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Food and Drink Guide from CADOGANGUIDES by Guy McDonald While the rest of the world thinks England is the land of bland, stodgy food like grave-doused meat-and-two-veg, Yorkshire pudding, pies, fish and chips, steamed suet puddings, and sickly confectionery like Bakewell tarts and Sally Lunn buns, all masquerading as a national cuisine, mercifully this is not the whole picture. The Norman Conquest had a culinary dimension, introducing pungent foreign herbs and spices into the plain Anglo-Saxon cookbook. Richard II’s court, famous for its gourmet tastes, ate food dyed gold with saffron and elaborate sculpted marzipan. A rare Tudor cookbook gives a glimpse into the cooking of that era. Starting with some general advice on meat conservation (‘mallard is good after frost’ and ‘goose is worse in the midsummer month and best in stubble time’ while ‘goat is always good’), the wife of the master of the Corpus Christi College offers mouth-watering recipes for fish or meat soup, dressed crab, meat pies, fish sauce, roast venison and fruit tarts. Fish is cooked with butter, salt pepper and parsley, and sachets of rosemary and thyme, or fried in parsley butter; meat, spiced with cinnamon and sugar, is charcoal roasted; mutton pies are packed with prunes, raisins and dates. So where did it go wrong? Modern English Food  England “once had a fine food culture, mislaid it out of carelessness, and then realised to its horror that the rest of the world regarded its eating habits with contempt”, writes food critic Paul Richardson in Cornucopia: A gastronomic tour of Britain. Although there is evidence of an enduring English regard for fried breakfasts and vegetable boiled to a pulp, the menus of England’s proliferating restaurants, café-bars and gastro pubs are now filled with fresh, home-made, organic, locally sourced and seasonal produce, and a wide choice of dishes. Food is now fashionable, alongside other elements of modern style like architecture, music, design and art.
The new style of English cooking takes good old comfort food, like pork sausages, roast lamb and fried fish, and throws in the pilferings of Mediterranean holidays, spicy immigrant foods and colonial exotica. Lunch in any English provincial town today might start with salad Nicoise, chick-pea burgers or salsa dipped potato wedges and go on to a pan-seared eye fillet, game casserole or fish with piquant Oriental seasonings, served with grilled vegetables or rocket salad topped with shaved parmesan. This so-called modern English style is in itself no guarantee of quality: it can scale the height or plumb the depths, offering mediocre dishes that are fast becoming contemporary clichés (pork and leek sausages with mustard mash, or Thai fishcakes), or new and exciting combinations of familiar and unfamiliar ingredients.
Unless otherwise indicated, restaurants are usually open for lunch around 12 until roughly 2:30, and again for dinner from 6ish until 10:30 or so. Café-bars may open all day and late into evening, whereas cafes and tea shops tend to close at 5pm. Many restaurants stay open all day at weekends too.
Café-Bars  The main purveyor of modern English food is the café-bar, a newish concept in eating, drinking and lounging the grew out of Manchester clubbers’ need for somewhere to hang out before and after clubs; they provided the natural context, with cool décor, chill-out music and art on the walls; eating was made compulsory by the licensing laws.
The café scene has exploded in England, which astoundingly now has more cafes than anywhere else in Europe after Portugal, although France and Italy drink more coffee per head (8lbs 13oz a year compared to 5lbs 8oz in Britain). In Continental Europe, however, café culture is more laid back: sipping, talking, and relaxing all come from the same impulse to savour the moment, alone or with friends. As the English self-consciously get their minds and mouths around the Cappuccino, mocha, espresso, macchiato, frappe, latte, they have more in common with Americans than with their European counterparts; empowered by the number of choices on offer, but not yet raising coffee-drinking to the level of culture.
Country House Hotels and Gastro Pubs  The ‘meat and two-veg’ soul of traditional English cooking – roasts, stews, pies, pudding, fruit and cheese – resides in the country house hotel restaurant and gastro pub. In the hotels, delicious meals of roast pheasant, rack of lamb, rabbit stew, venison, game and grilled trout come with herb dumplings, red cabbage and parsley butter. They will usually be followed by divinely filling puddings.
Gastro pubs, on the other hand, are the French bistros of British catering: once gloomy old boozers turned friendly, no-smoking, reasonably priced family restaurants with bars. While the licensing laws are a national embarrassment, the food is better than ever, with revamped pub-grub favourites like Cumberland sausages and herb mash, beer-battered Whitby cod, thick cut chips and mushy peas and steak and kidney ale pie regularly chalked up on the blackboard.
Fish and Chips  Every English town has its fish and chips shop; according to surveys, fish and chips are England’s most popular food – and it’s still a great fall-back when the round of chorizo ploughman’s and ricotta tarts with raspberry coulis starts to get you down. Despite depleted stocks worldwide, customers routinely demand cod, not because of the flavour, which is indistinguishable from haddock or coley when deep fried and drowned in salt, vinegar and ketchup, but because ‘cod and chips’ rolls of the tongue so nicely. The fish supper, redolent of island living, is undoubtedly the national dish.
Indian, Chinese, Thai and Exotic Cuisines  The main opposition in provincial towns is the Indian restaurant. The preferred dish is the chicken tikka masala, a combination dreamed up for the beer-swilling English hordes; in fact these restaurants are suspiciously devoid of Anglo-Indian families, who presumably don’t recognize the brightly coloured oily slop served up as Indian food. The best immigrant food is found in the suburbs and Chinatowns of cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leicester, where the incoming populations have transformed the grey, rainy English streets into something more fragrant. Inline with the modern English revival, however, you will find some excellent Indian restaurants serving really fresh, unusual dishes. You may also be surprised to find pubs everywhere serving Thai green curry – sometimes excellent. In the metropolitan centres you may also find Japanese sushi and noodle bars, and cuisines ranging from Sudanese to Indonesian.
Pizza and Pasta  Cropping up everywhere are pizza and pasta chain restaurants: Pizza express, Zizzi, Bella Pasta, Ask, Pizza Piazza. Although their dishes tend to be bland substitutes for the real thing, the benefits of relatively healthy, inexpensive food, served in a cheerful setting, are hard to resist. Not having to deal with the awkward intimacies shared by staff and diners in traditional low-lit provincial restaurants might be seen as another selling point. Other chains that are palatable and affordable, if not sizzling with originality include Café Rouge, Café Flo and Browns – all pseudo-French-style bistros.
Roadside Dining  The Little Chef is still king of the roadside dining, the cheap, plastic décor in close harmony with the saccharine offerings on the laminated menu. The motorway service station offers lamentable self-serve grills, fried breakfasts and plastic-tasting sandwiches as the only alternative to fast food – and at a price.
Tea Shops  The much loved institution of the English tea shop, often styled Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, is to be found all over the country. At the top end are famous tea shops like Bettys of York and Sally Lunn’s of Bath, where frilly-shirted and bonneted waitresses entice customers with well-garnished sandwiches, jammy pikelets, sweet and savoury tarts, scones and the joy of the English cream tea (scones with jam and clotted cream).
Otherwise your basic English caff serves all-day greasy breakfasts and lunches of meat, potatoes and gravy, washed down with the obligatory strong, milky ‘cuppa tea.
Food in England, like so many things, is a class thing. Gastronomy tends to have strong links with the other forms of middle-class culture: the music festival has turned the small fishing town of Aldeburgh into a hive of good restaurants; TV chef Rick Stein has turned Padstow into a huge middle-class tourist destination and the well-heeled Shropshire town of Ludlow has s French-style food market and three Michelin-starred restaurants. But until good cooking has fully permeated English society, it is safe to say that what you eat in England may still be a bit hit and miss: not every roadside café or country pub will serve you gastronomic delights, although, these are to be had, for a price, at superior establishments.
Pub  The traditional English pub, a great national institution comes in many shapes and sizes. There are those that have been refurbished for families, with patterned carpets, highly polished woodwork, soft lighting and piped mood music. There are the unreconstructed old boozers that subsist on a gang of aging locals and will have to close (or go gastro) when they die. Either of these two might offer Sky Sports to raucous single sex audiences in the evenings. There are pubs that have chucked out the musty old carpets and dark brewery furniture in favour of rustic décor, hiring top-notch chefs, stocking carefully chosen wines and beers, and banning mobile phones to complete the back to basics ambience. And there are pubs of varying quality that trade on the character of the building, which may be Art Nouveau (stained glass and carved woodwork), Tudor (heavy timbers and inglenooks), converted high street banks, opera houses or even a gents’ public toilet.
Once upon a time virtually every town had its own brewery, pumping out a nourishing aroma on brew days and giving the town a distinctive, recognizable taste in its range of beers. Not many are left, although a few are still going strong, like Shepherd Neame in Faversham, Adnams in Southwold, Bass in Burton-upon-Trent and Green King in Bury St. Edmunds. It is a great shame that the market is dominated by big national brewing companies, Bass, Carlsberg, Tetleys, Scottish Courage and Whitbreads, who also control most of the pubs. A promising new development is the number of pubs that brew their own beer, almost always cheaper, and more interesting, than the brewery beers. As for ciders and perry (made with pears), there is nothing more refreshing to drink sitting outside on a sunny afternoon, particularly in Herefordshire were most of them are made. In drinking local beers, ciders and parries, in preference to imported lagers, you are also supporting a raft of ailing industries, including hop-growers, barley producers, and breweries. Many Metropolitan pubs now also keeps some reasonable bottles of wine behind the bar and mix decent cocktails, but in country pubs you’re best off sticking to beer.
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