CHAPTER-1
INTERNATIONAL CUISINE:
THE COOKING OF GREAT BRITAIN
Historical Background
Unlike the French, the British have no Grande cuisine or customs of elegant restaurant eating. Almost everyone royalty and commoner ate the same food, however fancy or plain. The royal kitchens merely drew on a wider variety of foodstuffs and in greater quantities. Britain was a worldwide trader since the 16th century and could afford to import the best the world had to offer from tea, coffee and rice to exotic spices and fruits and all these found their way into home cooking.
The British Breakfast
The British consider it their finest meal. A truly traditional British breakfast would include Baps (a soft round roll) or some other traditional bread with preserves, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs - boiled, fried or scrambled, ham kedgeree, stewed prunes, sautéed kidneys, smoked haddock or kippers, cereals with milk and of course tea. The English breakfast owes, in particular much to the Scots. They eat an even more substantial breakfast that the English and the Welsh or the Irish. They consume vast quantities of porridge and considerable amount of bread usually in the form of a breakfast roll called a ‘Bap” and drink large quantities of tea sometimes laced with whisky. Aberdeen was the birthplace of the breakfast sausage, while Dundee is the home of marmalade without which no breakfast is completed. Bacon is in original entirely English. Ham, which also often figures on the breakfast table, is the cured hind leg of the pig. Only the English cured the pig, usually by salting, while the rest of Europe ate it fresh. Bacon and ham are cured all over the country, but the ham from York became most famous. Wiltshire ham is also famous especially for the mild and delicately flavoured Braden ham.
Oatmeal and porridge are also breakfast favorites. In Scotland, porridge is traditionally eaten unsweetened but well salted, and with cold milk. English people eat their porridge with sugar.
Tea
Tea is consumed at almost all hours of the day as a bracing start to the morning, a welcome break in the work at offices or in the factories and a pleasant cup at bedtime. In rural areas, where dinner is eaten at midday the evening meal or supper is called the “high tea” or “meal tea”. Among the gentry and middle class, tea is a hospitable spread for guests. Today, nearly half the tea consumed in Britain comes from India.
A Nation of Meat Eaters
The main Sunday meal served at mid-day frequently is roast Beef. It is served with its classic accompaniment of Yorkshire pudding and its attendant of roast potatoes, which is an integral part of the meal. So are the other accompaniments - mustard, horseradish sauce and a sauce boat of rich brown gravy. Green vegetables and perhaps carrots add a splash of colour. India’s long association with Britain and educated the British palate to more fiery flavours. Into the sauces went turmeric, cumin and cardamom.
The East India Company also introduced the chutney to the British. In the big cities the faster life styles have led to the more time-consuming meat dishes like stews and casseroles to disappear from the daily menu. Chops, steaks and cutlets are now the more easily prepared cuts and hence more popular.
The thrifty use of leftovers lead to the creation of homely recipes such as shepherds pie, toad-in-the-hole and froise or fraise (a slice of leftover bacon, batter fried). Other popular stews include Irish stew, Lancashire hot pot, lobscouse (a mutton and vegetable stew with barley) boiled bacon and cabbage with peas pudding and beef roll.
The British are also great hunters– both furred and feathered. These include deer, rabbit, hare, goose, partridge, pheasant etc. The general principle for all game is that they should be properly hung. It should be allowed to age for anything between 3 days and three weeks. The strong flavours of hare and venison demand a sweet adjunct – red currant jelly or the fruity Cumberland sauce.
Game birds, when roasted are often served with crisp bacon, skirlie (oatmeal and chopped onion fried in fat) game chips and cranberry sauce. Wild duck is always served with orange sauce and goose was the traditional Christmas dish, long before the advent of turkey.
FISH
The English do eat Roast Beef, but only on Sundays. Every other day they eat fish and chips, and with roast beef, it wrestles for supremacy for the national dish of Britain. The fish and chips shops which dot every city, town and village of the country are a legacy of the industrial revolution in the 18th century factory workers needed quick, cheap and nourishing meals. Shops that specialized in hot pies, potted eels (jellied), sausages and mash and fish and chips grew steadily in demand. Cod, plaice, hake, skate and haddock are all popular traditional fish used for frying. Salt, vinegar, pickled onions and gherkins, ketchup, HP sauce all serve as accompaniments. Fish and chips sold as takeaways are always wrapped in newspaper. A true Britisher feels that without the newspaper, fish and chips do not taste the same. Every part of the British Isles, from Scotland to Ireland has its own specialty.
Scotland is the place Salmon and Trout. For prawns it’s the Yorkshire coast of the North Sea. But for oysters you have to go to the Channel Islands. Ireland is known for it’s mackerels and the famous Dublin Bay prawns sole traditionally comes from the south namely Dover. Another popular dish from Cornwall is ‘Stargazey Pie’ which uses Pilchards and Herrings in a puff pastry blanket.
CHEESE
Cheshire – the oldest and in many ways the most distinctive of the detectable variety of English cheeses. It is mellow with a hint of sharpness, firm but slightly crumbly, it has for years been one of the prime cheeses of England. It is the cheese of the rich and the poor, the kind and the peasant, the sailor and the soldier. Stilton was named after the tiny village of Stilton in Huntingdonshire. Of all the Blue Cheeses, the finest is Stilton. It stands besides Roquefort, Bleu de Bresse, Gorgonzola and Cheshire as the worlds greatest. It is white cheese, tinted with yellow and richly marbled with greenish blue. The crust is dark and wrinkled and the flavour subtly mellow. Wheels of Stilton weigh around 14 lbs and are covered by a crust peculiar to
each manufacturer.
Most popular of all British cheeses include Leicester, Derby, Stilton, Cheddar, Wensleydale, Cheshire, Gloucester from England and Caerphilly from Wales. Many cheeses such as the Daventry, Lincoln, Oxford, and York are long forgotten. But of the cheeses that remain, the three greatest cheddar, Cheshire and Stilton are here to stay.
THE BRITISH PUDDING
Each country in Britain has produced a wealth of puddings, large and small, hot and cold, all of them delicious. Rich golden ones, topped with jam and cream, tender beef and kidney ones steamed for hours. Puddings from country villages like those in Bedfordshire, where farmers wives created a sausage like object called a clanger containing meat and chopped vegetables at one end and jam and fruit at other.
The men working in the fields could thus carry their entire lunch in one piece.
A Christmas speciality is the flaming Plum Pudding while Yorkshire pudding is the traditional accompaniment to Roast Beef.
In virtually every home in Britain you will find a deep bowl with a thick rim that is called a pudding basin. Although most puddings are steamed or boiled, many others are baked. Apricot pudding is a mixture of baking and steaming; a cross between a pie and a pudding.
Almost as popular as puddings are pies. A pie is usually a deep dish lined with pastry crust. A fruit pie would have a little sugar added to the dough.
Tradition demands meat pies to be decorated with pastry strips while fruit
pies are left plain. In this way you can tell if a pie is sweet or savoury. A tart may look like a pie but it is always a sweet dish made with fruit and jam.
Tarts range from small jam-filled hollows of pastry (tartlettes) to large platesized pastry cases. Tarts are usually left uncovered by pastry. But hard and fast rules cannot be applied. Some tarts are covered. Some pies are not. As a general rule, if the dish is shallow, call it a tart, if it is deep call it a pie. Thyme, sage, majoram are used for flavouring and so were spices. Until quite recent times, meat pies were sold all over Britain by traveling piemen.
Popular preparations:
- Shepherd’s Pie: A layer or minced meat topped with a layer of mashed potatoes and browned.
- Bubble and squeak: Usually made of left over vegetables that are mashed and made into paties and pan fried till golden and crisp.
- Fish and chips: Batter fried fish along with potato chips or French fries.
- Roast beef: Traditional Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding.
- Toad in the hole: Made by cooking sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter.
- Bangers and mash: Sausages are called bangers in England. Cumberland sausage grilled and served on a bed of mashed potatoes with rich onion gravy.
- Haggis: Popular Scott preparation made by stuffing stomach of sheep with minced lamb, offals, spices and oats.
- Bread and butter pudding: Made be layering bread with preserve / butter and pouring egg custard over it before baking.
- Scones and clotted cream: popular tea time accompaniment Dundee cake: Rich fruit cake from Scotland made by creaming butter, sugar, eggs and flour with candied fruits, almonds and other nuts.
- Beef Wellington is a preparation of filet steak coated with pâté (often pâté de foie gras) and duxelles, which is then wrapped in puff pastry and baked.