‘I went to my [British] husband’s family for Christmas. It was a huge cultural shock, the saddest Christmas in my life. If somebody had come to my house in Emilia Romagna at any time, not even a festive period, my mum would make an extra effort – a special pasta, a special secondo [meat or fish course], more of everything, a real welcome. But I don’t think his mum is cooking at all. She doesn’t care about that. When it was lunchtime she said “Everything is in the fridge, everybody can help themselves” and off she went. At about 12 o’clock, his dad would go to fridge and make himself a sandwich, at 12.30 his sister served herself and so on. The day after was the same. At the actual Christmas dinner, after half an hour, all the food had already disappeared from the table. I have had to adapt to it, but for me, it was definitely shocking.’
People from abroad are regularly baffled by what they see as a lack of family meals and communal eating. One Austrian arts administrator explained:
‘Now that I live in Britain I still cook every night. We eat together every night and that is a most important time for us. But I see from other British families that this is considered really strange. In the UK, eating together is almost something you do on a Sunday if you are a “good” family. It’s really important to me that we sit properly, half an hour or so – not like in France where they take one and a half hours – and not a fancy meal necessarily, just something that’s properly cooked. We would not sit at the TV and eat either. I notice people do that here. You don’t come across much of what I would call proper, normal eating in the UK.’
For an executive summary of the outsider’s verdict on British food and eating habits, click onto the web pages of ‘Grenouilles au Royaume Uni’ (‘Frogs in the UK’), a reportage by French people living in Britain, and look under the ironic heading ‘The Delights of British Cuisine’:
‘The British no longer consider a meal as a family ritual. That’s a growing trend in France too but it’s more noticeable here. English families cook less in general and rely more on food delivered to their homes. Members of the same family tend to eat on their own when they feel hungry. Hence the profusion of junk food, fast food, takeaway and so on. Direct consequence: 39 per cent of Britons are overweight, 19 per cent are obese.’
Although most Britons view it as entirely normal, Terry Durack, restaurant critic for the Independent on Sunday, has voiced the ongoing incomprehension with which British eating habits are viewed internationally:
‘As an Australian, I often find myself blinking in disbelief at the average Briton’s relationship with food, at how unimportant it is to so many people. But then, I grew up in a country where good food was available to all at a good price. Here [in Britain], eating well is an economic issue, a class issue, and an education issue. Good food is available – at a price. And nobody is going to pay the price if good food is simply not a priority in their lives.’
Whether we like to admit it, Britain is seen abroad as a country that has well and truly lost the gastronomic plot, a food recidivist, demonstrating precious little capacity for improvement.
Any country with a healthy food culture has a distinct body of ingredients and dishes that that can be recognized widely as constituting a national cuisine, but in Britain even the native population has some difficulty agreeing on such a definition. Expatriate Britons, on the other hand, seem entirely clear. Scan the catalogues of companies that purvey distinctive British foods to Britons in the diaspora, such as Best of British – a chain of stores throughout France – and you will be left in no doubt about what they crave. Their mission statement reads:
‘It is good, from time to time, to be able to have some of those traditional British foods we so enjoyed in the UK; a good fry-up with bacon, pork sausages and beans, steak and kidney pies, battered cod with mushy peas, proper curry, syrup sponge with real custard, trifle, etc. You will find them all at Best of British.’
To French people who happen on Best of British, the stock must appear bizarre. For the most part, the goods on offer represent a drab, sad testament to Britain’s addiction to over-processed, industrial food: Plumrose pork luncheon meat, Jackson’s white sliced bread, Tunnock’s marshmallow snowballs, Cadbury’s Curly Wurlys, Bisto gravy granules, Walker’s prawn cocktail crisps, Angel Delight, Spam, Pot Noodles, Heinz tinned coleslaw, spaghetti hoops and salad cream, Princes Hot Dogs, Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup, Hula Hoops, Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney, frozen sausage rolls and Birds Dream Topping are just a few of the treats in store. For some Britons based abroad, these are delights to seek out and savour.
Wherever they go in the world, Britons like to uphold their food traditions and remain loyal to an unedifying portfolio of industrial products whose main selling point is that they make cooking more or less redundant. An internet search for ‘British food’ will find a bevy of other companies – Brit Essentials, UK Goods, The British Shoppe, British Delights, Brit Superstore, British Corner Shop, amongst others – with a flourishing trade in much-loved, quintessential British foods. Branston pickle, Daddy’s Sauce, Bovril, Twiglets, Ribena, Bird’s custard powder, Oxo cubes, instant coffee, Heinz tomato soup, Ambrosia creamed rice, Coleman’s Cook-In sauces, tinned meat paste, Paxo sage and onion stuffing, fruit-free fruit-flavour jellies, Burton’s Wagon Wheels, ‘fun-size’ confectionery, and Yorkshire pudding mix are all typical offerings.
Far from being food best left back in Blighty, these products are very much in demand, as one company that sends them to customers’ doorsteps all around the world explains: ‘As ex-expats ourselves, we fully understand your frustrations in obtaining a taste of Britain in your new country. It seemed like Christmas when we did find a shop selling British products.’ Frequently, these much-missed British foods are on show at social events run by Britons living abroad. Bemused local guests might be invited to British ‘curry suppers’ or parties where a common offering is the nominally Mexican chilli con carne, made in the British style using mince and served with rice, to be eaten from a bowl while standing up – followed by mini Mars bars.
Back in the UK, those intent on promoting the idea that Britain has lately undergone a food revolution and developed a food culture that can hold its head up, not only in Europe but in the world at large, would hasten to point out that many of these products are reminiscent of the stock list of a 1960s convenience store, and not at all representative of the way most British people now like to eat. If this is the case, then what exactly is ‘British food’ nowadays?
In reality, this is a bit of a puzzle, both to the British and to other nationalities. Up until the 1970s, we had something that amounted to a national cuisine, a repertoire of commonly eaten dishes which most citizens would agree were British; toad-in-the-hole, roast meat with roast potatoes, Lancashire hotpot, boiled beef and carrots, mince and potatoes, bangers and mash, tripe with onions, boiled ham with parsley sauce, broths and hearty soups, shepherd’s pie, oxtail stew, cauliflower cheese, potted shrimp, steak pie, kippers, raised pies, steak and kidney pudding, jellied eel and any number of stick-to-the-ribs puddings. Depending on who you listen to, this cuisine was either a) monotonous and almost invariably badly cooked or b) straightforward, appetizing and wholesome. Either way, at least it was based on native raw ingredients – give or take a few billion packets of gravy powder.
Even then, a certain confusion reigned. In countries with consolidated eating traditions, ‘national’ is the sum of the ‘local’ parts. In Britain, on the other hand, what was once ‘local’ – Cumberland sausage, York ham, Melton Mowbray pie – becomes a ‘national’ dish, which may be a reflection of the absence of regional food pride, or perhaps a sign of desperation about the thinness of Britain’s food culture.
In 1998, the food