Stigand

Thanks for the plug! But actually (as in Lobscouse & Spotted Dog), at sea it was made with ship's biscuit and potatoes - assuming the latter were available, that is. In fact, one of the figurative meanings of lobscouse is hodgepodge, miscellany - basically it's a mess of whatever you have on hand. Which after a few months at sea can be pretty damn aleatory....

Food historian Rachel Lauden writes:

Do we know when Bordeaux stopped being claret in the literal sense of 'clairet' and when it became the weightier stuff it is now? The Pepys reference is interesting. I suppose the question I'm asking is really a hypothesis in two parts: i) For a long time England was by far the largest wine importing country ii) Importation of wine led to stylistic innovation (including fortifying wine, making more robust styles that would stand up to the vicissitudes of shipping, and making better wine to justify the cost of shipping). One objection might be that the French have always demanded good, aged wine, and that the English market was incidental to this - as you say, it's pretty hard to come up with data.

I think you could argue that England's influence on the development of wine over the centuries has been massive. Not least becasue as a wealthy, wine-consuming but (largely) non-wine-producing country, it seems to have been responsible for the creation (or at least the popularisation) of all sorts of fortified wines: port, sherry and madeira spring to mind. And of course there's the old claim that the English invented Champagne... I'd be interested to know how much the need to ship and store wine for markets like England also led to the development of more robust styles of regular wine, intended to be drunk mature rather than fresh. I assume that in the middle ages a lot of the wine of (English) Gascony was exported to England rather than drunk locally. I suppose we'd need to consider how much quality French wine was sold within France compared to the amount exported to England in the period afterwards to form an idea on this (but since much of the exports were smuggled, I don't know if any really indicative figures exist). Any thoughts?

Paul Krugman's old article Supply, Demand and English Food is an interesting and readable account of how Britain lowered its expectations of food over the last two centuries and how an economist might think of the changes in the food scene over the last few decades. I agree with John Whiting that much of the damage occurred during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, as people migrated from the countryside to towns, generally leaving behind family life and traditions as well as traditional sources of food. The Industrial Revolution in France was much less demographically dramatic (less migration, less population growth and - it is thought - less social disruption), so older foodways persisted even before large-scale government intervention in the C20th. What would be interesting to compare is the different evolution of _urban_ eating in the UK and in France. Why did C19th England, with its dynamic and wealthy urban middle class, not develop a cuisine bourgeoise in the way that France did? And to return to real issue: pork pies, kippers and smoked eel.

Smoked elk sausage is a great match with beer. I'm not sure if elk is anything like reindeer, but I imagine it might be. If so, a family tradition of ours is to have a browned-then-slow-cooked reindeer leg in a cream sauce with wild cranberries on boiled potatoes for Christmas Eve (the evergreen joke being that Xmas presents will be late because Rudolph will be walking with a limp...). It goes well with an old, good claret, so long as you go easy on the cranberries. The claret copes with the intense gameyness of the meat and its astringence cuts through the heaviness of the cream sauce. But I'm not sure if this is the kind of dish you had in mind.

It's basically a simple meat stew, food for the poor. See here. lobscouse Also made at sea, with ship's biscuit instead of potatoes. (At least it was in the C19th.) Lobscouse and Spotted Dog

cornish pasties and devon cream teas?

One of the problems about extending this thread to the UK is that a lot of traditional dishes that spring to mind are traditional to areas, rather than cities. To me, roast beef is more a national thing: the Roast Beef of Old England. I'm not sure I'd want to assign a city to Haggis or Cawl or pasties or grouse for that matter. I agree with you on the breakfast though - especially if we're talking Leadenhall Sausages. I wonder if it's fair to generalise that the UK's traditional food culture is primarily a rural rather than an urban one? I certainly find it had to think of many town-related UK foods. Someone's already suggested Balti, and then there's Barnsley Chop and Bath buns and Eccles cakes - but what else?

Or pie & mash with liquor, or jellied eels.

For what it's worth, the Carolingian Empire included modern-day Germany. There are records of Jewish communities in West Francia (which later become France), East Francia (which - very loosely - later became Germany) and Lotharingia (the bit in the middle which became the Low Countries and Burgundy). It's not clear that 'French' cuisine from the period had much to do with the mdern French cooking tradition, although there is an interesting story in Notker the Stammerer's Life of Charlemagne about Charlemagne trying Brie for the first time. For the record, he didn't eat the rind. </medieval history geekiness>

Eel Pie Island (in the Thames, near Richmond)

Well, only slightly ashamed - not ashamed enough to stop drinking it, for example. Does this mean there are restaurants out there throwing away old, gently sparkling, slightly maderised champagnes? If so, I'll selflessly volunteer to take them off their hands...

I'm ashamed to admit that I've always loved slightly maderised old NV champagne. I'd wondered whether this was a fault or not - I suppose now I know.

Nahm is probably not the best if you're looking for a trendy, young atmosphere. The dining room is pretty unprepossessing - fairly standard hotel dining room fittings (not chintzy but not designer cool either), and the time I went there (admittedly a weeknight) there wasn't a particularly young vibe. Having said that, I loved Nahm: the Thai banquet was fantastic (especially when compared to the standard green-curry-orama experience of workaday Thai places in London or the US). The service was great as well - I remember a great Australian sommelier who chose us a really good South Australian Viognier. Disclaimer: I haven't been to the fabled Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas, although I understand that those who've been to both LoS and Nahm still thought Nahm was worth the visit. So in short: Nahm doesn't aspire to be wildly trendy, but is great anyway.

Wow - squaremeal.co.uk really does the trick. Thanks.

I wonder if anyone has had the same problem as I have in using restaurants' websites? I find that most restaurants are totally un-googlable, largely because a google serach for the restaurant name just generates pages and pages of 'www.london-eating.co.uk' and similar pages. These pages never link to the restaurants' websites, and usually contain totally unhelpful reviews. (Try it for Chez Bruce - in fact the only restaurant not affected is St John.) If you want to check out a restaurant's menu or wine list, say, this is really annoying. Sometimes adding '-review' to the Google search helps (this was Google's advice to me), but usually not. I'm dimly aware that Google works according to the number of sites that link to a given site and their popularity, but could anyone answer any of the following questions: a) Why 'london-eating.com' scores so highly on Google search (it doesn't look like a very good site...); b) Why they don't link to restaurants' websites (do they act as some sort of booking intermediary? Or have they just not thought of it?); c) Whether there are any search engines that make looking for restaurants' own websites easy; d) Whether there's anything simple restaurants can do to make their sites Google-friendly (short of setting up spurious links etc.).

I agree that it's unlikely that spices and chillis have ever been widely used to mask rotten food. I think the idea is a mistaken extension of an older (and in some ways understandable) Anglo-Saxon cultural prejudice: namely that fresher, high quality ingredients could be prepared in simple ways with few flavourings, whereas inferior ingredients needed tarting up. This idea is prevalent in eighteenth-century English discussions of how England's cuisine differed from that of, say, France. In England, luxury ingredients (in particular prime cuts of meat) were more generally affordable (initially because of high livestock-population ratios, then increasing because of wealth). By the eighteenth century, this was tinged with political prejudice too: the English could afford good honest plain meat because they lived in a fair and well-governed society, the French lived in an impoverished tyranny and so couldn't (see Hogarth's The Roast Beef of Old England - http://www.peterwestern.f9.co.uk/hogarth/hogarth36.html). So elaborately cooked food was inherently suspicious - the implication being that the spices, ragouts and fricasees were concealing suspect food. I suppose it's not hard to extrapolate 'suspect' to mean 'rotten'. But I doubt it was ever actually true.

One that shouldn't work, but does. Spanish pickled chilli peppers (guindillas) - I like the Delicias brand, which is available in the UK at Sainsbury's with... Champagne. The vinegar in the chillis (and they are intensely vinegary) ought to spoil the taste of the champagne, but for some reason, they complement each other amazingly.

Does this mean we can expect to snap up NZ Pinot Noir bargains in the UK? If so, does anyone have any recommendations, any particularly good deals? I had a nice Wither Hills NZ Pinot Noir the other day, but I'm not an expert.

Wither Hills (NZ) does a screw-top Sauvignon Blanc that I like a lot. About GBP7.00-8.00 a bottle from Waitrose, if I haven't bought the last bottle. No idea if you can get it in the US, though - sorry.

Personally, I often prefer a VSOP to an XO - especially given how expensive XO is. I've found the XOs I've tried (Hine, Remy Martin) have seemed over-refined and somehow too smooth in comparison to the VSOPs (for the same reason, I prefer Armagnac to Cognac). Is this just an idiosyncrasy of taste, or is there a different XO I should try that would convert me?

Marrowbone

I'm afraid I'm going to lower the tone by talking about supermarket beef, but for what it's worth I've tried the Jamie Oliver beef alongside Waitrose's organic beef and the Waitrose stuff knocks Jamie into a cocked hat. Both raw and cooked it has an intense smell of buttery fat and a much creamier flavour (I'm not sure if this implies it's better marbled - I'm afraid I'm a beef ignoramus...).

I've been given membership of the Wine Society as a Xmas present, and I'm looking forward to ordering. Any tips for good ways to get to know their offerings? For example, has anyone tried their mixed cases (at first glance, some look interesting, but some look full of the kind of thing I could - but don't - buy at Sainsbury's)? On the subject of off-licences, the Threshers near me has undergone a bizarre metamorphosis in the last few weeks. It was never great (small; obvious and so-so wine), but it's become very chi-chi while still remaining bland (for example it now has a branded display with lots of Louis Jadot burgundies). It also now has a section devoted to Rocket pre-prepared food. I guess in a way this makes sense: since off licences are open late, they are good places to sell expensive semi-prepared food to people who work late. But overall I'm disappointed that Threshers' attempt to go upmarket involves selling lots of heavily branded, not very interesting posh wine and ready meals. Has anyone else seen one of these places? Are they doing well?