British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History

Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History

by Colin Spencer

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, English cuisine was known throughout Europe as extraordinarily stylish, tasteful, and contemporary, designed to satisfy sophisticated palates. So, as Colin Spencer asks, why did British food "decline so direly that it became a world-wide joke, and how is it now climbing back into eminence?" This delectable volume traces the rich variety of foods that are inescapably British―and the thousand years of history behind them.

Colin Spencer's masterful and witty account of Britain's culinary heritage explores what has influenced and changed eating in Britain―from the Black Death, the Enclosures, the Reformation, the Age of Exploration, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of capitalism to present-day threats posed by globalization, including factory farming, corporate control of food supplies, and the pervasiveness of prepackaged and fast foods. He situates the beginning of the decline in British cuisine in the Victorian age, when various social, historical, and economic factors―an emphasis on appearances, a worship of French cuisine, the rise of Nonconformism, which saw any pleasure as a sin, the alienation from rural life found in burgeoning towns, the rise and affluence of the new bourgeoisie, and much else―created a fear that simple cooking was vulgar. The Victorians also harbored suspicions that raw foods were harmful, encouraged by the publication of a key cookbook of the period, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.

However, twenty-first century British cooking is experiencing a glorious resurgence, fueled by television gurus and innovative restaurants with firm roots in the British tradition. This new interest in and respect for good food is showing the whole world, as Spencer puts it, "that the old horror stories about British food are no longer true."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Food, Cookbooks, Food Writing, Food History, Cooking

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Author biography:

Colin Spencer was born in London in 1933 and attended Brighton Grammar School and Brighton Art College. From an early age, he was interested in both art and writing and had his first stories published in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22.

Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), and Panic (1971), books that one critic has said ‘revel in the eccentric, the bizarre, and the grotesque’.

A man of many talents, Spencer is also a prolific author of non-fiction books, including gay-interest titles like Homosexuality: A History (1995) and The Gay Kama Sutra (1997) and acclaimed works on food and cooking which led Germaine Greer to call him ‘the greatest living food writer’.

More recently, Spencer has devoted himself to painting and to writing a trilogy of autobiographical works, the first of which, the memoir Backing into Light: My Father’s Son, was published by Quartet in 2013. He lives in East Sussex.

Reviews

[imngrer · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's OK when he is talking about food and also shopping for food. He should have stuck to it because his politics are rather strongly biased and so he makes exceptionally sweeping statements about the historical background with little grasp of the complexities involved.

He is, however, rather interesting about the food and the acquistion of it.

[Reading Through the Lists · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will start by saying this book is DENSE. Lots and lots of information, usually presented in the form of lists, one following right after the other. Because of this, I only read the first three chapters, from pre-history to Norman rule, as most of the research for my stories comes from the middle ages.

The three chapters I did read were very informative, however, and gave a full picture of the English diet, from peasant to king, instead of just focusing on the lavish diet of the nobility. It's clear that (at least for the middle ages) Spencer has a great respect for his subjects and treats them and their diets with respect. He sees them as people, not just "peasants-who-ate-rotting-foods" or "the-greedy-nobility-who-ate-rotting-foods."

That being said, it's not a quick or necessarily fun read. I enjoyed it because of the wealth of sensory detail I can now add to my stories but it's not one I would cuddle up with on a dark and stormy night.

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

The organization within each chapter was rather haphazard. Mostly it was a bunch of lists of food.

[mylogicisfuzzy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Giving up at just over a third read. Extraordinarily bad, sweeping and selective on actual history. Hardly anything on trade, commerce, economy (up to 17th century, do not know whether it gets better later), it's as if what people ate developed independently of these factors. He looks at cookbooks and things like expense records from estates and households. He'll say, 'in year xx, expenses on food increased' but does not look at why. He's also enthralled by medieval recipes and use of spices and almond milk (later noticing that almond milk use in cooking fell - again without the why/how), then how this changed in Tudor times - but if you look at Tudor dishes he does mention, in their use of spices they are quite similar to what was eaten at the high table in medieval England. He is often self-contradictory. The final straw for me was Spencer talking about industry (meaning guilds) and working class (meaning peasantry) in the 17th century.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Astonishingly badly punctuated. The grammar was sometimes on shaky ground. And some questionable editing: "coloured peopled," Colin/Colin's editor? Really?

Overall got a good insight into the connections between food/agriculture and the historical patterns of trade/migration/class development, thought wasn't the main focus of the book. You can really see the medieval/Arab roots of English cooking! Some astonishing information about what English people ate in the middle ages; England was hardly insular in its food.

[SkyFerret · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dense and poorly organized it often had less to do with the actual food than it did with a vague outline of the socio-politicial events of the time with no explanations as to how they connected.

[R · Rating 2 out of 5]

This starts off well but by the end actively annoyed me. It’s far, far too long and, while the bits of social history are excellent, too much of it is simply seemingly endless, utterly pointless regurgitations of random cookbooks, surveys and kitchen accounts books the authors has uncovered in his research.

[Mariko · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was eye opening, gave me a new perspective of life.