COOKING THE ENGLISH WAY

Introduction

Fresh-caught fish, tender roast beef, rich scones and shortbread— these are just a few of the varied foods that make up the cooking of England. For years English cuisine was regarded as bland and unexciting. This reputation has changed as English chefs have become more adventurous, earning praise for their innovative and flavorful dishes. Although most English food is not spicy or unusual, it is hearty and delicious. It relies on fresh, simple ingredients prepared to highlight the natural flavors of foods. English cooking also incorporates influences from the many cultures that make up the English population, such as East Asian, West Indian, and Chinese communities.
England is famous for its large cooked breakfast and for afternoon tea, dainty sandwiches and sweets served with a pot of tea. “Takeaway” (takeout) food also got its start in England with fish and chips—pieces of fried cod or haddock and thick French fries served with salt and vinegar. Another early “fast food” was the Cornish pasty , meat and vegetables baked in a pastry crust. Pasties started as a way for miners and farmers to carry their lunch to work. While fast foods and frozen foods remain popular, many English people are becoming more health conscious. Cooks use less fat in preparing food, and people are eating less meat, eggs, butter, and sugar and more fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain bread. The recipes in this book will give you a taste of English cooking that’s both good for your health and good tasting.

The Land

England,Wales, and Scotland make up Great Britain (often called simply Britain), and these countries plus Northern Ireland form the United Kingdom. Britain is one of the British Isles, which lie in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwestern coast of mainland Europe. The English coast stretches for hundreds of miles. It is lined with high cliffs, jagged rocks, and beaches.
England has a damp climate and moderate temperatures. Though it is never very hot or cold, it is often swept by chilly winds and sudden showers. In much of England, frequent rains turn the countryside a brilliant green. Beautiful fields are crisscrossed by hedges and low stone walls. Sheep and cattle graze on lush grasses in the hills and valleys.
Farmland covers much of England. English farmers grow barley, potatoes, wheat, sugar beets, and other crops. Oats are grown in the high, rugged hills and wild moors of northern England. The county of Kent, in the southeast, is called the Garden of England and is famous for its apple and cherry orchards.

The Food

Every part of England has its own specialties, from the Cornish pasties of Cornwall to the Lancashire hot pot to Yorkshire pudding. Among the hundreds of regional specialties are gingerbread from the Lake District in northern England; Staffordshire oatcakes, a type of pancake; Cumberland sausage; and apple cider from the West Country (the counties of Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall).
Beyond the regional favorites, many foods are commonly eaten throughout England. Sheep have always been important both for their wool and their meat. Lamb is the main ingredient in the Lancashire hot pot, for example, a robust stew from Lancashire, an area of rich, fertile plains in the northwestern part of the country.
(The meat of a sheep is called lamb if the animal is under eight months old, mutton if it is older.) In addition, spicy dishes from India and the Caribbean, referred to simply as curries, are popular throughout England.
Despite health concerns about British beef in recent years, it is safe to eat and remains a staple of the English diet. Cattle breeds such as the white-faced Hereford are famous for their fine meat. In many English homes, the traditional Sunday meal is a joint, or roast, of beef. It is often served with Yorkshire pudding (a batter baked with the meat drippings), roasted potatoes, and seasonal vegetables. The trim-mings—brown gravy and horseradish sauce—are important, too.
People in England eat fish as much as meat. Since no point in the British Isles is more than seventy miles from the sea, fresh fish is available everywhere, all year long. Common types include mackerel, cod, haddock, salmon, and Dover sole. Shellfish, such as crabs, mussels, and oysters, is available in many coastal towns. In the East End of London, street vendors sell dishes of prawns, whelks, and cockles, all sprinkled with malt vinegar.
England also produces outstanding dairy products, including a wealth of local cheeses. The most famous are Cheddar, from the village of Cheddar in the west of England, and Stilton, from a district of the same name in central England. The largest Cheddar cheese ever made weighed 1,100 pounds and was given to Queen Victoria as a wedding present in 1840.
The prize of dairy products is double cream. It is far thicker than American whipping cream—so thick that it has to be spooned, not poured, onto such mouth-watering desserts as summer pudding and trifle, a jam-covered dessert. When double cream is gently heated, it becomes even thicker and is known as clotted cream. In southwestern England, well known for its cream teas, bowls of clotted cream are served with jam and scones. English people have an ongoing debate about whether it’s best to put the cream or the jam on the scone first. Either way, it tastes wonderful.
Many English people refer to all desserts as “puddings.” In England, a pudding may be many things besides a creamy milk-based dessert. It might be a pie or a sponge cake. It can be hot or cold, but most often it will be hot, to help keep warm in the cold, damp English weather.
Many English recipes have unusual and colorful names. Some examples are bubble and squeak, courting cake, lardy cake, singing hinnies, Sally Lunns, orange fool, Bath chaps, hasty pudding, toad-in-the-hole, mushy peas, salmagundi, angels on horseback, and devils on horseback. As you’re having fun experimenting with English cooking, maybe you can invent clever names of your own for your creations.

Holidays and Festivals

Public holidays in Britain are called bank holidays.They include New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter, the first and last Mondays in May, Christmas, and Boxing Day (December 26). Between Christmas and New Year’s, many offices and schools close.
Besides the official bank holidays, people in England celebrate many different occasions throughout the year. Many holidays are connected to the seasons and cycles of the year, such as harvesttime or spring. Other festivals celebrate quirky local traditions, including the Furry Dance, a stately, rhythmic procession of fancily
dressed men and women. It takes place on Floral Day (May 8) in the village of Helston in Cornwall.
Christmas is a major holiday in England. In London, a Christmas tree is raised in Trafalgar Square and there’s a Christmas parade. Throughout the country, people gather to sing carols during the holiday season. On Christmas Day, many English families pull “crackers” before dinner. These are small tubes covered with bright paper and twisted at the ends. When you pull on the end, the cracker explodes and jokes and paper hats fall out. Family members wear the hats during dinner. Christmas dinner is usually roast turkey, followed by plum pudding. The day after Christmas is Boxing Day, which was traditionally a time to give money and other gifts to charity, needy families, and people in service jobs. The holiday evolved into a day to spend with family or to get out and play sports.
In the West Country of England, wassailing ceremonies are held around Epiphany, or Twelfth Night—the twelfth night after Christmas, when, according to Christian belief, three kings arrived with gifts for the baby Jesus. The word wassail comes from two old Saxon words meaning “good health.” The custom is to drink apple cider punch and toast the apple trees to ensure a good crop that year. The West Country has an ideal climate and soil for apple orchards, and the area is famous for its hard, or dry, apple cider, an alcoholic beverage.
Another tradition on Epiphany is to bake a three kings almond tart. A dried bean, gold ring, or tiny baby figurine is hidden in the cake, and a gold cardboard crown is placed on top of the cake. When the tart is served, the person who finds the hidden object is crowned king or queen of the feast for the evening.
Many holidays and festivals in England mark the coming of spring. Easter dates back to ancient times and was later linked to Christianity. The holiday is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn and spring, Eostre or Eastre. Many Easter traditions and symbols have to do with birth, good luck, and fertility.
Lent, the forty-day period before Easter, involves many food traditions. Shrove Tuesday, the day before the start of Lent, is known as Pancake Day in England. People traditionally made pancakes on that day to use up any foods that were forbidden during Lent, such as lard (pork fat). The day was also a time for games and merriment. The celebration was announced in many villages by the ringing of the pancake bell. In some towns, a pancake race still takes place on Shrove Tuesday. Women race with pancakes in frying pans, tossing them as they run.
Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies are part of Easter in England, just as in the United States. In northern England, another custom is egg rolling, in which hard-boiled eggs are rolled down slopes to see whose egg goes farthest. The village of Hallaton in Leicester holds a “hare pie scramble” and bottle kicking contest on Easter Monday. Half of a hare pie (actually a beef pie) is distributed to villagers, and the rest is scrambled, or tossed out to the children.Then the villagers begin a game that involves kicking beer barrels.
In villages near the Severn River in west central England, an elver-eating contest is held on Easter Monday. Elvers are baby eels, which make their way up the river each spring. One champion ate about seven hundred elvers in half a minute!
Another spring festival is May Day, when dancers called morris men, dressed in white clothing decorated with colorful sashes, ribbons, and bells and carrying white handkerchiefs and sticks, perform in village streets. Some villages in Gloucestershire celebrate the spring bank holiday with a cheese rolling. A large round of cheese is packed in a strong wooden case and rolled down a steep hill. Competitors chase after it, and the winner gets to keep the cheese.
The summer and fall bring more festivals. In London, a large street fair called the Notting Hill Carnival takes place during the last weekend in August. It’s a spectacular celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture, with floats, music, and hundreds of stalls selling arts and crafts and all sorts of food and drink. In the autumn, harvest festivals take place all over England, especially in farming areas. In Colchester, on the east coast, the Oyster Festival in September celebrates the start of the oyster-fishing season. On September 29, the old holiday of Michaelmas, or the feast of Saint Michael, was traditionally celebrated with a meal of a well-fattened goose that had fed on the stubble of the fields after the harvest. The Nottingham Goose Fair has taken place around this time of the year for more than seven hundred years. Originally, geese were sold at the fair, then walked to London in time to fatten up for Christmas. Although the fair no longer has anything to do with geese, there’s plenty of good fair food, along with rides and games.
Many people in England celebrate Halloween, but a more important holiday comes a few days later, on November 5. Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night, marks the day in 1605 when a man named Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Fawkes wanted to kill King James I because he felt the king and his government were treating Roman Catholics unfairly. Fawkes’s plot failed, however, and he was hanged.
Throughout England on Guy Fawkes Night, fireworks are set off and people light bonfires.They make dummies called guys out of straw and old clothes. The guy is tossed into the fire and burned. Gingerbread is traditionally eaten around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night.
Whether it’s for a holiday, special occasion, or just an everyday meal, you can cook up some tasty English treats to impress your family and friends. Cheers!

By Barbara W. Hill, In 'Cooking the English Way'- Lerner Publications Company, A division of Lerner Publishing Group U.S.A., 2006, p. 7-17. Edited and adapted do be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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