REASONS FOR THE DECLINE OF BRITISH COOKING

Britain in the nineteenth century was an aggressively, socially mobile society, and people in fierce competition to gain a place on the next rung of the ladder formed rigid rules and regulations as a method of selection. These rules were comprehensive, covering the whole lifestyle, and any infringement in the codes of dress, deportment, language, family and the rituals of entertaining and offering food, ensured an obstacle to social improvement possibly for a lifetime. To court social disapproval was to become a pariah which few were brave enough to contemplate. There was a real fear of difference and a strong need within every class for sameness amongst its members, all, of course, aping the class above. Hence there was a mass movement towards the bland and the nondescript which food reflected. The appearance of the food was more important than the flavour and to achieve the right look, flavour was either secondary or entirely ignored.

A part of this was a delight in mock recipes: the most famous was Mock Turtle Soup made from a calf ’s head, which bore no relation to the flavour of real turtle soup which had a greenish hue and was, as Mrs Beeton puts it, the most expensive soup to be brought to the table. She advises that a tin of turtle flesh which contains the green fat would be more economical than buying a live turtle. Mock turtle cost 3s 6d a quart while the real thing cost a guinea. There were many other recipes which were a kitsch version of something else: mock crab was made from coarsely grated Leicester or Cheshire cheese mixed with chicken, tossed in mustard and salad oil and piled up in a crab shell.15 A boiled salad, made from potato, celery, brussel sprouts and beetroot, with a superhuman effort of the imagination pretended to be a lobster salad.16 None of these three dishes added any fishy essence so that it might taste like produce from the sea; taste was of no concern for the dishes were aping their superiors as were the diners themselves.

It is the unsophisticated, untroubled by the anxieties of social climbing, who can often see through the facades of their age, like this streetseller who told Henry Mayhew: ‘I don’t know nothing of the difference between the real thing and the mock, but I once had some cheap mock in an eating house, and it tasted like stewed tripe with a little glue.’

There was a belief that raw or undercooked food was bad for you, since it harboured germs, and so everything had to be thoroughly cooked and boiled. Medical opinion was divided on this, but whatever the experts said on the subject the public were suspicious of raw vegetables. Mrs Beeton fostered this opinion: ‘As vegetables eaten in a raw state are apt to ferment on the stomach, and as they have very little stimulative power upon that organ, they are usually dressed with some condiments, such as pepper, vinegar, salt, mustard, and oil. Respecting the use of these, medical men disagree, especially in reference to oil, which is condemned by some and recommended by others.’ She gives two pages to salads out of 1,112 and begs the cook to ask her employer on the use of such vegetables as the spring onion and the radish. The Victorians loved both because they were decorative, but the fear of them upon the breath, or what they might do to the digestion would have induced women to have avoided them. Imagine those platters and bowls of uneaten salad going back downstairs to the kitchens where the footmen could then chew on onions and radish to their hearts’ delight spending the rest of the night and day burping with pleasure.

The Victorian middle class was nervous of pleasure, not in feeling it, but in showing it: any outward exhibition of pleasure should be controlled, so a sensual appreciation of food, any rolling around the mouth of an oyster for example, would be deeply shocking; it would in fact be vulgar and reminiscent of the working class. So anything that gave any possible potential pleasure was viewed with suspicion, as being an instigator towards the road to ruin and social downfall. Food must be eaten with a show of decorum; if hungry, one should never show it; meats should be sliced small and thinly; one should eat slowly, masticating thoroughly. A mouth bulging with food was disgusting and to speak while the mouth was full, well, again only the working class male behaved so. A social dinner party was viewed as a minefield where the civilised veneer could crack to show the Darwinian beast beneath. There was nervousness as to what food could do to one. (Though the subject of this book does not cover drink, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the Temperance movement grew in power in this century.) Food should be tamed to make it powerless, and the only effective way of doing that was to make it uninteresting and unattractive.

The Victorian era used food as a moral weapon to condition the young. Various writers throughout the century wrote books on child-rearing, which were eagerly bought by a middle class anxious over matters of moral guidance. Dr Pye Henry Chavasse was one of the most authoritative and best-selling of these authors: ‘His tone appears to owe more to a vengeful deity’17 than anything else. His view on desserts and cakes was extreme:

"I consider them so much slow poison. Such things cloy and weaken the stomach and thereby take away the appetite and thus debilitate the frame. If the child is never allowed to eat such things, he will consider dry bread a luxury."18

Notice the child is ‘he’. New emphasis was given to the doctrine of original sin by the revival of Protestantism and the growth of non-conformist religions, hence children were viewed in a new and darker light. These tots were bundles of original sin which had to be disciplined and purged from it. It was considered that food was a strong persuader. This attitude continued until well into the next century. For example in W.B. Drummond’s The Child: his Nature and Nurture (1901), the author thought tasty titbits should not be allowed in a child’s diet, ‘if for no other reason than they are apt to make the children discontented with the plain and wholesome food with which they are perfectly satisfied so long as they have never had anything else’.

The modern Irish novelist Molly Keane, writing about her first four years, came to the realisation that ‘nursery food was so disgusting that greed, even hunger, must be allayed elsewhere’.19 Ruth Lowinsky in 1931, looking back on her childhood, wrote: ‘When we were children it was considered good for our souls as well as our bodies to be continually fed on any food we disliked.’ The Victorians felt certain that they were highly civilised; anything untouched by civilisation made them nervous and not a little frightened. Darwin’s theory of evolution with its suggestion that the primate was a distant cousin seemed at first horrific and blasphemous. Children too could be untamed and unruly, not unlike that primate at times, and so they were punished severely, beaten and starved, to crush the devil within.

‘Aunt Marjorie was always alert for greed in the young,’ Molly Keane continued, ‘a vice that was a depravity to be commented on and corrected whenever evident … for years I had a sensation of shame as well as guilt about second helpings; a deep rooted sense that the enjoyment of food was unattractive, something to conceal.’ Nursery food was plain and monotonous. The day began with bread and milk or porridge for breakfast; mutton and vegetables were considered suitable for dinner.’ Lady Sybil Lubbock, in her book From Kitchen to Garret about her childhood in the 1880s, was still eating a nursery luncheon of boiled or roast mutton, mashed potatoes, greens and rice pudding; there was also steaming potato water for chilblains.20 These meals were often made unpalatable by careless cooking or by resentful and angry relationships between the nurse and the cook. Nursery quarters behind baize doors and at the top of the house cut children off from the rest of the family and were unpopular with staff, for bowls of hot water had to be carried upstairs as well as trays of food, which tended to be furnished with left-overs from downstairs with concessions to juvenile taste or stature. The formidable lines of Dr Watts against lying might also serve as a warning against food:

"Then let me always watch my lips,
Lest I be struck to death and Hell,
Since God a book of reck’ning keeps,
For every lie that children tell."

Ursula Wyndham in Astride the Wall recalls:

"greasy mutton, overcooked vegetables wallowing in the water they had been cooked in, burnt rice puddings … This prison fare was the unsupervised production of the kitchen maid, whose more important task was to assist the cook in preparing many courses for the dining room
twice a day."21

Mrs Leyel comments in 1925: ‘The repugnance of many English children for green vegetables is explained by the dishes of stringy, watery, tasteless, tough green leaves that are sent up for nursery dinner, a relic of the Victorian days when grown-up people ate far too much meat, and when butter was regarded as a superfluous luxury for children brought up almost exclusively on starch.’22

Gwen Raverat, writing in the 1950s about her late Victorian childhood, asks: ‘Surely our feeding was unnecessarily austere?’ They began the day with porridge without sugar or salt, with toast and butter; if they had jam there was no butter, for they could not have both. For tea there was only bread and butter again, no cakes, unless they had visitors when there would be sponge cake, which the children nibbled the ends off.23

Nor did children’s food improve when they went away to board at public school, if anything it got worse. Harold Acton recalls the food at Lawnwood Crammar as blotched oily margarine, hairy brawn and knobbly porridge smuggled into his handkerchief and thrown down the lavatory.24

Gwen Raverat was puzzled that her loving parents were so severe; it was difficult if not impossible to understand how those who love you could plunge vulnerable growing lives into such regimented days erased of all pleasures.

Yet those parents in their defence would have said it was all done with love, though such regimes allowed those with a sadistic cast of nature to give full reign to it. The zeitgeist of the age demanded such severity, but why should it? Why should it have inflicted upon children such a regimen of disgustingly unpalatable food, bequeathing them with a diffidence for food throughout their lives which in turn affected their children; it was only after the Second World War that as a nation we managed to emerge from this baleful inheritance.

At the heart of Victorian society there was guilt. The wave of affluence, which brought the middle classes into prominence with an excess of capital to be spent on opulent household furnishings and on palatial municipal constructions, also intensified the guilt they felt about being surrounded by poverty and pauperism. Victorian religion was a sadistic one: it encouraged men to flay their souls and spirits with arduous tasks and penances; eating plain food was but one of them and inflicting it upon your children became a religious duty.

The reasons for the decline of British cooking were, firstly, the Enclosures Acts which removed the constant stimulus that peasant cooking gives to any nation’s cuisine; our roots were cut away. Secondly, Victorian society praised French cooking and belittled the traditional British cuisine, so that no distinguished cook was encouraged to develop it and lead the way. Thirdly, as the first industrial society we became to a great extent urbanised, which created new and acceptable practices not conducive to good food. Fourthly, the architecture of the suburban villa and the hierarchy of servant labour drove a wedge between kitchen and dining room, turning cooking into a mercenary duty. In addition to which there was a dearth of experienced cooks. With the huge expansion of the middle classes needing more and more kitchen staff; illiterate and untrained women were employed as cooks who could only muddle through, presenting their employers with overcooked, tasteless meals, which they learnt to accept rather than lose their staff. Fifthly. the advent of technology in canning, packaging, freezing and retailing was enthusiastically and uncritically embraced in the kitchen, bringing standardised tastes and textures. Sixth, a fear of the untamed, the raw, the hearty and the vulgar caused dishes to be bland and overrefined with their emphasis upon appearance rather than flavour. Seventh, religious zeal made bad cooking acceptable and insensitivity over food praiseworthy. Eighth, and this factor was to continue with even greater disaster into the twentieth century – war. Wars caused naval blockades and the halt of food supplies from distant countries, severely limiting the diversity of ingredients on which British cooking had traditionally relied. The Crimean War (1853-1856) and then the Boer War (1899-1902), though both only of three years’ duration, halted supplies. Lastly, in the seventeenth century, we had lost a royal court that thought of food as a developing aesthetic form. Our monarchy thereafter followed bourgeois practice; it was the bourgeoisie that took over the role of food guardians and in the eighteenth century fulfilled the role admirably. It was totally unaware of the role it played, however, so tragically threw it away; instead, it pursued a French culinary chimera, which they often felt inadequate to create.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all these factors had combined to wreak their havoc upon the British kitchen, without the British people being quite aware of what had happened. They remained smug, defensive and not a little arrogant on the British food they offered to guests from other nations, they found criticism of their food hard to accept. For the process of its decline had occurred at their finest hour, so how could the sustenance of Empire builders be in any way inadequate?

NOTES

15 Black, Mrs, Superior Cookery (Collins 1898).
16 Janey Ellice’s Recipes 1846-1859 ed. Wentworth, Josie A. (MacDonald and Janes 1975).
17 Mars, Valerie, ‘Parsimony amid Plenty’, Food Culture & History (London Food Seminar 1993).
18 Quoted in ibid.
19 Keane Molly, Nursery Cooking (MacDonald 1985).
20 King-Hall, Magdalen, The Story of the Nursery (Routledge 1958).
21 Quoted in Boxer, Arabella, Book of English Food (Hodder & Stoughton 1991).
22 Leyel, Mrs C.F.; Hartley, Miss Olga, The Gentle Art of Cookery (Chatto & Windus 1925).
23 Raverat, Gwen, Period Piece (Faber and Faber 1954).
24 Acton, Harold, Memoirs of an Aesthete (Artellus 1948).


By Colin Spencer in "British Food - An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History", Grub Street, London, 2011, excerpts chapter 10. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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