit a Victorian tea parlour – of which there are a few still clinging gamely onto touristy places and seaside towns – but now, thanks to coffee shops, cakes are undergoing a bit of a revival. No better evidence for this than The Great British Bake-Off becoming one of the most popular shows in recent television history. Featuring two popular female comediennes as hosts and two famous bakers as judges, this BBC programme threw together a bunch of ordinary people – housewives and office-workers – who shared nothing but a passion for baking, pitting them against each other in a baking competition spread out over several weeks. The competition, filmed in that most English of settings – a white marquee set in a lovely English summer garden – had the nation gripped. Clearly, the British public still clings firmly onto its notional sweet tooth despite all the exposure to foreign goodies and the bad press about sugar.
So, cake apart, have the British said goodbye forever to their more traditional foods: kippers and kedgeree, pickled eggs and eels? Anyone searching for these relics of Britain’s past would face a difficult task and probably have to inveigle their way into one of the erstwhile gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall. Blame TV chefs, or cheap foreign travel, or even the Bangladeshi immigrant who first popularised ‘Indian’ food in Britain but the nostalgic image of a British family gathering around the Sunday roast has surely gone for good.
(Jaishree, a native of the city, who lives part-time in London, is the author of several bestselling novels such as Ancient Promises , Rani and Secrets and Lies )
