9.

Crumble

‘British food is a celebration of comfort eating. Our traditional savoury recipes are all about warmth and sustenance, our puddings a roll call of sweet jollity, our cakes are deep and cosy. We appear to be a nation in need of a big, warm hug.’

– Nigel Slater

Liz and I both love cooking, but we’re very different cooks. I’m experimental and adventurous, ambitious in scope, whereas Liz is more practical, one of those people who can open the fridge to find nothing but a bendy carrot, an old potato and some lard and still somehow create a delicious meal from it. I regularly cook beautiful meals from the cookbook of a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant, taking six hours and using every pan and utensil, and then fall down on my simple and enduring inability to cook rice properly.

It was slightly depressing to read a report on cooking by market researchers Mintel and learn that this makes us absolutely stereotypical of British households. As a rule, men overreach and make everything into a huge production, while women can somehow get a tasty old favourite on to the table in twenty minutes.

When I ask Liz when she first made crumble, she said, ‘I’ve always known how to make it.’ When Felicity Cloake did rhubarb crumble for her long-running ‘How to make the perfect …’ series in the Guardian and asked around for different recipes, someone responded, ‘Who uses a recipe for crumble?’ It’s as if the knowledge of how to make a good crumble is something we’re born with. Regula Ysewijn, author of Pride and Pudding: The History of British Puddings, Savoury and Sweet, claims it’s our favourite pudding as a nation.

It’s certainly the favourite pudding in our house. A few years ago, Liz found a small supermarket just round the corner that did packets of pre-prepared crumble topping and jars of stewed apples. The resulting dish wasn’t up to her usual standard but it took a minute to prepare and she bought the two ingredients whenever she was passing until, one day, the woman behind the till said, ‘Oh, hello! It’s the crumble lady.’ Liz was so embarrassed she never went back to the shop again.

Today’s crumble is made from scratch. Given that I have a severe allergy to apples, we go for rhubarb. This odd, somewhat mystical vegetable is a perfect case study in British food. Like the tomato and the potato, like Danish bacon and clotted cream, rhubarb is an immigrant to our shores. It was originally found growing along the banks of the River Volga in Siberia and was allegedly introduced to Britain by Marco Polo. Go back far enough in time and almost everything in our diet has transcended international borders.

Accustomed to cold, wet, wintry weather, rhubarb thrived in Yorkshire. I remember my dad growing huge bunches of it on his allotment but I rarely ate it because the way it was prepared at home meant it was sour enough to turn your face in on itself. I had absolutely no idea that we were living just eight miles outside the famous ‘Rhubarb Triangle’. It wasn’t famous to us. I’d never heard of it until I was an adult living in London. Just like our fish and chips and pork pies, I doubt many people I grew up with were even aware that we were sitting on top of culinary treasure.

Reading about forced rhubarb now, it sounds like a product of terroir and skill to rival any food superstar. The land between Morley, Wakefield and Rothwell was planted extensively with rhubarb from the early 1800s and at one point the area accounted for 90 per cent of the world harvest of forced winter rhubarb. ‘Forcing’ is a process that was introduced in 1877 whereby rhubarb is grown for two years in fields that were once fertilized with horse manure, woollen waste from the nearby mills and ‘night soil’ from the nearby bustling cities. Then, when frost hits in November, the plants are taken into long, low, forcing sheds and kept in complete darkness and warm temperatures, traditionally from coal heating but now from diesel. As the leaves wither and turn yellow, the stems grow thick and strong and the carbohydrates stored by the plants in the field turn into glucose. The process creates an appealing fuchsia-pink colour, a tender texture in the stems, thanks to the lack of light for photosynthesis, and a subtler flavour than rhubarb harvested from outside. In 2010, Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb was awarded PDO status by the EU.

Forced rhubarb is harvested from January to March, the pickers doing their back-breaking work by candlelight. Photos taken in the forcing sheds make it look otherworldly and out of time, and the Rhubarb Triangle is, perhaps inevitably, in decline: in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the forcing fields were sold off to build housing for the overspill from cities like Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield and now only twelve growers remain. They’re finding the work increasingly tricky: this product of the Siberian winter needs a good period of frost and the Rhubarb Triangle is in a frost pocket created by the Pennines. Increasingly mild winters are reducing the crop.

Today, there’s no indication of where our rhubarb comes from. It’s labelled in the shop as ‘English organic rhubarb’, but we’re too late in the year for forced rhubarb. Liz chops it up and spreads it on a tray, sprinkles it with water and sugar and puts it in the oven to bake for twenty minutes.

‘I used to make this all the time at university,’ she says. ‘It was just so comforting.’

Now, she rubs some butter into plain flour and adds a mix of golden caster sugar and demerara, ‘to give it a crunch’, adds a pinch of salt and rubs until she has a mixture resembling breadcrumbs, with some bigger, chunkier bits. The rhubarb comes out of the oven, goes into a pie dish and has a thick layer of crumble mix spread over it, before going back in the oven for about thirty-five minutes. And that’s all there is to the crumble itself.

We only started to eat crumbles during the Second World War, when a regular supply of ingredients to make pastry became difficult to obtain. A chunk of the flour can also be replaced by oats or flaked almonds. Like all the best British meals, it’s adaptable to any budget. It’s also a perfect union of scratch cooking and convenience. Because, to go with the crumble, we of course have Bird’s custard: a tablespoon of powder from a tin, mixed with a little milk and sugar into a smooth paste then added to a pan of milk and stirred until it thickens. There are as many recipes for custard online as there are for any other meal, but all of them are howling into a void: there’s simply no point making your own if you’ve got Bird’s – one of those rare products that’s better bought than made and is as good now as it’s always been.

What do we mean when we say food is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, especially when we carve up different meals according to their supposed cuisine of origin?

Is Al Gittner’s spag bol worse than the beef ragù linguine on the menu at Carluccio’s because he serves it with the ‘wrong’-shaped pasta? Is the ‘invented’ chicken tikka masala at your local curry house ‘better’ than the roast beef and Yorkshire pud at your local gastropub because it’s spicier and more exotic, or worse because it’s not truly authentic?

I think any of us, if we think carefully about it, would eventually conclude that, while we might think about authenticity, tradition, value and sourcing, ultimately none of that matters if it doesn’t taste nice. And if traditional British dishes are made well, they’re as nice as any other.

Take Liz’s rhubarb crumble, for instance. The caramelization where the sugar has burned on to the sides of the dish screams simple home cooking, warmth, comfort and quality. Large portions go into white bowls and the whole lot gets smothered in bright yellow custard. The rhubarb is searingly hot and I feel the first mouthful burning its way down my chest. This has to be eaten with care, but appetite takes over and I have to force myself to hold back. As it cools a little, the rhubarb is sharp and edgy, mouth-watering without being too sour. The custard and the crumble mix sweeten it, but not overly so. It’s unbelievably comforting and seems to create its own nostalgia. I can’t remember ever having this dish when I was growing up, but Stoke Newington is home now, Liz and Mildred the dog are my family. Writerly necessity means that, strangely, we’re eating crumble in the blazing summer heat, but it makes us yearn for winters past and eagerly anticipate those to come, when we’ll huddle over our dishes, breathe in the steam and say, ‘Do you remember when we ate crumble on the hottest day of the year?’ Like spag bol on a rainy Tuesday, fish and chips on a sunny seaside evening after cream tea in the afternoon and curry after a few beers in the pub, our best meals remain a product of their environment, even if they aren’t linked directly to the land.

Over the eighteen months I’ve spent researching and writing this book, my basic cooking skills have improved dramatically. Partly, this is because I’ve discovered new methods and techniques. But largely, I’m more mindful of the character of each meal while I’m preparing it. With spag bol, the full English breakfast and roast beef, I’ve learned that, with a little care and attention and some discernment about the quality of the ingredients, they can be elevated to rival the best of any cuisine. I’ve learned what Liz and any competent British cook has always known: simple things, done well, win hearts.

I’ve had some terrible meals along this journey too: breakfasts dissolving into puddles of watery grease; sandwiches that are 90 per cent mayonnaise and 10 per cent wet cloth; curries that seem to be made from perfectly neat, identical blocks of something fibrous that is supposedly chicken (but definitely isn’t) served in tepid tomato soup with a sprinkle of Schwartz curry powder; and, of course, my self-inflicted spaghetti Barnsleyaise.

Most of the time they were bad simply because the people preparing them couldn’t give a toss, serving a commodity they would never dream of eating themselves or exposing their own families to.

Other times, food is awful because it’s gone too far the other way – an experimental mash-up of ingredients, cuisines and flavours catering to a manufactured ‘lifestyle’ that screams, ‘I’m the kind of person who is open and adventurous.’ These are the meals that reveal why certain things have never been brought together before. (We’ve been eating chips for 150 years. Why have we started following the Dutch and Belgian practice of putting mayonnaise on them in the last ten?)

And sometimes you get both together, the ‘diffusion’ of a ‘concept’. A curry that claims to be meltingly hot but isn’t. A TV chef’s branded range of processed meals that are cynically disgusting, all aspiration with nothing behind it. A ‘Mexican’ meal where the restaurant proprietor patiently and patronizingly tried to tell me that he wasn’t cooking Tex-Mex but authentic Mexican food and I had to say, ‘Yes, I know what the difference is, thanks, but this is a microwaved chicken breast and sauce that’s obviously from a jar, on a plate that doesn’t even contain half the ingredients listed on the description of the dish on the menu.’

We’re just as capable of ruining food from anyone else’s cuisine as we are our own. But it’s a peculiar kind of self-loathing that describes this as bringing foreign cuisines ‘down to our level’. This can happen anywhere you go. As well as having an inedible full English in Amsterdam, in my time I’ve had revolting steak frîtes in Paris, terrible tapas in Andalusia and poor tagine in Marrakesh. Any country is as capable of offering sub-standard versions of its own cuisines as it is of mangling others’.

Such is crumble’s simple brilliance, it’s now becoming increasingly popular in France. In 2005, a book by Frenchwoman Camille Le Foll entitled simply Crumble had to be hastily reprinted after it rapidly sold 200,000 copies of its first edition. Around the same time Jacques Chirac was insulting British cuisine, his country was also acquiring an appreciation of English muffins, while cheeses such as Stilton and Stinking Bishop were finding favour in Parisian fromageries. In 2017, Gordon Ramsay won a second Michelin star for his fine-dining restaurant Le Pressoir d’Argent in Bordeaux, where he combines British produce with traditional French culinary style, paired with English wines. Ramsay told the Daily Telegraph, ‘I took a lot of shit when I brought over wines from Kent and venison from Scotland, but the French didn’t turn their noses up at it. They are enjoying it. They were going to hang me upside down in the square, but they love it so much.’

For most of us, for most of history, food wasn’t something you could be fussy about: you ate what you could get hold of. As food security improved around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (aided in no small way by the introduction of the potato) and ideas of national cuisines first started to emerge, Britain quickly established a preference for plainness and lack of fuss, driven by the belief that this was better in terms of quality, and even morally, than sophisticated creative cookery that was both wasteful and sought to disguise the origin of the ingredients. Our huge breakfasts and roast dinners, with generous portions of meat at their centre, were an emphatic statement of the superiority of our land, climate, breeding practices, generous hospitality and lusty appetites.

These were the meals that fuelled the architects of the world’s first Industrial Revolution, which in turn further increased the nation’s prosperity. But the spoils were divided unevenly. Britain industrialized first, quickest and hardest. Countries like France and Italy industrialized later and less dramatically. People there remained tied to the land more closely, for longer, and so kept in touch with a sense of the land and the food that came from it, of regional terroir and local delicacies and traditions, of the importance and nature of a good harvest and simply of food as a natural product. In Britain, this bond between the land and the people wasn’t just stretched, it was surgically sliced. Workers in towns and cities became detached from any sense of where their food came from and had to rely entirely on shops and institutions. Britain’s manufacturers and shopkeepers have always had a fondness for watering down, bulking out and using the cheapest ingredients they can find – it wasn’t even illegal to adulterate food with poison until 1875 – so the expectations of what poor people were able to eat began to diminish, setting up a cycle where the ready availability of cheap food is still considered more important by many than quality or ingredients.

Add to this the snobbishness of the class system, and even where working-class, ghetto ingenuity threw up something like fish and chips, which provided hot, cheap, nutritious food at prices affordable to anyone, it was decried by people who thought they knew better. Even the most well-meaning researchers at the BBC are complicit in this. In early 2018, the otherwise brilliant programme Back in Time for Tea took one family through a century of northern working-class diets. When they reached the 1920s and 1930s, fish and chips were not mentioned once – even when the family in question went to Blackpool! In reality, a family such as the one featured would have been eating tasty, wholesome fish and chips two or three times a week.

At the time when the majority of the British working population were being separated from the land, this divorce must not have felt like much of a problem – in fact, it was seen as the very opposite. Britain was a powerhouse, the most advanced country in the world. Progress and perfection would bring prosperity for all. Food production became scientific, mechanized and profit-driven. We invented modern cheese production and gave it away free to the world. We did nothing to protect the recipes or processes that made our cheeses or our beers world famous – the commercial trademark was all that mattered. We happily became a nation that was utterly dependent on imported food, because we would always have superior goods and technologies to sell in return – or so we thought until German U-boats came long.

But inequality prevailed. Class seems to have been the main factor in determining what British people ate between 1900 and 1945. While late-Victorian and Edwardian middle-class diets were becoming ever more varied and interesting, agricultural labourers and the city poor subsisted on bread, sugar, treacle, dripping and suet, bacon, milk, cheese, tea and the odd bit of meat, with fish and chips as a welcome treat.

That’s why we jump too quickly to blame the parlous state of late-twentieth-century British food on rationing. The nationalization of milk- and cheese-making is evidence of how, from a discerning point of view, the Second World War flattened out the British diet and made it duller. But when you look at the same picture from the perspective of a northern industrial worker, the effect is quite different: an averaging, a flattening, brings some things down but it also lifts other parts up. While the black market ensured that those with means still ate better than their inferiors, the average diet of the working family improved greatly during the war and its immediate aftermath. Questionnaires given out in government-run Communal Feeding Centres – quickly renamed ‘British Restaurants’ – showed that two thirds of their clientele hoped they would continue after the war. Despite being officially disbanded in 1947, many survived well into the 1950s. Those who had enjoyed quality and variety before the war saw this destroyed by rationing. But for most of the population, bland monotony was a significant improvement on what had gone before. In 1946, Orwell was commissioned to write a long essay on ‘Food in Britain’ by the British Council. He painted such a glowing picture that the piece was not published at the time, because it was considered ‘unfortunate and unwise’ to publish it for its intended audience, ‘the continental reader’, given the deprivations in Europe.

The criticism that should be aimed at post-war British food, then, is how it allowed itself to be surpassed so dramatically by continental cuisines as they gradually recovered from the effects of the war.

The new cuisines that arrived with increased immigration seemed even fresher and more exciting than they would have anyway. It’s no surprise that those who could afford it quickly adopted meals like curry and spag bol. As foreign travel became more affordable, our horizons spread. When we began to compare exotic foods eaten on holiday with a diminished local cuisine at home, it’s no surprise many of us started to regard British food as inferior. It rapidly became a reflexive habit.

And the stuff we ate every day did itself no favours. Yoked to desks and machines, we began to prioritize the convenience of sandwiches over the intimacy and communion of family mealtimes. Manufacturers who took pride in business and brands rather than in ingredients and terroir began to use technology to make things cheaper rather than making them better,fn1 until we get tins of ‘minced beef’ that smell the same as dog meat, bacon sandwiches containing gossamer-thin strips of something that looks like a child’s drawing of bacon they remember seeing a week ago, and fish-and-chip shops that can’t even be bothered to make their own chips and buy in McCain’s instead.

Among affluent, middle-class food lovers, the link with the land is being re-established. The food revolution of the last twenty years has traceability, sustainability, naturalness and relationships with producers at its very core. This is a very big part of why, at a broad level, there’s a perceived improvement in the quality of food in Britain. But the quest for ‘authenticity’ that often accompanies the genuine enjoyment of quality produce is also a source of ‘cool hunting’ that renews the class divide in the appreciation of good food. Traditional British food such as pork pie and peas or fish and chips is not cool, partly because it’s old-fashioned, partly because, as we’ve become more sedentary, what was once seen as comforting and wholesome in our cold, damp climate now seems stodgy and unhealthy, but also because this traditional food is accessible, familiar and available. So meals are deconstructed, reinvented or done with a twist, in forms many people can’t afford. Ritual and etiquette are invented and amplified to strengthen these distinctions, so we end up with people paying sixty quid for tea and scones in a fancy hotel and finding them distinctly lacking.

It’s tricky, being proud to be British – more so to be proud of being English. There’s a fine line between pride and jingoism and, as soon as we start to get too vocal, we can cross that line very easily. Most of us haven’t done national pride for so long we’ve forgotten how to do it at all. When people try, it feels like a throwback to the 1950s, clinging on to the death of the empire, and we’re very sensitive to that. Someone in the food industry warned me that Ben Rogers’ book Beef and Liberty, on the history of roast beef as a British icon, was ‘a bit dodgy’, a little xenophobic. It isn’t at all. But it tells the story of a time when many of us were, when beef was strongly linked to jingoistic nationalism. Even describing this time in a neutral manner opens the author to the risk of being tarred as some kind of Farage-esque Little Englander.

So we go too far the other way, conspicuously talking ourselves down, freely telling each other and anyone else who will listen how crap we are as a nation. In 2012, Des Lynam opened the BBC’s coverage of the Euro 2012 football competition with the words, ‘Let the agony begin.’ Later that year, everyone agreed that the 2012 Olympics were going to be an embarrassing farce until their jaws hit the floor thirty seconds into Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony. In the run-up to the 2018 World Cup, it felt like every newspaper carried jokes such as the England team bus being in the short-stay car park at Heathrow and, when they started scoring goals, no one quite knew how to cope, with many fans insisting even a 6–1 victory was entirely down to poor opposition rather than any skill on our own side. And I know of no other people in the world who are so quick to agree that their national cuisine is the worst in the world, when it patently isn’t.

But there is a middle way. Beer and beef are modest, democratic pleasures. At their best – like they are at Matt Slocombe’s Crown at Woolhope – they’re as good as any cuisine from anywhere else in the world. Secretly, we know this, just as we know the full English breakfast is the greatest in the world and good fish and chips are worth crossing great distances for. We confess all this if someone with a clipboard asks us what the best things are about being British. When we get it right, our food doesn’t have to look spectacular or taste surprising, and the thanks we get for it are quiet and perfunctory. Yes, it’s good. It’s great. But we’re British, and we don’t have to bang on about it all the time. We are subtle and understated, straightforward and democratic – just like the meals themselves.