British food, renowned for its lack of appeal, provokes gentle chortles of derision when mentioned in juxtaposition with a word like extraordinary. These two books disabuse readers of the notion that this has always been the case. British Food describes the glories-and the decline-of the nation's cuisine over the centuries, while Shakespeare's Kitchen translates a particular era for modern cooks. Spencer, former food editor of the Guardian and author of several cookbooks, intriguingly suggests that early modern British cooking was more influenced by Mediterranean and Arab fare than French. For example, the technique of cooking with almonds to create white dishes was the gift of returning Crusaders. Spencer traces the country's lamentable decline in cuisine through the Reformation, Puritanism, and the Industrial Revolution, noting that Britons gradually lost a knowledge of wild foodstuffs and the time in their day to gather and cook more than the most convenient foods. Modern Britons would not recognize the impressive lists of ingredients their ancestors used. Readers may, thus, find the glossary and appendixes of British edible flora and traditional dishes to be particularly valuable. Segan, a food historian and contributor to the New York Food Museum, offers a lavishly illustrated cookbook that goes beyond the usual ingredients and step-by-step instructions. Drawn in by a photograph, readers will not only encounter a tempting recipe but also an accompanying text on the provenance of the dish and how it was modernized. Better still, Segan frequently offers the original recipe from Elizabethan texts, allowing one to compare the styles of written recipes. Name-dropping Shakespeare is a marketing gimmick, perhaps, for while the recipes include quotations from the Bard, the book is about Elizabethan cooking, not food from Shakespearean works. The reader who has first enjoyed Spencer's book will recognize much found in Segan's book and likely appreciate it all the more. British Food would fit well in academic and public libraries for its unique view of British history, while Shakespeare's Kitchen is recommended for public libraries.-Peter Hepburn, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History
Narrated by Mike Cooper
Colin SpencerUnabridged — 18 hours, 52 minutes
British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History
Narrated by Mike Cooper
Colin SpencerUnabridged — 18 hours, 52 minutes
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Overview
This a revised and updated edition of an award-winning book, recognized as the authoritative work on the subject of British food. It is a breathtaking attempt to trace the changes to and influences on food in Britain from the Black Death, through the Enclosures, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of Capitalism to the present day.
There has been a recent wave of interest in food culture and history and Colin Spencer's masterful account of Britain's culinary history is a celebrated contribution to the genre. There has never been such an exciting, broad-scoped history of the food of these islands. It should remind us all of our rich past and the gastronomic importance of British cuisine.
Editorial Reviews
Ten reference books every food lover should own...#10 British Food
A book so absorbing it may even stop the reader from falling asleep after Christmas dinner.
Sure to become a classic.
Never has there been such a breathtakingly comprehensive, wide-ranging and fascinating food history as this stonking great tome by Colin Spencer. The amount of research involved makes the brain boggle.
Spencer's interesting book is a worthwhile addition to the food history literature. Recommended [for] all levels.
[Spencer] ably covers a millennium and more, reflecting intelligently on the dramatic, and often sudden, dietary developments wrought by political and economic change... Spencer's rich lode of information about British food justifies his subtitle's claim that its present vigor caps off 'an extraordinary thousand years of history.'
A stimulating work.... What did the Brontës dine on at Haworth Parsonage? How did Jane Austen's family cook prepare the sauce? Colin Spencer will tell you. His book is a joyous, lively mine of information.
One of the most fascinating and riveting reads this year. Go buy.
Never has there been such a breathtakingly comprehensive, wide-ranging and fascinating food history as this stonking great tome by Colin Spencer. The amount of research involved makes the brain boggle.
A book so absorbing it may even stop the reader from falling asleep after Christmas dinner.
Sure to become a classic.
A stimulating work.... What did the Brontës dine on at Haworth Parsonage? How did Jane Austen's family cook prepare the sauce? Colin Spencer will tell you. His book is a joyous, lively mine of information.
[Spencer] ably covers a millennium and more, reflecting intelligently on the dramatic, and often sudden, dietary developments wrought by political and economic change... Spencer's rich lode of information about British food justifies his subtitle's claim that its present vigor caps off 'an extraordinary thousand years of history.'
— Claire Hopley
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940191719269 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2024 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Prologue: The Land
Our food begins with the earth. Good food is a successful fusion between the living ingredients that thrive outside dwellings and the human skill and artistry inside, which fashions these disparate elements into harmony.
The land of these islands had been worked for at least four millennia before the Norman Conquest; a land of heath and downland, and of salt marshes, chalk hills and windswept plateaus, of forests filled with oak, elm, lime, ash and birch. Dense pine forests covered the north. The huge diversity of soil types, peat, sandy, lime, chalk and clay, and the mostly temperate climatic conditions dictated how the land would be used. Its main features, the cool hills of the north, the moist, mild variable weather of the west and south-west and the drier, sunnier east and south-east were settled after the last Ice Age receded about 5,500 BC, when Britain finally became an island and was tilled by farmers determined to wrest an existence from this land.
These islands were vulnerable to invasion by other races, for as a land mass it had great advantages over the rest of Europe, many of them due to its smallness; this allowed more efficient communication by water and track, since no part of it was more than 75 miles from the sea coast. Its topsoil was more fertile, it had gold, silver, tin and copper mines, it had coal, salt and wool. Its coastline then was indented with deep and wide river estuaries, providing safe harbours; when rocky it was good for collecting salt, while a strong tidal sea made its flat beaches easy to fish from both line and net. This feature also was always helpful to invasions and possible colonisation. Its forests were not huge or impenetrable, and by the time the Romans had landed there were no areas of woodland left unexplored or unmanaged, as the Celts were great farmers.
Britain's great attraction was its velvet turf, for our climate favours the growth of grass even in winter. Writers and agriculturalists throughout the ages have hymned the green pasture of these islands, where livestock graze and become supple and plump, so that their carcass meat is more appetising than any other. In addition, the soil grew cereals so well that there was often a surplus in livestock and wheat, which could be exported. The Celts, famed as agriculturalists, built underground silos to store their grains so that they could export them to the growing and ever hungry Roman Empire.
After the Romans
As the Roman Empire shrank so invasions from northern Europe began; there were times when harvests were destroyed and people starved. No sooner had the legions left, than the cities and villas with their orchards, fishponds and dovecotes became vulnerable. Three different Germanic tribes began to invade. Under the Romans the land had been well husbanded, and a thriving population reached five million in the first third of the millennium. Much fertile land was drained, cleared and brought under cultivation. The wide spaces of Salisbury Plain, Cranborne Chase and the South Downs became great wheatfields, and in the fourth century Britain became the most important grain-producing country in Europe. At the time of Julian the Apostate, 800 wheat ships left Britain each year to feed the garrisons of Gaul.
What was the inheritance of 400 years of Roman occupation? First was the Roman pattern of farming, a brickwork pattern which fanned out from a farmstead, or large villa; the tilled land formed clusters of irregular shapes, so that the countryside was a patchwork of hedged enclosures, fringed by ditches and wattle fences. This continued for a time because it was simple to go on cultivating the same plants in the same way in the same fields. Yet the demands for cultivating food was much less once the Empire had vanished. The population had declined to barely two million by the time of the Domesday Book, so there was less arable and a great deal more pasture or fields left to grow wild and wooded again. Both farming and communication – for the network of roads fell into disrepair – would suffer for the next 500 years. The people went back to using the old waterways again, if indeed they had ever stopped. The roads were repaired piecemeal, but a skeleton network still existed because we hear of their being used after 1066.
Rabbits had been caged in leporaria which were attached to the Roman villas; when they got loose they were devoured by wolves and wild boars. The peacocks, dormice, guinea fowl and pigeons followed suit; the plump dormice, feeding on acorns and chestnuts, ran to cover in the wild and were soon all eaten, while the pigeons flew into the forest and interbred with others. The Romans had also introduced geese and pheasants. The geese became part of the peasant economy, while the pheasant soon naturalised itself in the woods and fields. The first hen that has been recorded in Britain was in 250 BC at Glastonbury, and remains of chickens have been found at Belgic sites, including Colchester. Julius Caesar observed that the Britons did not eat hens, they simply fought with them.
The Romans had introduced the concept of a walled enclosure for fruit trees, the orchard, the vine and a place set aside for pot herbs. Many of these plants now grew wild on river banks, in fields and in forests. Perhaps the most important of these for the future of British cooking was white mustard. The Romans loved mustard, making a sauce in which the seed was crushed and mixed with honey and vinegar. Now the plants grew wild, the seeds gathered only by the perceptive peasant. The landscape of Britain had been enriched by these escapees; from almond, cherry, quince, peach and medlar trees to chervil, dill, coriander and parsley, wild or cultivated, we were to enjoy them for centuries more. The well stocked fishponds and lakes had been fished until they were empty and then they silted up, uncared for and never replenished. Many of the fields that grew barley and wheat were now covered in weeds and thistles.
Four hundred years of occupation must have changed the Britons radically, but all one can pin down from this change are tiny examples of elitist artefacts that were useful to the whole community: lamps became a common form of lighting, with candlesticks made of iron or pottery. The spoon, known before but never accepted as commonplace, and now made from horn, wood or iron in all shapes and sizes, had proved how useful and adept it was, whether on the table or hanging by the cooking pot. The kitchen too might well be far better stocked with bronze or iron pans, even pewter, crockery and cups of glass. British cheese-making was no doubt stimulated by Roman methods and flavours. Palladius (fourth century agriculturalist) made his cheese in May, curdling fresh milk with rennet from a kid, lamb or calf, or with a teasel or sprig of fig. The curd was wrung, pressed, wrapped in salt, pressed again, laid on crates and finally put in a dry place out of draughts. It could also be rolled in crushed pine nuts, thyme or peppercorns.
Under the impact of the new invaders, sporadic battles and the struggle for land, large parts of Britain were neglected; they looked unkempt, tangled and overgrown, yet what riches were hidden there. The marshlands were crammed full of eels, the rivers had plenty of salmon and trout, and other fish such as perch, pike, tench, carp and bream. The forests sheltered such a variety of game birds and red deer that it was a simple matter to trap all the meat you needed. However, forests had to be managed, trees to be coppiced for tools and building, young woodland to be fenced before cutting and replanting. Someone had to organise all this. Natural leaders arose in each community and methods of working grew up to protect the agricultural necessities, the machinery of living, so that a small human group of disparate people might continue to survive. These methods due to custom and practice in time became laws that the community accepted, as a necessity by which they could live together and survive. This changed again when the Angles and Saxons arrived, who, after colonising the eastern coast, moved inexorably into the centre of the whole land. They brought their own laws and customs, and they already had their own leaders and methods of agriculture. Their laws were particularly liberal and just regarding women.
The Saxon peasants were clothed in wool and leather. Their life expectancy was no more than thirty years, though a few might survive longer and, if still helpful in their advice and guidance, would be revered. From the moment they could walk by themselves, the children would help with all the work. Most of the workers would have been racked with arthritis due to the hard grind of agricultural work; their backs would have been painful, and their hands and feet swollen. They would have suffered throughout their short lives from toothache, due to the grit in the food and most of them would have lost some teeth in their twenties.
Their hearing was acute, able to detect the lie of the land at a distance from the sound of the wind where the pasture changed to bare rock, or where a stream grew shallow or the breathing of a beast in a lair, or which rodent was making that tiny scuffle. Their sense of smell (compared to ours) was selective: unwashed themselves they would be able to distinguish people by their stench as well as the type of beast that even if unseen was nearby; they could smell salt on the wind and describe in walking time, shown by the position of the sun in the sky, how far away the sea was. They slept when it grew dark and awoke at dawn.
In the fifth and sixth centuries the population of Britain declined to about one million, but the soil was cultivated and the beginning of the open field system was created. Barley, oats, rye and wheat were grown, peas, beans and leeks were cultivated, and cattle, sheep and pigs were grazed. Their diet had not changed for hundreds of years back into the past and would not do so for many hundreds more. The peasant survived, and as the bulk of his diet was bread, the harvest was the most important event of the year. However, into this scene of shifting populations the most important cultural change and quite the most long-lasting in its effect on the peasants and their diet was to be the advent of Christianity and the rule of the Church.
The Early Church
Christian missionaries reached Ireland and the west of Scotland following the sea route from the Mediterranean in the fifth century, almost at the time that Rome had relinquished control and the new invasions had begun. These were itinerant pilgrims with staffs of willow who spoke comfortingly to the working people they met. They came obviously in peace and were greeted hospitably as custom decreed; bread and ale were offered and they were given shelter for the night. Their hosts would sing and recite stories and poems that celebrated their heroes. In return the missionaries told stories of Christian relevance, if not of Jesus Himself, and gave advice, counselled on practical matters, and provided consolation for fears of the myriad devils of pagan belief which were everywhere, and which were thought responsible for snagged fishing lines and ruined harvests. The pilgrims went on their way and possibly did not return for a year or two, but within a generation they had been accepted as part of the landscape and their belief in an invisible deity was known.
It was the leaders of the communities, however, that the missionaries needed to speak to and hopefully convert. It took another hundred years before in 565 St Columba founded the settlement on the island of Iona, and it was not until 597 that St Augustine landed in Kent and converted King Ethelbert, whose wife, Bertha, was already a Christian. The first churches to be established were minsters with a body of clergy and these were situated in the manors and estates that seemed to have grown upon the sites of old Roman villas. The minsters were at the heart of local government and also at the centre of the food supply. For the peasant, Church and State were already completely entwined, becoming over the years the one oppressor.
This was a time of economic expansion, and settlements increased by a quarter from the sixth century to 1066; the main growth was in the south, the south-east and the West Midlands. Many hundreds of the villages and towns that we are familiar with now, began then, growing up around the minster. This means that the farming was being well organised and more and more land was under cultivation. The power of the early Church is shown in the account rolls of the minsters and abbeys in the amount of food that they demanded as rent. For example, at the abbey of Bury St Edmund's, one month's food rent amounted to three bushelsof malt, a half bushel of wheat, one ox for slaughtering, five sheep, ten flitches of bacon and 1,000 loaves; this was in 1020 in Abbot Ufi's day. A later abbot, Leofstan (104465), upped the amounts, adding another bushel of malt, 300 more loaves, another twelve flitches of bacon and ten cheeses.
The type of cheese is unnamed, but abbots in England might have ordered a Casewick made in Lincolnshire, or a Keswick near Norwich, or a Chiswick in Essex or another cheese of the same name from Middlesex or even a Cheswardine from Shropshire. Place names ending in 'wic' meant a place of dairy-making. Hard mature cheeses were eaten by the elite – Church dignitaries and the nobility – while the poor ate fresh cheese or cheese pickled in brine. (The Welsh always used the brine bath method for preserving cheese.) Cheese was made by all households that possessed milch animals, so there was great regional diversity. Even new cheeses could have been hard, however, for in the Leechdomswe read instructions such as the need to shred new cheeses into boiling water. They also very likely had some blue cheese. Dorset Blue is also called Blue Vinney and 'vinney' comes from vinew/finew from the Old English fynig meaning mouldy.
The most radical manner in which the Church changed the people was in dietary rules, which proliferated over the centuries. It was St Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) who, influenced by Galen's theory, considered that eating meat incited lust. Red meat and gross lechery were twins, therefore the devout Christian must temper his appetite for them. As meat then was only regularly eaten by royalty and nobility this was one method by which the Church could attempt to control the excesses of its worldly rulers. This struggle between Church and State would permeate the whole of the Middle Ages.
Fast days took up two-thirds of the year. Church policy was to erase the pagan by substituting a Christian interpretation, so now fish was to be eaten on a Friday in memory of Good Friday instead of Frigga, the Norse goddess. The pressure against gluttony was immense. Alcuin (732-804), the cleric and foremost scholar of the Carolingian Renaissance, wrote of Adam that 'Through greediness he was overcome, when, by the devil's instruction, he ate the forbidden apple.' He considered gluttony to be the first bodily sin, describing it as an intemperate pleasure in food and drink, from which 'foolish delight, scurrility, frivolity, boastful talk, uncleanness of the body, unsteadiness of mind, drunkenness and lust' all came. Lust was thought to be very close to the stomach for, as Pope Gregory the Great had pointed out, 'The sexual organs appear attached beneath the stomach.' Hence excessive amounts of food were dangerous; food could be made harmless, by eating only small amounts of bland food, which could not stimulate those parts apt to be uncontrolled. (This fear was later taken up by the nonconformist religions and even by the Victorian bourgeoisie.) Alcuin had warned of eating food that was more choice and exquisite than necessary. The theme is referred to in Metres of Boethius, possibly composed by King Alfred (849-899): 'I can relate that from excess of each thing, of food and apparel, of the drinking of wine and from sweetmeats, there especially grows a great mad fit of wantonness; this strongly stirs up the conscious mind of each man and from it comes in the greatest degree wicked arrogance, useless strife.'
Eating and drinking became for the Christian church a symbol of worldliness and therefore of the world of sin, yet within the Church itself the libidinous cleric was too common a sight. A poemmakes fun of the priests who after mass, when for some hours they should be fasting, instead ran to the tapster and sated themselves with wine and oysters. Patristic tradition saw fasting as a union with the angels, believing that it made the soul clear for reception of divine truth. Meat-eating was seen to reflect Cain's primal crime and was proof of human weakness and cruelty. To abstain from meat was to go some way to recovering primal innocence, for it was observed also that fasting moderated lust. According to Aethelred (c.1009) people were to fast three days on bread, herbs and water on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Michaelmas, though food might be given to the sick and needy. The 40-weekdays' fast of Lent was of course modelled on Christ's 40-day fast in the wilderness. On fast days one meal was allowed per day; a typical meal might be simply bread washed down with water, but the bread might have a relish of gitte, black cumin, described as 'the southern wort good to eat on bread'.6 Periods of fasting were followed by periods of feasting; even a single day of fasting (children and the infirm were exempt) would be followed by single feast days.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "British Food"
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Copyright © 2011 Colin Spencer.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
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