CHAPTER 11

Food for All

Edwardian society was distinguished by an orgy of conspicuous waste; a society that senses its impending end tends to throw itself into mad excess. Headed by that symbol of indulgent luxury, King Edward VII, it was to be seen at Biarritz, Cannes, Monte Carlo and even Marienbad consuming a sequence of similar meals characterised by an abundance of cream, butter, sugar and animal protein. These meals continued on steam yachts and private trains and at opulent country houses where a weekend visit might stretch into weeks complete with horse racing, the massacre of game birds and adulterous liaisons within its own set.

The idea of the British Empire still irradiated this class, bequeathing it with notions of racial superiority; a vague Darwinism had been allowed in suggesting that certain races were better fitted to survive than others. The imperialist spirit was all about civilising the native, giving it the Christian values that the Anglo-Saxon race fostered. These values had been created by clergymen, boys’ fiction writers, poets, journalists and schoolmasters, and popularised a cult of Anglo-Saxon manhood, a compound abstraction of ideas comprising self-discipline and self-sacrifice, heroism, patriotism, skill at games and a sense of fair play. Square-jawed, blond, muscular and blue-eyed, this paragon disdained creature comforts and was entirely ignorant of gastronomy; in fact he took a distant and diffident attitude to all food.

The social structures behind such a creation were the public schools, which in the second half of the nineteenth century (set more or less free from all government control) had actively encouraged an anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, games-dominated Tory imperialism, which had fuelled all these ideas. It also gave a daily, practical illustration of the unimportance of food in the inedibility of their meals. The end product of such an education tended to be a conservative, cautious Christian gentleman with a stunted imagination who could read Latin and Greek, but who could barely taste the difference between an overdone Brussel sprout and a turnip.

Food for Heroes

In the winter of 1899-1900 many thousands of young men came to enlist for the British infantry, like their blond strong heroes in a G.A. Henty novel, only to find they were unfit for service; malnutrition throughout infancy had stunted growth and given them heart afflictions, poor eyesight, hearing and bad teeth. Thirty-eight per cent were turned away.

The Victorian diet continued much the same until the First World War; for the upper and middle classes the diet depended wholly upon staff:

There is such a multitude of servants that elaborate hierarchies have to be created below stairs. Housekeepers, butlers, valets and personal maids are even more relentlessly snobbish than their masters and mistresses.¹

In all those households it had become habitual to fortify the occupants of the best bedrooms with a cup of tea before rising. Staff had to be up and working very early, preparing the breakfast rolls and the breakfast trays for the ladies who would be served in bed. Cook was expected to be down by 6.45 and to find all the housemaids busy cleaning the house and laying the fires; she began to prepare breakfast which was eaten by 8 a.m. or 8.30 a.m. Prayers often preceded this meal with the staff in serried ranks all kneeling.

In the great country houses breakfast could continue until 10.30:

There were pots of coffee and of China and Indian tea, and various cold drinks. One large sideboard would offer a row of silver dishes, kept hot by spirit lamps, and here there would be poached or scrambled eggs, bacon, ham, sausages, devilled kidneys, haddock and other fish. On an even larger sideboard there would be a choice of cold meats – pressed beef, ham, tongue, galantines – and cold roast pheasant, grouse, partridge, ptarmigan… . A side table would be heaped with fruit – melons, peaches and nectarines, raspberries … there were always scones and toast and marmalade and honey and specially imported jams.²

In lesser households breakfast meant porridge with cream and sugar, buttered eggs and bacon, perhaps a kedgeree, coffee, tea, toast and marmalade.

Working Class Food

In 1886 almost a quarter of adult males earned less than 20 shillings a week, and this remained relatively unchanged until 1914. Charles Booth thought that the urban poor were all more or less ‘in want, ill nourished and poorly clad’. Food expenditure was the largest item in the family budget: nearly sixty per cent of income went on food, most money being spent on meat, which amounted to roughly one quarter of the income. Because of the cost both meat and dairy produce were eaten in small amounts, the staple food being bread and potatoes. The meat was often just a flavouring. ‘The tiny amounts of tea, dripping, butter, jam, sugar, and greens, may be regarded rather in the light of condiments than of food.’³

Charles Booth noticed that if the father was in regular employment family meals became more regular:

For dinner, meat and vegetables are demanded every day. Bacon, eggs and fish find their place at other times. Puddings and tarts are not uncommon, and bread ceases to be the staff of life.

But other observers saw what a struggle achieving the regular meal could be:

Potatoes are an invariable item. Greens may go, butter may go, meat may diminish almost to vanishing point, before potatoes are affected. When potatoes do not appear for dinner, their place will be taken by suet pudding, which will mean that there is no gravy or dripping to eat with them. Treacle, or – as the shop round the corner calls it – ‘golden syrup’ will probably be eaten with the pudding, and the two together will form a midday meal for the mother and children in a working man’s family.⁴

When there was no animal protein sugar took its place which determined the type of starch eaten.

Children’s meals followed a less regular pattern:

Bread is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked; it is always at hand, and needs no plate or spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam or margarine, according to the length of the purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in an ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals a day. Dinner may consist of anything from the joint on Sunday to boiled rice on Friday. Potatoes will play a great part as a rule, at dinner, but breakfast and tea will be bread.⁵

Food was very carefully distributed among the members of the family. The father, the breadwinner, took the lion’s share, especially in animal food. If the family was thrifty the husband would have a morsel of meat or bacon daily throughout the week, but his wife and children would only eat it once a week. The meat is bought for the men; the chief expenditure upon food was on the Sunday joint and the following day it was eaten cold but only by the father. What cooking the mother did tended only to be for her husband as the children made do on ‘pieces’. Most working-class homes had no gas installed, hence no gas ovens; solid fuel was too expensive, so ovens were rare. In the towns in houses with multi-occupancy one oven might do for several families. The eating of food was never a social occasion, except for a funeral which was termed, ‘a slow walk and a cup of tea’.

To boil a neck of mutton with pot herbs on Sunday and make a stew of pieces on Wednesday, often finishes all that has to be done with meat. The intermediate dinners will ring the changes on cold neck, suet pudding, perhaps fried fish or cheap sausages, and rice or potatoes.

Breakfast and tea, with the exception of the husband’s rashers, consist of tea, and bread spread with butter, jam or margarine.’⁶

Nutritionists and social observers were horrified at the paucity of food on which the working classes were obliged to live, and constantly drew the attention of government to their plight:

We see that many a labourer, who has a wife and three or four children, is healthy and a good worker, although he earns only a pound a week. What we do not see is that in order to give him enough food, mother and children habitually go short, for the mother knows that all depends upon the wages of her husband.⁷

Growing children suffered particularly from the shortage of fats, dairy produce, fresh vegetables and fruit in the diet. Rickets became exceedingly common in children before 1914. Symptoms that were noticed were dry scaly skin, thin wispy hair and nutritional deficiencies were thought to be factors contributing to the incidence of disease in infancy and early childhood; over 140,000 deaths of children under five formed almost twenty-eight per cent of all deaths in England and Wales in 1913.⁸

Milk Crisis

By 1900 the diet of the rural labourers had much improved. A survey in 1902 showed that their consumption of raw milk was between 3 and 7 pints of milk per week. Much of this milk would have been used in cooking, for the milk pudding was still a staple part of diet and a large amount of it would have been added to tea, as 8 oz of tea was consumed per person each week. It is interesting to compare that intake with a later survey from 1924-34 of the average middle-class home, which shows that the raw milk consumption was only 2.8 pints; in these homes, however, the consumption of other foods and the range of foods eaten are much greater.

When just before the First World War hospitals began to test the milk they were alarmed to find massive infection with ‘B. Coli’ and other impurities. In 1916-17 twenty out of thirty samples of milk delivered to Manchester hospitals carried more than 1,000,000 bacteria per centilitre. Milk supplied through infant welfare centres in London to mothers and babies in the same year was also generally contaminated.⁹The introduction of tuberculin tests showed how far herds were infected. Measures to improve the quality and hygiene of the milk supply were started by the wholesalers and the larger retailers who were concerned at public alarm and decline in sales. They installed pasteurisation and bottling plants with regular testing of milk.

Within a few months of the outbreak of the First World War there were shortages of foodstuffs for the dairy herds, and many roundsmen had enlisted; the supplies of milk began to fall and the price rose making it too expensive for the poorer families. In 1915 United Dairies was formed from two separate companies; it began by controlling half of the wholesale trade in London, and throughout the war continued to buy up wholesalers and retailers in the milk trade. It claimed its objective was to rationalise the industry and to make economies in horses, dairies, equipment and roundsmen. Though this ‘milk combine’ was attacked in the House of Commons as a dangerous monopoly the Astor Committee appointed to look into the affair was impressed by its efficiency. Nevertheless, it advised the Government to take immediate control of milk supplies, and after the war to buy out the firms that controlled it. In May 1918 the Government accepted this report and authorised the Ministry of Food to take over the premises and plants of milk distributors; the head of United Dairies was brought on to the new Milk Control Board to show the Government how this new nationalised industry should be run. The farmers hated the idea, however, and the Ministry of Food found it impossible to rationalise the milk prices – they had estimates ranging from 2s 9d to 4s 9d per gallon. The Armistice and a change of government swept the whole issue off the map and the Milk Control Board withered away.

In 1918 when the price of milk rose to 10d a quart, local authorities were allowed to provide free milk to the poor from Welfare Centres. Alarmed at the malnutrition in working-class children, the Government also provided free milk and school meals. Various nutritional studies from the beginning of the century had discovered that it was only the young, invalids and the old who drank milk by itself, for other adults drank most of their milk in hot drinks and consumed the rest in milk puddings. Milk consumption changed little in the first thirty years of the century. By 1925 nearly all of the milk sold in London was pasteurised.¹⁰

At all times between 1921 and 1938 at least one out of every ten citizens of working age was unemployed. In seven out of those eighteen years at least three out of every twenty were unemployed; in the worst years one out of five. It was in this era that the Milk Marketing Board was born to stabilise milk prices and to ensure that free milk would be available to all schoolchildren.

Due to pasteurisation there was now a firm belief in the health-giving properties of cows’ milk (which to a certain extent continues today). The League of Nations had summed it up: ‘Milk is the nearest approach we possess to a complete food … it contains all the materials essential for the growth and maintenance of life in a form readily assimilable by the body … milk should represent a large proportion of the diet of every age.’ But compared to other European countries we lagged behind in milk consumption, coming sixth in the league at only drinking 3.5 pints per week while Switzerland drank 8.9 pints. Throughout the 1930s milk drinking took on almost a glamorous appeal; certainly the new milk bars that were springing up in the High Street, copied from America with their chromium-plated interiors, high bar-counter stools and flavoured fruit shakes, were popular with the young throughout the era.

Not unexpectedly the highest consumption of milk was by the rich at 5.30 pints per week, while the poor only drank 1.57 pints. This difference is shown even more dramatically in the case of cream: the wealthy consumed seventy times the amount that the poor did; in fact cream was about as rare in the working-class home as caviare or oysters. Milk was, of course, used in puddings, custards and cereals as well as being added to tea, coffee and cocoa. All classes used milk in puddings, custards and cereals, though the poor used less. It was only in coffee that there was a noticeable class difference as the poor hardly ever drank it.

The Milk in Schools scheme which began in 1934 supplied a third of a pint of milk daily to half of elementary schoolchildren, increasing their consumption to 22 million gallons a year. By 1939 it was discovered that twelve-year-old boys were three inches taller and eleven pounds heavier than their fathers had been twenty years earlier. The Milk Nutrition Committee in 1938-9 found that schoolchildren on free milk showed quicker aptitude and intelligence.

The highest raw milk intake belongs to the 1950s where we drank 4.78 pints per person per week, compared to 1985 where our consumption was only 3.82.¹¹This, I would suggest, was due to the end of rationing in 1953 where the range of foods available was limited and the milk pudding was still a fixture on the dining table. But after this peak milk consumption fell, possibly due to public awareness of milk being a source of saturated fat. From then on skimmed milk began to go on sale, and though whole fat milk fell by eight per cent skimmed milk sales more than trebled.

J. Lyons & Co. Ltd

In the midst of the century almost every town and city in the British Isles had a catering establishment with J. Lyons’ name upon it, while nearly every kitchen in the land had his tea or cakes. How did part of our diet become so standardised? J. Lyons & Co. Ltd. was born from the Temperance movement of the late Victorian period.

Because in towns the provision of catering facilities for the growing tribe of office workers and shop girls was so rudimentary and largely based upon the public house, Dining Rooms began to spring up serving cheap, simple food. The Temperance movement then began to open public coffee houses, where people could sit in comfortable surroundings, which were almost exact replicas of their alcoholic cousins. After the initial success these places began to lose custom; people could happily drink ten pints of beer but failed to drink more than two cups of coffee. To save themselves, coffee tavern proprietors began to serve food; sandwiches, sausages, Melton Mowbray pies, pastries and bread. The motto of one such chain, Pearce & Plenty, was ‘Quality, Economy, Despatch’. There, a lunchtime menu was: steak pudding and potatoes 5d, two sausages and potatoes 4d with tea at 1d or 1¹/2d. Around the same time the Express Dairy opened ‘milk and bun’ shops.

The Lyons business was run by two families, the Salmons and the Glucksteins, who were so bonded by intermarriage that they almost formed one family group. They were well known for a thriving tobacco business called Salmon & Gluckstein and when Montague Gluckstein (who had noticed how inadequate the food was at exhibitions) wanted to go into catering they felt a new name should be chosen. Montague’s brother Isadore was engaged to a girl who had a distant relation running a stall at the Liverpool Exhibition; as he had some experience they approached him and offered him a job. This included giving the new scheme his name, although the entrepreneurs behind it remained Salmon & Gluckstein. His name was Joseph Lyons (later chairman of the public company), who was then credited with the idea of the Joe Lyons teashops. He began with a tea pavilion at a Newcastle exhibition in the 1890s; when the exhibition closed, Lyons continued to keep the tea pavilion open and hired a Hungarian orchestra at a cost of £150 per week to provide the entertainment. The tea pavilion flourished, leading to a chain of teashops uniform in price and decoration. The menu was lighter and more sophisticated than those of Pearce & Plenty, appealing to lady shoppers and the growing army of girl typists. Their cheapness, speed and cleanliness became the Lyons watchwords. In the 1920s the profit on a full-scale meal in a teashop was reckoned to be less than a farthing.

They had triumphed in exhibition catering, leading to a chain of teashops and exploiting the Temperance market; they then assailed that temple of gastronomy – the high-class restaurant. The Trocadero opened in 1896 on a site that the caterers described as ‘the centre of pleasure-seeking London’. It was slowly being accepted that it could be respectable to take women out to dine and even to entertain guests in restaurants. ‘Men don’t dine at their clubs nowadays; they go with their wives or the wives of others to partake of the restaurant dinner … they have become the greatest feature of the Night Side of London high life.’¹²At the Trocadero you could have the table d’hôte inclusive of wine for as little as 5s with a regimental band as entertainment. The menu was in French: an Escalope de Veau Charbonnière was priced at 4s; this was an egg- and bread-crumbed piece of veal with mushrooms, aubergines and truffles fried in butter mixed with a few capers. Coffee was sold as Cafe Moka and cost 9d. By 1900 they had also opened the Throgmorton Restaurant directly opposite the Stock Exchange; this had both a high-class restaurant and another dispensing cheap refreshments for city clerks. The first Lyons Corner House opened in 1909.

Lyons also bought the Regent Palace Hotel at Piccadilly Circus. On the ground floor there was the Rotunda Cafe where in the 1920s the in-drink was ‘Gin and It’. The restaurant had a table d’hôte for 2s 3d, where you could start with hors d’oeuvre or a grapefruit en coupe or Crème Santé; the next course was a Filet de Bar Frit Orly or Curry d’Oeuf Madras, followed by the meat course. On offer also might be Pied de Veau Portugaise or Steak and Kidney Pie or Roast Pork Sauce Reinette; the vegetables to accompany them might be Panais à la Crème or Pommes Mousseline. To follow there might be either a Baked Apple or Glace à l’Orange or Fruits Frais. I can just remember food like this and it was dreadful. The food was basically British, cooked without care, given a French title simply because it was thought the diner would be conned into thinking it better. The disdain for British food was just as great. Although Steak and Kidney Pie was popular (a pity that they did not cook the dish as a pudding, i.e. wrapped in suet, using absolutely vital ox kidney needed for the dish – both would have been even more popular), the general attitude coloured the kitchen’s attitude, providing a choice of products not at their best cooked in an offhand way. By this time the British public knew no better, so they flocked to these huge and gaudy eateries and ate happily.

Lyons became the country’s largest caterer in the inter-war period; it had 250 teashops, three Corner Houses, each capable of seating up to 3,000 people and both the Trocadero and Throgmorton’s. Lyons’ waitresses, or the ‘nippys’ as they were called, were accepted as a symbol of public service. The cups of tea sold in the shops were produced from the finest blends. The most popular meal in the teashops, roast beef and two vegetables, cost only 10d and a table d’hôte lunch at a Corner House cost as little as 1s 6d. The most expensive item was a lobster mayonnaise at 2s 6d, but hors d’oeuvres ranged from 4d-9d. The price was dependent on what you chose: there were tinned sardines, anchovies and celery, hard boiled egg in mayonnaise, diced beetroot and sliced cucumber in malt vinegar, soused herring, potato salad, tomato salad, Russian salad, cole-slaw, sweet corn with diced red pepper (from a tin), cocktail onions, marinaded mushrooms (also from a tin), slices of honeydew melon with dyed scarlet maraschino cherries, diced ham and gherkins. All of these were immensely popular; their strong and variegated colours had aesthetic appeal which was so sadly missing then from most British food. Soups cost 5d, whitebait 9d, mutton cutlet 8d, roast beef 11d, ices from 3d upwards and meringue Chantilly 5d.

The Corner Houses had many different departments, and there were three orchestras on different floors. Both in their menus and in their restaurants, they used French words and titles cleverly, words that were not too obscure but still gave that element of style and mystery, to make their lower middle class customers feel that they were visiting something classy and special, and yet still affordable. There was Cafe de Petit Repas open day and late into the night, and a cocktail lounge called L’Apéritif. On the menu there was Clear Jardinière and Jugged Hare Bourguignonne. There was also a Sun Vita Cafe selling Soda Fountain specialities; hairdressing shops; wine and spirit counters; flowers, chocolates, cakes, candy, cigarettes and grocery counters – and a theatre ticket office.

Because of the popularity of the food, products began to be sold from a counter near the entrance of the shop as early as 1904. First, it was packages of tea, then cakes, ice cream and bread. Special recipes were devised by Lyons’ laboratories to reflect public taste, while factory buildings were specially designed by Lyons’ engineers to cope with production on a scale hitherto unknown. Visitors to their site were astonished to learn that the daily production of Swiss rolls could be measured in miles.¹³

Lyons owed its success to brilliant planning and a sensitivity to seeing public needs and trends, combined with a belief in a tiny profit margin on individual products, but huge sales of them. To a large degree it standardised food tastes to a very limited range of flavours and ingredients (banned from its food, for example were all herbs except parsley and mint, as well as garlic, black pepper, cayenne, paprika and, of course, chilli). Even though it introduced foreign dishes like kebabs and moussaka in the Corner Houses they were reduced to a blandness suitable for the British palate. It also took over much of the traditional roles of home baking: bread, pies and tarts could now easily be bought, even delivered and the term ‘baking day’ became an anachronism. Yet making cakes, especially sponges or fruit cakes, still remained a central part of home cooking and perhaps the most popular.

First World War

Though wages remained the same in 1914 as they had been in 1895 the cost of living rose sharply from 1910-13 bringing a rash of strikes not seen since the early 1890s. The Edwardian bubble had burst, more or less with the death of the King in 1910. In the next few years the real world would obtrude in a far more bleak manner than the rituals of Black Ascot, when the Royal Enclosure went into deepest mourning but still did not forgo its champagne and strawberries. In 1912 forty million days were lost through strikes, and emigration rose in those years preceding the war.

It was that Government-manipulated sense of fair play, of fighting against the bullies that brought us into the conflict; though Serbia was seen as a small nation struggling to be independent, no one really cared, but when Germany invaded ‘little Belgium’, trampling on its neutrality, there was a moral cause to unite the public. No one imagined, nor has it yet been fully appreciated, that victory in this terrible war would hinge upon food.

Food policy had been a subject of a Royal Commission since 1905, when the Government realised that with a high amount of imported foods the British Isles would be especially vulnerable at times of war. Four-fifths of Britain’s wheat supplies were imported from Canada making that dangerous journey across the Atlantic; from August 1914 the price of wheat rose from 36s a quarter to 70s in May the following year. The public were asked to make voluntary sacrifices on bread, meat and sugar. Asquith, the Prime Minister, had created five ad hoc committees concerned with food supply by January 1915. With a shortage of imported foods, the British diet changed; a Ministry of Food was established to control and direct supplies, while agriculture was hugely expanded.

David Lloyd George, appointed minister for munitions in 1915, was deeply concerned that munition workers should have adequate nutrition; in 1916 a Health of the Munition Workers’ Committee was set up under the chairmanship of Sir George Newman, who encouraged factories to establish canteens. Already it had been realised that the physical fitness of the worker had an important bearing on the output of the factory. All the new factories had restaurants decorated in pleasant colours which provided breakfast, dinner and tea. A three-course dinner cost 4d, Scotch Broth cost one halfpenny, stew 2d, mince and potatoes 3d, meat pies 3d. The Times of 30 September 1916 stated: ‘The provision of proper meals for the workers is indeed an indispensable condition for the maintenance of output on which our fighting forces depend, not only for victory but for their very lives.’

Today, we would find the food offered in factory canteens uninspiring, but considering that the workers all came from families which had been struggling for decades to alleviate hunger pangs this food would be luxury: chop and mashed potatoes, roast beef, mashed potatoes and vegetables, steak pie and potatoes, liver, onions and potatoes, tripe and onions, fish, parsley sauce and potatoes, fish pie, Shepherd’s pie and puddings all for a few pennies each. Soups were not popular, possibly it was thought because many of them went back to a bowl in the evening which with bread and cheese was supper. They were offered Haricot Bean soup, Spring Soup, Kidney, Tomato, Lentil, Vermicelli, Scotch Broth, Green Pea and Potato– but Scotch Broth was by far the most popular.

At the time of the Armistice in November 1918, one million meals were being served daily in industrial canteens. It was said that if you gave workers a canteen they could be proud of, the canteen would soon be proud of its workers. It was soon learnt that the most efficient method of serving food was to have portions already upon hot plates and to have soup, meat and sweets at separate counters. ‘A factory canteen, apart from its primary object of supplying wholesome food under favourable conditions, has in it great possibilities as a social institution, where workers meet, make friends, and learn to be part of, and take part in, the life of what should be a valuable humanising influence.’¹⁴

Within these war years the whole basis of the factory canteen was explored with astonishing success. Once the war ended and all the food restrictions were lifted, however, industry fell back into apathy. For ten years or so there was comparative stagnation, because of lack of understanding and suspicion of the science of industrial welfare.

For the first two years of the war the food problem in Britain was not acute; in that time plans were made to build up a secret reserve of wheat supplies and sugar rationing was considered. But by June 1916 German U-boats had become a threat to merchant shipping, and when Lloyd George became prime minister in late 1916 he created the role of a Food Controller. According to Sir William Beveridge, by the summer of 1917 ‘complete control over nearly everything eaten and drunk by forty million people’ had been established. Sugar was rationed by January 1916, but there were queues for meat, bread and other products. Two weeks before Christmas 1917, The Times reported long rows of women queuing for margarine outside multiple shops in London, some with infants in their arms and many with children at their skirts. Bread and potatoes were never rationed, but staple prices had to be subsidised in 1917 and potatoes were often in short supply. General rationing was only brought in by February 1918, and this abolished the queuing which had been looked upon with horror. (It was to return with a vengeance in 1940 and became a facet of the British character forever lampooned.)

On the whole the people have been fed and fed, in the circumstances remarkably well. If there has been any class discrimination, it has been the working classes who have benefited by it, as it should be, not those with money or special privileges.¹⁵

Indeed, working-class British women and children were better fed than they had been before 1914, owing to improved employment, canteen meals and easier access to the weekly pay packet. Rationing continued until 1920, but for the first time in the history of this land, there was food for all distributed fairly. Tragically, it was not to last for with peace declared the imperative soon waned; it was to return, but it took another war to provoke it.

The story in Germany was strikingly different; even though in the spring and summer of 1918 German forces had made advances into the Allied lines, there was a crisis within Germany itself. By early summer 1917 military food reserves were being drawn upon to feed civilians; munitions workers were getting only two-thirds of their pre-war calories, the fat ration was down to 4 oz a week and industrial output fell. Civilians severely malnourished so that their immune systems were enfeebled were dying. According to one observer who visited Germany at the end of the war, ‘The people were physically and mentally enfeebled … in a condition of dull depression and lassitude; they had no feeling of national honour; they had completely lost the will to victory.’¹⁶Lack of food, caused by the Allied naval blockade and lack of foresight in planning and rationing what food they had from the beginning of the war, led them in November to negotiate an Armistice.

The Ministry of Food, sadly, was short-lived. It was described by the President of the Food Manufacturers’ Federation as ‘a continual source of irritation to traders and no little yearly expense’. Editorials in The Grocer attacked the idea of a permanent Ministry of Food as being unreasonable and unnecessary, a view that agreed with the general mood throughout the food industry of ending controls and returning to free markets.

In the inter-war years the Co-Operative movement went from strength to strength. By 1929 membership had increased to six million and by the outbreak of war in 1939 to over eight and a half million, taking twenty per cent of the total trade in groceries and provisions and over a quarter of the milk trade. Its shops reflected closely all the current food fads and trends, and during this period moved into the south and west of England, appealing now to the middle classes as well.

Social Upheaval

A new age had begun; the evidence of social injustice was too blatant for the authorities to dismiss any more. In the summer of 1917 the Minister of Education justified the raising of the school-leaving age to fourteen on the grounds that ‘industrial pressure on the child’ should cease. He had already abolished all school fees in elementary schools; he was concerned that talent should not be wasted. He appealed to the increased feeling of solidarity generated by the war and argued that conscription, which had caused so much liberal concern, implied that ‘The boundaries of citizenship are not determined by wealth’. Two years later the Government passed a Housing Act which laid on local authorities the duty of surveying the housing needs of their areas and submitting plans for new estates to be subsidised from state funds. Suddenly, the working classes were to be housed and their children freely educated.

One of the effects of war was early marriage; contraceptives were increasingly taken for granted, and every village chemist was now selling them. Not unexpectedly there was a rise in adultery, illegitimacy and divorce. Nonconformist strictures began to look old-fashioned and its canons of behaviour absurd. The moralists picked on women drinking in pubs, their boyish figures and short skirts for denunciation. The war had shattered the sense of security that had cocooned the Victorian age. When husbands, sons and lovers could be blown to bits in the next second people began to live for the present.

The great landowners, feeling the economic chill which nibbled at their assets, sold off some of their land, and one quarter of England and Wales passed from being tenanted land into the possession of farmers in the thirteen years after 1914. Some sold their huge London houses. Devonshire House, built in Piccadilly opposite the Ritz by William Kent in the eighteenth century, was sold for £1,000,000 in 1919 and pulled down in 1924.

In both 1919 and 1920 there was a dramatic wave of strikes; when the General Strike was called in May 1926 it was effectively crushed by voluntary workers from the middle and upper classes who took over the main services, driving buses and trains, and emptying rubbish. The class war was never so fierce and brutal; the top class irradiated by that sense of fair play felt it was being blackmailed by cunning working men with the shadow of Bolshevik Russia behind them.

In a society so disrupted with no beliefs or ideals to unite it, falling into fragmentation like the empire it was about to lose, the food everyone ate was bound to change as radically. Staff had left domestic service in droves for work in the new industries; after the war they failed to return preferring to work in offices and shops. No longer could meals be made by indifferent and resentful servants whose cooking skills (with honourable exceptions) were limited. For the most part, the middle classes were now reduced to one maidservant, who was a glorified char and au pair, and only some households also had a cook.

Of course, for the rich there were still servants, but the food eaten was a very pale shadow of the pre-war diet; both the number of courses and the amount eaten had shrunk. Edwardian pretension had been stripped away, and the need to impress was less urgent. The lessons of the war with its horrible stalemate, armies glued down in mud and blood, where no aristocratic field marshal or monarch made a ha’porth of difference, where the values of sportsmanship and fair play were risible, had been felt by the Establishment, if not absorbed. It was aware that its role in the world had altered dramatically.

Accordingly, the rituals of the meal became more modest as its assessment of itself became more cautious, as apprehensiveness grew over Stalinist Russia. In 1932 on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, and at the height of the Depression, 2,750,000 British people were unemployed, standing in long queues waiting for work outside Labour Exchanges. For these people their diet fell to a level that was barely above subsistence. In this world Hitler was seen by some of the upper classes as a saviour, a bulwark against Communism to be appeased and palliated. This was the world of the society hostesses, where the King who was shortly to abdicate took cocktails and nibbled canapés with his American mistress, a world where the food was influenced by that huge country, its silver screen and its packets of cereals.

British Canned Food

In the early part of the twentieth century canned food was still viewed by certain quarters in society with suspicion; food poisoning scares in the past had scared off the affluent and except for condensed milk and bully beef, most canned foods were too expensive for the working classes. The war helped to change people’s views; soldiers recently returned from the horrors of trench warfare had fond memories of tinned food. Increased production, once free from wartime restrictions, brought fierce competition among canned producers, which reduced the price dramatically and imports of canned foods soared.

In 1922 there were only three firms in Britain producing canned foods, compared with over 2,000 in the United States. The British share in this market was absurdly low: canned meat was only fifteen per cent, canned fish 1.8, canned vegetables 5.1, canned fruit in syrup 2.7 and condensed milk 23.9. In 1926 Smedleys was the first to introduce a fully automatic, high-speed pea-canning plant, after their chairman, S.W. Smedley, had visited the United States. Peas remained the most important British product to be canned. Within a short time other British canners were turning out British fruits and vegetables to compete with the imported varieties: strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, cherries, damsons and apples.

By the early 1930s all sorts of vegetables could be bought in cans: asparagus, beetroot, baked beans with pork, carrots, celery, mushrooms and spinach. Over eighty factories were now in production in the UK and with prices falling steadily because of the Depression, the consumption of canned foods became commonplace. Between 1920 and 1938 the consumption of canned vegetables, fish, meat and fruits rose dramatically. However, this did not halt the popularity of the imported cans, except for canned peas. To keep the factory working throughout the year, British canners used the dried pea and rehydrated it; they marketed them as ‘Readi-Peas’ and found they were an immediate success.¹⁷

In 1939 Ambrose Heath compiled a book of recipes to be made from canned foods, which includes a list of the cans available. There are nearly sixty soups, including five types of consommé, over ninety fish, including five types of anchovies, one with pistachios, and twelve types of herring, including one smoked, as well as tinned ormers, oysters and pike quenelles. He lists 218 types of meat, including sixteen beef; chicken comes in eleven different versions, including tamales; there are fourteen different types of galantine, seven types of lamb and eighteen of meat roll. There are 100 kinds of vegetables, including okra, sea kale, samphire and truffles; ninety-seven varieties of fruit, thirteen sauces and forty miscellaneous, which includes four different types of spaghetti.¹⁸Heath himself thought the scope of his list was ‘portentous if not horrific’, but it was not even comprehensive. He revised and republished the book for wartime in 1943 under the new title Good Dishes from Tinned, but as these goods were by then all on the point system most of them would have been unlikely to have endured. (The point system was a form of rationing whereby goods carried their own ratings and were available according to supply. Each consumer had a set number of weekly points.)

Diet in the Thirties

In a poll taken in the late 1930s Mrs Beeton’s book was used by nearly half of the housewives, though many more read it from the upper social grades (determined mainly by income) than the poorer. The next most popular cookery books were books from MacDougall’s Flour, or the gas or electric companies. Gas cookers were used by three-quarters of the population and very few used electric. Solid fuel cooking was even lower, but as the survey was only in urban areas that would have been expected. The most popular food cooked at home was cakes followed by soups, then jams and preserves. Home-made soups were particularly popular in London, Glasgow and Newcastle while jam-making appealed particularly to housewives in Cardiff and Liverpool.

With milk now delivered twice a day and meat, fish and greengroceries delivered every day or every other day, the housewife needed only to buy enough perishable food for a day, but following the American example, domestic refrigerators were being installed and the newest flats and houses had kitchens with spaces made for them. Forty per cent of the top social grade had a refrigerator but only sixteen per cent of the next grade down and the lower grades had none; three-quarters of those refrigerators were electric. (In the thirties my grandparents had a small gas refrigerator table height, while we had a tall electric one.) As was to be expected, London was the area that had the highest proportion of refrigerators installed.

The percentage of family income spent on food declines steadily as the social scale rose. The poor spent just over half (those with less than 10s per head per week) while the wealthiest group spent a little under one-eighth. A male over fourteen spent 5s 11d a week. This is at prices prevailing in 1933. The highest number of people across the classes stored enough food in the home to last a week; in fact the middle income groups stored more food than either the poorest or the wealthiest. One-fifth of people kept only sufficient food in reserve to cover a single day.

The highest proportion of people ate breakfast between eight and nine; all classes had bread, rolls or toast with butter, only the poor also ate margarine while only the rich had marmalade. Rather more of the rich tended to have a cooked breakfast than the poor; over seventy per cent of the rich ate eggs, bacon or ham while only thirty per cent of the poor did so. Taking fruit juice also declined steadily from rich to poor as did eating tomatoes. A working-class breakfast without a very strong cup of tea was unthinkable. Coffee was only drunk by the rich and was a sign of social standing. In all social scales except the wealthiest ‘dinner’ was a much more popular designation for the midday meal than ‘lunch’. (Seventy years later this designation is not so cut and dried: ‘dinner’ remains the name only in the labouring classes while ‘lunch’ is used by almost everyone else.)

The food eaten at this meal also changed with each class, except for meat which appears classless, though lower income groups ate more offal. While the rich ate fish the poor were choosy; all classes ate potatoes but the rich ate more green vegetables, fruit and salad, which the poor entirely ignored. Half the population, of whatever class, ate this meal at home. Forty per cent of the rich ate at a restaurant while only four per cent of the poor did so; the lower income groups tended to take packed food while the rich had never heard of such a practice. There were two types of tea eaten, afternoon tea and high tea, but at both the same beverage is drunk. The time the meal is eaten designated the type. Afternoon tea in well-to-do homes was taken from 4 p.m. to 4.30 p.m., but as one descends the social scale the tea-time hour became later and later; yet as the working man’s day became shorter, high tea was eaten when he returned home. The average time in 1933 was around 5 p.m. instead of 6 p.m. or even 6.30 p.m., as was the case before 1914. At afternoon tea bread and butter and cakes were served, but at high tea there were potted meats, pies, sausages and ham and even fish and chips. At weekends crumpets, muffins and a choice of cakes were offered at afternoon tea. Hot cooked meats were not the only difference in high tea: margarine and sometimes dripping were on the table instead of butter; potatoes and other vegetables were sometimes eaten as well as puddings. What was similar was that jams and preserves were on the table with cakes, buns and pastries. (Seventy years later both these meals have almost vanished entirely, except as part of a day’s trip out.)

The names for the evening meal also divided the classes sharply: dinner was only used by the highest social class; supper gained ground as one moved down the social scale. Even the middle classes preferred to use the word supper. In the poorest working class group only seven per cent ate anything after high tea. The wealthy ate dinner between 7.30 p.m. and 8 p.m., while the poor ate supper after 9 p.m. Forty per cent of the rich began their dinner with soup or fish; they tended to eat more poultry and game than meats and green vegetables and salads, while they also ate more fruit and cheese than at earlier meals. The working classes ate fish and potatoes, cheese and bread, and drank tea or cocoa.

Less than half of the meat eaten in the UK then was homebred; half the supplies of lamb and mutton came from New Zealand; and three-quarters of the bacon and ham came from Denmark. One-third of the meat supply, beef and veal, pork, bacon, poultry and game, was British and meat consumption as a whole was rising; though we were in fourth place, the three leading Commonwealth countries, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, ate more meat than we did.¹⁹ According to the 1930s poll, beef consumption had fallen slightly in recent years, while that of mutton and lamb had risen; it was thought that smaller families demanded smaller joints. Bacon was the one meat that appeared to be classless; the weekly consumption hardly changed from rich to poor, though with beef, mutton and pork less than half was eaten by the poor than the rich. The amount of meat eaten falls steadily as one descends the social scale; the only brake on the British avidity for meat was an economic one. The joint reigned supreme in the British home; prepared meat dishes which were not based on leftover scraps of roasted joint hardly existed. So much for the French influence on our cooking.

The consumption of eggs declined with the social scale; the rich ate around six eggs per head per week, the poor only two. In the 1930s we ate more fish, 12.3 oz than Europe and the United States.²⁰ The rich ate over double the amount of fresh fish than the poor, and surprisingly four times the amount of tinned fish, salmon and sardines being the most popular varieties.

The richest class in this survey²¹ had at least two live-in servants and one gardener, a house with at least ten rooms, a high priced car or more than one car, a luxury flat in town, and children at public or private schools. These were the factory owners, stockbrokers, bankers, business executives and landowners. The poorest lived in a council house or tenements, and were lower grade office or warehouse clerical staff, semi-skilled and unskilled employees.

Other surveys throughout the 1930s had shown that the agricultural worker was among the worst fed of English workers, that thirty-three per cent of children were of sub-normal nutrition, and that the average consumption of fresh milk was 0.3 pints. The Times in 1936 concluded that ‘one half of the population is living on a diet insufficient or ill-designed to maintain health’. Poor families first satisfied their hunger with cheap carbohydrate foods accompanied by innumerable cups of sweetened tea, and only after that might they turn to protein food or fresh vegetables high in vitamins if they could afford it.

Rebirth of a Cuisine

The social upheavals that occurred throughout the war and afterwards caused not only radical changes in what everyone ate, but also made gastronomes rethink some of the basic tenets of good eating. Foremost among them was was Mrs Leyel (1880-1957), a herbalist who opened Culpeper House in Baker Street in 1927. The year before she had published The Magic of Herbs and founded the Society of Herbalists. Just as importantly, in 1925 she published with a friend, Olga Hartley, The Gentle Art of Cookery. This is a remarkable book, and a key book for Elizabeth David who wrote a preface for the 1974 edition. Mrs David believed it to be a ‘small classic of English culinary literature’, and was fascinated and stimulated by Mrs Leyel’s use of the ingredients of Eastern cooking, such as almonds and pistachio nuts, apricots and quinces, saffron and honey, rosewater, mint, dates and sweet spices. Mrs David wondered whether she ever would have learnt to cook at all, ‘had I been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel, with her rather wild and imagination-catching recipes’.

Mrs Leyel was intelligent, civilised and rebellious; she fought the Establishment in two big court cases in the 1920s and won. After the war, deeply shocked at the plight of ex-servicemen, which the Government was ignoring, she raised £350,000 for them by means of a ballot. She was prosecuted immediately under the Lottery Act, won her case, and then faced second charges under the Betting Act; after she had won that case she succeeded in legalising ballots for charity. Unlike Mrs Beeton with her quotation of Miltonic gender definition, Mrs Leyel chose a much more apt quotation from John Ruskin which attempted to define cookery:

It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves, and savoury in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist …

The fundamental point in this astonishing cookery book, which Elizabeth David could not have known as the earliest recipes had not then come to light, is that Mrs Leyel was simply reviving ingredients and recipes which had been loved in Anglo-Norman cookery. There is a chapter on flower recipes with a chrysanthemum salad, a nasturtium salad, eggs cooked with marigold, all of which the English medieval court would have loved, for their beauty as much as their flavour. (As we saw earlier, the French court never used flowers in cooking.) She has a chapter on almonds, giving recipes for soups, pastes and creams, all of which would have been very familiar in medieval cooking; she has another chapter on chestnuts with soups, salads and the most delicious of puddings. Further chapters on soups, fish, eggs and meat with their intelligent comments are all highly individual and owe their attractiveness to the way they have reinterpreted traditional Anglo-Norman culinary inventiveness for a new age.

Mrs Leyel was not alone.

By 1928 I had struck a rich line of research. We had the finest cookery in the world, but it had been nearly lost by neglect; a whole lifetime would not be sufficient for one person to rediscover it.

The words belong to Florence White who founded the English Folk Cookery Association, but there were very few subscribing members, as English cookery was disdained with such snobbish fervour that most people would have paid a subscription to keep away. Florence White gave a series of six weekly broadcasts and the public responded by sending her recipes. The result was Good Things in England published in 1932, which contains 853 recipes and celebrates our culinary heritage. Both these books broke away from Mrs Beeton and the unending new editions of her book, which was constantly being revised by the publishers to meet, what they felt, were the fresh demands of a new age; they were in fact only dissipating the original.

Another cookery writer who recorded the change that occurred after the war was Alice Martineau, who wrote: ‘Food fashions have greatly changed. Large parties where the principal entertainment was the dinner, have given way to brief but well selected menus …’²² Mrs Leyel, Florence White, Alice Martineau and others were part of a brief flowering of English gastronomy, which Arabella Boxer explored recently.²³ She found it regrettable, as must we all, that this trend was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. ‘Such things take time to reach all levels of society, and this one had hardly had time to spread beyond the sophisticated world in London and the south before war was declared, and the country was plunged into austerity.’ A cuisine, if it is to be accepted by all classes in society, is reinterpreted by them and ideas from the working classes, being generally more robust and tasty, are often taken up by the classes above them – mustard and crème brûlée being but two.

English cooking, as practised by rich people of taste (it is a rare combination), was influenced by the United States; a number of American women had married Englishmen of influence, such as Nancy Astor and her niece, Nancy Lancaster, Emerald Cunard and Wallis Simpson. Again, past English culinary triumphs which had been taken to the new colonies in the seventeenth century, were now returning in more sophisticated versions: roast squab served with a grape salad, cheesecakes, new flavours, grapefruit and avocado became fashionable.

The new style of cooking was understated; it eschewed peasant earthiness as one would expect, for we had lost our peasant roots. Fresh produce was now cooked simply, presented elegantly and was eaten with a sharp contrasting sauce. The ingredients were cooked separately, not mixed together as in the French tradition. There was an emphasis on clear soups, and a liking for jellied consommé and aspic-covered chicken; but in an age that was the first to be conscious of dieting and the need to be fashionably thin, one might expect the food to be lighter, for the fish to be briefly poached and the chicken breasts to be grilled. Both would be served with an attractive sauce, of course, such as Sauce Duglère with the fish and that still starring favourite of the Victorians, Devil Sauce made with English mustard, curry powder, cayenne and tabasco mixed with butter, flour and cream. Devilled chicken or game was also a favourite lunch or supper dish, served either hot or cold.

There was a new emphasis on vegetables, cooked briefly and on mixed salads, another American influence. But, oddly enough, here our own royal family led the way. King George V liked to have his vegetables served after the main course as a separate dish. Many households followed this example, serving a vegetable dish alone, and some more enterprising cooks liked to turn them into soufflés. Alice Martineau described the vegetable soufflés made by Lady Wilton’s chef at Melton: ‘a soufflé of small Brussels sprouts, boiled very soft with well-beaten eggs and cream one night, the next, a soufflé of white Jerusalem artichokes or asparagus, and the third night one of spinach which, boiled with cream and whipped up with eggs was a delicate green colour with a brown top’.²⁴

In the 1920s a mixed salad, now a rather tired cliché, was considered a new dish from America. Before salad here had usually only been leaves,²⁵ now it had tomato, cucumber and spring onion mixed in with the leaves. In a little book published in 1925, Green Salads and Fruit Salads, Mrs Leyel, so much our contemporary in her culinary taste, advises ‘purslain, rampion, skirret, scalions and sampier’ with shoots of ‘nettles, tarragon, sorrel and corn salad’ to be added to cos lettuce leaves, and begins her book with John Evelyn’s list of English salad herbs. However, a characteristic recipe for a composite salad at the height of fashion then might be Mrs Martineau’s Hollywood Salad, which had two heads of lettuce, one head of broccoli briefly cooked, four devilled eggs, three small tomatoes, a small tin of sweetcorn, a cup of celery strips with a plain French dressing or the ‘new buttermilk’ dressing to be served at a ladies’ lunch party with baby lobsters cut in halves, very thin wafers of ham and brown bread and butter sandwiches with a powdering of cheese inside. The buttermilk dressing was mayonnaise, onion juice (a particular craze), lemon juice, mustard, paprika, white pepper and thick buttermilk or sour cream.²⁶

Mrs Martineau’s book, published in 1938 at the close of this interwar era, is both pragmatic and advanced in its style and advice. Take her chapters on meat and poultry: a tournedos steak is carefully cut, oiled, seasoned then cooked briefly under a hot grill and served with an anchovy sauce; the lamb cutlets have olive oil rubbed in them; she uses an oatmeal stuffing in a loin of lamb and in pheasant; she advises soy sauce with veal cutlets and even gives a recipe for raw beef sandwiches. Her chicken is spatchcocked and sprinkled with thyme, parsley, onion and mushroom, a young chicken is stuffed with cream crackers, oysters, cooked chestnuts and cream; while her jugged hare has added chocolate, squabs (first eaten in America) are steamed, casseroled and roasted.

It is the lighter dishes that personify this new cooking, however: soups of green peas or asparagus, baked eggs and soufflés, scrambled eggs in black butter with artichokes, soufflés of smoked haddock and savoury custards, crab mousse and fish chowder, steamed scallops and devilled soft roes. Arabella Boxer describes the cuisine: ‘Meals became shorter and more informal, and the dishes themselves more light hearted. Meals were rarely more than three courses, except for a formal dinner, and a more relaxed attitude became the norm.’

Then wartime austerity arrived as complete and daunting as the blackout. Rationing began the whole structure recalled from the First World War: the books were already printed; the hostesses closed their London houses, retired to the country and informed their gardeners that they must dig for victory. Mrs Boxer claims the cuisine then vanished, and when after the war Elizabeth David’s books on Mediterranean food were published they exerted another influence altogether. But did the interwar cuisine really disappear? I very much doubt it; in fact the proof that it had an almost immediate effect upon the middle and lower middle classes resides on my bookshelves.

New Technology and Middle-Class Cooking

The Radiation Cookery Book, which went through eighteen editions from 1927, came with the New World gas oven. These practical guides to cooking given away with the new technology had a more potent influence on the cooking of the nation than any other cookery books. I have the one published in 1935, which belonged to my mother; it has a small section on hors d’oeuvres, another on food for invalids and one on preparation of sweetmeats, such as how to make almond fondant and peppermint creams. There is also a short chapter on vegetarian dishes.

The same social forces that brought the hostesses’ stylish cooking into being, operated also upon the creation and sale of this cookery book. New technology and loss of domestic staff are the two most potent, which propelled the hostess into the kitchen to learn from her one resident cook, and which also made the cookery book give a long section on dinners that could be cooked in the oven without any attention being given to the food inside. Other influences, which I explored briefly earlier, were grouped around the concept of the new woman, no longer chained to a sink or hot stove, but needing and succeeding in being an individual in her own right; cooking and recipes could fade into the background.

The gas oven was an incredible step forward for the cook, because the heat could be controlled from a very low simmer to a blazing boil. By 1939 it was estimated that there were between eight and nine million gas cookers in Britain and that three-quarters of all families had one. The remaining quarter without one were because they lived in areas with no mains gas supply, for by now even the very poor cooked on a gas ring as well as keeping an open fire, which was used for warmth in addition to cooking food. Penny-in-the-slot meters were available from the 1880s, whereby you paid for the gas daily; these were commonplace in all homes except for the rich. Electric cookers made much slower process in being accepted by the public, though they were available from the early 1900s, but the electric heating elements were at first inefficient, in 1914 for example it took 15-20 minutes to boil two pints of water and 35 minutes to preheat an oven. Cookers were much improved throughout the 1920s and by the 1930s the design of saucepans had changed to make them fit more completely on the heating rings which cut the time of cooking by half. Even by 1936 only six per cent of British families cooked by electricity. After the war this rose rapidly to thirty per cent in 1961 and by 1980 electricity had almost half of the market.²⁷

From the early years of the century women had seen electricity as a ‘new servant’, capable of liberating them from household drudgery. The General Electric Company advertised their product by saying as much, the electric home was where cooking was ‘hygienic, uniform and economical, where cleaning is an easy and pleasant job … where ample heating, clean, smokeless, fumeless is always available’. There was an Electrical Association of Women to help promote and sell the product. Their President, a Mrs Ashley, said she wanted electricity to be the best friend of the middle class woman, and of the poor woman. ‘I want the people who have only one servant, or none, to have cheap power in their homes.’²⁸ There was also a range of different electrical appliances which would cut down housework to a few hours a week rather than the twenty-six hours estimated: electric irons, whistling kettles, toasters, portable fires, water heaters and wash-boilers.

Cooking by solid fuel which in some form or other had been done for countless centuries depended upon gruelling labour (hauling coal or logs around) and tiresome chores (cleaning, raking and stoking); all of these vanished. The new machines were easy to clean, simple to use and in addition the cookery books handed out with the ovens explained step by step how to cook a great range of foods. No wonder they were popular.

Naturally, the recipes changed, because the heat could be regulated down to the smallest degree. Sauces were more easily made, for there was little chance now of their burning or sticking; other dishes could be left unattended, with no need for constant basting. What the combination of new technology, few staff and a much more active lifestyle brought about was quick dishes, food that only needed brief cooking and the simplest presentation. (The effect of fresh food being kept in the refrigerator was not yet an influence, as by 1948 only two per cent of the population had one; there were also daily deliveries of every perishable food.)

The women who compiled the Radiation Cookery Book were obviously aware of the cooking of Mrs Leyel, Mrs Martineau, Lady Sysonby and others, and had absorbed much of it, for some of their recipes, such as celery creams, anchovy biscuits, scalloped artichokes and seakale might well have been served at the smartest party. So the book is far from being without sophistication. They give, for example, a recipe for frying parsley, but unlike Mrs Beeton they tell you it should turn to a dark green. The fact that such recipes, with many others typical of the new style of cooking, reached three-quarters of the population has not been properly registered before, because these stylish recipes – Salmi of Game, Roast Teal, Chaudfroid of Chicken – were lost among other more banal ones. The book had also been well grounded in Mrs Beeton and her disciples, representing a sturdier more earthbound cuisine, fuel for the working man such as Tripe and Onions, Toad-in-the-Hole, Sausage Pudding, and Baked Stuffed Heart. There are different cooking times given for a sheep’s, bullock’s or calf ’s heart. This was a common dish in our home, and the blood made a dark rich gravy.

Yet, what a relief, there are no recipes for leftovers. In a recipe for curried mutton, the neck of mutton is uncooked, cut from the bone and chopped into cubes; the same for the soup Hodge-Podge, which is now basically shin of beef or scrag end of mutton with vegetables, pulses, potatoes and dumplings added in the last twenty minutes, casseroled in the oven for over two hours at a very low temperature. The book is full of culinary skill which had been thoroughly adjusted to the new age that the gas oven ushered in. It also obviously had a Scot upon the team, for there are over twenty Scottish recipes, from Cock-a-Leekie and Kail Broth to Free Kirk Pudding and Haggis, but alas, there are only two Welsh recipes and one Irish.

It also makes mistakes, seen from our view. At the end of the book it lists fifty whole dinner menus, which include, enterprisingly, four vegetarian ones; these menus are for a main course with vegetables and a cooked pudding (another section of the book gives cold sweets); in its urgent desire to make the role of the cook in the home an easier one every menu is cooked in the oven and needs no attention through the specified time given – often an hour. Unfortunately, it sometimes suggests vegetables which should not have to endure an hour in the oven beneath the main dish. Both Brussel sprouts and peas are given this treatment, though the root vegetables in other menus benefit from it. Menu 33 suggests a brace of roast pheasants with potatoes, bread sauce and the braised Brussel sprouts cooked with a few bacon rinds, but with these go a Cranberry and Apple tart; elsewhere there is a recipe for making real custard with cream, sugar and egg yolks.

Mistakes are made by everyone: Mrs Martineau in giving a recipe for stuffed aubergines adds a last note: ‘On the stuffing depends the flavour of the dish as the aubergines have none!’ Mrs Leyel tells of an English cook she knew who was asked to fry a vegetable marrow. She flatly refused and explained that it was ‘against nature’ for a vegetable marrow to be fried, it must always be boiled. I was delighted to find in this Radiation Cookery Book instructions for cubing and then frying the marrow in butter.

Second World War

In 1939 Britain was only thirty per cent self-sufficient in food compared with eight-six for Germany; it was urgent that huge changes be made in our agricultural policy. They had, in fact, already begun, for as Nazi Germany had grown powerful, the British Government had started to make some provision for a possible war. In 1936 a Food Defence Plans Department had been set up. British agricultural output had been greatly expanded throughout the 1930s, with the help of subsidies and various marketing schemes; it helped too that the old landed aristocracy was selling out to its tenant farmers who were concerned to work hard at wresting a living from the land. Throughout the war with the help of the Dig for Victory campaign arable acreage rose by half from twelve to eighteen million acres to provide food for the domestic market, so that valuable tonnage could be saved in supplies coming by sea. Unskilled land girls were drafted into the country for a considerable amount of this work; the number of sheep, pigs and poultry fell substantially, though the number of cattle (felt to be essential because of milk) rose by about ten per cent.

One of the most significant advances, however, was the new understanding of the science of nutrition led by such men as John Boyd Orr of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, which had been founded to study the subject. Orr’s previous work in the 1930s on the relationship between poverty, inadequate diet and poor health had been invaluable in discovering the diet for optimum requirements for health and energy. At the outbreak of war Orr calculated that only a third of the population were living above that optimum requirement. ‘The health line of the Home Front may become as important as the Maginot Line,’ warned Orr in 1940.²⁹ The Government was now clear that adequate nutrition was part of the war effort, and that it would be hugely strengthened with an energetic workforce in the factories, the homes and services. It was convinced from the beginning that food must be rationed and that everyone must have a fair share. Orr was an idealist; he believed that the war would destroy a great many nineteenth-century ideas of the supreme importance of trade and money-making. He believed that:

The post-war Government in dealing with food will have as its objective the welfare of the whole population. Supply will be regulated, not by trade interests, but according to the needs of the people, and in price fixing, the price of essential foods will be fixed in accordance with the purchasing power of the poorest.

Orr told the Government that with sufficient bread, fat (butter or margarine), potatoes and oatmeal, there would be no starvation. What worried them was that it was obvious from pre-war surveys that there were deficiencies in calcium, vitamin A and vitamin B1 (caused by a preference for white flour). Margarine was therefore fortified with vitamins A and D and white flour was not used for bread-making. Lord Woolton took over the Ministry of Food in April 1940 and Jack Drummond was appointed to head a food-advice division. From then on the Ministry poured out a steady stream of sensible advice, information, recipes, suggestions and encouragement with brilliant use of radio pulling in known and popular comics like Gert and Daisy (Elsie and Doris Waters) to get over to the public important nutritional facts. Not only was the radio used, there were advertisements everywhere, news flashes in cinema, leaflets and booklets. From them all, the British learnt that eating wisely for health was part of defeating Hitler. If hungry, starch would fill you up. ‘Rations go twice as far this way,’ said the soup advertisements. ‘Start with platefuls of piping hot, thick, appetizing soup, and plenty of bread. It’s filling and satisfying and you can make do with smaller servings of the rationed foods …’

Irene Veal, who wrote a book of recipes for wartime, dedicated it to Lord Woolton, ‘who taught British women to cook wisely’. She continued in her preface:

Never before have the British people been so wisely fed or British women so sensibly interested in cooking. We are acquiring an almost French attitude of mind regarding our food and its careful preparation, and the demand for good and practical recipes is continually increasing.

The public began to understand that vegetables must be cooked briefly, otherwise valuable vitamins would be lost, that the cooking liquid must be saved for soup, that it was good to eat raw vegetables everyday, that carrots were essential for seeing in the dark. They were taught that potatoes contained vitamin C as well as oranges, which with other citrus fruits and bananas were unobtainable. After two years the public were slimmer and livelier and this was not lost on the women. In 1943 one of their most popular magazines, Woman, commented:

Food discoveries that ought to stay long after there’s no stringent need for them are our new habits of eating raw vegetables in salads, raw cabbage and raw carrot; our new wisdom in cooking vegetables so that all the goodness and health-giving qualities stay in; our wartime substitute for a glass of fruit juice which is a glass of the water that the vegetables were cooked in …³⁰

One of Jack Drummond’s innovations was the process of dehydration, which reduced eggs, milk and bananas to a powder; again this saved on shipping space, as did importing boneless meat like ‘spam’ and corned beef. Every home in the land ate both gratefully, though while dried foods were used in cooking (their added nutritional value was well known) the thought of making scrambled eggs from dried egg never stimulated the salivary glands. What food rationing did do was to force everyone to grow their own vegetables; however small a patch people owned, lawns and flower beds were dug up, soil was dug, fertilised and planted with a year round supply of potatoes, vegetables and salads; it also forced people to pick from the wild, blackberries and rosehips, sloes and bullaces for making jams; though sugar was severely rationed, other sweeteners were tried, honey was precious, maple syrup unobtainable, and the herb Sweet Cicely was found to be not all that sweet. Damsons were used for cheese, rowans for jelly, beechnuts made into a butter, pine kernels could be gathered and roasted, the cones used for fuel, chestnuts made into a soup and walnuts pickled.

Books by the French Vicomte de Maudit, the first with a preface by Lloyd George (who really did know his father), was amazingly informative on how to live completely from the wild. He gave recipes for roasted and grilled squirrel and for making squirrel tail soup, for wood pigeon pie and stewed starlings; recipes for making marmalade from just the peel and a sugarless pudding – made from dried fruits; as well as how to cook with flower pots and scallop shells and how to make a water bottle from a brick. There were a host of self-help books published throughout the war years on every possible topic.

But how severe was the rationing? Rationing began in January 1940 for bacon or ham at 4 oz per week; 12 oz of sugar were allowed and 2 oz of tea – so old leaves were re-used. (Coffee was not important enough to be rationed.) Four ounces of fat were allowed, 2 oz each of margarine and butter, and cheese was rationed in May 1941 at 1 oz per week, which was barely a mouthful. Jam, honey and golden syrup, mincemeat, marmalade and lemon curd all went on ration coupons, though the amount varied from 8 oz to 2 lb a month. Extra sugar was allowed in the jam-making season.³¹ A points system allowed for luxuries such as canned salmon, sardines or baked beans, American sausagemeat in a tin, condensed milk or cream crackers; their points value changed, becoming higher as the stores ran low, and so in this way the housewife had the illusion that she enjoyed some freedom of choice. Spam was ubiquitous; it turned up sliced cold with pickled onions for a funeral breakfast, and was chopped up small in vol au vents for a wedding, it was fried in lard or covered in breadcrumbs or batter.

Under such severe limitations could gastronomy survive? Mario Gallati, who was the manager of the Ivy, admitted that sometimes all they had on the menu was tripe and onions and spam, but they had to invent variations on what ingredients they had.

For instance, I used to make a kind of mayonnaise with flour and water put into the mixing machine with vinegar, mustard and a bit of powdered egg. It made me shudder to serve it, but every one took this kind of ‘ersatz’ food very much in their stride.³²

As restaurants could not charge more than 5s for a meal, if they managed to get game birds or salmon, even crayfish and had a supply of vegetables and herbs, they made up their costs by charging far more for the wine. Shooting game depended upon spare cartridges, which were precious so older methods of trapping and snaring were brought back into use.

Most people muddled on and attempted their best to rustle up a meal that would at least be edible, but they failed miserably if they struggled to keep to conventions. Spam was not beefsteak and it was little good pretending otherwise. The natural cooks with a flair for making anything edible into something stylish were unfazed and accepted the challenge, using a large amount of wild foods. Half the battle, they discovered, was not to let on what was the real nature of the food people were eating. Nettle soup, for example, was eaten with far more enthusiasm when people were told it was sage and onion. Theodora Fitzgibbon queued for hours to buy horsemeat and made enormous pâtés and jellied tongues which everyone enjoyed, thinking it was beef; another time she made a pie out of rooks and let them believe it was grouse. When she complained to the butcher that all the offal had disappeared and that:

All the animals seemed to be born without tongues, tails, hearts, kidneys, livers or balls, he winked at me, a great arm went under the counter, and he flung up a half-frozen oxtail. I had never cooked one before, but even today I can taste the thick gravy and see our grease spattered lips as we chewed on the bones. Unrationed rabbit was the salvation for many people in a low income group. Frying was quite difficult, as lard was rationed and olive oil only obtainable at a chemist on a doctor’s prescription, so sometimes we were reduced to liquid paraffin. At least we didn’t suffer from constipation.³³

It was impossible to defend the quality of the wartime sausage. Sausages were unrationed and became a butt for jokes. The manager of my father’s building works referred to them as ‘them breads’. Their ingredients were best not enquired into, as offal was rarely on sale; it was suspected that unmentionable parts of the carcass were minced up and used, but certainly sausages contained a high proportion of cereals and their flavour was feeble. The Ministry of Food had stipulated that the minimum meat content of luncheon sausage, breakfast sausage, meat galantine and polony might not be less than thirty per cent. Before 1939 it had been eighty. They overlooked the fact that when the meat content of sausages is depressed lower than twenty per cent, the flavour of meat falls below the threshhold of taste altogether and the manufacturer might just as well make his sausages with no meat at all.³⁴

People were reduced to strange behaviour:

One Northampton woman who saw a dog dashing out of a butcher’s shop with a large piece of suet in his mouth, followed him on her bicycle and watched him bury the suet. ‘When the dog was safely away I went to the spot and confiscated the hidden treasure … I took home that suet, cut out the mauled part and then made suet pudding.’³⁵

By the third year of the war the nation had adjusted to the new diet; by the end of the war they were not a little surprised to know that they had never been healthier. Child mortality rates had never been so low, fewer mothers had died in childbirth, fewer babies had been stillborn, children were taller and sturdier; this was a reflection of their daily regulation milk, orange juice and halibut liver oil, and added to that trio I recall a most delicious bottle of rose hip juice. There was a much lower rate of tooth decay, deaths from TB were down, there were fewer anaemic women and children. All of this had been achieved when there were fewer doctors, dentists, nurses and health visitors because the majority were all with the armed services. Overall, the rich had eaten a great deal less and the poor had eaten adequately and well. The message was simple: Government food control was able to give society a good mixed diet which benefited their health. Why could they not do it in the future? The answer was that people hated to be under that amount of control, if it was not in wartime conditions. However, rationing would continue for longer than anyone dreamt possible.

The Age of Austerity

When the war finished Britain expected, if not the lap of luxury, at least a few bananas, a haunch of beef, pork with real crackling, a dozen eggs and perhaps, with any luck, half a pint of cream and a bottle of whisky. But it was not to be. The population was alienated as much by the petty regulations as the lack of luxuries that had been common enough in the 1930s. When the public read that a costermonger with a licence for vegetables had been hauled up for selling rhubarb because it was a fruit, or that a restaurant was in trouble for serving asparagus, not lawfully on the same plate with the meat balls but as a separate course, or that a farmer’s wife was fined for serving the Ministry snooper with Devonshire cream for his tea, or a shopkeeper for selling home-made sweets that contained his own ration of sugar, then it lost its temper and heaped most of the blame on the new Labour Government.

The British had to endure food rationing for fourteen years (1939-53) and after the war put up with even more scarcity. Bread was rationed for the first time from 1946 to 1948; the meat ration was cut and even potatoes were rationed for a year. In restaurants bread was also placed on a points system, so it counted as a single dish in a meal which comprised the maximum three dishes. If, however, it was served as bread and cheese or as sardines or baked beans on toast or even Welsh rarebit, it didn’t count as an extra course, unless the customer had soup beforehand and wanted bread with it; they then forfeited a right to have the pudding. There was then the matter of the vanishing dried egg. We had at last, it seemed, grown to love this protein powder and when in the negotiations with the United States over post-war loan schemes, it disappeared, there were questions asked in the House of Commons.

The bakers were furious that bread was rationed and faced with the quantities of form-filling they complained that Britain had become like Nazi Germany. Sadly, the main reason for bread rationing was so that we could send flour to occupied Germany, as the civilians there were having to survive on 1,000 calories a day. Another baker observed bitterly that the quality of British bread – greyish coloured, with a low fat and high chalk content – was so bad it hardly needed rationing at all.

It will ration itself. We have never used worse flour. It is thirty-five percent cattle food.³⁶

There was a housing shortage and if you did have a house, there was not even enough coal to warm one room in it. Bombed cities were trying to clear ruined buildings and rubble, clothes were still rationed, there was no soft fruit in the shops because the Ministry had taken it all to make jam, beer was weak and whisky had vanished entirely. In 1947 there was a freak winter when the snow fell blocking roads and railways with fourteen foot-high snowdrifts and the country was paralysed for weeks. Ice floes were seen off the Norfolk coast, on the hills thousands of sheep lay dead in the snow. Then instead of the spring arriving the floods came; forty miles of the River Severn spilled over, the Thames swelled to the width of three miles below Chertsey and a million people in London were without a water supply. It was the worst winter since 1880. The Government poured money into distress funds, housing drives, farming subsidies, but the food and fuel prospects were worse than ever. The floods had destroyed 80,000 tons of potatoes and a further 70,000 acres of wheat; thirty-two per cent of the hill sheep had died and 30,000 cattle.

What is astonishing is how very conservative the British were in what they refused to eat; they found tuna fish disgusting. I suspect no one knew how to cook it properly, for its dark bloody flesh³⁷ must be placed under a running cold tap until the flesh is bloodless and pale, the colour of tinned tuna. The depths of their revulsion was unleashed when given whalemeat; it was cooked like stewing steak but it tasted fishy, which was the main critical condemnation. Shock and deep horror were felt by all. Again it should have had the cold water treatment before being cooked, or been marinaded in vinegar and spices. This simply illustrates how very reclusive our island race had grown; we had no idea at all of what others ate, no idea at all that whalemeat was a staple in the diet of the Inuit or our recent enemy, the Japanese. (If the last fact had been known, no one would have touched it, such was the depths of feeling.) But how did the Inuit process it and cook it? Did anyone bother to ask? No, we still had immense pride in our own idiosyncrasies which we felt strongly were healthy and normal. Yet there were people in Britain who could cook whalemeat and make it delicious. At one Lyons Corner House they were selling 600 whale steaks a day by 1947 simply by not labelling it. Raymond Postgate wrote that he knew a City restaurant ‘where for months city gents consumed the steaks in great gollops, happily convinced they were eating on the black market and spiting Mr Strachey … If they had known they were not breaking the law they would have left in a huff.’³⁸

The depth of British revulsion was kept for snoek, however. One would think at a time when the butter and meat ration had been cut, the bacon ration halved and after a winter and spring of catastrophe, a new tinned fish which was cheap and unrationed, for it was only on points, would be greeted with delight. Snoek is its South African name; in Australia it is called barracouta (not to be confused with barracuda, a different fish). Snoek (thyrsites atun) lives in the seas of the southern hemisphere, grows to a length of 135 cm (54 inches) and is often smoked. It was planned that ten million tins of this fish would replace Portuguese sardines, whose import was restricted by exchange problems. Wholesalers had already tried it and pronounced it tasteless and unpalatable. But the Minister had already spent £857,000 on the fish and, what is more, eaten it in sandwiches. He had pronounced it ‘good, palatable, but rather dull’. The Government published eight recipes when the first consignment arrived in May 1948: snoek piquante was mashed, mixed with chopped spring onions, vinegar, syrup, pepper and salt, to be eaten cold with salad. It cost 1s 4¹/2d for a half pound tin and took only one point, thirteen points less than red salmon.

Nevertheless the British housewife was unimpressed; by the summer of 1949 more than a third of the snoek imported since 1947 was still unsold. The Ministry hopefully put out more recipes: snoek sandwich spread, snoek pasties, snoek with salad. In September 1947 the price was reduced, but it still remained unsold; three weeks later with tinned tomatoes and various tinned meats it came off the points system, and then people forgot about it. Eighteen months later among the celebrations of the Festival of Britain a large amount of new tins labelled: ‘selected fish food for cats and kittens’, went on sale in the shops.³⁹ The public was biased against the food because it was now suspicious of all Ministry announcements; it disliked the imposition laid upon it of having to eat some new food; besides, the fish was unexciting and it had a ridiculous name, so how could anyone treat a food called snoek seriously? Also, the Ministry recipes were hardly adventurous or imaginative; they were far too cautious. Their piquante was not piquante enough; some curry powder and cayenne might have cheered the fish up. A southern hemisphere fish needed southern hemisphere recipes, but if not that, a few ideas borrowed from the new Jamaican immigrants would have made a huge difference.

Until 1948 there had been very few black and coloured immigrants arriving in England, but in that year 547 immigrants arrived from Jamaica alone. By 1951 the Caribbean population was 15,300 and ten years later it had risen to 171,800; now there were women and children too. The Indian, Pakistani, African and Asian numbers were barely half of this number, but continually rising. There were also Cypriot, Maltese, Hong Kong and Malaysian peoples, all of whom would enrich our cuisine. The new immigrants worked in hospitals and on the railways where there were grave labour shortages, but they met with persistent discrimination and there were serious disturbances with Teddy Boys going ‘niggerhunting’. As always, neighbours complained of cooking smells from curries and spice mixes, which the English thought were offensive.

The dour and depressing kitchen scene across the land was set against the beginnings of mighty changes in our agriculture, which began with the 1947 Agricultural Act passed by the new Labour Government and designed to save the farmer in its structure of subsidies, from the insecurities of pre-war farming. There was an eightfold increase in the use of nitrogen fertilisers between 1953 and 1976. In 1950 there were still 300,000 horses working on farms, by 1979 there were only 3,575; in 1945 there were 563,000 regular full time farm workers, in 1980 there were 133,000.

By 1950 food controls gradually began to lessen. In January milk rationing was suspended; in May hotels and restaurants were freed of the 5s limit and the number of courses eaten. In autumn 1953, flour, eggs and soap were unrationed and it all finally ended in 1954 when fats, including cheese and meat came off ration. Now, if you had the money you could begin to buy more or less anything you wanted to eat. There were still restrictions on the amount of money you took abroad, so doing an eating tour of France was impossible. But what had happened to British cooking in these fourteen years?

Cordon Bleu

The Constance Spry Cookery Book was published in 1956; Spry and her colleague and friend, Rosemary Hume, had been working on it for almost ten years throughout the worst years of austerity. In the foreword Constance Spry tells of a conversation with a student on the eve of war who had suggested that after the war she should add cookery lessons to her flower programme. The student added, ‘I think we shall need it.’ Spry adds the statement, ‘showing in this constructive suggestion a prophetic vision’.

Did her students lack all culinary skill and knowledge? The answer is, unfortunately, yes. This particular student saw the future stretching bleakly in front of her with not one servant to do her bidding. From the onset of war all the servants had gone, and these were the people who for good or ill had coped mostly with all the cooking for the middle and upper classes. Constance Spry’s students and those who learnt cooking at Rosemary Hume’s Cordon Bleu Cookery School all came from this class (in fact the first section in their book is on food for a cocktail party). They well knew that after the war the servants would not return, and that if they did not learn to cook, no one else would do the job.

‘Remembering as I do the days of immensely long, boring, wasteful dinners, remembering too the starvation which was all too often at our very doors, I cannot forbear to remind you how much respect ought to be paid to food, how carefully it should be treated, how shameful waste is.’ Mrs Spry was grateful for the rationing system at which they grumbled so incessantly as it had meant ‘the immensely better and fairer distribution of food among all grades of society’. She thought that the contemporary cook-hostess had the best of it, for she saw her efforts appreciated and heard the food discussed, ‘which is a pleasant innovation, for talk about food used to be taboo’. This gives us a clue to that Victorian/Edwardian past into which Mrs Spry was born in 1886, when the food was allowed to decline; food was not discussed, it was bad manners to comment on the food eaten, whether to praise or criticise it. Obviously, when that happens the subject becomes moribund.

In 1953 food was discussed, however, and no wonder for throughout the war people could think of little else but how to make what little food there was appetising. Once food reappeared again in all its variety, yes, it was discussed endlessly – the corpse had stirred and was returning to life. Spry’s book with Hume is an excellent illustration of where British food was at the time, but it is restricted to the class from which their devoted students came, who were ‘in effect an English variant on the French style’.⁴⁰ For that reason the Cordon Bleu style of cooking never permeated much further into society; it became rather a joke and was also instantly recognisable in being a little over fussy in presentation and tending towards the bland in flavour.

Earlier, in 1952, another book had been published which had far more influence over the way the majority cooked, The Penguin Cookery Book by a New Zealander, Bee Nilson. Taking both books together, we can see where British cuisine was in the midst of the century before other influences arrived, which had been waiting in the wings.

Firstly, on that old controversy of French influences, Mrs Spry in her Introduction apologises:

The incidence of French words is no snobbery, or I hope not. It is sometimes difficult to find a suitable English equivalent for them; if you try you will find that often the English words lack nicety of description. Sometimes a translation sounds downright unappetising. Do you like the sound of ‘paste of fat liver’?

The point that Mrs Spry overlooks is that ‘a paste of fat liver’ strikes us as odd, because we have no tradition of making it. If we had had overstuffed geese or ducks ever since medieval times in some town in Devon we would almost certainly know the dish by the name of that town. However, her note above is misleading: she does not just use French expressions for French dishes, which would have been acceptable; in her section on chicken most of the following recipes are variations on poulet, which could easily have been English recipes. This becomes ridiculous when in the fish chapter in three recipes for colin (hake), she specifies cod without an explanation. In fact she expresses nervousness about buying fish and admits to only recently daring to cook skate; one supposes that the fishmonger stocked hake and she failed to recognise it. The fish chapter with its unending list of French recipes makes me impatient with Mrs Spry. Surely she knew of the work of Mrs Leyel and Florence White, surely she was aware that there were excellent English recipes for fish which she could have used? That at this vital moment in our culinary history she took the easy route of agreeing with her colleague that there was no question that French cuisine was superlative seems to me a sell-out. However much she protests above, the impression is that French terms are used throughout for snobbish reasons and snobbish reasons only. But then we are in the land of Cordon Bleu.

In the style of Mrs Beeton, Spry and Hume include a chapter titled ‘Rechauffés’, which is for dishes based on leftover meat, another called ‘Pièces Froides’ which is full of galantines, terrines and pâtés, another deals with petits gâteaux, petits fours and gros gâteaux, and of course under egg dishes we have oeufs this, that and the other. The book, over 1,200 pages long, is astonishingly comprehensive; over fifty years later it still remains an excellent work of reference and can still be used with perfect results as a cookery book. But it attempted to fix the British cuisine in an aspic that had already melted; it taught the leisured classes how to cook in the manner of the nineteenth century, a useless requirement in 1955.

The fish chapter in the Penguin book is quite practical: without necessarily naming a fish it goes into detail about different methods of cooking, boiling, poaching, steaming, stewing, grilling and of course, frying. It gives recipes for a fish pie, for soused herrings and fish baked in stock or wine. It has ten suggestions for using various canned fish in recipes and a section on shellfish and how to make ‘Hot Buttered Crab’, though throughout whenever butter is mentioned it adds ‘or margarine’, though it does say earlier that ‘butter is by far the ideal fat’.

This cookery book, which sold many millions of copies in the early 1950s, lacks all enthusiasm for its subject; it treats food like domestic science (the author taught it at North London Polytechnic); it is severely pragmatic, and totally without any imagination. It is a rule book, which if followed carefully will give plain and edible results, but, I imagine, little enjoyment. Certainly this book is not about gastronomy or about the traditions of a rich English cuisine; it delivers to you the bald facts and does not attempt to make them appetising. Moreover, so much of the information one would rather not have at all: ‘Hors-d’oeuvres are meant to be appetizers at the beginning of the meal to stimulate the flow of digestive juices and help digest the food which will follow.’ But Bee Nilson is excellent on the cooking of vegetables and on the dangers of eating too much sugar. This was a perfect book for people who were never going to love food or express much interest in it, but who felt that they should learn to cook as a duty. This, I fear, was a general feeling for many people in the 1950s: they were unexcited by the food they ate, but knew that they had get on and eat the wretched stuff.

Both books together did nothing to destroy the conviction among the British that their cooking was the worst in the world, nor did we know why we had reached such a nadir of genuine awfulness.

Fifties’ Food

The state of our food was partly a hangover from the war; so many dreary short cuts still existed in the use of food substitutes. (Dried egg, for example, did not curdle like egg yolks when used to thicken sauces.) Hotels and restaurants that boasted of their gourmet cooking tended to overcook food and serve it sodden with water, or they failed to season it, or else it was oversalted and excessively peppered; they served ill-butchered meat, stale fish smothered with a floury sauce, mixed butter and marge together, used bottled mayonnaise, mock cream (another leftover from the war); used false pie crusts which had had no previous contact with the food beneath it, packet soups, gravy cubes and gravy browning, and had the nerve to present a cheeseboard full of dried and sweaty scraps of hard cheese, mostly Danish Blue and factory-made Cheddar. One of the most common crimes was to bone and roast meat, then allow it to go cold, then cut slices paper thin on a meat slicer to be warmed and served up with ersatz gravy. Had no one before realised, as did Raymond Postgate, that Britain was packed full of wild food which was edible and delicious, and at times of rationing or austerity such a larder could be raided to the full? In his seminal article which launched The Good Food Guide Postgate wrote:

There is, and there has been for a long time, plenty of chickens, poultry, rabbits, geese, game, salmon, sole, cod, herring and all kinds of fish: and of vegetables when they are in season … Food is ill-cooked in hotels and restaurants, or it is insufficient, or it is badly and rudely served up – or all three. The pretence that this is due to Ministry of Food regulations will not do any more.⁴¹

By 1951 the first edition of The Good Food Guide was in print and sold 5,000 copies. It only had just over 500 entries from Aberdeen to Wembley, all based on the recommendations of readers of the Leader Magazine. The beginnings of a gastro-nomic revolt against bad food, ill-informed cooking and sloppy service had begun.

Now, as well as newly designed gas cookers, we also had a refrigerator, television and cookery programmes with Marguerite Patten, Philip Harben and later in the 1950s, Fanny Cradock with her stooge husband. She, in a ridiculous ball gown and white fox fur stoles, gave an ersatz glamour to her cooking which was heavily biased towards French dishes. After the years of rationing, meat returned to become a central ingredient; the Sunday joint reigned supreme with its leftovers eaten cold or rehashed as shepherd’s pie or curry.

Frozen peas arrived and were an instant big hit; peas were now being eaten throughout the year. Other frozen foods followed, and fish fingers became a children’s favourite meal. Instant coffee took over from Camp coffee essence which had been flavoured with chicory, a Continental addiction that never caught on here. Steak and chips became a favourite choice when eating out, though the appearance of fried scampi was a close runner-up; quiche lorraine was a popular snack or lunch in pubs and delicatessens, while pasta began to be eaten more. The new steak houses that began to spring up found that prawn cocktail was a favourite starter, and when the prawns were available frozen, which began in the 1960s, it could also be made at home. The middle classes socialized now by giving dinner parties, beginning inevitably with pork or chicken liver pâtés followed by coq au vin.

The invention of the espresso coffee machine by Achille Gaggia resulted in the coffee bar with its false coloured ceilings and rubber plants. By 1960 there were 2,000 of them, where young people could meet, discuss, read and write, eking out a cup of espresso or cappuccino for several hours. They vanished almost as suddenly as they arrived, as Italian caterers realised that there was more money to be made if they served food and obtained a drinks’ licence. The Italian trattoria began to spread in the 1960s; every provincial town had one with its check tablecloths and plastic grapes, and on the menu its long list of different pastas and veal dishes – how very welcome they were. In London there were also the superior trattorie, owned by Mario and Franco and designed by Apicella in white and black tiles, which served sophisticated Italian food with style. But the Italians were not, by far, the most invasive foreign influence on our high streets. This era also saw the rise of Indian and Chinese restaurants, whose spicy meals were a more than welcome change.

Looking back on those years when I was growing up, I ask myself what did I know of good or bad food in that time? All children know is what they enjoy or dislike, and each of us seem to be born with idiosyncratic likes and dislikes which could have their roots in genetic or environmental causes. Mine were a negative response to pasteurised dairy products, especially milk, and to all kinds of liver, though oddly enough not pâtés. My mother was a good, natural cook, eager to try new ingredients and recipes when they came her way. Looking back now on my childhood, I enjoyed two separate dishes made perfectly and learnt to cook both in my late teens. Now, I consider they are two of the greatest British dishes and I’ve never had either cooked better than in those early years. The first I ate at my grandmother’s home and it was roast beef with Yorkshire pudding cooked beneath the joint; she had learnt that method from her grandmother so it goes back to the eighteenth century. The beef is cooked on a rack and its juices drop down into the batter; the centre of the pudding never puffs up, and is rather sloppy and very meaty. The charm of it is that one has a slice of the centre batter and a slice of the crispy outside piece too. There’s no gravy, the bloody juices of the meat suffice. However, my most favourite dish as a child and an adult (until I gave up eating meat in middle age) was steamed steak and kidney pudding with its suet top but not its sides, which my mother made. It was essential that ox kidney was used and no other, the amount of kidney to steak had to be equal and the pudding had to steam slowly for all of three hours. These are two simple meat dishes, but great ones individual to our cuisine.

As a very young man in the middle 1950s I cooked other dishes than these, such as piperade, for at John Lehmann’s literary parties, I had met an extremely shy Mrs David, nestling close to writers like Elizabeth Bowen, William Plomer and even Dame Edith Sitwell, on one occasion resplendent upon a sofa wearing her Tudor toque with her skirts spread out like any monarch. Like me, Mrs David did not appear to belong anywhere, and I had already been bewitched by her writing.

Elizabeth David

It was John Lehmann who published in 1950 Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food, followed by French Country Cooking in 1951, both books illustrated by John Minton. After his publishing business collapsed, her third book, Italian Food, was brought out by Macdonald’s in 1954. The influence her books had was immediate. Their power was due to the strength of her prose which in the most economical style evoked countries of taste, texture and colour that we all longed to experience too.

Arabella Boxer makes the point in her introduction⁴² that in our embrace of the Mediterranean world we forgot our own English food. That is so up to a point, but what we were embracing in reality, though we did not know it, were the past influences that had once created our own medieval food. Mrs Leyel, thirty years earlier, had done the same. It was as if our national atavism had been pricked alert and awoke to a world that had once been ours and that we now needed to regain. The shallots, garlic and saffron, the almonds and pistachios, the mixture of sweet and savoury, of dried fruits and lemon zest, of lentils and chick peas were all somehow faintly familiar. We seemed to have no tradition of them because we could only go back as far as Victorian bourgeois cooking; before that through the diaries of Parson Woodforde and Pepys we learnt only of roast meats and steamed puddings; nothing to be proud of, we thought naively. Earlier historians of medieval food had been disapproving of the flavourings:

A large proportion of the receipts in all the cookery books prescribe spices, even for food which, according to modern taste, would be far better without them … the practice of smothering ordinary meats with spices … quinces are not merely boiled but flavoured with rose water … the highly spiced dishes that one encounters in India, in northern Africa, and in out-of-the-way districts of Italy and Spain today differ in no essential particulars from those that chiefly characterize medieval cookery.⁴³

And there was the nub of it, said by a food historian whose opinion was that medieval food sounded thoroughly disgusting, akin to the foreign muck on the continent.

Pre-Reformation cooking had continued to grow and develop in France without interruption, but the Reformation in our own national psyche seemed to have built a barrier between us and the past. Perhaps Henry VIII’s instigation and enforcement of it was so brutal and bloody it inhibited our awareness, was too painful to consider. Each time thereafter that we took an influence from across the Channel we believed it to be a completely new one; in the seventeenth century we absorbed some of the ideas of La Varenne, but most of those were also medieval.

Reading Mrs David was like rediscovering a part of oneself that had been so utterly lost we were unaware of its existence. As Mediterranean longings permeated society in the late 1950s so the first package tours made it possible for people with slim incomes to go abroad and to sample the food first hand. Pre-war only the rich and the upper classes travelled abroad (my mother never went further south than the Isle of Wight). Strange vegetables began to appear in the grocers – peppers, courgettes, avocadoes and aubergines. London’s Soho had streets where the smells were a heady mixture of garlic, coffee and Parmesan, where you could buy home-made pasta, olive oil and Parma ham. At home one could cook the dishes eaten abroad little knowing that one was returning to smells and flavours once loved by our ancestors.

Going Ethnic

Our taste for the curry ever since the eighteenth century had been a strong one. Led by Mrs Raffald and Mrs Glasse, almost immediately after the part colonisation of the sub-continent, recipes for pickles, ketchups, kedgeree and curried mutton appeared in all the English cookery books. We absorbed this spicy food as our own. Now in the 1960s Indian restaurants began to open in towns, large and small, all over the British Isles; these were a boon to vegetarians for it was the only world cuisine in which a meal lacking animal protein was regarded as commonplace.

Almost at the same time immigrants from Hong Kong and the New Territories fleeing from the fear of Maoist China arrived in Britain and began working in the service industries. From there it was a short step to opening a restaurant; by 1970 there were around 4,000 Chinese catering businesses in the UK, many of these being take-away shops. Their success was certainly due to a combination of the cheapness of the dishes and the spicy flavours which in a harmless manner easily become addictive.⁴⁴ But sweet and sour meat dishes (the number one Chinese favourite), for example, were also a favourite medieval dish, so again here was a spectrum of flavours that not so long before had been part of our own cuisine.

By 1965, thirty-one per cent of people who ate out regularly visited Chinese restaurants, eight per cent went to Indian, five to Italian and another five to French. In the 1963 edition of The Good Food Guide eight Chinese and six Indian restaurants were felt to be good enough to be listed in London, while there were eight more Chinese and four Indian in the rest of the UK. It was only in the late 1960s that regional Chinese differences began to appear, and there were noticeable differences between Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai, between the wheat-based menus of north China and the rice-based food of the coastal south; dim sum, snacks steamed in baskets, became popular, as did crisp fried duck rolled in pancakes with hoi-sin sauce. Later still, other differences appeared, as in the more specialised Szechuan, hot with its own aromatic pepper. The discerning British gastronome learnt to search out the Chinese restaurant that attracted the largest Chinese clientele, and to appreciate the Chinese cuisine that they ate so enthusiastically.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, various Indian regional differences in restaurants also began to attract English customers. The British bureaucrats and the military had always centred on the meat-eating Muslim north, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But now wider audiences grew to appreciate the mild pilaus, sweet dhansaks and cream kormas of north India, and clay ovens, tandoors, for dry roasting of yoghurt-marinated chicken were imported. Nepal, Goa and the vegetarian Gujerat, the Tamil cooking of the south, were all regions to find appreciative British audiences. Yet the most favourite dish still remained sweet and sour pork, or sweet and sour anything. We cannot escape our past.

Observers of our eating patterns considered that we embraced every new world cuisine because of the paucity of our own. On the contrary what we were embracing was the return of flavours that once had been part of our own tradition.