Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table. Nigel Slater

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СКАЧАТЬ The Glorious British Chocolate Bar

       Rest in Peace

       The Supermarket Fish Shame

       The Greengrocer – A Local Hero

       A Nation of Old Boilers

       Hotel Toast

       Dick and Other Delights

       Dead Man’s Leg

       The Glue Factor

       The Gingernut

       Pear Drops

       Acid Drops

       Aniseed Balls

       Butterscotch

       A Drop or Two of Sauce

       Midget Gems

       Winter Teas – The Crumpet Season

       A Muffin Worry

       How to Open an English Muffin

       A Log Fire Tea – Some Suggestions

       Cupcakes at the Hummingbird

       High Tea

       The Packed Lunch

       Werther’s Originals

       The Polo Mint

       Camp Coffee

       Robinson’s Barley Water

       Out of a Net and onto the Net

       Marmite

       The Organic Box

       The Neat and Tidy Cook

       The Cool, Modern Shopper Cook

       ‘Hands that Do Dishes’

       Things Move On

       The Death of the Cheese Board

       Thick Toast

       Best Friends

       Treacle Tart

       Coconut Ice

       The Cream Cracker

       Barley Sugars

       Nut Toffee

       Brown Sauce

       Eating with the Wasps

       A Summer Tea – A Few Polite Suggestions

       Seaside Rock

       A National Hero

       Sarson’s Vinegar

       The Pink Wafer

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       From the reviews of Eating for England

       Also by Nigel Slater

       About the Publisher

       Preface

      New York, late autumn, and I have just taken the short walk from Central Park to Carnegie Hall, where I am being interviewed for a radio show. It’s a bright, invigoratingly breezy day and I’m feeling confident. I know what I am to be interviewed about, and am pretty sure of my ground and even remain unfazed when, at the last minute, I find that the interview is going out live. As I say, I know my ground. And then comes the question, the one I wasn’t prepared for, the one where I am asked to describe British food to the listeners.

      Do I tell them about the meltingly tender lamb from North Ronaldsay, the famous apple hat pudding with its tender suet crust, or the northern teacake known as the fat rascal? Do I have time to enthuse about the joys of medlar jelly, damson gin and the unpasteurised cheeses made down long leafy lanes in Dorset, Devon and Dumfries? Perhaps I should wax eloquent about Wiltshire bacon, sherry trifle, Christmas pudding, or steak-and-kidney pie with its crumbly pastry and dark and savoury filling? Will there be time to get in name-checks for Scottish heather honey, toasted teacakes, gooseberry fool and Caerphilly cheese? And will they let me squeeze in the glory that is a decent haggis, Welsh rarebit or Cornish pasty?

      Or do I tell them the truth? That for every Brit eating our legendary roast beef and jam roly poly there are a million more tucking into Thai green curry and pepperoni pizza. That more people probably eat chocolate brownies than apple crumble and custard, and that it is now easier to find decent sushi than really good roast beef. Should I mention too that despite our love of all that is local, fresh, organic and ‘real’, we also have a list of edible icons more eccentric than anyone could ever imagine?

      It is well known that we have been arguing for years whether gravy should be thick or thin, if pickled onions should be part of a ploughman’s lunch, or whether or not jelly belongs in a trifle. I wonder what they would also make of the fact that different counties argue about whether the jam or the clotted cream goes onto a scone before the other, or that more of us apparently use gravy browning than wine to capture the heavenly pan juices of our Sunday roast.

      British food is, of course, about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; it is about dressed crab, and roast chicken with nutmeggy bread sauce. It is about huge flakes of locally caught fish in crisp batter, eaten from the paper with the sea breeze in your hair, oysters from Whitstable as fresh as an icy wave, Eccles cakes with soft, flaky pastry, and the best bacon sandwich in the world. But it is also about Heinz tomato ketchup, brown sauce and Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. The biggest names on the high street are not Betty’s tea rooms but Starbucks and Subway. There are more Pizza Expresses than traditional pie and mash cafés, and more McDonald’s than fish-and-chip shops. Looking at some people’s supermarket trolleys (oh, come on, you know you have), I sometimes wonder how you could define this country’s tastes at all. The internet, by the way, gives approximately 375,000 entries for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but over five million for that other great British invention, the Mars bar.

      The fact of the matter is that our food culture is about both the gentle, buttercup-scented cheese made in a village barn the colour of honey, and the childish delight of unwrapping a foil triangle of Dairylea. It is indeed true that we make the most crumbly and agreeable oatcakes in the world, but it is the mass-produced cream cracker that has become the culinary icon. And despite producing some of the most delectable pork products in the world, we still love tucking into a bacon sandwich from СКАЧАТЬ