[DanaC]

'British' cuisine may well be a contradition in terms for much of the last hundred years or so, but 'English' cuisine is a little different.

'Britain' as an entity carried certain self-conceptions, including things like plain speaking, plain cooking stoicism. Around the the eighteenth century native fruit and vegetables, drawn as they were from the dirt, and suitable food for beasts of burden, became the food of the poor. Proper solid British yeomen ate meat and bread. White bread mind, none of that nasty black shit the Frenchies were eating. Beer, not 'vinegar' as French wine was termed. Stout leather boots, not those silly wooden shoes.

Culinary creation and variety, which had always been a feature of aristocratic English society, even if it hadn't been available to the labouring classes, now became a sign of weakness and effiminacy. By the time of Victoria, this had become wrapped up with a kind of morality of plainness. The Victorian age then added the concept of 'nutrition' to their diet. The scientific Victorians were eager to solve their social, moral and class crises. Along with new investigations into sanitation and the effects of city life on the constitution of the nation (e.g. the moral and physical strength of the workforce) came a focus on food. Again, the emphasis was on plainness. Good, wholesome food. None of that foreign muck. Simple flavours. Balanced meals (probably not what we might considered balanced now).

The morality of food is a major part of the development of British cuisine. The wealthiest and most favoured of our elite sent their sons, who would impose themselves on the globe, to schools that built their character. Cold showers are not a myth. The regimes of those schools concentrated on a lack of physical luxury. Food was simple, basic, 'wholesome'. And three generations of our ruling elite fostered a taste for over-boiled vegetables and suet puddings. Add to that ideas that 'rich' foods were bad for children, and the nurseries of the wealthy also had no truck with spices and fancy-shmancy sauces.

OUtside of the elite our food is highly regionalised. People talk about 'British' food, or even 'English' food. But the truth is the traditional foods of Yorkshire and Devon are wholly different from each other. Obviously there are also common trends. Traditionally our cuisine is very similar to German and Scandinavian.

We lost touch with a lot of our food traditions during the nineteenth century because of increased urbanisation and the introduction of mass produced goods. Fruit was no longer needed as a sweetener once sugar was cheaply available: this changed the nature of our desserts for example. Without agrarian life patterns and with food being imported in large quantities, our diets became less seasonally defined. This drastically reduced the level of variety in poorer diets. With work now taking place primarily outside of the home, and the family no longer a discrete production unit, food as a daily event reduced in importance. Interestingly one area where there was (and is) great variety in shape and flavour was in 'street foods'. Things that could be eaten on the move, like pasties and pies, fish and chips etc. Baked goods are where you get the most variance regionally I think. Seafood to go (mussels, whelks, eels etc) was a biggy with the workingclasses: actually that survived for a good lone while. As a teenager, I remember guys coming round the pubs with their trays of mussels and whelks.

Into the 20th century and two world wars devastate the country, and we are left with privation and rationing into the 50s.

There's nothing about traditional English cuisine that warrants the reputation it has. 'British' cuisine however is a very different matter. 'British' is a political and cultural definition, and that carries through to food, style of dress, preferred arguing method, attitude towards the French, everything.