Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking
Kate Colquhoun
Bloomsbury £20, pp460
The rise of the celebrity chef is a good thing in one way: it has resulted in a collective consciousness-raising about food. An unintended consequence of the vulgarity, and sometimes plain nastiness of chef-led reality-TV shows, is that we now think, talk and read more about our food. Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay and their kind, by showing off their cojones in the kitchen, have rendered victuals virile, and made it kosher for intellectuals to take an interest in nosh. Besides Bill Buford and Jeffrey Steingarten, Simon Schama (Vogue) and Richard Sennett (Spectator) have recently started writing about food.
More important, the buzz raises the status of food history from a subject addressed by cranky vegetarians, bored, empty-nest housewives or curry-obsessed, retired military gents, to a proper academic study. The next few years will see the foundation of many institutes and departments of food studies or gastronomy. They will succeed or fail depending on whether they treat history as the core of their teaching and research.
Meanwhile, popular histories of food, such as Kate Colquhoun's Taste, have emerged to feed the minds of readers made hungry for knowledge of food by the huge interest in recreational cooking. Some of these popular works are superb, such as the American Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, or Michael Symons's One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. These books are definitive in the sense that, though details might have to be altered in subsequent editions, they will probably not need wholesale rewriting.
Symons's book, written 25 years ago, is unusual in its sweep. But the history of Australian food has to cover only a relatively short span of time. Attempts to do the same for America are rare - and usually encyclopaedic in form, such as the recent Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. By virtue of the time span covered, the history of British food is incomparably more complicated.
Kate Colquhoun is the latest to take on the Brobdingnagian burden. Enormous advances in archaeology mean there is much more territory to cover than previously. As detailed in Martin Jones's recent Feast: Why Humans Share Food, we now know a good deal about food in prehistory; and Joan Thirsk's fine Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500-1760 fills in the early history, before examining food from the Renaissance through to the accession of George III.
Of course, the evidence for what much earlier people ate is not in tidy records such as recipe books, but the archaeological record and agricultural history. Colquhoun recognises this, and has a few pages on prehistory, a good deal on the evidence of diet in Roman times, and still more on that of the Middle Ages. Until the first real English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, compiled around 1390 by the cooks of Richard II, we can't, broadly speaking, really have a history of cooking, only a history of growing or importing food and its consumption.
Colquhoun comes into her own when the written record starts to include recipes. The spices that disappeared from the British diet when the Romans left returned with the Crusaders - and were used because of their flavour, not (in the long-discredited shibboleth) to disguise tainted meat. She says: 'If so much about the European Middle Ages seems bewilderingly remote, contemporary Moroccan food, robust and subtle by degrees, broadly unchanged for centuries, offers a hint of our own culinary past.'
The most fascinating aspect of the first half of her book, though, is to do with religion and fish. Christianity brought with it fast days and their number grew and grew - all of Advent and Lent, Fridays (the Crucifixion), Wednesdays (Judas's payday), Saturdays (Sabbath Eve) - not so irrational for an island people, but with only salt to preserve fish, drearily boring. In 1541 Henry VIII allowed eggs and dairy produce on fast days and cut the number of them by three-quarters. By the time of Bloody Mary the Friday fast had to be reinstated to protect the fishing industry.
From the statutes and the existing histories of the era, we can obviously infer something about what the common people were eating. But as literacy was confined to them, most of the written record relates to the food ways of the upper classes. Some of the earliest surviving texts are manuals of carving, as important in great houses as at court. I cherish John Russell's comment in his Boke of Nurture that 'Crabbe is a slutt to kerve'. Such documents and books, though, are not only confined to the eating habits of a tiny proportion of the population, but they can also be misleading. Elizabeth David once told the Oxford Food Symposium that you should never take a recipe as evidence that a dish was current at the date the book was published. Recipes, as a rule, took at least one generation to get into print; and culinary fashions were so rapid that, by the time a recipe was circulating in print, the dish might well have vanished from the trend-setting table.
Colquhoun is perfectly aware of both these points, and that the real subject of this book cannot merely be cooking. So she focuses also on ingredients, equipment, trade, social distinctions and changes of language. Her asides on language are one of the joys of Taste, as when she points out that 'garbage' originally meant 'offal' (of birds - giblets), and that 'offal' comes from an Old Dutch root meaning to fall off - ie the parts of the animal that fell off when it was butchered. The book teems with pleasing insights, such as the fact that by the late 15th century the English already entertained guests to meals in their homes - the first dinner parties - though by this time the feudal traditions of hospitality, whereby the lord of the manor and his dependants ate in the one great hall, were already giving way to less public modes of eating.
Colquhoun is at her best writing about the Regency period, and you can read this book with confidence - until the 20th century dawns, and her research collapses. Though Edwardian excess is over, she neglects to ask whether appetites have changed, and fails to tell us, for example, whether at the Duke and Duchess of York's wedding breakfast in 1923 guests were expected to eat all eight courses. She has a lot of time for Escoffier, but buys into the idea of him as the simplifying, recipe-codifying patron saint of chefs, and neglects to mention his well-attested stealing from the Savoy in the 1890s.
In the 1980s she totally misunderstands nouvelle cuisine, so it's probably not surprising that she misidentifies the traditionalist Paul Bocuse as its 'leading proponent'. Errors pile up in her final chapters. The first chef on British TV, Marcel Boulestin, was secretary to author Henry Gauthier-Villars, also known under his pseudonym 'Willy', not to Colette. I don't at all mind that she identifies the first British-born TV cook, Philip Harben (d. 1970) as a 'foodie' avant la lettre, but Ann Barr and I coined that word in 1982, not 1987 as her text implies.
It's 'bon vivant' (not 'viveur') as Fanny Cradock could have told her, as a copyright dispute once turned on the error, but her sources do not appear to include the New Oxford DNB where she could learn all this. Colquhoun's use of footnotes versus endnotes is infuriatingly inconsistent, though I expect she could probably produce a less anarchic apparatus if she ever gets the chance to do another edition of what - if only it ended with the Hanoverians - would be a reliable as well as amusing book.
