British cooking/Britain's food history and reputation

[Steve Plotnicki]

Sam-What is the French regulary and what is a Speldhurst Sausage?

[Tonyfinch]

The British working classes go out to DRINK.They do not go out to eat.To eat they go to the caff and they take their kids to Macdonalds.They may go to The Light Of Bengal when the pub shuts and they'll take the wife for a treat to Il Siciliana for lasagne and a bottle of Chianti.

I know plenty of people who think nothing of spending £50 in an evening in a pub ("nah,nah,its MY round") but who look askance if you tell them you've spent £50 pp on a meal.Drinking and getting pissed is what constitutes fun for the Anglo Saxon working classes.Eating just gets in the way.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

Captain Tony, you're clearly not working class.

The working classes spend their money on expensive DVD entertainment centres and NEXT storecards.

[Scottf]

Sam and I, as younger participants to this thread agree with Tony wholeheartedly.  We are viewed as freaks between friends and some family because we spend what could be judged as 'a lot of money' on a meal.  

I've disagreed with quite a lot of what Steve P. has posted on this thread but I guess the above brings me/us more in to his views than against, in a roundabout sort of way.

I guess we as Egulletarians, enjoy a very healthy attitude towards food, restaurants, markets, bakeries etc. and we will hunt out what is best and good for us.  But can anyone say hand on heart our neighbour does or the bloke a few doors down or across the road?

As an aside to Steve P., the markets are monthly which isn't very regular and only really contain cheese and breads.  Whilst we were in Paris in January we saw one street market that we stumbled across on a Sunday morning that pisses over anything I've ever seen in England though it galls me to say it.

And a Speldhurst sausage is ok (a local sausage in Kent) but it doesn't hold a candle to an Appledore sausage which is the best sausage I've ever tasted and thus to me the ' best' sausage in the world      

[Jinmyo]

Jimnyo, Is there any chance you could expand on your more pithy posts. As they stand, I find them not a little irksome.

LML, apologies. Hate for you to get pith stuck between your teeth. Had more to say but said enough. Always try to maintain a low irk ratio. Will try harder.

xoxo

[Steve Plotnicki]

"Whilst we were in Paris in January we saw one street market that we stumbled across on a Sunday morning that pisses over anything I've ever seen in England though it galls me to say it."

Scott-Now why does it gall you to say that? We have loads of crappy markets in the U.S. and it doesn't gall me to say it at all.  But Tony is right. The people are more interested in drinking than they are in eating.

There is a line of thought I've heard expressed by people on various wine boards that say that France and Italy have good food cultures because wine drinking was encouraged in the home as part of the religious ritual associated with having a meal. But drinking at home is discouraged by Protestant culture and so drinking away from home became the tradition. There's a lot to be said for that argument.

[Tonyfinch]

This is probably a topic for another thread,but in fact the French and Italians have a far higher overall alcohol consumption than the Brits and a much higher death rate from alcohol related diseases(Must be all those homemade eaux de vies and grappas that they're nipping on the side).Its just that they don't set out to get pissed by drinking endless pints all night.

Jancis Robinson,in her fascinating book "How To Handle Your Drink" quotes a survey carried out by the WHO about what constitutes "normal" or "average" daily drinking in different countries.Back came the answer from Britan-3 pints,or something like that.Back came the answer from France-3 LITRES of wine!!-and that was AVERAGE. Ahem-that must say something about something.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Tony-Sounds strange to me. In all of my life and travels, I don't think I've ever seen a drunk Frenchman or Italian for that matter. But I've seen lots of pissed Brits who have had more beers than seem humanly possible. Anyway, the point isn't how much they all drink, it was did the fact that British culture discouraged drinking at home have alot to do with how their food culture turned out?

[Fat Guy]

Here are some statistics in this regard:

http://www.who.int/substan....ion.pdf

I wrote an article that touched on this awhile back, but I can't remember exactly what the experts told me about how to interpret the statistics. I think it had something to do with the total number being not nearly as important as how much people drink when they drink. So, like, you could drink a glass of wine a day. Or you could drink two bottles all in one night, once a week. And those would show up statistically as the same. Something like that.

[Jinmyo]

I agree. I believe incidents of drunkeness are rare in France and Italy. No doubt there are drunks, but having lived in both places, I don't remember seeing them. I do remember copious quantities of alcohol at meals, including the ocassional beer at breakfast.

I hardly can recall meals with wine in England. But then much of my time there was in boarding school in the 50s and early 60s.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Steve-That interpertation has to be right. It is rare for anyone to drink more than a 1/2 bottle of wine at a meal (which doesn't get you very drunk.) And in instances where I've seen greater consumption, like a bottle per person, it takes place over a long dinner like 5 hours and the wine gets consumed with an entire meal with multiple courses. Beer gets drunk all by itself. People are doing it to get pissed. I can't think of a single person who drinks wine to get drunk. The other thing that the statistics seem to show is that British beer consumption is similar to Germany. Is this something one can trace to Saxon dining traditions? Are those Germans the source of it all? Maybe when you cut through it, it really splits into Northern and Southern European dining traditions and ther British are just a variation of Northern.

[Fat Guy]

I think maybe everybody in France is slightly intoxicated all the time, whereas the Brits are mostly sober and then get totally plastered on occasion.

There's also the small matter of the beer in England being so damn good. But yes, I do think there's a distinction that follows roughly geographical lines between nations where beer is the beverage of choice for the working class, and nations where wine is. I think in some of the far-north nations the beverage of choice is hard liquor, so there's really a three-way split I suppose. Some of this no doubt has to do with where grapes and various grains and such can be grown successfully and cheaply. I took only one advanced geography class in university, but we did read Montesquieu and he impressed me greatly with the importance of geography/climate/geology/agriculture/whatever to the way societies develop. I mean, he basically thinks geography is destiny and I wouldn't go that far, but it's a major factor influencing the development of a culture.

There's also a vaccination effect when you drink like the French.  If you put wine in everybody's baby bottle, and you serve it at every meal, and you otherwise completely and utterly deprive it of countercultural or forbidden fruit status, you get fewer alcoholics as adults because people tend not to binge drink as teens and beyond. At least that's an argument that has been made, and I think it's sensible.

By the way, I don't drink wine to get drunk but, if I could afford all-you-can drink quantities of great old Bordeaux, I would.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Steve-Your logic is off. The reason one drinks mature wine is to experince its complexities, something you can't do when drunk. So I doubt that is what you would do even if you had a cellar full of '45's and '47's. But I think you might be onto something else here from this point. Did the type of alcohol one could produce have any impact on the cuisine? In Northern European countries, a reason people drank hard liquor was to keep warm (even though it is a fallacy when looking at one's body heat, but it does give the feeling of warmth.) And does the fact that neither hard liquor nor beer are conducive to being paired with fine cuisine have any impact on food customs in Northern European countries?

[Fat Guy]

Who said I was being logical? All I'm saying is that if I had a cellar full of those babies, I'd drink them all the time and be drunk all the time. Wherever I went, I'd carry an old magnum in a brown paper bag and give tastes to people and myself and discuss it with them. I'd drink it like winos drink Manischewitz.

Beer is conducive to being paired with the heartier specimens of fine cuisine, it's just that there isn't much of a tradition of doing it. In New World restaurants where the French traditions aren't as strong, such as at Gramercy Tavern or March in New York, you'll see people do tasting menus with all beer or beer and sake (which is really a kind of beer). It's just that France has been the model for fine dining in England (and to a greater or lesser extent in much of the rest of the Western world and beyond) for so long that wine is the beverage consumed with haute cuisine there.

You can certainly conclude that both beverages and food get heavier as you go North. But that doesn't explain why in Europe there are great Northern cuisines (German) and lousy Northern cuisines (English); and great Southern cuisines (French/Italian) and lousy Southern cuisines (Portuguese). So it does eventually come back to culture, at least in part.

[Tonyfinch]

Fat Guy,alcoholism is a major problem in France and Italy,but public drunkenness is not.Being so dependent on alcohol for large swathes of its econonmy the French and Italians have been far slower than the Brits and the Yanks to admit that there's a problem,although they have begun to do so recently.The same applies to the Spanish and Portuguese.

[Fat Guy]

I agree with that, but I also think there are degrees of alcoholism (the whole premise of AA and other groups is that it's an absolute, like pregnancy, but it isn't really) and that French and Italian drunks tend to be lower-grade drunks who are functional in society more so than their Anglo off-the-wagon brethren. That's not really something I could support statistically -- just a sense I get.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Steve-Hmmm. I think that in instances when beer is paired with a modern day tasting menu it is because the spicing regimen of that cuisine doesn't doesn't have a tradition of being served with wine. Like we can pair grassy Sauvignon Blancs with Thai cuisine or semi-sweet wines with Indian, but because those cuisines are spicy they also pair well (better in many instances) with beer. But beer does not go well with any French food I can think of except Alsatian food and the Alsatians have at least a few toes in Germany, if not a whole foot. And is there an Italian dish that goes well with beer outside of the types of pork and sauerkraut dishes they serve in Istria?

Tony-Are you not discussing the difference between alcohol dependancy and being drunk in public? Alcohol might be eating away at French livers, which might shorten their life expectancy. but I haven't seen many French people giving up their cookies outside of the local wine bar. In fact I've never ever seen that happen. But all you have to do is spend one night in Soho and you are bound to see person some keeled over Brit (including women) watering the daisys.

[Fat Guy]

Plotnicki, if you want to start a new thread on beer-with-food versus wine-with-food, I'll give you a list as long as your arm (okay, maybe just a dozen or so examples) of French and Italian dishes that pair very well with beer -- and a few I like better with beer than with wine.

[Andy Lynes]

It is rare for anyone to drink more than a 1/2 bottle of wine at a meal (which doesn't get you very drunk.)

I had a bottle all to myself in Sartoria the other night. Mind you, the service was bloody slow.

[Tonyfinch]

.

. But that doesn't explain why in Europe there are great Northern cuisines (German) and lousy Northern cuisines (English)

Now look! I'm perfectly prepared to compare "English" cuisine unfavourably with French cuisine,but I'm shocked and bewildered that you can characterise German cuisine as "great" as opposed to English "lousy".

GERMAN cuisine for God's sake.The only "great" things about German cuisine are the size of the great big plates of schweinflesch they serve up to you at every opportunity,accompanied by dumplings and knodel that will sink you to the bottom of the Rhine as surely as if you were encased in concrete

The Germans are obsessed with pork.I know someone who runs an Indian restaurant in Vienna (yes I know its not Germany but its the same thing ).Pork is not a meat much eaten in India and is unknown on Indian restaurant menus in the UK.He has  to make virtually every meat dish out of pork otherwise no-one will eat in his restaurant.

I have nothing against pork per se,but its ridiculous overuse in German cuisine leads me to seriously dispute that you can term it great.

As someone said ,the Germans cook saurkraute,but over the border here in Alsace we cook CHOUCROUTE-enough said.

[Tonyfinch]

BTW I can put away 2 bottles of wine at a sitting without a problem.Maybe I'm an alcoholic but I prefer to think of myself as an honorary Frenchman.

[Fat Guy]

Tony, I was just trying to be provocative. I didn't really mean it as a categorical statement. By good German cuisine, I really mean the great Viennese cuisine of old that has inspired Bouley and others. And they have some nice food in the much-maligned Portugal now, too. You get the idea.

[Tonyfinch]

Whew,that's a relief.Actually the finest food I've eaten in Central/Eastern Europe was in  Budapest-wonderful old restaurants and complex cuisine incorporating French influences(lots of foie and lots of cream)-creative use of duck and roast goose(rarely to be found in restaurants) wonderful vegetables and creative spicing and very passable wines,including the lovely Tokay-all at dirt cheap prices.It really was a revelation.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Tony-I'm with you about German cuisine. It isn't very good, although if I had to say whose cuisine is more evolved, I would say Germany tops Britain. But neither cuisine is adequately evolved in my opinion. Lots of roast game and birds. Not much sophistication to the sauces which is where all the action is. But I have to say that even on the simple level of boiled meat, the Germans created a more sophisticated way of serving it than the Brits did through the various accompaniments.

Is a British "Boiled Dinner" similar to an Irish one or the American version which is a "New England Boiled Dinner" that relies on brined meat (corned beef) to flavor the rest of the ingredients? A less sophisticated approach than to poach in beef stock, or even to create the equivelent of a beef broth with the fat skimmed off the top like a Pot au Feu.

[Fat Guy]

Tony & Steve I guess the cuisine I'm referring to is so-called Mittel European, which would encompass the old style high cuisine of Vienna, Budapest, and a couple of other places too (Bratislava?). It has perhaps failed to keep pace, but historically was major. I mean, that's why Bouley called his place Danube.