How to Be English

by David Boyle

  Oldest pubs:

  Old Ferryboat Inn, Holywell, Cambridgeshire (560)

  Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, St Albans (eighth century)

  Bingley Arms, Bardsey (905)

  Nag’s Head, Burntwood (1086)

  Ye Olde Salutation Inn, Nottingham (1240)

  Adam and Eve, Norwich (1249)

  Ye Olde Man and Scythe, Bolton (1251)

  Eagle and Child, Stow-in-the-Wold (thirteenth century)

  George Inn, Norton St Philip (fourteenth century)

  New Inn, Gloucester (about 1450)

  Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham (disputed)

  Her face all bowsy

  Comely crinkled

  Like a roast pig’s ear

  Bristled with hair.

  Description of alewife Elinour Rumming of Leatherhead, by poet John Skelton, 1508

  THERE IS SOMETHING about roly-poly pudding that conjures up the winter in England, the strange metallic taste of school dinners and the sweet warmth of custard. Ah yes, the comfort of black and white television and Formica tables – it all comes wafting back.

  There is a reason why roly-poly pudding is a winter dish. It is because it uses up the surplus fruits and jams from the summer. It also fits neatly into the need for warmth and stodge as the evenings have drawn in and the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness has given way to cold.

  It belongs with the other great English puddings, spotted dick and sticky toffee pudding, which survive in rather old-fashioned cafes and restaurants, but which disappeared from many English dinner tables sometime in the 1970s. This kind of monstrosity always rather scared other nations – what was all this stodge about? – and it horrified the French because of its sheer weight. It horrified some Americans because of its defiance of everything that is politically correct in the way of healthy food.

  Roly-poly puddings stretch back into the dawn of English puddings, which began as savoury concoctions in the medieval period, and evolved via Bakewell tarts to become the great sweet plate-fillers of the nineteenth century. Jam roly-poly pudding, as Mrs Beeton called it, probably emerged two centuries ago, with a combination of jam and large quantities of suet.

  Suet is a key ingredient. So Atora suet went on sale at the end of the nineteenth century and still sells 2,400 tonnes a year. What isn’t so easy to manage these days is the steaming. Most people pop them in the oven for baking. The puddings also no longer find themselves wrapped in old shirt-sleeves, which explains the less palatable name of Dead Man’s Arm.

  The most famous roly-poly pudding comes in Beatrix Potter’s book The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908), which was first published with the title The Roly-Poly Pudding, so central was it to the plot. Samuel Whiskers was the name of the Potter pet rat, much lamented, which had died some years before. Whiskers and his compatriots take Tom Kitten hostage and roll him up in pastry. He is rescued in the nick of time by the carpenter. It would have been a terrible, and yet tremendously English fate.

  Baked roly-poly recipe:

  Preheat the oven to 200ºC / gas mark 6 and line a baking tray with baking paper. In a large bowl, mix together 250 g plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 pinch salt and 2 tablespoons caster sugar. Stir in 125 g shredded suet and enough water to create a soft, but not sticky dough. Use a floured surface to roll dough into a 30 x 20 cm oblong shape. Brush with 4 tablespoons of jam, leaving a 1–2 cm border all around. Brush the border with egg wash made from an egg beaten with a tablespoon of milk. Roll the dough into a loose roll, starting at the short side. Pinch the ends to seal. Transfer to prepared baking tray seam side down. Brush with egg wash and sprinkle with sugar. Bake in the oven for 35–40 minutes or until golden and cooked through. Serve hot with custard.

  IT IS SEPTEMBER 1660, the restored king is on the throne, and the great diarist Samuel Pepys is about to test out a whole new element of Englishness: ‘did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) which I had never drunk before’.

  Now there is something strange about this. Pepys is pretty clear that he thinks of tea as a foreign concoction, yet it is hard to imagine anything so quintessentially English as a cup of it. If the English were the magpies of the world, collecting bits and pieces around the planet to enhance their culture – and they clearly were – then there is really nothing quite as contradictory as tea-drinking.

  On the face of it, it is hard to imagine anything quite so un-English. How could a drink described by the Chinese emperor Chin-Nung in 2,737 BC as the ‘cup that cheers’ find its way into the English soul? Yet there was Pepys, testing out the beverage brought to English high society that very year, by Charles II’s Portuguese bride Catherine of Braganza, whose vast dowry had to be paid partly in spices and other eastern delicacies, including ‘tea’.

  The first advertisement for tea had appeared in London two years before (23 September, since you ask). Already the Dutch East India Company was paying doctors to recommend it as a health drink – one Dutch doctor recommended 200 cups a day.

  But how did it become so overwhelmingly English? The answer is partly: by accident. The English East India Company was thrown out of the warehouses on Java in 1684, and their representatives were forced to import tea directly from China, which turned out to be much quicker and therefore much less expensive. At the same time, they were under political pressure back home to stop undermining the English textiles market, and they began to compensate their Indian traders by cultivating tea in Assam.

  In London society, something alchemical was happening. Women were banned from the man’s world of coffee houses, so they made tea-drinking their very own, sipping the stuff in tiny porcelain teacups the size of thimbles, packed with sugar from the American plantations. They even adopted the Parisian habit of adding a drop of milk.

  The first teahouse in England opened in 1717, the Golden Lyon at 217 Strand. Not many decades later, Samuel Johnson described himself as a ‘hardened and shameless Tea-drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle scarcely has time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the midnight, and with Tea welcomes the morning’. In 1678, Henry Savile complained about people ‘who call for teas instead of pipes and bottles after dinner – a base unworthy Indian practice’. Then a century later, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed tea as a way to reform criminals.

  The English may have adopted a foreign drink, but they also left their mark on tea. The Victorians soon dispensed with green tea and embraced the black stuff, grown in Wuyi in north-west Fujian, and carried by Chinese workers in lead-lined boxes over the mountains, and then on to Canton or Shanghai.

  From there it would be bought or rejected by a handful of foreigners, mainly British and Americans, who were allowed to live in a tiny area outside Canton as buyers and agents. Then there were three or four months running home on clippers (Captain Robertson of the Victorian tea clipper Cairngorm never slept during the home run, just napping on a deckchair on the poop deck). The tea was poured out on the floor in the Port of London, tested for adulteration, and brewed by a professional tea-taster, before being bought, packaged and shipped out to the hearths of England.

  After that, it was brought out for the wealthy at tea dances and other At Home functions, and for the working classes for ‘high tea’ after the shift had ended – cold potatoes and veg and scalding hot tea. Or it was sold in cups at Lyons’ Corner Houses (first one: 213 Piccadilly in 1894) for actresses and clergymen alike.

  In fact, it was a teahouse liaison between actresses and the clergyman the Rev. Mr Harold Davidson that led to dismissal from his position as Rector of Stiffkey in Norfolk in 1932, and his famous demise in Skegness as a lion tamer, at the hands of a lion. Tea can still carry a punch.

  Use Indian or Ceylonese tea.

  Tea should be made in small quantities – that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash.

  The pot should
be warmed beforehand.

  The tea should be strong.

  The tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea.

  One should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about.

  After making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.

  One should drink out of a good breakfast cup – that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type.

  One should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea.

  10. One should pour tea into the cup first.

  11. Lastly, tea – unless one is drinking it in the Russian style – should be drunk without sugar.

  George Orwell’s recipe for a perfect cup of tea, Evening Standard, 12 January 1946

  THE GREAT FRENCH philosopher Voltaire had his own ideas about the difference between France and England. France has many different kinds of sausage but one universal church, the Roman Catholic Church, he said. England, on the other hand, has many different varieties of church, but only one sausage.

  Perhaps it is because the English survived centuries with one kind of sausage, which – sizzle as it might – looked much the same in the pan or out of it, they needed to provide variety some other way. Hence the variety provided by a dish called toad-in-the-hole.

  Toad-in-the-hole is the quintessential English way of eating sausages, or originally bits of beef, all bunged in together to use up leftovers. As such, it was always a little class-conscious, as you might expect from an English dish. It was the kind of meal that even the wealthy rather enjoyed, even though it looked dangerously like a poor family’s lunch – a ‘homely yet savoury dish’, according to the pioneer English cookery writer Mrs Beeton.

  So it seemed to make polite sense to excuse the fact that even the wealthy rather liked it by calling it traditional. In fact, it stretches barely any further back in time than Voltaire himself. There it was on the menu of the Royal Philosophers, the Royal Society’s Thursday evening dining club, eating in the Mitre Tavern in 1769, and there it was a few years later with an explanation: ‘Baked Beef in Pudding, alias Toad in a Hole.’

  It didn’t satisfy everyone’s need for class-conscious distinction. There was the novelist Fanny Burney describing the dish as ‘ill-fitted’ because it plunged a ‘noble sirloin of beef into a poor paltry batter-pudding’.

  The Mitre Tavern, once frequented by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, was later pulled down to become a bank (it is now a pub again, because – as we know – English life goes in circles). The club moved down the Strand and carried on meeting for nearly a century. History doesn’t relate how often they dined on toad-in-the-hole.

  By then, the main ingredient of toad-in-the-hole had begun to mutate from any old bits of meat that happened to have been hanging around, into sausages. In the Second World War, frugal housewives were urged by the government to make it out of spam.

  Yet there may have been a link with sausages right from the start, and that might explain the name. Because, there is some evidence about the origin of the nickname for this dish of kings and peasants. It seems to have derived originally from an Anglo-Saxon word, now slang, which sounds almost the same, a reference to the shape of the sausages. It seems to have been called turd-in-the-hole. I’m sorry, but it was.

  Nigel Slater’s classic recipe:

  Set the oven at 220ºC / gas mark 7. Whisk together 2 eggs and 300 ml of full-fat milk. Add a good pinch of salt, then beat in 125 g plain flour. Heat 3 tbsp of lard or dripping in a small roasting tin or baking dish until it starts to smoke. Add 6 fat pork sausages and let them colour on all sides then, while the oil and sausages are smoking hot, pour in the batter. Bake for 25–30 minutes until puffed and golden. Like making Yorkshire pudding, get the fat in the roasting tin (literally) smoking hot before adding the batter. I put the lightly cooked sausages in the pan first then pour in the batter when you can see a blue haze rising. I am a great believer in letting the batter rest before using, though others disagree.

  THE MAN WHO speeded Charles Darwin to Tierra del Fuego, and fell out with him about the theory of evolution, fell victim in the end to the peculiar English relationship with the weather. Always far-sighted, Admiral Robert Fitzroy, as he was then, founded the first meteorological office, designed to warn shipping about imminent gales.

  The office was enormously controversial. The shipowners found the whole idea intolerable because it meant that their vessels were, as they saw it, skulking in port – costing them money – when they could have been braving the weather on the high seas, delivering their cargo so that debts could be paid.

  It was a tragic story. The shipowners lobbied for the funding to be withdrawn, Fitzroy’s pioneering service was shut down and he cut his own throat in despair. The whole incident was a testament to the English obsession with weather and its wonderful unpredictability. Without unpredictable weather, after all, what would there be to talk about? When the great journalist Jerome K. Jerome set about describing the weather forecasts before his famous trip in Three Men and a Boat, it was their sheer inaccuracy that he was celebrating.

  He described the smug attitude of those who listen to the forecasts and stayed in their digs on summer holiday, enjoying the fact that the other, less careful holidaymakers would be caught by the weather. ‘Ah! they’ll come in the afternoon, you’ll find,’ they said to each other. ‘Oh, won’t those people get wet. What a lark!’ Jerome went on:

  And when the afternoon was nearly gone, and still there was no sign of rain, we tried to cheer ourselves up with the idea that it would come down all at once, just as the people had started for home, and were out of the reach of any shelter, and that they would thus get more drenched than ever. But not a drop ever fell, and it finished a grand day, and a lovely night after it.

  There is the point about the English attitude to weather. They enjoy not knowing. Who wants to live somewhere where the weather is boringly predictable?

  It is partly because of England’s peculiar position. London is the same kind of latitude as Calgary in Canada, scene of the 1988 Winter Olympics, and of Irkutsk in Siberia, where they freeze dry the washing instantaneously and have to keep the car engines running all winter. In England, harsh winters are so unexpected that all the transport infrastructure immediately grinds to a halt and the schools close down. It is, of course, all to do with the benevolent Gulf Stream, which takes warm water and air from the Gulf of Mexico.

  The weather determines English preferences for beer rather than wine because the climate isn’t good for vines. Nor is all this rain good for dramatic geography – the biggest English canyon (Cheddar in Somerset) is three miles long (the Grand Canyon manages 227 miles). Swings and roundabouts.

  You may find that the weather is far better than it is said to be. But please remember that the English don’t heat their homes as much as other nationalities, so bring warm clothes.

  Notice for new students at a language school in England

  ONCE YOU KNOW where to look for it, the evidence that wool once built England – the reason why successive Lord Chancellors have sat on a woolsack in the House of Lords since the fourteenth century – is all around us. The ruins of the great Cistercian abbeys that drove the production of fleece from the twelfth century onwards, the old drovers’ roads that slice between fields and over hills and valleys, the vast wool churches, the songs – from ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ to ‘Little Boy Blue’ – they are all testament that, once upon a time, England gave wool to the world.

  Not to start with, of course. Southern Italy produced the best wool in the Dark Ages. But thanks partly to the Cistercian abbeys, with their distinctively white-robed monks – founding a distinctively English tradition of agrarian radicalism – it was English wool which crossed the Channel to the famous Champagne fairs, and from there went for cloth-making to Spain or Cyprus or Constantinople and beyond.

  It was wool that drove the
economic success of England, which in one generation – that of King Richard the Lionheart and his brother John – three times collected a quarter of the national wealth and sent it to Germany, while making barely a dent on the inflation that was such a by-product of success. The great sheep centres – Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and East Anglia – generated vast wealth for the growing nation in the centuries to come.

  The Hundred Years War, which was primarily about getting access to Flemish weavers to create a home-grown industry to process the wool, deepened the relationship between the English and the wool trade. From 1275, the Great Custom, the tax on wool exports, was also a huge source of revenue for the English Crown.

  By the fifteenth century, the textile trade had grown so much that exporting wool was forbidden. Smuggling it out of the country, a practice known as ‘owling’, meant losing a hand. The textile centres were then dominated by a radical system of cottage industries whereby the dyeing, weaving and finishing of products was distributed to people’s homes and carried out domestically. This still continued until recently in the production of Harris Tweed, admittedly a Scottish brand. It was a system which broke the power of the guilds, but was in turn broken by the Industrial Revolution.

  By that time the future of English wool was being overshadowed by the cotton industry, emerging more powerfully by then, and threatened also by the softer wool from Merino sheep bred and obsessively protected by the Spanish, which began to drive out the coarser English wool. By the twentieth century, the British textile industry was beset by underinvestment and monopolistic practices, and the writing was on the wall, as famous name after famous name shifted production overseas and then disappeared completely.

  There then followed the global collapse in the use of wool – down forty per cent in 1966 alone – and the great relationship between England and the wool business, the source of their original wealth, was broken. A sad story, and rather typically English. Some English wool is used in carpets every year, but most of the rest – so laboriously sheared – just goes into incinerators or is exported to China for their carpets.