Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  As I say, I don’t mind them, although the relentless tide of Thai fish cakes and lamb shanks across every village and town in Middle England is a bit deadening. But it is a vast improvement on the days when whole pubs would quiver with delight at the prospect of ‘the prawn man’ coming round with his tray of marine delicacies in plastic bags and the resident wag would ask him if he had crabs.

  Gastropubs and the rise of the restaurant culture have caused a subtle and significant shift in the way Britain lives. I remember sitting with my dad in the almost deserted lounge bar of a working man’s club in Wigan a few Christmases back and wondering where everyone was. ‘This place would have been packed thirty years ago,’ my dad mused. ‘Then people came out and wanted entertainment: a singer or a comedian. Now people go out to eat. When I was your age, only posh people went out for meals. Working people came home and had their tea and then went out.’ He’s right. Even when I was a kid, going out to dinner was something only the Saint, played by Roger Moore, did, or at least Peter Bowles in To the Manor Born. Going out for a meal was reserved for special occasions. Now it is as quotidian as buying a newspaper.

  And so we have gone from being a culinary laughing stock to a nation obsessed with food, where cookery programmes swamp the networks and celebrity chefs are the new gods. It began in Middle England with one Delia Smith, the winsome, wholesome goddess of English cookery. From her humble beginnings (an ex-hairdresser who contributed a recipe for kipper pâté to the Daily Mirror) she rose to become a woman who could make or break companies and cause runs on the stock market with a casual recommendation. Supermarkets would run out of limes, capers, cranberries, Maldon sea salt, omelette pans or pestles and mortars after a mention from Delia. When she was filmed, well dined herself, shouting, ‘Where are ya, let’s be having you!’ at reticent supporters of her beloved Norwich City, the nation blanched. It was like seeing your mum chasing the dragon in a Camden boozer with Pete Doherty.

  In the twenty-first century even Delia has been eclipsed by the rise of newer, hipper celebrity chefs. Gordon Ramsay continually does his bit to coarsen British culture and promulgate an entirely false, macho distortion of kitchen life (Ferran Adrià‘s kitchen in El Bulli, thought by many to be the world’s greatest restaurant, is a temple of zen calm). Jamie Oliver seems likeable enough but I find his elevation to unelected national diet tsar vexing. In 2005, he launched a one-man vilification campaign against a convenience food called the turkey twizzler. As the name suggests, it is not haute cuisine or one of your five-a-day. It is quite fatty, though presumably very tasty, which would explain its popularity with kids. A diet comprising nothing but twizzlers would doubtless make you as fat as a fool, but the odd one is no more injurious to your health than an ice cream or glass of sherry, neither of which should comprise your total diet either.

  Oliver demonised the twizzler during an impassioned, almost tearful tirade on a TV show. Face quivering with rage and hurt, he railed and accused in a volley of four-letter words and a manner more suited to a denunciation of Third World child prostitution or the tyrannical regime in Burma. Such was the tide of sanctimoniousness swelling from Britain’s middle classes that I felt like starting to eat turkey twizzlers, perhaps on a bed of saturated fats, just to wind the smug so-and-sos up. Because food, like the environment, has become the bourgeoisie’s political crusade of choice precisely because it doesn’t involve doing anything uncomfortable like going on strike or getting truncheoned on a picket line. No, you can just make fun of poor people’s diets and waistlines instead. This is done constantly on radio and TV and stage by one of a repertory company of interchangeable, cancerously unfunny Home Counties posh boy ‘satirists’ with plonking ironic deliveries. Pavlovian and drooling, their audiences snicker, just as they do to the endless references to George Bush, David Beckham and old people smelling of wee. It’s hardly Jonathan Swift or Beyond the Fringe, is it?

  It’s apt that this national hand-wringing should concern a snack most enjoyed by kids since, fundamentally, one might argue, our attitude to food is essentially childish. We don’t grow it, we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t really know what we’re buying but, possibly from urban middle-class guilt, we have become obsessed with it. Secretly we wish we had a smallholding in Provence or Tuscany where we could spend our days holding lemons or figs up to the fierce light of the sun as we squinted knowledgeably through wrinkled, sagacious eyes, before wandering down to Francesco or Pierre’s little place in the village for a glass of rough local red and some grilled locally caught sardines. This is how a section of Middle England believes the continent lives, and they may be right. Certainly grassroots civic muscle – and ingrained, ungrateful anti-Americanism – have kept the fried chicken chains and the burger behemoths at bay in France and Italy to a degree that seems unthinkable here. I suspect, however, that the average citizen of Bologna or Toulouse spends a goodly amount of time on the settee watching Les Simpsons and eating Benito et Geraldo’s Praline Surprise from the tub.

  But there is one gustatory arena where, if we do not lead the world, we are the special ones, bringing to the activity a nuanced, passionate, deep-seated national love and flair that is almost akin to Brazilian football culture. Or – to use another football analogy – just as the Dutch soccer maestros of the 1970s played a brand of dizzying, all-embracing game called Total Football, the English are the maestros of Total Drinking.

  The Finns and the Russians may drink more intensely, more broodingly, from bottles of vodka in cramped and dingy Muscovite tower blocks or from stills of grain alcohol in moonlit woods whilst mired in existential angst. The French and Italians may drink more discerningly, muttering about ‘terroir’, sniffing, holding glasses up to the light and squinting. But we have embraced drinking as a national pastime, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, hammered or sober. Our love of booze runs deep; in Elizabethan England, the water was so noxious it wasn’t generally thought fit to drink. Beer was the liquid staple of our diet, our cuppa. A particularly weak version, small beer, was brewed specifically for women and children, hence the expression for something trifling. In our drinking we are fundamentally northern, as in Arctic Circle rather than Accrington, and we drink accordingly: copiously, as warmth against the dark and as fuel for our berserkings. The pint of foaming ale and the small sherry, the tipple of the squire and the spinster, are pleasing and stolid evocations of our national thirst but we have always showed an enthusiasm for excess. Binge drinking is nothing new. When gin was popularised in the 1700s, it was said that half the nation was pissed at any one time. In 1727 England consumed roughly five million gallons of gin; that’s a hell of a lot for only six million people. Drunkenness became so widespread and such a dire problem that the government passed the Gin Act, restricting the production of ‘Mother’s Ruin’. So we should see the current concern over binge drinking not as a sign of the times but as an old friend coming round again. Peter Haydon, author of Beer and Britannia: An Inebriated History of Britain, writes, ‘The British are big drinkers, it has always been part of our culture. That is who we are and we shouldn’t wring our hands and try to suppress that [but] nowadays 22-yearolds are drinking flavours no more challenging than what they were drinking at 12 … Drinking alcohol is not a challenging experience for young people any more. I remember my first taste of alcohol was disgusting …’ He has a point. Most of us can remember that involuntary shudder after tasting Dad’s scotch at Christmas. It passes, though, for most of us. It would have passed a lot quicker, I guess, if Dad’s Scotch had been mango and lychee flavour, sticky and coloured blue.

  For me the moral panic over drink is muddled at best and pernicious at worst. Again and again, the anti-alcohol lobby picks the softest targets for its rage, and targets don’t come much softer than pregnant women. As I write, women are now being told by ‘experts’ – Middle England hates intellectuals but loves experts – that it is OK to have a couple of glasses of wine a week when pregnant. If I were a pregnant woman
I’d be tempted to shout, ‘Oh for flip’s sake, make your expert flipping minds up,’ whilst downing a pint of rum. Leaving aside the twists and turns of this debate (‘experts’ now admit that they plucked the eighteen weekly units of alcohol maximum for women out of the air), I don’t seem to recall the babies of yesteryear growing up any stupider, weaker, less intelligent, less brave or gifted or lovely back when Mum was having a Harvey’s Bristol Cream of an evening. In fact, quite the opposite.

  Drinking too much makes you fat, unhealthy and may kill you. This is unarguable and it should be said. But everyone has the right to go to hell in the manner of their own choosing. Dylan Thomas will be remembered when sober saints are long forgotten. That, though, is not the point. The point surely should be that one of the most serious threats to health from alcohol consumption is being battered by a drunken husband, neglected by a drunken father or glassed by a drunken thug. Yet I never see campaigns against male alcohol-related violence. I see little else but scare stories in colour supplements about female office-worker binge drinking. As with pretty much everything, men are the problem but women get the blame. It’s enough to have you reaching for the Lambrini.

  Sorry. Back to turkey twizzlers. Schools took them off the menu and replaced them with rocket and caper risotto, to the horror of the kids. In a move of breathtaking arrogance, Sainsbury’s took them off the shelves. Not cigarettes, though, which are undoubtedly worse for you than a few grams of saturated fat. The ironic postscript to all this is that it emerged this year that Jamie’s own pasta sauces have twice as much salt as a turkey twizzler, which stand revealed as positively radish-like in comparison.

  Middle England has always loved its food, whatever the quality. We take comfort in it, from shepherd’s pie to spotted dick, bangers and mash to Bovril. On the Icons of Britain website, contributor Hugh Peaman nominates ‘biscuits’ as one of said icons – everything is ‘iconic’ nowadays but don’t get me started on that – and sings their praises thus: ‘Ginger nuts, custard creams, bourbons, garibaldis, malted milk, digestives, lincolns, jammie dodgers, rich tea, fig rolls…A panoply of delicious low-cost treats that are an intrinsic part of our national character, and a major indigenous industry.’ So I take out my map and, dipping a custard cream into a mug of piping-hot brown tea, I look for some of the places that food has put on the map. My eye is drawn to Leicestershire, and a town synonymous with one of Middle England’s lardiest, loveliest treats…

  Even the teenage ticket clerk at Birmingham New Street says, ‘That’s where the pork pies come from,’ as I buy my ticket for Melton Mowbray. Like Champagne, Parma and Eccles, Melton Mowbray is a place whose name is synonymous with a comestible, and one that instantly evokes the heartiness and geniality of Middle England. I share my train with a gang of rowdy, pimply but good-natured teenage Ipswich Town fans making their tortuous way across the East Midlands for a football match. England is a long thin country and yet journeys along its spine are a doddle compared to even relatively short cross-country jaunts. Judging from the empty cans of Fanta and crisp packets, the lads have been on this train for some time, but they are still in good spirits and chipper, as befits well-brought-up middle-class kids. ‘One of my Facebook friends said I was a tramp cos she lives in Buckinghamshire. I think where we live is well nice,’ asserts one, and I’m sure he is right. When any church comes into view, they shout excitedly, ‘Ely Cathedral!’, clearly a private joke created for this journey. Quite sweet when you think about it, ecclesiastical-landmark-recognition jokes being fairly rare amongst British youth today. At one point one lets slip a ‘fuck’ and the others redden and hang their heads because of the presence of two white-haired ladies on a shopping trip to Leicester. Sotto voce and touchingly, another says, ‘Let’s not swear, eh?’ It is one of those moments that restores one’s faith in the Middle English, I think, as we pull into what even I as a Wiganer must acknowledge is Britain’s pie capital.

  The raised or standing pie developed from the medieval habit of making robust pastry cases that could be filled and baked without need for a mould. The pastry case was not intended to be eaten, being merely a basic flour-and-water casing that was thrown away. Then realisation dawned that with a little tweaking of the recipe the pastry too would be tasty enough to eat and, lo, the pie was born. Picnics, wedding receptions and half-time at football matches would never be the same.

  Why did the pork pies of Melton Mowbray become so famed? Various theories have been mooted. According to local piemaker Stephen Hallam, it was a by-product of the local cheese industry, whose surplus whey supported large herds of swine. Also, Leicestershire has long been hunting country and the cold pork pie was the ideal portable picnic snack for the aristocratic houndsman. In time developed the Melton Mowbray pie, an aristocrat itself of the pie world. Aficionados sing the praises of its crunchy pastry, distinctive shape and coarse chopped pork, seasoned but not brined as in generic mass-produced pork pies. The latter may well be comforting but they come at a price in hardened arteries and excess poundage. My friend Paul Rodgers works in radio, not in pies, but he is from Rotherham and so I have no reason to doubt the veracity of two fascinating items of pork-pie-related trivia he once told me. The first is that a generic mass-produced pork pie contains more fat than an equivalent-sized block of lard. The second is that whilst pork pie sales are on the increase, the numbers of people who say they eat pork pies is declining. In other words, we are a nation of secret pork-pie consumers. I imagine men in cagoules on rainy garage forecourts furtively wolfing down the forbidden treats before returning home to their wives, claiming shiftily they had a pot of tuna salad for lunch. If you are going to eat pork pies, then, they should be Melton Mowbray pork pies, on the grounds that forbidden pleasures should be of the finest quality.

  When speaking of the town rather than the pies, call it Melton. This will make you sound like a local. If you want to, of course. I learn this from a woman at the station taxi rank, information she manages to impart between her lung-sapping drags on several cigarettes and bouts of hacking and wheezing. I ask her if my hotel is within walking distance and she answers, ‘God, no,’ with a kind of shudder. I let her get the first taxi, which she makes wait until she’s finished her fag. My chivalry is rewarded when my taxi driver turns out to be cordial, chatty and very informative. He tells me that another great ‘iconic’ local product, Stilton cheese, has never been made in the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton and that, sadly, Melton Mowbray pork pies are part of the Ginsters empire, which turns out to be not strictly true, though some of the pie companies produce for Ginsters. He also uses the word ‘obtuse’ twice during our short journey and is good on the town’s restaurants, warning me off one particular Italian with a sorrowful shake of the head. ‘Absolute rubbish. The worst carbonara in Leicestershire …’

  From the restaurant patio of my hotel I can see across the river Eye (or possibly Wreake, both run through the town) and over dull pastures and playing fields dotted with dog walkers to a distant vista of churches and houses. ‘Very flat, Leicestershire,’ says the female half of a middle-aged couple, she twinkly and smart, he starchy and red-faced. They have come for the Quorn Hunt, an activity they follow avidly. ‘Isn’t it illegal now?’ I ask a little mischievously, and he harrumphs. Actually harrumphs. Actually makes the noise ‘harrumph’ as he shakes open his newspaper which is, inevitably, the Daily Mail. She says something about following a scented trail rather than a fox. I think it rather funny that the Quorn Hunt should now be making do with a meat substitute.

  Pies and hunting occupy me on my afternoon tour of the town. They occupy Melton too. So much so that the tourist information centre has closed down and been replaced by a computer terminal and a leaflet stand in Dickinson and Morris, the oldest remaining makers of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie in town. Since 1851, this revered establishment has been selling pork pies. Proper ones, with the shiny egg-glazed pastry that bows out like ‘the purse of a medieval merchant’ and the uncured, unminced pork which is the
refore a dull grey not pink like the garage forecourt staples. It must be baked for a time at a high temperature, around 200 or 210 degrees centigrade, then for much longer at 40 or 50 degrees below that, and then the gelatinous stock, made with trotters and bones, is poured through a hole in the lid of the pie. It is a food rich in nostalgia. The serving suggestion should read, ‘Best eaten wearing thigh-length leather boots in a coaching house whilst drinking from a pewter tankard with a busty serving wench on your knee.’

  Dickinson and Morris recently won a ten-year battle to get ‘Protected Geographical Status’, which means only pork pie producers using a traditional recipe and in the vicinity of Melton can use the name Melton Mowbray Pork Pie. Thirty-four other British products are also protected under the scheme, such as Arbroath smokies, Cornish clotted cream and Welsh lamb. I mull all this, furtively munching, as I head past the ubiquitous Edinburgh Woollen Mill and the grim hangar-like Tubes nightclub and Melton Theatre (‘Coming attractions…Slam Wrestling and Allo Allo’) to the rather snazzy glass-fronted museum.

  It is, of course, fun: fun being the condition that all museums must aspire to even when least appropriate. Something of that desperate cheeriness underpins exhibits such as ‘Fun with Stilton wedges!’, in which children are encouraged to rearrange large plastic slices of the famously pungent cheese into a slightly differently shaped cheese. To be honest, children and Stilton do not make good bedfellows anyway. Stilton with its distinctive aroma and taste of a forgotten sock discovered in an old gym bag is best enjoyed by slightly drunk middle-aged male relatives at Christmas – I’m a Roquefort man myself – whilst kids surely prefer Dairylea Dunkers with their tawny port.