Find a picturesque picnic spot and create your own unique dining space.
Eating outdoors, be it a picnic, a barbecue or a campfire fry-up, brings out an optimistic streak in the British. Appetites will be sharpened by the fresh air and there is an opportunity to lounge on the grass or seashore, to admire a wonderful view, or to feel a sense of freedom. English literature is full of these events both real and imagined. Sometimes it might be admitted that conditions were less than ideal, and the weather is frequently blamed – as if everyone imagined that the usual changeable climate might behave itself simply because someone had arranged an outdoor party.
What an attraction the picnic has for us, what a hold on our imagination. All the elements that feed into our ideas of the event can be seen in the tangled strands of its history. The word, of mysterious origin, arrived in the English language in the late 18th century and quickly came to mean a pleasure excursion including an outdoor meal, often one to which each person made a contribution by providing some food.
There were precedents for eating outside: hunting parties and informal collations taken in special banqueting houses, set on the roofs of mansions or at special viewpoints in the grounds of large houses. But at about this time, the Romantic movement also brought new ideas about the joys of being outdoors, especially in rugged scenery. William and Dorothy Wordsworth and their circle were notable picnickers.
However much food we might pack into the boot of the car, we are amateurs compared to the Victorians. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) provided a menu, surely idealised, for a picnic for 40 people. Large quantities of cold cuts and meat pies, lobsters, baskets full of salad, jar upon jar of stewed fruit, pastry of various descriptions, a large Christmas pudding (‘this must be good’), fruit, cheese and the wherewithal for tea – bread, butter and three types of cake – are all listed. Ale, ginger beer, soda water, lemonade, sherry, claret, champagne and brandy are suggested as beverages. The outdoors not only sharpens the appetite – it also sharpens the thirst.
The informality of eating outside still has great appeal, but it must have been appreciated much more in the past. James Tissot’s painting The Picnic (1876) shows some of the joys of such an occasion. The young men and women of the party flirt in an urban setting, the garden of his own home in London, and there is cake, bread and butter, and a kettle is set on a spirit burner in the foreground. It is autumn, the horse chestnut leaves are golden and brown, and scarves, caps, rugs and shawls are all evident. The season, although late, is clearly no obstacle to frivolous enjoyment of food and company outdoors.
Further freedom, which we take for granted, came with the invention of the motor car. Picnics for Motorists, by Mrs Leyel, was published in 1936, with menus of mousses and galantines, jellied cold dishes, extravagant pies and meat dishes. ‘Everything seemed to contain truffles’, said the friend who lent her copy to me. This isn’t true, but the book has the aura of a time when money was no particular object, and ladies of leisure, although they might have learnt their way around a kitchen, undoubtedly had someone to do the washing-up while they packed a basket of delicacies and drove off to meet friends at some beauty spot. Mrs Leyel was an advocate of the thermos flask, although many took a kettle along and made tea fresh as required.
Most importantly, a picnic is an escape, a break from routine. Ambrose Heath wrote of this in Good Sandwiches and Picnic Dishes (1948): ‘For children it is an ineffable glance into Paradise, when the shackles of restraint are unloosed, and for far too brief a while realities withdraw.’ He captures the curious tension, evident in all the best picnics: a mixture of spontaneity and good planning. The sense of time apart is emphasised again and again in descriptions of good picnics.
Ambrose Heath makes another very important point: it is best to agree a destination in advance, for if you set off with no particular place in mind, you may well find yourself ‘shot out upon some unlovely roadside with no more than an unappetising row of modern brick cottages and a farmyard midden’ – or these days, more likely, its modern equivalent, the car park of a motorway services.
The food and destination are within one’s control, but picnics have many potential hazards – weather, wasps, stray animals. I’ve sat in the car drinking tea from a flask while heavy rain blurred a view of tarmac, and I’ve cowered behind a wall in a hailstorm, trying to eat disintegrating cake from frozen fingers. Elizabeth David described an unnerving experience during a picnic in India (the members of the British Raj were great picnickers), of eating while surrounded by a circle of stray dogs that howled in unison. Another intrusion into the bucolic ideal is shown in the late 19th-century painting, The Pig’s Picnic, by William Weekes. A broad damask cloth is spread on the ground, elaborately set with cutlery and glasses. A stack of plates, bottles of champagne, a neatly garnished pie and a roast of beef await the company. The lone guardian of all this, a small boy, lies asleep, his shiny top hat discarded, while unobserved, a large black pig advances with a mixture of caution and curiosity across the snowy cloth towards a brilliant carmine lobster. Sometimes, one feels that lurking disaster is also part of the picnic mix, to be enjoyed retrospectively.
Provisions for travellers and food for walks have an element of necessity about them. They need to be easy to carry and easy to eat and to satisfy. There is the possibility of being tetchy and bored with carrying the picnic, but the probability of an appetite sharpened by an early start and chilly weather. Eating a meal outdoors is a product, not the object, of the day. But there is no reason why it should not be good and pleasurable, and a well-made sandwich from home cheers a long journey in a way that no pre-packed offering can. During my childhood there was a very clear division between taking a picnic for a day out and taking food because one was on a journey. It was nicer, and of course cheaper, to take food from home and not be at the mercy of cafés or railway-station buffets. That the food was usually egg sandwiches and a flask of tea, whatever the occasion, was beside the point.
In the English love affair with eating al fresco, the barbecue is a late arrival. It is noticeable that, although many authors from the past would have been familiar with the notion of spit-roasting and cooking on a grid-iron in the kitchen, the idea of carrying this into the outdoors is limited. Grand celebratory events such as ox-roasts aside, few people seem to have grilled their food outdoors (an exception being Sir Walter Scott, whose salmon-fishing expeditions to the Tweed often ended with cooking the catch). As with so much else to do with food, the idea arrived in the mid-20th century. The North American influence – burgers, steaks and a plethora of sauces – and foreign holidays, in which the British found themselves salivating at the smells of meat or fish grilled over charcoal on the shores of the Mediterranean, played a large part in the rise of the barbecue’s popularity. It is difficult to imagine this as a novelty now, when every fine weekend seems to lead to the mass lighting of charcoal across the country, but a barbecue still captures that essential of eating outdoors, a space outside ordinary time, a bit of a party.
Campfire cookery was, and remains, a many and varied thing. The modern-day romantic is likely to be found practising bushcraft, regarding the woods as a kind of outdoor kitchen. Serious campers, intent on long-distance walks or bagging Munros, tend to believe in packaged food and gas-fired stoves, and, indeed, the old-fashioned campfire tends to be discouraged in many places. It was essential for the tramp of the past with a billycan, and for eccentrics like the writer and artist Dorothy Hartley who walked through the English countryside of the 1920s and 1930s. This kind of necessity is not desirable in outdoor food. Countrymen and women of the past, obliged to work outdoors and often to eat their modest midday meals there too, had reservations about eating outside for pleasure and retreated indoors.
Wealthy and leisured picnickers, on the other hand, would light a fire as part of an al fresco meal, sometimes just to boil a kettle, sometimes more. The Reverend Francis Kilvert described many picnics in his diary during the 19th century, one of which included a disastrous attempt to boil a pot of new potatoes over a campfire. My Aunty Nan, the queen of outdoor cooking in my family (and of outdoor food in general) was always ready to spend time under canvas. She and my Uncle Jack happily camped in the field adjacent to our farmhouse every May, even though they actually lived in a village only a mile away. They had many reasons for doing this, but much of the appeal seemed to be a campfire, daily breakfast fry-ups, and once again, that sense of space beyond routine.