They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  The English have only one sauce, melted butter.

  COMMENT MADE BY VOLTAIRE TO THE SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHER AND ECONOMIST ADAM SMITH (RECORDED IN JOHN RAE, THE LIFE OF ADAM SMITH, 1895)

  The French are no exceptions to this general world tide of derision. An old saying in France says of la cuisine anglaise that ‘if it is cold, it’s the soup; if it is warm, it’s the beer’. The great French politician and diplomat Talleyrand (1754–1838) observed: ‘In France, we have three hundred sauces and three religions. In England, they have three sauces and three hundred religions.’ The novelist Émile Zola, forced into unhappy exile in England in 1898 for publishing his controversial open letter accusing the French army of obstructing justice in the Dreyfus affair, considered that whatever matters the English and French might agree upon in the future, cuisine would never be one of them (see here). Nor did French opinion seem to soften greatly over the next hundred years. ‘You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that,’ President Jacques Chirac was overhead saying of the British to President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of a meeting in Kaliningrad, Russia, in 2005. ‘After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.’ He went on to comment that the only thing the British had contributed to European agriculture was ‘mad cow disease’, and that his problems with NATO originated when he was made to try haggis by the then NATO Secretary General, George Robertson, a Scot.*

  Talk to any French exchange student on their return from a stay with an English family, and they will invariably claim to have been traumatized by the experience. Not only did it rain every day, but the host family (inhabiting some terrible pebble-dashed semi near a petrol station) spent every night in front of the television watching soap operas and consuming endless cups of revoltingly milky tea. The poor student will have been made to eat fish and chips, or overcooked lamb served with a bizarre mint vinaigrette, or beans in an orange sauce made of vinegar and cornflour, or a revolting tartrazine-yellow substance called la jelly (or very possibly, all four at once). A guide for French waiters published in 2004 by the French Tourist Board describes British cuisine as ‘simple, founded on popular food culture, based on leftovers’. Signature dishes are apparently ‘les pies’, ‘les puddings’ and ‘les dumplings’. Waiters are advised to ‘de-animalize’ meat as much as possible with British tourists, i.e. on no account even to hint at the identity of the animal from which the meat came; to serve meat without a trace of blood (that is, overcooked in French terms); to steer them away from offal, frogs’ legs or snails; and to avoid making snide comments about British food.†1

  † The traditional British horror of red meat is odd, given that it was the celebrated London restaurant Simpson’s that is said to have first served bloody meat at the end of the nineteenth century. But the French Tourist Board’s 2004 guidance suggests that the British are not alone in their aversion to a bleeding steak: the Americans, Germans, Spanish, Italians, Japanese, Dutch and Polish apparently share this repugnance.

  From where did British food get its abysmal world reputation? English food in the Middle Ages, as food historians have noted, had a Europe-wide reputation for its delicious cuts of meat and adventurous use of spices.2 Whilst the precise reasons for the decline in British food are the subject of simmering academic debate, one of the more convincing theories is that the rot first set in with the Reformation, and was later exacerbated by the Puritan influence on British society from the seventeenth century onwards. Gastronomy – with its hedonistic and sensuous delights – became allied with Gluttony, for Protestants one of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins that were the subject of weekly tirades from the pulpit. The G words were the mark of the traitor and the Papist – those noble, recusant families who persisted in eating the rich dishes of the pre-Reformation era, redolent of Romish luxury. The plain food of the Protestant became the food of the righteous and God-fearing Englishman: unadorned, wholesome fare without frills or fancy. Gastronomy (an art) gave way to cookery (a branch of domestic science). The Industrial Revolution simply made matters worse, cutting off thousands of workers in the fast-growing urban sprawl from their former food sources. Then, with the Second World War, came the final death-blow to an already ailing cuisine: rationing. For fourteen years, the British were severely restricted in their access to milk, butter, eggs, sugar, and dozens of other foodstuffs. A whole generation grew up without having tasted a lemon or seen a banana – let alone learning traditional British skills such as pot-roasting a partridge or pressing an ox-tongue. Whatever remnants of culinary credibility Britain had left were killed off by the war. Into the vacuum stepped the pioneers of early processed food: Fray Bentos, Nescafé and the producers of the first sliced loaf, Wonderbread.

  THE UNHAPPY EXILE (skip)

  On the evening of 18 July 1898, the French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) was bundled onto a train and packed off to England in the deepest secrecy. The reason for his flight was his conviction for slander over the newspaper publication of ‘J’accuse’, an open letter in which he attacked the highest levels of the French army for the antisemitism and corruption it displayed in the Dreyfus affair. Zola was to spend just under a year in exile in England, first in Weybridge and then in Upper Norwood. During this time, he kept a diary (later published as Pages d’exil, ‘Notes from Exile’), which revealed how miserable he was in his adopted home. He missed his dog, mistress, children and wife (possibly in that order), and spoke barely a word of English. Most of all, he loathed British food:

  ‘I confess that I am finding the cooking here harder to get used to. It’s true that my cook is a hearty lady, who has only cooked for modest folk. But that at least tells me much about how modest folk eat here. Never any salt in anything. All the vegetables boiled in water and served without butter or oil. The large cuts of roasted meat are good, but the braised cutlets and steaks are inedible. I’m so suspicious of the sauces that I’ve totally banned them. And the bread – oh my God! – the half-cooked English bread, soft as a sponge!... I live pretty well on roast meat, ham, eggs, and salad. And it’s not in order to complain that I talk about the cooking, but rather to express my astonishment – philosophically speaking – at the gulf that exists between the French pot-au-feu and the English oxtail soup. We may at some point bring these people together, but we will never get them to agree on cooking. Even when we are brothers, we’ll still be quarrelling on the question whether potatoes should be served with or without butter.’

  From Pages d’exil, 1898–9.

  George Orwell, however, predicted that British food would rise again after the punishment of rationing, and sure enough British food today ain’t what it used to be..3 ‘Modern British’ has whisked away the stodgy past, with gastropubs now serving dishes such as buttered Manx kippers and bacon with Burford brown eggs in place of traditional pub fare like pies, chips and beans and chicken in a basket. There are farmers’ markets, shelves of organic produce, and a battalion of television chefs busily working at defining a ‘New British’ cuisine. No longer is it an act of humiliation for the red-blooded British male to don a pinny and sweat heirloom organic onions in Suffolk goose fat. But have the French registered any of this outre-Manche culinary activity? Are they eating humble pie and changing their minds about the horrors of la cuisine anglaise? To some degree, yes. The new enthusiasm of Her Majesty’s subjects for the finer things in life has been noted approvingly by the French Bible of gastronomy, the Michelin Guide (a formidably tough nut to crack). The 2012 Guide awarded the coveted three stars to four British restaurants: Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck and Alain Roux’s Waterside Inn (both at Bray in Berkshire), Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, and Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Mayfair. In a humiliating defeat for French cuisine, in the ‘Top 100’ review for 2012 by Restaurant Magazine, Blumenthal’s Knightsbridge restaurant Dinner was placed ninth, three places above the highest-ranking French restaurant, Joël Robuchon’s restaurant L’Atelier. And, to add insult to injury, the menu at Dinner spurns French haute cuisine in favour
of dishes painstakingly researched from Britain’s culinary archives. Some English classics have even made it into Gallic restaurants: crumble, for example, can now be found nestling on French bistro menus alongside the more traditional crème brûlée and tarte aux pommes.

  THE FRENCHMAN WHO CHAMPIONED BRITISH FOOD (skip)

  Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943) is barely remembered today, but it was he who first brought French country cooking to England. Born in Poitiers and growing up in the regional kitchens of the Southwest, Boulestin was an Anglophile who attempted to make his father’s household in Poitiers appreciate the sublime flavours of mint sauce with mutton and Anglo-Indian curry. In Paris he is said to have searched out mince pies and marmalade, persuaded the writer Colette to partake of the pleasures of a festive plum pudding, and drunk whisky instead of wine at a dinner in the Parisian restaurant Fouquet’s.

  Boulestin arrived in England in 1906 and, having failed in a decorating business, turned to writing cookery books after the First World War. His first book – Simple French Cooking for English Homes – was a huge success on publication in 1923. He was also the first television chef. Boulestin did not have a professional qualification as a chef, but as he said himself, ‘I had eaten well all my life, and like the majority of my compatriots of the south-west, I had an instinct for cooking.’ Abhorring the faux French cooking of London hotels and restaurants, where ‘nondescript dishes boast of pretentious names, and where there is always a white sauce for fish and a brown one for meat’, he placed an emphasis on the fresh ingredients and simplicity of the French country kitchen. His unfussy dishes suited the pared-down lifestyle after the war, and inspired cookery writers such as Elizabeth David. The restaurant he founded in Covent Garden survived, under various ownerships, until the 1990s.

  All in all, the signs are that the French gastronomic élite is aware of an aroma of change wafting from the culinary shores of Albion. But what of the French person in the street? Are they eating their words too? Sadly, it seems not. Surveys and the recorded views of French visitors to Britain are depressingly negative. ‘Water is the basic ingredient of English cooking,’ the French pop singer Daniel Darc observed, after a visit to the UK. The typical French visitor’s view seems to be that – however avid consumers of food literature the Brits may be these days, and however cutting-edge the fanciest London restaurants – glossy recipe books and posh eateries with pretentious single-word names do not a nation of gourmets make. French online guides to London advise that, in all but a handful of top-end restaurants, one should ask for one’s steak to be ‘underdone’ or, even better, ‘imported’. English supermarkets are accused of being stocked with hermetically sealed, out-of-season, flavourless fruit and veg; they lack even basic dairy produce (no plain petites suisses or fromage blanc); they fail to provide a good selection of meat or seafood (no veal, rabbit, sea urchins or live lobsters). Ultimately, of course, in the opinion of French visitors and expats, the best English cuisine is always French. ‘The English may have taught the world table manners,’ conceded the contemporary French-Greek writer Pierre Daninos, ‘but the French taught the world how to eat.’

  One cannot help wondering if an English salad is the result of ignorance or the aim of a curiously perverted taste.

  MARCEL BOULESTIN, FRENCH CHEF (1878–1943)

  Among the French at home, the impact of British food on the national palate appears to be nil. In a 2011 survey of French people’s preferred foreign cuisine, the top-rated foreign food was Italian, followed by Chinese and then Japanese (a particular favourite for the younger and hipper French). British food did not even figure.4 But to cheer the British up, there is one British meal that is the cream of the crop for every nation in the world: breakfast. A survey of 2,400 hotel guests in 2011 found that the full English breakfast was voted the best breakfast in the world, with even French people agreeing that it was their favourite hotel wake-up meal.5 So if there is one meal at least that saves the bacon for British cooking, it is the great British fry-up. In the words of Somerset Maugham: ‘To eat well in England, all you have to do is take breakfast three times a day.’6

  Myth Evaluation: Partly true. The French cognoscenti are changing their minds on the awfulness of British cuisine, but the view that ‘Modern British’ is now quite pukka has yet to filter down to the man in the rue.

  THE ENGLISH HAVE TAKEN OVER THE FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE… AND THE FRENCH HAVE TAKEN OVER ENGLISH CITIES

  The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.

  ROBERT MORLEY, ENGLISH ACTOR (1908–92)

  Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

  ATTRIBUTED TO JOAN OF ARC, FRENCH NATIONAL HEROINE (c.1412–31)

  Invasions of France by the English are nothing new. In fact, at various times in the turbulent history of the two countries, parts of France have come under English rule. The English have longed to own a piece of French soil ever since Henry of Anjou – the future Henry II – inherited vast swathes of territory in the western half of the country through his marriage in 1152 to that most eligible of French brides, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Most of these Plantagenet lands (except Gascony in the Southwest) were lost to the French crown in the early years of the thirteenth century – partly owing to the incompetence of bad King John – and it was to recapture them that the bellicose King Edward III embarked on a hundred years of war with France in 1337. Indeed, English monarchs from that time forward styled themselves Kings of England and France, and the English royal coat of arms historically included the insignia of pretenders to the French throne, the fleur-de-lys. The fleur-de-lys was only removed from the royal coat of arms after George III, in a brief moment of sanity, finally relinquished the centuries-old claim of English kings to the French throne after 1802. In all likelihood, George III’s largesse was motivated by self-preservation; after all, by then France had undergone a Revolution and dispatched its own royal family to the scaffold.*

  * The relinquishing of the British monarchy’s age-old claim to the French throne by George III was part of an attempt to reach a peaceful accommodation with Napoleonic France, which had just successfully defeated a coalition of European monarchies (including Habsburg Austria and Russia), and was generally frightening the life out of conservative, monarchical Europe. For more on British contemporary reaction to the French Revolution, see the chapter on the French as a nation of Revolutionaries, see here.

  The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a break with the previous five hundred years, in that England finally lost interest in ruling France, and concentrated on ruling much of the rest of the world instead. But that did not mean that the English lost their dream of colonizing their neighbours by stealth, if not by the sword. As early as the second half of the eighteenth century, the upper classes of England had flocked to the natural beauty and sunny Mediterranean clime of the French Riviera, which became the traditional winter resort of the wealthy and fashionable English set. Nice’s celebrated Promenade des Anglais is testimony to the presence of these early, well-heeled and aristocratic British good-lifers.*

  * Even today, the ‘season’ for the fashionable jet-set to frequent the French Riviera is in the autumn/winter, leaving August to the tourist scrum. The discreet arrival of elegant yachts at St Tropez in time for October’s weekend des voiles (‘weekend of sails’, or yacht racing week) is testimony to the fact.

  In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Anglo-Saxon adventurers began pushing further inland, invading the lavender fields and rustic villages of Provence: a new type of resident was beginning to arrive, in the form of the arty and bohemian English-speaking middle-classes. In the 1920s and 1930s, Provence and the Côte d’Azur became the home of American writers such Edith Wharton (a lifelong fan of all things Gallic, Wharton boug
ht Castel Sainte-Claire on the hills of Hyères in 1927, and spent winters and springs there until her death in 1937); or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who visited Hyères, Cannes and Monte Carlo in the 1920s, finally stopping at St Raphaël, where he wrote The Great Gatsby and began Tender is the Night. The British writer W. Somerset Maugham also bought a house – the Villa Mauresque – at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in 1928, living much of his life there save for a brief period of exile during the Second World War. The publication of Elizabeth David’s phenomenally successful cookery books brought the flavours and aromas of provincial France to an entire generation of postwar British middle-class, who also began to purchase homes in Provence. As that region became prohibitively expensive, due to the vast influx of foreigners, they spread out to the equally picturesque, albeit cheaper, neighbouring department of Gard, and then out to the Southwest of the country (especially the Dordogne and the Lot).