The Politics of Food

Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith spoke to Matt Chorley (Times Radio) about ‘The Politics of Food’–from Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala speech to Ed Miliband’s sandwich, with our eighteenth-century knowledge sprinkled on top!

Chocolate Fudge Cake

This is a recipe from my mother. She made it when we were children and whenever I make it now, people always ask me for the recipe!


Chocolate Fudge Cake

4oz / 125g butter

2 tablespoons cocoa

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon golden syrup

200g crushed digestive biscuits

100g plain chocolate


1) Melt butter, sugar and syrup (do not boil). This can be done in a microwave or saucepan. 2) Mix in the cocoa and crushed biscuits and press firmly into a (approx) 16cm tin
3) Melt the chocolate and then spresd thinly over biscuit mix and leave to set.
4) Cur into small squares and serve


Lesley Clayton

Kufta Rice with Mince

Contributor: Khawla Mizori

Firstly, you prepare 1 part rice and 2 parts mince ( e.g 1 cup of rice and 2 cups of mince).

After you wash your mince you drain the water out of it using a sieve, you then add it into a bowl and mix the rice with it with salt and black pepper.

You mix this really well and then roll them into small balls.

Then you shape them into an oval shape and squeeze them to make sure they stay in place.

After, you get a pan and carefully place them in, then you boil water using a kettle and pour it on top of them, 2 centimetres above the rice/meat ovals and put it on medium heat until it boils, once it boils bring it down to simmer and when they are cooked, turn the heat off.

Lastly, you slowly one by one remove them out of the pan and enjoy!

Tuiles (almond tiles)

Contributor: Gaspard Perluson

This is my dad’s recipe. I personally add a bit more flour and ground almonds because I like the spongy texture. My dad puts more flaked almonds, for a flakier texture. These go really well with sherry, mulled wine, cream, ice cream; anything really. Or in the morning they are good dipper in hot chocolate.

Ingredients

250g Flaked almonds

Whites of 3 eggs

160g sugar

50g melted butter

30g flour

50g ground almonds

Instructions

Mix almonds, sugar, flour in a bowl. Add the egg whites. Mix. Add the melted butter. Mix. Heat your oven to 175 degrees. Make the tiles by placing the dough in a tablespoon. Place them on a baking try lined with baking paper or oiled. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes.

Jeannine’s Banana Bread

Contributor: Cristina Stefan

This is the one recipe I make each week. It is my husband Gary’s mom’s recipe he grew up with and loved to much that I asked Jeannine to pass it along. I always add raisins or walnuts to it, sometimes chocolate chips. It is dead easy.

Ingredients

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

4 tablespoon sour milk (add 1 tbsp vinegar)

2 cups flour

salt

4 bananas

Instructions

Beat eggs, add sugar, dissolve soda in milk and add to mixture; add flour, salt. Last add smashed bananas.

Fold in until mixed

Bake 175 degree for 45-50 mins or until toothpick comes out clean.

The Problem with Community Cookbooks (and the correct way to cook fish fingers)

Last week, our proposal to put together a New British Cookbook was (quite rightly) challenged on Twitter. Very perceptively, our challenger asked if the notion of cooking as accessible to all is a modern fallacy. They asked if it was possible for us to represent a cross-section of the population through food when access to food was shaped by production, seasonality, supply chain and money.

The following day, the media was aflame with the government’s decision not to provide free school meals to children during the October or Christmas holidays, as they had done over the summer.  Popular objection to this decision was encapsulated by the Twitter feed of footballer and food poverty campaigner Marcus Rashford. Offers to feed children usually in receipt of free school meals flooded in.  These stories of food shortage and food poverty sit in stark contrast to images of the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme, in which wealthier UK citizens were encouraged to support the hospitality trade through a government-backed meal price reduction scheme.  That these stories can co-exist in the same spaces, the same communities, shows us that what we eat and where we eat is loaded with cultural signifiers, shaped by environment and by context. 

Nor is this a new phenomenon. As well as writing a New British Cookbook we are also researching the meals of George III and his family.  Despite having a reputation for eating plain and boring food (he was nicknamed ‘Farmer George’ on account of his plain tastes) the menus from Kew Palace show that he was eating mutton and beef, fresh fruit and cakes that were simply not accessible to most of his subjects.  Indeed, as George and his family were sitting down to eat boiled turbot with lobster sauce (July 1795), his subjects were rioting over the high price of wheat and bread that was making it difficult for them to keep their families alive.

Community cookbooks are often sites of memory.  They represent the community that collected the recipes at a very specific moment in time.  The community, or social group that they represent is constantly changing and the cookbook captures only a very specific moment in the life of that community.  As with all conscious acts of memorialisation, community cookbooks are carefully curated.  We offer up only recipes or contributions that represent how we would like to be seen by our neighbours.  I must offer my own prejudices here for scrutiny. 

When I joined the research team, I was of course asked for my contribution to The New British Cookbook. What do I cook most? Well, if I’m honest, it’s fish fingers – fresh from the freezer. This is partly because my youngest child will pretty much only eat fish fingers but also, I like a fish finger tea too.  Is this what I offered for The New British Cookbook? Of course it isn’t. I offered a garlic and thyme roast chicken. Yummy, most definitely, but absolutely not something I regularly cook.  Why did I do it? Because I didn’t want to be seen as a ‘bad’ cook, the sort that Jamie Oliver railed against in his ‘School Dinners’ campaign, the sort that didn’t craft her children’s fish goujons from fresh fish, panko breadcrumbs and eggs fresh from the chickens in the garden.

Community cookbooks rarely speak to poverty or to the everyday.  None of us likes to be seen as poor, or as boring cooks, even if those descriptions could arguably be applied. This, I suggest, is why you rarely see blogs or community cookbooks addressing poverty, or the correct way to cook fish fingers (grilled so the outside is crispy, dressed in salt and vinegar).  Cooking on a Bootstrap is the exception here. Most recipe collections are heavy with assumptions about the individuals that may try to recreate the meals within their pages. The time and inclination to purchase the cookbook in the first place, to source the ingredients and to be able to afford them, and to pay for the gas or electric required to cook them are all assumed despite 10 million adults in the UK facing food and energy insecurity on an annual basis.  Not many blogs or community cookbooks contain recipes designed around the contents of a Trussel Trust food parcel (BudgetButYummyMummy being an exception), despite the Trust’s forecast that they will be giving out six emergency food parcels per minute this winter to individuals and families dependent upon them for survival.

Social and cultural ideas of what a community cookbook should be, what it should contain, shapes and restricts the recipe contributions that we make to it.  How we wish to be seen by those that try the recipes and even the nature of the ingredients that we suggest is a way of advertising to others our identity, our life experiences and our tastes.  But in putting together The New British Cookbook we want to know what you actually eat – on the days when the kids are hungry and you are low on energy and inclination to cook (microwaved Babybels anyone?), in the times when money is tight, or you are self-isolating and eating the food at the back of the cupboards.

Keep an eye out for my fish finger butty recipe…

Join in the discussion?

If you wish to contribute a recipe to our New British Cookbook please send it to newbritishcookbook@gmail.com.

If you want to join in the discussion about the cookbook with team members Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith (along with food writer Leah Hyslop), we are hosting a virtual event on ‘The New British Cookbook’ on 13 November, as part of the Being Human Festival. We’ll be talking more about the recipes contributed to our cookbook can tell us about food in the United Kingdom today.

Sign up here to join in!

What’s for dinner?

As I type this, I have gulped back a mug of builder’s tea and a slice of multigrain toast with peanut butter: a mix of the very British and the very Canadian. Just like our research team.

We’ve been thinking about what people living in the U.K., wherever they were born, think of as British food. As part of our project on British food and national identity, we are compiling The New British Cookbook… and we’re looking to you, dear readers, to help us. 

We’d love to hear from you about your favourite or most meaningful recipe–and, most importantly, what you’re actually eating on a day-to-day basis. We envision our (free) digital cookbook as something that builds on a long history of collaborative recipe collection and community cookbooks—and will allow us to learn about what food people are eating in Britain today.

Collaborative Recipe Collecting

Do you have a treasured family cookbook with notations in the margins? Or piles of recipes snipped out of magazines? Or a collection of handwritten recipe notecards? Or maybe you have lots of online recipes bookmarked? This type of recipe collection has a long history.

Wellcome Collection MS 4051 (London). A burn mark in the middle of the manuscript, which evokes the use of the book beside the fire.

The family recipe book as we know it has its roots in the seventeenth century and, from the outset, was connected to class and education. Well-to-do, literate women began to compile collections of recipes—laboriously written with pen and ink on expensive rag paper. Notes in the margins, crossings-out and insertions all point to the ways that the recipes were tested and approved (or rejected) by their compilers. A woman would have needed a well-equipped kitchen with access to a range of ingredients to test recipes so comprehensively and to be willing to fail; even recording recipes in a book required leisure time and literacy.

When it came to collecting recipes, it was never a solitary endeavour. Recipes were often labelled with the names of people who shared them, perhaps even written in their hand. Compilers might copy recipes from printed books or, by the eighteenth century, even clip them out of newspapers, just as we do today. As Elaine Leong argues in her recent book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, such books functioned as a compact archive, containing networks of friends, family history, and (of course) everyday knowledge. 

In the eighteenth century, printed recipe books became increasingly popular with the growing middle class. Recipe books offered the certainty of knowledge, often including ‘how to’ sections on choosing fresh meat or seasonal vegetables. Printed books may have lost the sense of personalisation and family history of their handwritten counterparts, but they offered aspirational futures to their readers, as Gilly Lehmann points out. Although printed books had specific authors, writers and publishers happily lifted recipes from each other, earlier recipe books and even previous editions. The printed books were every bit as ‘collaborative’ as manuscript ones, even if they did not acknowledge their sources.

What is a community cookbook?

Community cookbooks, which have been around since the nineteenth century and continue to be popular in North America, have similarities to their seventeenth-century predecessors; they are collaborative efforts of memory and community building. 

An example of a fundraising community cookbook created by HSBC employees in IT from across the EU, 2004.

The past few years has brought a resurgence of the community cookbook tradition in the United Kingdom, with celebrity-led fundraising projects. These include Meghan Markle’s Together: Our Community Cookbook (2018) to raise money for the Hubb community kitchen (run by several women who survived the Grenfell Tower fire) and Riaz Phillip’s Community Comfort (2020) to support the Majonzi Covid-19 Bereavement Fund.

An example of a book from Edmonton, Canada (c. 1980s). Courtesy of Eluned Smith.

Although the most famous community cookbooks tend to have a touch of celebrity—including the The Suffrage Cook Book of 1915 (reprinted in 2018), which included recipes from Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the tradition is much more homely. Take, for example, Something to Share (2018), which Refugee Action-Colchester published to raise funds for its efforts and to draw attention to Colchester’s growing multiculturalism. The contributors to this project also shared their stories behind the food.

An example of the community cookbook being used to recreate a common history. This image comes from Miner’s Menus, compiled by the Nordegg Historic Interest Group in Rocky Mountain House, Canada. Nordegg was a coal-mining town in the Rocky Mountains, which closed down in 1955. The book was compiled c. 1970 through the contributions of previous inhabitants. My aunt, Margaret Gilbertson, shared a recipe for Welsh Cakes, reflecting both my maternal family’s heritage and one of the town’s ethnic groups. Courtesy of Eluned Smith.

The Refugee Action book is typical of the community cookbook tradition. Such cookbooks are collections of recipes compiled (typically) by a group of women as part of a fundraising project—perhaps for a Parent-Teacher Association, a church group, or a particular cause. The books incorporate the recipes of the group’s members and the intended audience is the community as a whole, plus their friends and family. As with Something to Share, the recipes are often accompanied by stories about the food, although other tidbits are common, such as proverbial statements or jokes or—especially in the case of school-related projects–drawings and poems. The name of each contributor always appears besides their recipe.

An example of the sort of tidbit that might be found in a community cookbook. This example is from the Hillcrest United Church Cookbook (1966) in Fort Nelson, Canada. Courtesy of Eluned Smith.

Writer Gillian Polack, reflecting on the theft of her cookbook collection, described the cultural importance of community cookbooks:

If I were making a time capsule, I would include a community cookbook. It would tell the person who opened the time capsule so much about the people who buried it. What recipes were worth including in the book? What group of people does the volume’s creation tell us about and what background do they share?

Our New British Cookbook follows in this community tradition. We are looking for contributions of recipes from our virtual community. We want to learn more about what recipes you think are worth including. And, most of all, we want to think about what ‘British’ food looks like in the multicultural context of the United Kingdom in 2020.

How to contribute

Please send in your recipe contribution – along with your story about the food, or even just a joke, proverb, or drawing… We’re not looking for things specifically defined as ‘British’, but rather what people living in the United Kingdom are actually eating on a day-to-day basis.

  • What is your favourite weekday dinner?
  • What is your favourite recipe?
  • Or a recipe that you would make for a party or a holiday?
  • Which recipe do you look forward to when you see it on HelloFresh?
  • What do you feed your children when they are eating only from the beige rainbow?

We’re interested in what you really eat, not just aspire to eating. Please send your recipes to us at: newbritishcookbook@gmail.com.

Join us to talk about The New British Cookbook

On 13 November, team members Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith, along with food writer Leah Hyslop, are hosting a virtual event on ‘The New British Cookbook’, as part of the Being Human Festival. We’ll be talking more about the recipes contributed to our cookbook can tell us about food in the United Kingdom today.

Sign up here to join in!

The New British Cookbook Event at the Being Human Festival

We’re so excited to be a part of the Being Human Festival this November! Please join Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith to talk about British food in the Georgian era and today.

Shot of an extravagant dinner setting. Credit: Getty Images.

How have international tastes influenced the food we eat today? Join food historians as they discuss 250 years of British cuisine and uncover our changing tastes at this online event. From the occasional peacocks that graced the dining tables at the court of King George III to the chicken tikka masala we know and love today, the food we eat is rooted in Britain’s connections to its international past. Discover how Georgian royal tastes tweaked classic Italian and German dishes, find out about the global origins of 19th and 20th century recipes like Mrs Beeton’s mango chutney, and test your own foodie knowledge in pop-quizzes.

It is also your chance to say what you think and how this reflects different British tastes today. Share your favourite recipes which will be gathered into the ‘New British Cookbook’ collection – a guide to the flavour of Britain today.

Please send in your recipe contributions to us, either by email (newbritishcookbook@gmail.com) or by Twitter (@historybeagle).

How to Join

To see more on the event on how to book (free) tickets for your online place, see the Being Human Festival website: https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/the-new-british-cookbook/.

How George III’s kitchens gave Britain a taste for international cuisine

Mutton again? Must be a Wednesday…

This blog post was intended for the British Academy Summer Showcase in June 2020, which unfortunately could not happen in person (owing to Covid). We had all sorts of wonderful plans, which involved tasting a pie made using an eighteenth-century recipe, old recipe books to handle, examples from the royal menus, colouring pages and more!

Read our British Academy post to get a taste of what the royal household was eating and how the household staff played a role in helping to internationalise British cuisine.

William Pitt depicted as a butcher selling beef as a substitute for bread. John Bull, the customer, looks very hungry and poor.
William Pitt (‘The British butcher, supplying John Bull with a substitute for bread’) by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey hand-coloured etching, published 6 July 1795 NPG D12541 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Dinners, Appetites, and Bodies…

On 27 February 2020, Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith presented at the IHR Food History seminar.

The King’s Dinner and the Nation’s Appetites

By Rachel Rich

On Christmas day 1788 their Majesties the King George III and Queen Charlotte were served a feast consisting of, among other items, 18 ‘Beef Roasted,’ duck, pheasant, Christmas pie, and a dish of mince pies. In total 21 dishes were served, which we know because from 1788 to 1801 every meal at Kew Palace while George III was in residence was recorded in meticulous detail. This recorded included their majesties’ dinners and suppers, and the dinners served at many other tables within the royal household including the Equerries table, and the tables of the pages, grooms, and kitchen servants. Taken together, this provides a rare and rich account for food historians, allowing us to move from the prescriptive menus assembled by cookbook writers to descriptive account of what was served in this unique household.

This paper will argue that while the King’s dinners were often lavish in quantity, the dishes eaten at Kew were in many ways similar to what other English families ate. In spite of his German ancestry and his German wife, the King was served recognizably English food, with a French influence, as was the fashion at that time. By comparing the King’s dinners with the recipes in several contemporary cookbooks, including Hannah Glasse’s famous Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, this paper will seek to show that the royal family were the parents of the nation through the food they imbibed and the relationships they formed around the dinner table. 

Of Meat and Men: Bodies in the Royal Household

By Lisa Smith

The menus of the royal household at Kew (ca. 1788-1790) appear to be lists of food. Kept by William Gorton, the Clerk of the Kitchen, the menus were a reminder about quantities and types of food served for each dinner and supper that the King was in residence. As aides-memoire, they indicated details of consumed food, food gifts, and guests. In addition to listing food amounts and preparation methods, for example, Gorton carefully noted any food gifts (game from Lord Cadogan) and the presence of guests or temporary residents (like Dr. Willis’ servants).

Food in the household reinforced social status. While equerries had an extensive choice of meat, poultry and fish, the servants only had mutton. But food choices were also framed by medical concepts of appropriate diets. Roasted mutton, a hearty and difficult to digest meat, was particularly suitable for servants, who were thought to have coarse bodies. Food was gendered; equerries had meat-laden tables, while Miss Goldsworthy (sub-governess) ate fish. At the same time, Princess Amelia, who was a young child (b. 1783), required an easily-digestible diet: chicken and rice, vegetables, and toast.

The social demarcation implied in the menus, however, was blurred in practice. The letters and diaries of Fanny Burney, Co-Keeper of the Robes, show that diners frequently moved between tables, particularly those hosted by women. Equerries, for example, came to Burney’s teas, while Miss Goldsworthy hosted dinners. This paper argues that the although menus reinforced the social hierarchy and expectations for different types of bodies, the daily experience of the royal household revealed permeable boundaries in terms of gender, status, and food—at least for the elite.

See our presentation on YouTube!

Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith talking at the IHR Food History seminar in February 2020.
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search