On the Brit and his food - Lucy Lethbridge in TLS:

‘Cookbook illustrations are a sound barometer to social trends through the decades, and Ben Mervis’s The British Cookbook confirms that nostalgia for the gamey farmhouse kitchen is still with us. Aficionados of the genre (and who can blame them?) want to gaze on food they will probably never cook, on roadkill served on rusty enamel dishes or muffins kept warm in linen napkins on grainy old wooden chopping boards. Mervis’s book, a substantial compilation of traditional recipes with some history thrown in, is lavishly illustrated with photographs of oozing brandy snaps on Spode plates and game chips straight from the Aga, as well as shots of scenic rural corners shrouded in mist. It is, in fact, a feast of heritage loveliness.’

(…)

‘The American-born Mervis tells us that his own first encounter with British cuisine was a bacon butty liberally soused with ketchup; it was, he writes, a “Proustian moment”. The sprinkling of recipes for modern dishes that have taken their place in the culinary canon – chicken kiev, arctic roll, coronation chicken – reflect his pleasure in the ever-changing food landscape of Britain, but also show up the lucky-dip nature of the project. And it is a bit cheeky to kick off the book with a recipe for boiled egg and soldiers (“season the exposed egg with salt and pepper and dip a soldier in”), but he is clearly aiming for a reader range that runs from never-having-boiled-an-egg to might-have-a-go-at-jugging-a-hare.’

(…)

‘The history of food is the history of human ingenuity, about making a few turnips go far, or stretching a pig’s innards to another meal. It is about waste (or fear of it) as well as want. It is also about trade, travel and immigration: Mervis includes mogo chips, made of cassava, popularized here by Ugandan Asians in the 1970s; kheer, a cardamom-flavoured rice pudding that originated in Pakistan; mulligatawny, a soup created by eighteenth-century Indian chefs to suit the insipid palates of the colonial British. “Chicken parmo”, a parmigiana/fry-up hybrid, apparently emerged from a chip shop in Middlesbrough in the 1950s.’

(…)
‘And while Mervis obligingly includes separate recipes for champ, bashed neeps, colcannon, clapshot and the gloriously named Welsh stwnsh, they are all pretty well the same thing – root vegetables, usually potatoes, mashed with milk and butter. But then the pleasure is in the quirks, and the poetry in these old names is so seductive that it is not surprising Mervis doesn’t want to miss any out. They bring alive the story of changing topographies, of farming, religion and regional seclusion. Cullen skink, hattit kit, partan bree, groaty dick, hollygog pudding and panackelty – this is the deep, protean language of oral history, full of jokes and inventive asides. A tweed kettle is actually a dish of salmon, a Scotch woodcock is made from eggs and anchovies, an Orkney broonie is a ginger cake and a curate’s eye is a slice of fried bread with a hole in which to cook an egg.’

Read the article here.

I just read Natalia Ginzburg’s essay on the English, not her best one, but still good enough, and she complains with a delightful sense of humor about English food. Perhaps we should give hollygog pudding a second chance.

Long has cooking been a survival skill, let’s make few turnips go very far, and for many people it still is. But to many it’s mainly nostalgia, snobbery and an alternative to sex.
Not so much a necessity anymore, sheer escapism by mouth, with the help of tongue and teeth.