Wilfrid

Yup.

Eh? Of course beer is nutritious in the simple sense that it contains nutrients which the body can absorb and benefit from. Liza is absolutely right that about nursing mothers being encouraged to drink stout (and not only in Ireland), primarily as an iron supplement; and of course Tony's right too. This is not unrelated to certain topics on the UK Board: the real social problem in Britain, up to the fifties at least, was not absence of haute cuisine but malnutrition. The government and medical community backed moderate beer consumption as one way of getting iron and minerals to the people who needed it. You have to make an effort of imagination to put yourself back into the historical context. Public communication on health issues was far less sophisticated than it is today, and concern about alcohol-related illness much lower. Note, I am not saying the government and doctors were right, I am just explaining what they did and why. And indeed the health-based beer ads continued at least into the 1970s: "It looks good, it tastes good, and by golly it does you good." That was Guiness, I believe; or was it Mackeson?

Picked up my bison balls on Saturday - thank you, Liza. Will be cooking them tonight or tomorrow, depending on whether the apartment is full of decorators when I get home. Also grabbed a pack of frozen bison burgers. Two for dinner last night. Perhaps because they were frozen (yes, I had thawed them before cooking), they disgorged a fair amount of liquid in the first few minutes in the pan. But once I drained that off, they browned up nicely. They need some extra seasoning, but they were nice enough - although, I wouldn't have known they weren't good quality beef. Ate them with a home-made tomato and onion sauce, and a side of tostones which I thought were just fine (depsite yells of derision from a Dominican back-seat chef).

I was boiling beef this weekend, and this seems the right place to pose a question about it. I was dealing with corned beef, rather than tenderloin, and I think I made the mistake of having a recipe intended for more tender cuts at the back of my mind (and having read this thread, I now realise it was Poumiane's recipe for boeuf a la ficelle which I looked at a few weeks ago). In short, I was pleased with the flavor and aroma of the meat, cooked in seasoned water with juniper berries, bayleaves, onions and carrots; and the broth, once skimmed, made a nice ingredient for an unrelated tomato sauce I also made at the weekend. I digress. But the meat was tougher than it should have been. Am I right in thinking that a fifteen-minutes-per-pound approach to simmering corned beef was really dumb, and that I should have been approaching it in a slower, gentler fashion?

Can I just say that I have read Proust in the Modern Library edition? I just don't get enough opportunities to say that. Thank you.

Oh, I wish. Out of action because still unpacking crates from the recent move. And this thread? What have we wrought? If anyone wants to get back to the original discussion - and it's by no means obligatory - it was not about whther Britain has better food than France. This may shake Steve P, but I agree with him entirely that, across the board, French food is much better than British food. I disputed two points with him. First, that it was a reasonable generalization to say that British food is "crappy" or well-represented by spam and marmite - there has always been bad food in Britain, but always good food too, and standards have improved dramatically over the last twenty years. Second, that British gastronomy fell behind French gastronomy because the upper classes in Britain agreed to feed the people badly, whereas the upper classes in France (and Italy too apparently) agreed to feed them well. This preposterous theory, after being re-cast in various forms, eventually emerged as a plot by the industrial/mercantile class around the time of the great "enclosure". I think this has been pretty thoroughly falsified by some of the contributors here (as for the French theory, it too has some problems, like the Revolution for example). Now, over to Steve to concede that he was, after all, wrong on both counts:

I wouldn't cancel your NJ reservation just yet. (Cynical Wilf)

This is me being in denial: "British cooking and British eating habits have had their failings over the years. I am a Londoner by birth, but I am not going to dispute that fact" (Wilfrid, March5). I am happy to respond, but I want to discuss a clear and finite historical period, so we don't end up going around in circles. I am not now talking about what the British ate between 1760 and 1960. If that's what you mean when you talk about "eating junk for so long" then we are at cross purposes. I am now addressing only 1960 to 1994 (the Plotnicki watershed year ). Fact is, a whole lot of us have not been eating crap for twenty years or so. Like Rebecca Mead, you are not so much wrong as just way out of date and out of touch. It would be interesting to have some specific stats about food consumption in the UK, about obesity, about the rise of supermarket chains, and so on, but sadly I don't see an offer of an eGullet grant to the detailed research. There is no question in my mind that during this period a lot of British people ate of a lot of very bad food indeed - usually without realising how bad it was (why they "stood for it"). Both at home, and even more so in restaurants. Restaurants in Britain were appallingly bad through the 1960s and much of the 1970s. There is clear evidence of an improvement in standards of dining out thereafter (see other thread). Also, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a dramatic increase in the range and quality of produce available in stores and supermarkets, in the level of discussion of food in the media. I was lucky as a child. My family - an ordinary family, and there were millions like them - didn't have a freezer, were suspicious of pre-cooked food, and prepared two or three good home-cooked meals every day. Incidentally, there wasn't any junk food in those days, in the sense of burger/pizza/fried chicken chains. The US exported those to us later. Did we eat anything a French or Italian family would recognise? Of course not. We scarcely knew what that would be. In my teens I ate loads of junk. That's teens for you. Over the last twenty years or so, there has been no reason to eat junk. Many people still do of course. But a lot of us, and not just food geeks, have been eating very well, thanks. There's nothing I can do to prove that to you, short of describing ingredients and meals I remember with fondness from those years. But let me turn that around. What do you think about the quality of British meat (pre-BSE)? British game? British cheeses? British fish? We know you don't like our bread. Oh, well.

He is very bright on one side. It's when you turn him over...

Dived into the shad roe last night, poached in white wine and cream with onions, garlic and parsley. Also, for the first time I think, I cooked shad itself. Wonderful fish: firm-fleshed and slightly tan in colour - it looked lightly smoked, but wasn't of course. Very fresh as far as I could tell, I simply seasoned it and fried it. Plated the roe (very carefully), laid a strip of shad across it, strained the sauce around them and garnished with a few diced carrots. Drank the Louis Latour Grand Ardeche chardonnay, which I think is a decent drop for $10.99. Only difficult thing about all this was not breaking the roe membrane. Top dinner. Oh yes, a wedge of soumaintrain to follow with some crusty pain d'Avignon. Anyone hungry?

Well, I'm not sure how we all managed to convince Steve that he was right all along (imagine a smiley shrugging with despair). I plan to pipe down today - I have said more than my fair share, and I thought the posts from other contributors were considerably more interesting than anything I can add. My British history is a little better than Steve's (ahem), but not as good as some of you other guys. I would still be interested in other people's view on when the improvement in British gastronomy (dining out and eating at home) originated. I know 1995 is wrong - but how early can we trace it back. Finally, it is tiresome to be repeatedly told that "you have been eating crap", but if Steve won't believe me or Yvonne or Macrosan or Michael Lewis, that's up to him. By the way, Jason, I am with you on German food. Much underrated. But, of course, Britain and Germany should not be compared on their wines but on their beers. That would be another interesting thread.

Definitely the former. If we do arrange one, you'll have trouble keeping me out. And I am sticking to a policy of not discussing dinners in June until we get to May (apart from in this sentence, of course ).

The Chinese take-out, straight from the fridge the next morning. Traditional hangover food. I think it gives the blood sugar a good kick in the pants. I especially commend sweet and sour chicken this way.

Yes, but "fascinating forkfuls" is exquisitely alliterative. Still, I was pretty close.

Steve, I did completely rewrite my last post as I too was unsatisfied with it. So I am not sure which time I shied away from the question. But, okay, we have stupid people too. That's part of most social problems. Now it may be my fault or it may be yours (I have a view ) but I do have a problem ranging around from the eighteenth century to the present and back again. I think your last post is talking about people's stupidity/laziness about food in recent times. Use of junk/convenience foods, erosion of good cooking and eating practices, and obesity through over-eating are all deplorable (let me go and look in the mirror and deplore myself). Are their causes in recent times reducible to "a tradition imposed by the governing classes"? Well, no, I think I've already mentioned a bunch of other social reasons - big changes in post-war lifestyle. Turn it on its head - did France and Italy avoid these problems (to the extent they have) through the wisdom and compassion of their governments!? I think, for the French, you'll answer yes. But the Italian government - which one?? I think I did answer in my last post the reason Britain began changing from the late seventies on, as opposed to in 1995, shortly before I left the country. Travel abroad. But add the steady increase in numbers of people in higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, the increase in international business, with the travel and contacts entailed, increases in disposable income (people getting married and having kids later, vastly greater numbers of women working). Do you realise the explosion in reading which has taken place in my lifetime? When I was in my teens, you were lucky to find one bookshop in a decent-sized town. I could go on (but not tonight). Certainly I don't see a sudden revolt against a government-imposed tradition.

My favorite line by Mr Shaw, and I swear I am quoting this from memory, was about the plating of some food at Bid "which made for some interesting different forkfuls, depending on your angle of attack". Did I get that right? I now mutter that to myself whenever I sit down to dinner.

Assuming it occurred as you say, why did we stand for it? Simple. From 1760 to 1960, very little opportunity to experience alternatives. After 1960, the gradual development of overseas holidays created a very slowly evolving demand for different gastronomic experiences, to which shops and restaurants slowly responded. My parents were of the first generation to experience holidaying abroad, and it came to them late - early 1970s on - and was a big deal (my father travelled a lot for business reasons, but that was pretty rare then too). Versions of French restaurants did start appearing, in central London at least, in the 1890s. Many of them do not seem to have been that great. In any case, still not an experience available to the public at large. And, of course, taste for things like olive oil and garlic - when they are completely and utterly new to you - take time and repeated experiences to develop. In short, Steve, we didn't know - not in the 1760s, and not even for most of my parents' lives, what you and I know now. It wasn't like people were opening their spam cans and thinking - dammit, I would much prefer some terrine de campagne, why doesn't somebody do something! The whole process of becoming better-educated about food could doubtless have been hastened if we had been invaded by Germany in 1940. Take the rough with the smooth.

I knew I had another campari cocktail I liked, and just got around to looking it up. It's a refreshing concoction called a Jasmine. Here's the bartender.com recipe: http://www.webtender.com/db/drink/4700 The one I have used is from an excellent little book, Cocktail by Harrington and Moorehead, published by Viking. I like the book not just for the recipes, but for the cute pictures and the interesting historical background they give to each drink. Their Jasmine recipe ups the lemon juice from three quarters to a whole ounce. To taste, I suppose.

I didn't agree that Britain was dependent on the colonies for its food supply. But that probably doesn't matter to your argument either. I now read you this way: British food was (by implication) okay, or headed in the right direction at least, before the industrial revolution (doesn't matter when that was, as long as it came before the other events you describe). The diet of the people in the cities suffered (per Tony Finch) for economic reasons. I think you now say that this was after all realised by whoever was making the decisions behind the industrial revolution (not necessarily government or the ruling classes), but that they expected a tolerable diet to be available because of supplemental imports from the colonies. I depart from you on that, because I have no reason to believe that the staple foodstuffs of the urban poor were ever imported, or likely to be imported from the colonies - let alone at an affordable price. I mean, they weren't subsisting on bananas. By the way, were the remaining rural population still eating well? But on your analysis, the colonial support system broke down with the war(s). So: were the urban and rural populations eating okay up to that point? Okay, scrub the unsubstantiated colonial part of the theory, but maintain the points made by Tony, Michael Lewis and others about the effects of war, and I think you come down to the view that the reason Britain has lagged behind France gastronomically in recent decades has a lot to do with the Second World War (and the First and the Depression, if you like). Yes, I think that's what I said. You are working very hard at making it consistent with your original theory about what the "governing/upper classes" "agreed" to do in Britain as opposed to in France. You have tried out banking regulation and maintaining cultural hegemony (in theatre, radio, and so on), but you seem to have arrived at a program of urbanization run, not necessarily by the "ruling classes", but by "people with the power to make decisions", back in the 1700s. I mean, keep trying, I am sure you will eventually get your theory to fit the facts. But haven't we come a long way from "the French upper classes agreed to feed the lower classes in France far better than the upper classes in Britain agreed to feed their lower classes. It is really that simple." or do you think you are still saying the same thing, only in a slightly different way? I hope some other contributors will weigh in on when they think the British gastronimic improvement began; I think that's a topic of real interest.

Er... "Wilfrid-You are trying to pigeon hole my assertion that what happened in Britain was 'intended' by the government or that they realized that the net result of the enclosure laws (thanks for that) would be a diminution of the quality of food. I have made no such statement." Decision? Program? Intention? I'm lost. Are we agreed that the Industrial revolution in Britain was, very roughly, a late eighteenth century phenomenon? Just so we know when the rot set in (no spam and marmite yet, though). Can we make a distinction between the merchants, factory owners and other members of the bourgeoisie who were the prime beneficiaries of the industrial revolution (often at the expense of the land-owning gentry)? Or are all these lumped together as "ruling classes'? Okay, then we move on to the "onset of the twentieth century". In the intervening period, was Britain significantly dependent on its colonies for its food supply? Tea, spices, sure, but we were never growing those anyway. Cotton? too chewy. Bread and potatoes? Home grown, I think. So, no, I don't believe we were. Now, let's try to get events in order. First, the 1914-18 War, then the great depression of the thirties, then the 1939-45 war. I believe our colonies are still with us at this stage - haven't "lost them" yet. South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), India, Canada, Australia. All present and correct. Unfortunately, whatever food flow we were enjoying from them, somewhat interrupted by the war. But then, I suppose, the independence of a succession of colonies lead us into the spam and marmite era. I am no longer sure whether we are dealing with bad British food in the late eighteenth century, caused by an intentional or unintentional governmental industrialisation program; the dreadful spam and marmite era which ended circa 1995; or what. If the issue is British gastronomy in the 1700s, I withdraw the Second World War as an important causal factor. :wow:

Whatever you say, Tommy. I am arguing with Plotnicki on the UK thread, so I don't have the strength....

Steve, don't the excellent points made by Tony influence your thinking? I am happy to stipulate that most or all plans of the "upper classes" are malign, but I'm not convinced they plan everything that happens. To be honest, I don't really recognise your economic models as applying to any economy; I just don't think economies work like that (is there, perchance, a role for a mercantile class?), but I just have to beg off of a discussion of economic theories right now. Some other time maybe? But - getting bogged down in 1995? It was the year you cited. Of course, I know you didn't mean things changed on the stroke of midnight, and that it was an estimate. But if you meant 1988, I wish you'd said so. If you'd go as far as 1980, not only could we stop squabbling, but we would also have a plausible explanation for the role played by the chefs I listed (remember them?). But I see your gut still says 1995 - so I don't really know where we are.

No, Tommy, a verb posing as a noun. I dunno, I describe you as a genius, then you show up and embarrass me!

You're right, but it just shows how careful a reviewer should be. It's easy to imagine the reader walking away from that article with the clear impression that Bid has pricey wine list.

I am agreeing with you on this thread, Steve P. - that was my understanding. But may I also point to the unharnessed, impressionistic genius of Tommy, who mentioned the grammatical term "gerund" on the restaurant review thread. I think a gerund is a noun made from a verb, and that seems to be what "appetizing" is. I stand, as always, open to correction.