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Now we’ve just eaten way too much food, is anyone wondering why British food is Like That (and by "Like That" I mean traditionally kind of bland)?
It turns out that the answer involves highly spiced medieval recipes, trade, religion, and snobbery. Oh, and The French.
It turns out that the answer involves highly spiced medieval recipes, trade, religion, and snobbery. Oh, and The French.
To start with, let's go back to the 1300’s, when an unknown English cook published "The Forme of Cury" (Cury meaning cooking, not Curry, let’s not get carried away here) and another English cook published “Utilis Coquinario” - Between them these books contain hundreds of recipes.
These recipes, published in the 1300’s, prove the English upper classes were eating Caraway, Ginger, Saffron, Cardamom, Pepper, Nutmeg, Almonds, Pears, Sugar, and even Pasta, and Vinaigrette Salads, alongside a vast array of native herbs, meat, and fish. So what happened?
Well, nothing happened for a while. During the 1500’s wealthy Tudors ate very well - dried fruits, sweet potatoes, and citrus fruits such as lemons and oranges appear in recipes, and the first meringue appeared in a cookbook (though not under that name), and all was tasty.
Then French influences and Protestantism started a change (it’s always the French, you know?). Before this, highly spiced purees had been the base of many dishes - however, the effect of French influences on English food began a turn towards butter and animal stock based sauces.
At the same time as the French influence, Protestantism pushed a change in the understanding of the “humours” and rather than using spicy food to combat colds, etc, people saw digestion like fermentation, and moved to simpler, supposedly easily digestible foods, for their health.
But this wasn’t the end! Understanding of food and digestion may have shifted, and the French might have caused more butter and less spice to appear, but the food of the English upper classes was still reasonably flavourful.
And then the 1600’s came.
And then the 1600’s came.
In 1584 the first potato arrived in England. And that was the beginning of the end for spicy British food. It wasn't the potatoes fault, the reason spice in food declined was unrelated, but the timing of the arrival, just before that change, is too good for me to not point out.
You see, the English upper classes have always been inveterate snobs, and as exploration and colonisation led to spices becoming cheaper and more accessible, the upper classes began to freak out. So if the poor were eating spiced foods - they didn’t want to anymore.
So justv because spices were becoming popular with the poor, who were delighted to be able to eat like the rich had for centuries, the rich moved to simpler, plainer, foods, they even came up with a new philosophy on flavour, simply to justify their new diets and their snobbery.
The rich began to claim that foods should taste like themselves, unadulterated by strong spices, and even began a (completely false) rumour that the poor were using all those spices to disguise rotten food, a rumour which still persists about medieval food in general to this day.
Obviously, in the end, the poor began to switch back to blander food, copying those new ideals upheld by the rich which were seen as sophisticated and aspirational, and the new philosophy on food that they’d formed meant the rich stood by their new, blander, cuisine.
And that the story of how pure snobbery (and a bit of religion, and French influence) led to the death of highly spiced, flavourful foods in England, and, by extension the whole of the UK.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that Curry isn’t British, and that Fish and Chips is, please remind them that the first potato arrived in England centuries after the first curry, and that the first deep fat fryer didn’t arrive until centuries after that.
If you enjoyed this, please consider chucking me a tip if you can spare it at https://ko-fi.com/jayhulme (and if you can't, don't worry - I get it)
You can find more weird history in my thread of threads here: https://mobile.twitter.com/JayHulmePoet/status/1077958443410042880
