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Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

Episode Six: The Fish Finger Bhorta

[Knocking on the door. Door opens]. 

Ash Sarkar: Hi! So nice to see you!

Bhorta is just like mashed, like anything mashed it. Do you have mustard involved in some capacity? Is there ginger? Is there chilli? And so that's like the traditional bit and then I guess the like fusion cuisine element is like, fish fingers! 

And originally it's your mum's invention?

AS: Yeah, or like, it's kind of like drawn from like the collective Bangla unconscious. You can bhorta anything. The thing is that, like, if you can mash it, it can be a bhorta. All you need is belief!

Forest DLG – the man behind the music in this show – and myself are at writer and commentator Ash Sarkar’s house to learn how to make a fish finger bhorta. The recipe is one that Ash learnt from her mum. When she shared it on Twitter, Nigella Lawson picked it up and featured it as the first dish she made in her show Cook, Eat, Repeat. And with that, the fish finger bhorta blew up.

AS: I'd either been at home and got the recipe off my mum or I'd been at home and eaten it. And I just tweeted about it, saying that it was the equivalent of like Proust’s tea dipped Madeleine. Like it was just so connected to memory and being a kid. And then people were like, “oh, what are you talking about”? So I just posted a bare bones version of the recipe. And then Nigella was like, “I'm gonna cook it” and I was like, “lol, okay”, and then she was like, “I cooked it”. And I was like, “Oh, fuck!”

Ash attributes some of the success of the dish down to the nostalgia that people in England hold toward fish fingers, or beige food in general. But it’s also a dish that tells a story.

AS: It's kind of the story of the immigrant experience in this country, particularly for the ones that came over earlier. So my grandma when she first came to this country was like 1954 or something like that. You didn't have the ingredients. I mean, these people were eating like cavemen here. It was just like, unseasoned pebbles, and that’s it. Just like raw dogging boulders, just nothing! And so even for the basic stuff like garlic, that was hard to get. Or cooking with chopped tomatoes, or talk less of mustard seeds and mustard oil. So you're you're having constantly in your cooking to just integrate what you can find and season it, spicing it, do something with it in a way which tastes like something that you can have at home.

Welcome to The Full English, the podcast that looks at English history and identity through the lens of food. In this episode, we’re going to look at how immigration has led to new dishes being made and eaten in England. Do dishes like the fish finger bhorta count as English? To answer this question, first we need to know what a national cuisine is and, importantly, who gets to decide this? I also want to ask whether nationalism, and English nationalism as it exists in our everyday lives, actually receives enough attention from those on the left of politics who claim to be heavily invested in changing our culture. If not, then why? And can we really avoid talking about Englishness today? This is episode six: the Fish Finger Bhorta.

Jason Edwards: I think you can make a fairly cast iron case that any national food culture is a myth. 

This is Jason Edwards who lectures on food and politics at Birkbeck University. He was talking to me about British food, but the same can be said of English food.

JE: There's a famous book on nationalism by Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities. And, and it introduces this term, imagined community. He uses the term imagined communities, nations as imagined communities, and says they are imagined because we will never meet most of the people in that community. But we imagine who they are, their identities, and we imagine it through things like, you know, what newspapers, they read, what literature they read, what kind of sporting events they go to, what food they eat. Okay, so that's the sense in which we imagine our commonality, what we what we share in common with other members of this, this culture. Now, it's a myth that everybody eats the same thing in the same way at the same time, and so on. But myth doesn't necessarily mean false, that it has no basis in reality, right? Myth rather means important ideas, images, narratives about who we are, as as a nation. So it's not the case that English people sit around eating roast beef for dinner every night, or fish and chips or whatever. But it is the case that there are these important dishes and practices of food, which we imagined in our narratives and images, and so on, which do form a sense of, of national food identity

A national food is an image, or myth, that a community of people share in common. That doesn’t mean they actually all do the thing that the myth suggests, only that they consider a certain trait belongs to a certain group of people, who in turn constitute a nation. 

JE: But what's very important is that it's a contested myth. So not everybody agrees about what constitutes British food, what constitutes British foodways, and so on. This is something that's open to contestation, and actually open to a lot of public contestation, and certainly has been in recent times.

People fight over the myths that denote national identity because these myths say something about who the national community are and how such a community should behave. This is particularly important in contexts in which those with power, such as politicians, want to seek legitimacy or endorsement. Think of the cringey relationship between Hillary Clinton and hot sauce. 

CLIP

Do all black people in America carry hot sauce in their bag? No. But is hot sauce synonymous with being black? Often yes. It’s culinary myth, or idea, that Clinton sought to mobilise in order to win support from black voters. And that’s why Jason Edwards explains that who creates the myth matters. 

JE: If you think of gastronomical knowledge of what fine food is, or authentic, national food, it was, you know, it was always the gastronome and formalised gastronomic expertise that dictated or said, what authentic food was. France is the leading example of this. Which is interesting because the British state, so to speak, has never been involved in really in promoting an idea of British national cuisine. But of course, in France it was, from the period after the revolution, and really getting going, probably quite a bit later than that, from the late 19th century onwards, you have the French state sponsoring these ideas of what you know, classic French cooking is and how it symbolises France. And you have before that of course, the appellation system in France, which is first really set up system of legal protections for food items and food culture. It's that perhaps supported by official institutional knowledge that determines what authentic national cuisine is.

But when we get to the end of the last century, there's a shift. So, gastronomy is no longer seen in those terms. What tends to be elevated is what was traditionally seen as the peasant and the low, you know, it's the, it's ordinary rustic food, which gets to be seen as, you know, symbolic of a nation’s food. So, you know, you think of lardo as one of the, the typical examples. You know, lardo, is pig fat, back fat. That's, you know, salted. Who would want to eat that in a fine dining restaurant 30 years ago? But now, of course, everybody's putting it on toast with anchovies, and it's, you know, and it's, it's the thing, thing to have, and it becomes elevated into this almost fine item of gastronomy. Even though it's very rustic and very ordinary. So you have this shift, gear down, if you like, towards the more demotic, the more ordinary. And it's the rediscovering that authentic, sort of rustic ordinariness of natural food that that is important. In certain circles, if you turn your nose up at a plate of intestines now, then people look down at you. How's that? How's that happened?

While our ideas of what constitutes authentic or refined cuisine may have focused downward, exactly how and why the restaurant St John has gained widespread praise and recognition for the practice of eating the whole animal – from nose to tail, as they put it – rather than West African or Pakistani migrants in England who never stopped eating in this way tells us something about the relative power of different voices to determine dominant myths about food. If English, or British, food is now about eating from nose to tail, one question we should ask is: ‘according to who’? While it might be easy to see how our dominant myths or fashions around food fashions can change, who has influence and who doesn’t in that meaning making is often far less visible. 

To explore these issues I’ve come to Accra Palace, a restaurant in Hackney, London, where offal is on the menu without much fanfare. I’m here to meet Riaz Philips. Riaz is the author Belly Full, a book which documents Caribbean food in the UK. I started by asking Riaz why he wrote the book.

Riaz Phillips: I noticed at the time that there wasn't much literature about Caribbean food in the UK, there wasn't much media about it. For me, that's where my family are from. And the history of that community is like an everyday part of my life. And it just occurred to me how little the mainstream knew about that community. So I wanted to do a project that celebrated the community in a fun way. That was like engaging. 

I think, for the major part, if a restaurant or a takeaway spot doesn't tick those, those kind of new forms of media, if it doesn't appeal to certain aesthetic, or a crowd that it kind of just lives outside that genre of food, almost to the fact where it doesn't exist. So that's the issue I had with a lot of these Caribbean, and West African restaurants that I think are amazing. Some of them have been around for about, some of them, nearly 40 years, 30 years, 20 years, and never given a review. Never been celebrated. Never had a picture taken in a local newspaper. Certainly not in the national newspapers. And, yeah, I just thought that was ironic, especially given the fact that, you know, when these new restaurants open with trendy names, and trendy celebrity, Instagram names attached, they get all the reviews out, and all the newspaper editors and reviewers and bloggers go there. But for me, the super ironic thing is that a lot of these places are like literally on the same road as some of the places I featured in Belly Full, like across the road or a few doors down. I'm not one to complain. So I thought instead of like complaining and moaning about it, I'll just do something myself.

Open the restaurant review section of any national newspaper and its unlikely you will find anywhere similar to the places that Riaz documents. This tells us something about who has a voice in the making of our national myths, and who is marginalised. This kind of problem is also ridiculous, because ultimately we all lose out on eating good food with good people.

Waitress: You should try fufu. 

RP: You can. 

Ok. I’m scared to use my hands though!

That’s not to say there aren’t any barriers to embracing unfamiliar food. I’m clearly not used to eating with my fingers. In the same way, I remember how my grandparents found it difficult to eat using chopsticks.

RP: If that's the case, then you just got to make mistakes and learn. Like, a Ghanian immigrant to England, if they’re eating Sunday roast for the first time. You know, it's the same, it's no different. It's exactly the same thing. Just an alien food and you just you approach it how you think you might. That person might pick up the Yorkshire pudding with their hand and just try to jump it and other people will be like, “what are you doing, you have to use a knife and fork!” You just watch other people how they eat.

The reason why people get that familiarity to other cuisines is for the things I spoke about before. So they've been shown it so many times that before they even go there, they feel a familiarity with it, even though they might not have actually ever had it before. Take something like tacos, for instance, loads of people have never eaten it before. But they've heard of it. And they're familiar with the culture, because it's been illustrated to them so many times through soft media that when it’s time to eat, or when they get presented with it, they have that kind of openness to it. 

While most people know what a taco is, even if they haven’t tried one, the same isn’t the case for Caribbean and African food. As Riaz says, that’s a product of our media environment. It’s a product of who gets the loudest say when it comes to creating shared images – or myths – about food.

RP: I think especially now, that social media and YouTube, when you can go into a restaurants page before you even go there. I think those kind of excuses are dwindling. Because you can know everything about, well, not everything, but you can have a good deal of knowledge about cuisine and how to approach it before you even go to eat.

We’re nearing the end of season one of the Full English and this is the part in the show where I ask you to give us a small regular donation so we can make more episodes. If you want to see a second season of this podcast, go to patreon.com/thefullenglish. You can sign up for as little as £3 per month and with that you’ll get access to loads of exclusive content including recipes related to this show. Go to patreon.com/thefullenglish. 

One myth concerning English food is that we’re great culinary borrowers. We might not know, or perhaps don’t like, traditional English dishes but that’s ok, because we are happy to eat other national foods, from pizza to pakora. In England, this idea is linked to the sense that the country wiped out its own culinary traditions through its rapid industrialisation, or otherwise that, at least since empire, we’ve embraced and adapted culinary traditions beyond our own shores. Yet attempting to define English food in this way can make it appear to be everything and so also nothing. But there’s another problem with this idea of England having a clean culinary slate. This is Riaz again.

RP: If you look through some of these books that come up by your top chefs, you flick through them. It's just a pick and mix of different cultures. One page is kimchi, the next page is tacos. They've got plantain in there. So they're happy to promote that. But then when it comes to promoting the people of those originating cultures then suddenly it's an issue: like we don't know if we can sell enough books on Nigerian food, or yeah, it's a huge problem. 

I would never say that people who aren't directly Caribbean can't cook Caribbean food. But it's plainly obvious to see when people from that background are struggling to get their work published or noticed but another chef can use those same recipes in their books. And there's no issue of that. The publishers don't have any problem with publishing that. So the issue is not that certain people can or can't cook food. It's the fact that people who are directly from those heritages aren't getting those same exposure opportunities as the other people. That's the major issue.

This point helps us think about who has the authority to determine dominant food myths and who doesn’t. About who gets the credit for cultural exchanges, and who is left relatively silent. What Riaz is saying is not an argument against cultural exchange as such. Because English food – like any national cuisine – is the product of interaction between different cultures. Because there is no such thing as a pure, untouched national cuisine. Ackee and saltfish, typically considered the national dish of Jamaica, is the fusion of the West African ackee fruit with North Atlantic salted cod, an ingredient that was often given to slaves by European slave owners and traders. The same is true of what we think of as Chinese food.

Andrew Wong: I'm Andrew Wong and I'm chef at restaurant A Wong

You can pick out random facts, you can say that, you know, Sichuanese food is based around chillis, predominantly Sichuan peppercorns, but, you know, chilies didn't arrive in China until the Columbian Exchange in the 1600s. You know, at the same time, you can, you could say that, you know, China has 14 international borders, it borders 14 countries ranging from Mongolia to Russia to, you know, to India to Turkmenistan, you cannot expect the cuisine to be the same when it has that type of transfer of culture along those borders. But I think the truth of the matter is China is the original sponge of other people's cultures, yet somehow because there's only been 100 and so odd years of Chinese cuisine outside of China in international countries I think that people have lost that message along the way. China through the various Silk Roads over the past several thousand years, has borrowed and adapted and – I don't want to use the word stolen – but absorbed more cultural gastronomy than any other cuisine. You know, whether it be from Persia through the south Silk Road or you're talking about the Ottoman influence from the kind of the sin Jang route into China, or taking stuff from the Middle East and India and bringing it back again. You know, China has taken all these ingredients and all these cultural gastronomies and made it part of what we perceive to be a lot of times just Chinese cuisine now in a generic form. But actually they're all very much integrated into being from other cultures. And I think sometimes people forget this, you know, they, they just assume that what they've experienced since their childhood is Chinese cuisine, but that is the very product of fusion over several thousand years.

Of course, a similarly global picture can be painted of England and the traditions we call English.

Catherine Hall: We've never been an island story. It’s always been a history of interconnection, with continental Europe, with Empire, with other empires. 

This is the historian Catherine Hall

CH: The more you understand how the idea that globalisation is a 20th century phenomenon is I mean, it's simply, it's absolutely not true. Mobility around the globe started almost as soon as there was human settlement. And this has been, you know, the waves of different peoples that have come into the United Kingdom, and people from here who've gone out, you know, in very, very significant numbers. So the history of migration, of emigration and immigration, is actually integral to our history. 

As dated and contradictory as it might sound, it’s probably better to think of any national cuisine as a kind of fusion food. But not all fusions are created equal. The chicken tikka masala is a dish that is often seen as the peak of this way of thinking about national food but this fusion food was invented for a white British audience. What Riaz has said should make us question why fusion food made for and by immigrant communities in England haven’t achieved the same national status. That is, at least until the fish finger bhorta.

AS: So fish fingers in the oven is the first bit

Nigella is clear that the fish fingers need to be cooked longer than the packet says

AS: Oh, yeah, they've got to be crunchy. But that's the thing, it’s that when I shared the recipe, I think I just had cook the fish fingers but I didn't specify that my mum always fried them. 1) it wants to get crunchy and then 2) growing up when my mum was making this you'd like be putting it on like kitchen towel or whatever and so you'd have this like fish finger pyramid so that if you were quick you could dart in and get a sneaky pre-bhorta fish finger and so that's kind of the way to do it. But then since Nigella was oven cook them I was like, yeah, what kind of obscene freak would fry them!

While our fish fingers were in the oven, and the onions were sweating in a pan, I wanted to know from Ash whether she thinks the fish finger bhorta would count as an English dish? 

AS: Yeah, cos, like, what are the boundaries of Englishness? Like what does it stretch to accommodate? I was born in this country, my mum was born in this country, it's involving fish fingers, which aren't like massive in Dhaka. This is profoundly English and it's shaped by the experience of the Bengali diaspora in this country, in a way which is profoundly English. And I think that this is also why I get really annoyed with the constant litigation, particularly on the left, ‘ouuu but that's patriotism’, because it's like, you know, that people are gonna live their lives outside of this conversation. If you listen to that AJ Tracy song False Nine, where it's like, “in Trinidad fam, I’m the English fob, white Air Ones and England top”. And I just think like, oh, that's just happening. Like, it's not happening, like, because of the left or because of what, so and so's like, written for Novara or what Paul Embery’s tweeted, it's just that's the way in which diaspora exists and makes a life and shapes a place. So you think about the relationship of grime or drill to the British state and British history, it’s deeply antagonistic towards those things, but also doesn't exist without like football chanting, as well as like the culture of dancehall MCing or toasting or jungle MCing, it also needs like football chanting to happen. Then you've got the riff by Big Narstie on like, you know, Bass Defence League. Do you know what I mean? It's in conversation with a racist English nationalism and all this is happening at the same time.

As Ash says, this kind of meaning making around Englishness is happening whether people pay attention to it or not. It’s happening in music and it’s happening in people’s kitchens. The product of this fusion culture stands in stark contrast to the imaginary of people like Paul Embery, who Ash mentioned, and who sees the consumption of commonly imported food items as elitist snobbery. But at the same time, as Ash points out, people on the left of politics are often reluctant to engage with the ideas around national idenity, in particular Englishness, even when these ideas already engage people’s lives and when they help determine the outcome of national elections. 

Adam Ramsay: Those of us who don't think of ourselves as nationalists still have our worldviews, you know, shaped by the lenses of nationalism. And there's a particularly Anglo-British arrogance to thinking that you're footloose, that you don't have a national identity

This is Adam Ramsay, a journalist from Scotland and an editor of the website Open Democracy. 

AR: Because England was the first sort of modern nation, it had the first Industrial Revolution, every other European nationalism constructed in comparison to it. So in the same way as often men don't think about our gender in the way that women do. English people don't think about being English in the way that the French understand their French and Scots understand they’re Scots and Lithuanians understand they're Lithuanian. And so, once you don't understand that Englishness is a part of you, you don't see it as nationalism, it's very hard to analyse it. But it's absolutely written through all of our political conversations. So an example I often give is the media will often determine that a person is or is not prime ministerial. You know, Boris Johnson and David Cameron are both apparently Prime Ministerial, whereas Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn were apparently not prime ministerial. Now you look at the opinion data and Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn agree much more with most British people than did David Cameron or Boris Johnson. Ed Miliband had much more experience in government than either David Cameron or Boris Johnson.

If you meet those people, Boris Johnson and David Cameron are not particularly charismatic people. They're not very impressive in any way. So what does it mean, to say their prime ministerial? You know, this isn't just something the press say. This is something that is widely believed across a large portion of the country. What it means is they're posh, you know, they went to Eton and they have, they exhibit certain kind of personal traits of posh people. And English nationalism tells you posh people should be in charge. And so they're Prime Ministerial, they're like other prime ministers have been, which means they went to Eton. They appear to be posh. This is this is about the class system. It's about the belief that you know, the ruling class ought to be ruling us, they're good at ruling us.

I’ve come to the India Club on the Strand in London to meet Sunder Katwala. Sunder directs the thinktank British Future and I want to know from him whether Englishness is seen by people of different backgrounds as an inclusive identity. Because this might be another reason why people on the left of politics avoid engaging with this idea. But to start, I asked Sunder why he brought me here to the India Club.

SK: This dining room feels very untouched really over five decades it's been here. You could imagine somewhere like this being Bombay or Delhi, as well as in London. So I think we've got a little piece of the jigsaw here.

Sunder explained to me that for his Dad’s generation British identity was more heavily invested in than Englishness, which was associated with being ethnically white and having a long lineage of family from England.

SK: I think when my dad arrives actually, gets the plane, it's the Whitsun bank holiday of 1968 and it's about a week and a half after Enoch Powell has made the Rivers of Blood speech which is the most infamous speech in a way resonating down generations but it really shaped the atmosphere around Britain that that first generation of Commonwealth migrants was arriving into.

CLIP: “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to permit the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents who are for the most part the future growth of the immigrant descended population” 

SK: It's sort of message that says don't come, you might have got your medical degree and want to be a doctor. But no thanks. What, what it's really about, actually, that speech it's a rejection of the idea that out of the British Empire, modern Britain will become multi ethnic because what Enoch Powell is saying is Empire was all a bit of a mistake, the last two centuries, we've gone on a bit of a wander, but we're home now. So kind of go away and stay out. We are, we are the untouched, unchanged, Tudor England, that we, that we have always imagined ourselves to be after all this global wandering. And yet, of course, that, you know, India has been transformed by the British being there for two centuries. Britain is now being transformed by the fact that British Indians have a have a link here. And so there's a, there's a fundamental argument about British identity, who can be British. But by the time I'm a teenager that's going on, but that's kind of being won as well, because the fact actually, of being born in this country is, you know, gives you a sense of standing. 

Britishness was also seen as more inclusive than Englishness since people who moved to England from within the Empire had been taught by the empire to see themselves as British.

SK: British identity had broadened, was broadening. I think migrants felt strongly British. They had a British passport. They were told about their Britishness. You look at another group, the British black Caribbean population. The Windrush is their symbolic moment of arrival. They come on a boat back to Britain. A lot of them have been in the RAF, they've got a sense because it's what's been taught in Imperial classrooms about their relationship to this country. And they sort of arrive in a London where, you know, schools in London haven't quite been told the same things as the schools in Jamaica. British identity proved quite easy to pluralise. Those who have a Commonwealth background felt it was their link to why they were here, the story of empire and decolonisation and migration and integration made sense. But we didn't have a conversation about British, English, Scottish and Welsh identity. I think in England, people tend to think of Britain and England as much the same thing until sort of Euro ‘96 and deevolution 25 years ago which makes the English start to realise actually England or Britain was slightly distinct. The Scots and Welsh have always known that. But your father's generation wouldn't have had a conversation about whether you could be English.

Sunder’s thinktank have conducted research into the extent to which people perceive Englishness to be an inclusive identity, and whether this is changing over time.

SK: It was a view of the young and not the old 15 years ago that everyone can identify as English, if they were born in England versus actually it's more ethnically defined thing you'd get from your parents or grandparents. And actually, older people have now adopted the view of younger people. In the last decade, they noticed that the norm has shifted and they've gone, they've gone with it. There's a reciprocal dance going on here. And to some extent, the white English have now moved to say, actually, we need to do the same thing with Englishness as we did with Britishness and the image we see in our football team that's who the flag belongs to. It belongs to people from here who want to belong to it. And match it up with whatever you want to. And ethnic minorities. If you're younger, you believe that as well. And if you're older, you're surprised to hear that, because you had a different set of set of categories. And so what we see in the data is that ethnic minorities think this is very true of the sphere of football in particular, but are less clear that it’s true of the flag, and on St. George's day and a pub in November, as it is of, you know, a football stadium in June. And so that's a work in progress across groups, across generations. 

If Sunder is right, then English identity is increasingly being perceived as inclusive of different ethnicities. Sunder is agreeing with Ash who says that investment in Englishness is already happening. In a sense, both Ash and Sunder are saying that those on the political left who claim to be invested in changing culture are actually being left behind by those who are already changing the meanings of Englishness to make it more inclusive. But in the domain of politics, as Adam pointed out, when left wing politicians don’t engage with the ideas of national identity, then right wing ones will find it easier to define it in less inclusive terms and more elitist terms.  

SK: You have to be quite secure about the passport in your pocket in order to believe that you don't need a national identity. And I think I think liberal left people who are sort of beyond national identity, who don't have a psychological need for it, don't realise actually the level of their security in doing that. And so you're less likely actually to see migrants and ethnic minorities take that post national view, even though they have post national links. So the argument about you know, do we get internationalism by saying the universal brotherhood man or do we get internationalism by arguing for an inclusive outward looking Britain an inclusive outward looking Sweden, Germany, France. On the whole, if you want to take a society with you, and people are going to run in democratic elections, you actually want the internationalist version of national identity to compete with the other version, otherwise, you give them all of the flags and things and all the stuff of the last few centuries to your opponents.

But there’s another reason why left wing politicians and activists are reluctant to engage with English nationalism. The problem stems from the fact that is England is a nation without a state. There is no English parliament, as there is a parliament for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That means that England doesn’t have political parties that represent England alone. In the non-proportional elections for Westminster, where the party with the most seats takes control of government, political parties like Labour and the Conservatives want to win seats across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; so if they spoke in the language of Englishness alone they couldn’t do that. But this could also be changing.

Mike Kenny: One of the really striking after effects of COVID will be that many people in England but elsewhere too sort of rather wake up to the fact of devolution, during the management of that crisis. And given that a number of the key powers that were important to those governments in relation to public health were held in different parts of the UK Boris Johnson was, in many respects, really managing England and as, you know, developing policy of England. I think that was really put into sharp relief. 

This is Mike Kenny, a professor at Cambridge University. Mike is an expert on the history and causes of the devolution of certain powers from Westminster to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In effect, he says, this devolution has caused the British state – represented by the ministries and parliament at Westminster – to become, at times, the representative state for England. That’s been observable in policies relevant to the pandemic and which have impacted our lives dramatically over the last two years. Mike also says that the absence of distinctly English political institutions can lend English nationalism a resentful character.

MK: I mean there are no English institutions, you know, the institutions of UK governance are labelled British and the English are ruled by the institutions of the British state. And this becomes a sort of feeling that Englishness is somehow being denied or forbidden, which I think has become a really important point and has undoubtedly, I think, given Englishness in some context, a sort of, you know, anti cosmopolitan, anti London vibe. I think what complicates that is that I think, particularly since the financial and banking crises, I think Englishness does, in some parts of the country, become a kind of almost a sort of a language, an idiom, that you can use to talk about a sense of feeling really forgotten about and disaffected about the sort of way in which government work. So I think there are different things going on here. But I think a really striking feature of the last 15, 20 years is the way in which the language of Englishness is picked up by those who are championing causes against the political elite if you like.

But how and why people express their Englishness isn’t limited to just that.

MK: The degree to which people find meaning in their national identity when it comes to politics just varies. I remember, I've always been struck by this, I did a workshop in Leicester, with a bunch of stakeholders, people who were sort of involved in community work or involved with working, doing projects with the council, mostly ethnic minority. I tried to replicate the cultural and ethnic character of the area. Most of the people said, “No, no, I feel British not English. That's not for me.” And then at one point one of them said, “Yeah, but my kids, they talk about being English”, and so on. And the room sort of lit up, because everyone said, “Oh, yeah”, and “I can't understand it”. And I just thought that was so interesting. Now they were partly talking about a cultural thing about football and so on. But it was more than that, because I probed them. And I just think it's really important that we remember that people's feelings of nationhood are not fate, they often are part of the materials that people use to make sense of the social and political world they inhabit. And, above all, I think what the evidence suggests is that there is quite a latent appetite for people to hear more the political world being conducted in a register that speaks to them as people who are English in their sense of national identity, as well as people who live in Leicester, or are members of their local community, it's just like a sort of level of, of identity and community that is sort of pretty much missing, I think, from the political world.

LSo what has any of this got to do with food? Well, if questions around national identity are not settled, if they are constantly evolving in our everyday lives, and if there are tensions in our political system that means our national identities are being mobilised, then how and who defines Englishness matters. As this podcast has sought to show, one way we define ourselves is through food. 

Looking at food can reveal both our national history as well as some of the contemporary fault lines in our society: from who can afford to eat out and where, to who struggles to put food on the table. Our ideas around food indicate, rightly or wrongly, what we see to be posh and elitist and what by the same token is seen as more popular. But food also shows us an immensity of collaboration, exchange and the embracing of difference: insofar as national cuisines can be said to exist at all, they are always, like the nation itself, a product of fusion, of exchange across man made boundaries, of cultures whose existence exceeds these boundaries but can, by the labour of our imagination, crystalised into something we call national.  

For this show I asked almost all the guests I spoke to what they would consider to be a dish that would represent English food today. Answers included roast beef, the English breakfast, roast mutton and an Indian-English curry, like Chicken Tikka. But if I had to choose, I’d probably suggest the fish finger bhorta. Why? Well, first of all, nations are ideas that bound together a group of people who usually share a language and a patch of land.

But these things are deeply porous. They are in fact made and traversed by the interactions of those who are not always included within the idea of the nation. And that’s especially the case for England. While America is often seen as a nation made by immigrants, England often represses what was a central position within an enormous global empire. I think the fish finger bhorta recognises this history. Second, the dish was created by Bangladeshi women looking for a taste of their previous home. Unlike the chicken tikka, it wasn’t intended for a white English audience, but by working with what was to hand – in this case a popular processed food, the fish finger – the dish has become popular among those with different heritages but who occupy the same spaces as people like Ash Sarkar’s mum: spaces both geographic and linguistic but also spaces like supermarkets and neighbourhood shops, school canteens and the front rooms of homes in England at tea time. The dish speaks of English history but above all the fish finger bhorta is also just delicious.

LB: This is delicious! 

Forest DLG: yeah it's fucking good! 

AS: I think I overcooked fingers, which you'd think is impossible to do! 

This podcast starts from the principle that the meanings of Englishness is a topic that is already a lively conversation in our society and that a key medium through which we talk about the nature of Englishness – just like any other national identity – is food. In a sense, this show is about crafting Englishness as much as it is about finding it. And that’s something that I want to do with you. If you have any ideas or views you’d like to share with me then please get in touch via Twitter and Instagram. You’ll find us there @FullEngPod. And again, if you want this podcast to continue, please show your support over at patreon.com/fullenglish. There’s so many topics we’d love to cover but we need the money to do that.

Thanks as always to our guests. Thanks to Forest DLG for the music and to Jonathan Nunn for all the support in making this show. I’m Lewis Bassett and that’s it for season one. Thanks for listening. 

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Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

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Episode five: The invention of ‘Modern European’ food in England

Lewis Bassett: So here’s a puzzle. How did food in England and the UK go from this…. 

Advert: Heinz 57! Get together with delicious Heinz Baked Beans!

To this…

Advert (Jamie Oliver): Try before you buy? Are they sun blushed tomatoes? I’ll have a little tub of those. Tell you what would be nice, some of those green olives. A little nob of parmesan darling. Uhm beautiful!  

You just heard an advert for Heinz baked beans from 1955 and an ad for Sainsbury’s from the early 00s featuring Jamie Oliver.

This is the story of the rise of Mediterranean food in England – from pesto to sundried tomatoes, rocket to feta cheese. Things that seem to be fairly normal food items today but which were pretty rare in England 30 plus years ago. Take olive oil. Prior to the 1990s, one of the few ways you could get it in England was in small bottles sold at chemists. 

In this episode, we’ll look at how a movement of cooks and cookery writers helped to challenge the status of elite, classical French cuisine as the gold standard of food in England with provincial French and Mediterranean cooking. It’s also the story of the rise of a new middle class movement whose European tastes not only assumed a central place at our dinner tables but lent politics and culture in England a repertoire of feelings and sentiments that have been mobilised in debates around the EU and inequality in Britain. Welcome to episode five of the Full English Podcast.

The story begins in the 1960s and 70s.

Shaun Hill: The repertoire of the time, in the late 60s, was that of you know, Escoffier. You got the same food for Land's End to John O'Groats, just done better or worse with Tornado Rossini and Chicken Chasseur on the menu, stuff like that. 

This is the chef Shaun Hill, who has over 50 years’ experience in kitchens and is still cooking at the Walnut Tree in Wales. Shaun’s career has been so exceptional that it stands somewhat outside the narrative in this episode. August Escoffier, who Shaun mentions, was a chef whose influence on elite, French cuisine reached its peak in the early 1900s but which continued to dominate the high end of the restaurant scene in Britain for the rest of that century. His influence on British food is so great that it probably deserves its own episode.

SH: Generally speaking, people ate out in hotels, and they ate out to celebrate a birthday, or a wedding, to mark some rite of passage. And the food was incidental. And, and so the food was a sort of imitation French food. Most of the kitchen staff were Italian and few Spanish people and quite a few of the dishes where we're, you know, Frenchified Italian dishes, and probably no worse for that. But people really ate out for the theatre that the maître d does. You know, Luigi, or whoever it was, he gave you a good table made of fuss of you. And then they carved things and set light to stuff. And it's easily to sneer at. But it's what people wanted.

Fay Maschler: It was very polarised in those days. There were gentlemen's clubs, there were hotels and big posh restaurants. And then, you know, some Indian restaurants and not much else, some bogus Trattorias. And that was about it.

I’m Fay Maschler, and I am a food critic, I still am. I was at the Evening Standard for 48 years.

It was a lot less egalitarian in those days. You know, you could say it was kind of divided between the rich and the poor. So there were posh expensive restaurants, and then there were greasy spoons. And Bangladeshi level of Indian food, immigrant food, which was more affordable. There wasn't the kind of anything that the range now.

Jonathan Meades: I very rarely ate in restaurants other than Chinese and Cypriot restaurants.

This is Jonathan Meades, a film maker and essayist who between 1987 and 2000 moonlighted as a food critic for the Times newspaper.

JM: In those days, Camden Town was entirely Cypriot. And there were two particularly good, Cypriot restaurants, Nontas and Karatzas. The food was absolutely great. But there was very little indigenous cookery, whatever indigenous has come to mean. French restaurants at that time were so so. Obviously there were places like Le Gavroche there was Nico, there was Koffmann. These were very sort of high end. There were cheap restaurants, lots of cheap restaurants, but they weren't very good. There, there was places which were fashionable, Langhams obviously, in the 70s and early the 80s. But there wasn't a kind of solid nexus of, of places. And outside London was generally really rather terrible and continued to be terrible.

Rowley Leigh: It's honestly true to say that if you wanted really, really good food you had to eat it in a fairly restricted environment

This is the chef and food writer Rowley Leigh

RL: you know it was expensive and quite formal and you had to obey the rules, you know, dress codes and everything else and ordinary people were rather intimidated by the atmosphere of places like that.

FM: And then it wasn't very good. And certainly no one knew the name of the chef or anything. It was all about front of house and being posh and expensive and silver service.

SH: A lot of that changed, and a lot of that changed for chefs in the 1970s. Quite early on. It changed with the arrival of Nouvelle Cuisine. The repertoire of dishes that were on just about everybody's menu, generally in misspelt and mediocre French were swept aside because it mattered, the chef made a menu. And so all of a sudden it became important to know who the chef was, and if he was any good or not. And so that shifted the focus, if you like on to the kitchen, and the chef and away from the front of house. And that was that was sort of important. As with all the major changes in cookery styles over the years that I've seen, a lot of it was bogus. I mean, the idea of the chef as artist is risible really, and you had people with no artistic taste whatsoever, doing designs on the plate with coloured vegetables and swirls and stuff. Massive plates became the deal. And but the core of it was the food itself should be interesting and good. It certainly wasn't all bad. And it's no worse really than one of the later fashions which was the chef as scientist.

In the 1960s, 70s and early 1980s, England’s restaurant scene was divided.  At the high end were restaurants and hotels serving classic, Escoffier inspired French dishes, the kitchens of which were nevertheless ran by various migrants, often not from France. And while the simple refinement and elegance of Nouvelle Cuisine challenged the food of these places, the trend was short-lived and certainly never upset the elite setting of this food, in fact reinforcing it. At the lower end were cafes and restaurants representing various inventions of national cuisines – including Italian, Indian and Chinese – whose offerings were either intended to meet the demands of English tastes within the constraints of the available produce. But as the year 1987 arrived, something changed in this scene. Located in, and largely limited to London, nevertheless, this change was fundamental.

FM: it was an extraordinary year because you've got River Cafe and Kensington Place and Bibendum. And I suppose it marked a change of attitude and a change of, it kind of gave rise to a whole new sort of restaurant, probably best exemplified by Kensington place. And new architecture. Plate glass windows. It sort of democratised eating out. Which was what, what was needed really.

JM: The order in which they opened was Alistair Little, River Café, Bibendum, Kensington Place. And Kensington Place. I mean when I wrote about it, I remember starting the article by saying this to me is what we've been waiting for. The food was excellent. The service was very good. They had a bar which made extremely good cocktails. I mean, it just got everything right. And it made places like - which it wasn't directly competing with - Nico with Koffman and Gavroche etc – it made them seem rather sort of old fashioned. I don't think there had been much thought previously about doing anything other than following a kind of conventional well furrow.

Picture this: It’s 1987. A general election has seen Margaret Thatcher elected for her third term, as well as Diane Abbot, the first ever black, female MP. Unemployment remains in the millions, but it’s slowly falling. Arsenal win the league cup for their first time in history. And rave culture is about to take off in the north of England. 1987 is also the year I was born, but, of somewhat more relevance, and as Fay Maschler points out, it was the year that Bibendum, Kensington Place and the River Café first opened their doors. Two years previously, Alistair Little had led the way for these three with his eponymous restaurant in Soho. Together, these four restaurants began a big bang in London’s culinary scene; the consequences of which can still be felt today.

I'm just gonna get the sound. Dan can you tell me what you ate for breakfast.

Dan Lepard: What did I have for breakfast? Actually, I had toast I had toast and peanut butter. Four slices. It was very good. … How's that? 

That's good. Yeah, sounds great.

DL: Hi, my name is Dan Lepard. I'm a writer, a chef, a baker, but mostly, you find me connected to bread in some way around the world.

I would eat at Alastair’s. He had this sort of sort of Italian antipasti bar that was downstairs and behind the bar with lots of cookbooks. And I would sit at the bar. And Alastair would come down and chat and I, I was just fascinated by his cooking. There were ingredients on the bar. They'd be red peppers, there would be sort of bowls of basil there would be Amalfi lemons, there would be all sorts of things. That was strange, then people didn't really see food in that way on a bar counter. Alastair just said in passing one day “Why don't you come and cook here?” So I said, yeah, yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to. And he started me on the pastry section, he started me with making bread. That's pretty much where I stayed.

I realise now that when people, when people say this nonsense I hate, when they say well everything's been around forever and that there's no such thing as recipes and there's no such thing is invention: Fuck off this is, this just isn't true. I'd see Alastair doing really shocking things like putting sliced thin raw beef on a plate that he'd had in in Italy or he'd get this this incredibly fragrant green olive oil and pour it all over things in a way that just people didn't do. You didn't drizzle oil on your food people didn't do this! So much of the excitement about Italian food in Britain Absolutely comes from Alastair and the things that are commonplace now, like, like rocket in salads and mozzarella on things, Alastair would say, arguably to middle class Britain, you can do this.

RL: I dropped out of university. And I farmed with my father for a couple years, but I didn’t like that. 

Rowley Leigh again

RL: Then I moved to London, and pretty much pretended to be a writer, but was mostly a waster. And then, when I was about 26, I was struck off the dole. So I got a job at the rock garden flipping hamburgers. I thought, well, if this is what I get to do, I want to do it properly. So I got a job with the Roux brothers. And I worked for them for eight years, including the last three years as head chef for one of their satellite restaurants in the city. And then I got together with some friends and opened a restaurant called Kensington Place in 1987. It was considered quite revolutionary at the time, because it took my skills from the Roux brothers and put them on a much more democratic platform if you like. And we were doing high quality food. Fairly low prices, in a very informal casual atmosphere. With no fine dining, Frou Frou sort of stripped down, fine dining in a very sociable convivial atmosphere. So we really did throw a hand grenade in at that point, I think. 

SH: it was people feeling more comfortable with eating out, that they wanted to actually enjoy the food that they were eating. And so the people who were aiming at that rather than anything that Michelin might offer or you know might get them a round of applause at a catering convention started to do very well indeed. And in fact, the poor devils who'd done the proper, normal route in, through catering colleges, were left behind for quite a while. Which is a shame, because they still, you still get taught all that sort of basic things. But it became a job for people who were interested in food, I mean, a bit like myself, they worked at food from the end product backwards rather than the craft skills forward. If that's not absurd. So you wanted food that tasted good, and that you could feel good about so the that's where sort of stuff like provenance and decent produce started to become more important. As well as that started to come, I think, more media interest in in chefs and cooking.

Margot Henderson: Simon was, I mean, he was, my god. 

This is Margot Henderson. I’m chatting to her on her break as head chef at Rochelle Canteen in East London. Margot is talking about Simon Hopkinson, the chef of Bibendum, one of the restaurants which opened in ‘87.

MH: I mean, I just looked up to him so much. I was desperate to go and work there. But too scared, way too scared. We had gotten a really good review at 192 and they took us to Bibendum. Simon came out and served us a rabbit pie. Beautiful rabbit pie, and in walked Elizabeth David, with Egon Renay. Then Francis Bacon sat down over there. And then to finish it off, Barry Manilow walked across the room. I was like yes, this is the place. Great simple cooking which was cooked with such brilliance. He's beautiful. He's an amazing cook. 

RL: Simon was slightly different. Well we were all slightly different. But Simon, you know, had a proper apprenticeship in a traditional French restaurant, in Normandy, and he was also more provincial in the good way that he was very connected to all the good people, you know, in the country, whereas Alistair and I were more metropolitan. But I think we were all very heavily influenced by a book called The great chefs of France, in the mid 70s. And that introduced us to French cooking, which included nouvelle cuisine. I mean, Michelle Gera was famous for nouvelle cuisine, but he also produced a wonderful book called Cuisine Gourmand. So they were sort of parallel tendencies. And a lot of the simplicity in the the de-institutionalising of French food was something I think we all went along with

David Webb [reading from Simon Hopkinson Roast Chicken and other stories: "Aged 16, I had taken my first holiday job at the Normandie, to decided whether this was to be my chosen career...” “I spoon-fed myself this for the first time while on holiday in Italy. It was high summer and we ate outside in a charming restaurant just outside Florence...” “The rabbits were a sensation. Having first been marinated with a splash of local rose, olive oil, garlic and some herbs, they sizzled and spluttered and really just cooked themselves…” “I tasted it 11 years ago on a first visit to Paris. A Parisian friend, called Hubert, took me there for Sunday Lunch...” 

That was Forest DLG the man behind the music in this show, reading from Simon Hopkinson’s cookbook Roast Chicken and other stories.

JM: You know, these were people in, I suppose their 30s, who had been brought up in middle class families who travelled a lot. I mean they'd seen food in other countries they tasted truffles in Albas or ate cassoulet in Toulouse. 

FM: Mostly when you read these chef's telling you about themselves they've all been inspired by holidays in France, Spain, and Italy, and Europe generally. And, you know, that was a sort of period before Japan came into it say. Now that seems to be, you know, very strong influence, but not then. It was Europe.

What united these four London restaurants was a focus on simplicity, on letting good ingredients, often European ones, become the focus of the meal.

FM: I mean, I remember at the beginning, because they were both amateurs Rose and Ruthie.

Fay Maschler again on Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of the River Café:

FM: I remember they ran out of sea bass and went and bought it at Harrods. Well, you know, that's not how you run a financially successful restaurant!

CLIP

That was a clip of the River Café’s Ruth Rogers directing a young Jamie Oliver on how to prepare porchetta.

FM: I think these restaurants do form a coherent whole. I think it's partly the people involved travelled and ate abroad and ate in France and Spain and Italy and came back and I suppose invented modern European, you know, where you put maybe slightly unlikely ingredients together and not stick to a rigid cuisine of any particular country.

Just as Indian restaurants in Britain adapted what were many varied styles of cooking from an entire subcontinent – an invention we now refer to as ‘Indian food’ – this was provincial French and Mediterranean approaches to food invented in Britain as something else. The end result was eclectic and entirely novel. 

MH: So our food celebrates the produce that we get, cooked in a simple way. I would say it's British European. We follow the rules of Italian, French cooking and simple food. But we, we turn it into British food. We get our fish from British waters. Our meat comes from small farms. And now some of our vegetables are coming from a small biodynamic farm so yeah, it's exciting. It's exciting the produce actually and we really got a great team and the menu changes – it’s a changing menu.

I’ve come to Café Deco in London to meet its owner and chef Anna Tobias. Anna’s CV includes stints at the River Café and Rochelle Canteen. The head chef at Quo Vadis, Jeremy Lee, is here as well. The pair once worked together at Blueprint Café. 

Anna Tobias: Well, so with Jeremy, I think the most amazing things that I got, specifically from my time at Blueprint was pastry. Jeremy has a sweet tooth. I don't know if you know that. 

JL: Laughs

AT: So it was kind of amazing to work for someone who loved puddings first, because sort of feel like there are some restaurants where you feel like, they don't love pudding. And you can tell that by the how short the pudding menu is, that it's sort of, you know, pannacotta, or chocolate ganache. 

JL: Or a fondant!

AT: Yeah. Whereas, you know, it was a really wonderful thing to learn how to make cakes and tarts and puddings and everything. But also, Jeremy taught me who to read, which I think was, I'm not sure I would have got that from everyone. So you know, I think I remember after working there for a few months, it was Christmas soon after and you got me Julia Child's mastering the art of French cooking Christmas. And so just being kind of given some instruction on which cookery writers to read was really helpful to me.

While Julia Child and eventually Alice Waters led the way for this style of cooking in America, in Britain it was the studies of homely French and Italian food by the cookery writer Elizabeth David that influenced the modern European movement in England, above all.

JL: You factor in that this very small book was published in 1950 called Mediterranean Cooking by Elizabeth David, which was then followed by French Provincial Cooking, and they were very slender volumes. French Provincial Cooking didn't come out until the 1960s and then bang! The world changed. You know, when Robert Carrie, Terence Conran, Elizabeth David all met, I mean, it was Titanic. 

Robert Carrie was a cookery writer and restaurateur. The designer Terence Conran was behind the furniture store Habitat, Bibendum and a string of other restaurants in London, including Blueprint.

JL: And that's what spearheaded this. George Perry Smith: I cook Elizabeth David. Joyce Mollinue: I cook Elizabeth David. It wasn't Escoffier. And then suddenly, they're all going “well, who is this Elizabeth David. We all need to read this”. And she didn't sell much even you know during her lifetime but she was a secret weapon and folk just went “you know this is amazing”, you know, and it was just, a pat of butter and good bread was all you needed to cheer someone up. And the food critics just adored this and went berserk so, by the time the 80s and 90s came along with this produce that had only once upon a time, minutes ago, been available at Boots for a little jar that size of olive oil and you know, you had to buy your garlic under a hood in Soho. Suddenly, this produce was available that we'd never had access to before. And it went berserk.

RL: I think we were children of the Elizabeth David age basically. My mother certainly cooked from Elizabeth David. Whereas you know most chefs have been thrown into a kitchen at 16 and were treated and sort of inferior beings, if you like.

Margot: She was ahead of her time I suppose. I mean, she taught women like Fergus' mother to cook. She taught so many people how to cook through her books in the 60s. She bought French cooking to Britain didn't she. Because I mean Britain, England had had food hadn't they that had cause a great tradition of food, especially if you lived north you'd have tripe and onions and, you know, slow cooked and you're meat in your arga and you went off to the fields, but then we lost it after the war and it was all white sliced bread and fancy food. She brought so. She taught us what an aubergine was. You know what olive oil was. It didn't have to be bought in the chemist. 

By the time we enter the 1990s, the modern European food movement was slowly growing beyond this relatively small clique in the capital to conquer the rest of the UK. Similar trends were also emerging in America, Australia and New Zealand. But as this movement began to gather momentum, another, related culinary explosion occurred in London. This time, it was centred on a single restaurant: St. John

DL: In New York, just towards the end, Anthony Bourdain was opening up this, this Portuguese restaurant called La Tasca. I think it was called. And I did about two months there, and we didn't get paid. And maybe at the end of the two months, these guys in suits came in with these envelopes with about $400 or $500, and I thought, I'm going back.

This is Dan Lepord again. I’m listening to him recount his life and times over a few glass of red at the French House in Soho. 

DL: So I jumped on a plane, went back to Alistair Little’s, because I realised flying back, I had no money, and I didn't have a job. And I was still poor. A constant theme! So I went up to Alistair’s. And one of the sous chefs, Jeremy Lee, at the time, who now is the chef at quo vadis said, “Oh, darling, darling, no work here. Why don't you go down to the French house? I hear they're opening something”. So I said Okay. Right. So I popped down here and I went upstairs and they said “Oh, look the chef's aren't here. Margo and Fergus are opening up this place in Smithfield. But give us your details and your phone number. And we'll let you know”. And by the time I got back they had telephoned to say “yes, why don't you come?” So I went down to Smithfield. And at that time, Smithfield was absolutely a kind of rough part of town in a way that is just hard to imagine - that whole area is changed. There was curb crawling there were, you know, sex in parks. It was it was just kind of a whole different thing. Meat everywhere and loads of taxi drivers - it was just a strange place. Fergus talked about what he wanted to do, that that he wanted to open up a kind of eating place that was very much like the, the eating places that you'd find in Rome, around the abattoir. The meat district. I thought, Yeah. Makes sense to me. 

I wanted to be sous chef. But they said “you can't. We have a sous chef.” And I said, “Well, I'll be head pastry chef”. And Margot said, Margot Henderson said, “Would you make bread?” I said, “Yes, absolutely. Absolutely”. I was still very New York at this point. I sort of came back powered up and kind of kind of electric. So we started making bread right there. 

MH: I'd been to a pop up - they didn't call them pop ups then - that Fergus had done.

This is Margot again, talking about meeting her husband Fergus Henderson, the man credited with St John’s style of cooking.

MH: And I'd heard about this guy and I went there. Everyone was there at this opening. You know, Rose Grey was really impressed with the chef's there. And then on the menu, it had pigeon and peas. And I thought, wow, that is crazy, man. And then on my plate came a whole pigeon and peas and I just, it changed the whole way I thought. I just thought that was the most brilliant thing ever. And it was beautiful. 

Margot and Fergus eventual met each other at the Eagle, a pub in London which lays claim to being the first ever gastro pub – more on those in another episode. Soon after, the pair were cooking together at the French House.

MH: I started boning out the quails and Fergus said, “No, Margo, we're going to leave them whole”. Whoa, that is mental that's so crazy. Now, we wouldn't even think about it. But I would have been taught that a quail is boned down, then it's stuffed and roasted, and then you slice it like that. So food was, as I grew up in Britain, in London, the food was things like a slice of orange on side, a sprig of parsley. I mean, there was Alistair Little and Rowley Leigh really having a great understanding of, I think, classic French cooking and food that women cook at home, which then they were bringing into a more modern way. But I didn't really sort of know it. And then Fergus said, “we're gonna cook a whole you know, shoulder of lamb. I'm gonna going to cook it slowly”. I mean, I was just, it was just the most exciting time in my life to explore this whole new way. It's much more about food that women would cook at home. It's very British in a way. And it's very, you know, you could say, Italian or the, you know, peasant food. I don't like to say peasant, but you know provincial cooking, and which is the most beautiful. It's a food that makes you really happy. It's gentle cooking. I mean, we all love fancy food, too. It's fantastic and fancy restaurants with lots of waiters looking after you. But simple cooking can really blow your mind as well. And it was a really exciting time. I am Fergus' number one fan!

DL: What what Fergus wanted to do was to, from my impression was just to simply preserve what he perceives as the essential characteristics of the ingredients from, from their real state to the plate state, without, without alchemy, there was no attempt to change anything. And in the kindest way, he was very firm about leaving things alone. Not to not to garnish with parsley, but just chuck it down, just plonk it down, just sort of let it fall. Fergus, I think, still talks about it being a kind of bourgeois cooking. But there was also a desire to represent a sort of very simple antipasti. And I absolutely adored, well, both of them, Margot and Fergus, I just adored their approach to food, I still do.

RL: I love Fergus' food. And God he's been, he's been really influential. As influential as any of the three of us you mentioned. He took what we were doing another step You know, even more pared down. Sometimes it's so pared down, to be a complete joke. We ordered - I was with a friend at St. John once -  and we ordered the chestnuts it just said chestnuts as a veg. And just out of curiosity to see what he would do with chestnuts. And of course, he did absolutely nothing. I mean, he gave him a little slash and then put them in the oven and we had to peel them at the table. And my friend said “Sometimes I think Fergus is just putting these things on and then watching from behind the kitchen door to see what we make of him”.

FM: he's been hugely influential. What he did and still does, is wholly admirable, I think, and it's just another way of looking at, you know, that nose to tail thing is another way of looking at cooking. He was in seasonality long before it became a kind of buzzword. He says nature writes the menu for you. It's true, and he follows it.

FERGUS AND TREVOR

Given the enormous respect that chefs and restaurant goers have towards Fergus Henderson, I wanted to speak to him. But the only way in that I could think of was that Fergus often had a Guinness at a pub I used to work at. I tried loitering around there on a few occasions. I got pretty drunk and spent lots of money, but it didn’t pay off. Then one day in October last year I received a reply from the generic St John email address. A few weeks later, I find myself sat opposite Fergus Henderson and his business partner Trevor Gulliver, with a bottle of wine, a pie and a plate of thinly sliced mutton between us. 

Fergus Henderson: I’m feeling a bit scatter-brained…

Fergus has Parkinson's disease, which affects his ability to talk. 

FH: Strangely enough, we're 27 years old and still people come in and go let's have the scariest thing on the menu. It’s not scary at all. There's nothing scary on the menu. It's all delicious!

St John has a reputation for serving offal. Fergus tells us that when the restaurant first appeared, newspapers greeted it with reviews containing a slew of puns, saying it was offaly good. The food they were making was presented by parts of the press as strange even sinister, especially as it appeared in the context of the Britain’s BSE crisis. 

NEWS CLIP: A mysterious brain diesces is threaning the country’s cows. Scientists say they don’t know what’s causing it, or where it came from… 

Fergus explains that in this context St. John’s reputation meant customers sometimes came to restaurant in an act of masculine defiance.

FH: People came and ordered bone marrow to show that we'll eat game, we’ll eat we'll eat offal. But it's not sort of a meaty, testosterone bloodlust thing it's - spleen, take a spleen - it swells when you're in love. It's not that I'm an offal hard nut or something. It's wonderful stuff!

Trevor Gulliver: I mean, unfortunately, or depending on your view, it was like that moment where that's just full of couples, some who got married here, which is fine, and then there will be this group of five Japanese businessmen, not that we’ve seen a Japanese businessman for two years, but sort of asking have we come to the wrong, is this a love hotel or something!? But Fergus is right, we were bussier. And our phone went bananas from the press and everything else. We were wondering what we do. But we thought, we don’t understand the science but know the provenience, we know the age of our creatures. So we decided to say absouletly nothing. 

FH: Just to sort of big up tripe and onions for a moment. Tripe and onions is uplifting. You can achieve with tripe and onions something soothing but uplifting. There are very few dishes that actually uplift and sooth at the same time but tripe and onions is wonderful stuff!

And romantic.

FH: And romantic, yes!

MH: I think there was definitely nervousness about meat at that stage. St John went up and down a bit. I remember this year and they didn't have aircon and it was really hot and all the reviews are about offally good. I was like, “Can’t you just put some pasta on the menu Fergus - let's get something on, why this bloody bone marrow!” But then he stuck to his guns of course. And you know, wrote the book. I think the book Nose to Tail Eating helped everyone understand more about what he was on about. It wasn't to be shocking. Fergus doesn't want to be shocking, doesn't want to put meat on to go uhhh. Doesnt want it to be gory and horrible, it's much more looking after the whole beast. But yeah, I think people were frightened for a bit. 

The growth in interest in the providence of food, spurred on by the BSE crisis and the environmental movement in Britain, combined with the rise of restaurants focused on seasonal British produce, is an essential part of St John’s legacy. But what I really want to know is whether Fergus and Trevor saw St. John as part of the European food movement that first appeared in London in the late 1980s. 

FH: Yeah, yes, they spawned us

TG: And our spawn has left us to spawn on.

FH: They've taken taking the spawn and run with it.

JL: From all these wild influences coming together at one time created modern European cooking, I think was the name that was used at the time. 

This is Jeremy Lee again

JL: Of which Alistair Little and Rowleigh Leigh were absolutely at the forefront of. And then from modern European, modern British cooking was born. It is very important that the path is plotted because there's lots of people involved to create the wunderkind, the dazzling presence, that is Fergus

Jonathan Meades’ answer to this question is typically severe:

JM: St. John is really a French restaurant which is finding English names for French dishes. I don't think they're an English restaurant at all. They're too good.

The food critic Jay Rayner has written something similar. In an appraisal of the legacy of St.John, Rayner has wrote that “what’s called a kind of British cooking nevertheless requires a knowledge of French recipes and techniques”. Indeed, there’s something distantly French and Italian about eating tripe and jowls, as well as using fresh, seasonal produce. The wine at St John is exclusively French.

BREAK

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Making this episode, one thing that’s puzzled me is how almost all the chefs and food writers involved in the making of modern European food came from middle class backgrounds. In fact, several of the leading chefs in this movement were educated at Cambridge and Oxford. Yet at the same time, in 1987, one chef from a distinctly working class background had also made his mark on London’s restaurant scene with the opening of Harveys. With his fiercely good looks, Marco Pierre White set in train a distinctly different tradition, reviving the Michelin Guide in the process and spawning a string of elite chefs like Gordon Ramsay, who also hailed from disadvantaged backgrounds. If this had been going on in the world of high cuisine, did that mean modern European food was distinctly middle class – as in, neither fish and chips nor champagne and caviar?

FM: It was, I hate to use the phrase, but it was middle class food, you know. And those guys personified it. They would probably read around the subject a lot, you know, read Elizabeth David, or whatever, you know, they would approach it differently to the way you might approach it if you were in catering college.

RL: We were just three middle class boys who had a fresh perspective. And dare I say a slightly more intellectual approach to what cooking can be and we you know, we didn't feel, we had the confidence if you like, not to be high bound by Escoffier and La Repertoire de la Cuisine. I mean, we could be stigmatised as middle class. But then that's what, that's what was happening, you know, an enjoyment of food was spreading out from a very small, you know, rather wealthy coterie to become a much more democratic experience.

JM: My parents teetered between lower middle class and sort of proper middle class. They wouldn't have exotic holidays but we'd go to Britany where my grandfather had various business contacts and we'd go to Normandy, very occasional trips to Paris and always sort of staying in cheap hotels and so on. And I imagine that is an experience which was shared by many other people of my age and class and you know, you think, why the hell can't we have this, you know, chips this good in Britain. Why can't we have battered, you know, veal escallops, as good as this and so on.

AT: I wrote Jeremy a letter. When I was 20. 

This is Anna Tobias and Jeremy Lee on how the pair first met

AT: I just finished university and I decided I want to try giving cooking ago. So I wrote a letter to Jeremy saying that I didn't have any experience. But I really loved cooking and would he, possibly…

JL: It was the most beautifully written letter. Ravishing!

AT: Yeah, that's how we met.

JL: It was very unusual for middle class kids to go into kitchens then still. Still very odd. I remember, Anna I saying that she wanted to come earlier, but she was studying at Oxford and her parents said you'll get your degree and then you can choose. I thought, god, don't let me meddle with the family! And so it was, it was a remarkable letter to receive with a story unfolding about how this young person, and Anna was very early doors about being one of this ever growing school of people who were turning their back on this road that would normally take you into the City or merchant banking or to law - one of the great professions. There was a growing disenchantment with that role, folk didn't want to go into architecture necessarily, or that there was this growing need to do things with our hands. To make things. And making things pleased far more people and developed one of the great talents of the day!

To say that this movement was led by middle class chefs isn’t meant to be a dig, in the way that food is often talked about in this country – something we briefly discussed at the end of episode four. Instead, it’s to say that the kinds of food cooked by these chefs reflected some of their tastes and life experiences – such as holidays in Europe – that were common among groups of people of a similar means and status. This is the sociologist Ben Highmore: 

BH: The term subculture gets us to talk about modern rockers, of course, and hippies. But actually we could use it to talk about the kind of fine tunings by which a group of people think of themselves as kind of bohemian than another group of people. And it's interesting to me, because a lot of what is seen as absolutely, you know, the highest kind of cultural kind of experience are the import of, you know, peasant cuisines from around the world. People use the term conspicuous thrift, so rather than displaying your wealth you display your austerity, your sense of constraint. 

Ben is noting the way in which groups of people emerged in the 1970s, 80s and 90s who in a sense rejected older markers of class and taste and instead pursued something that in their eyes appeared to be authentic and certainly pleasurable. Essentially, we’re talking about the process through which Italian lardo or the once discarded marrow bone can become a desirable thing to eat at a restaurant.

BH: I think the idea of Mediterranean food as offering something that was authentic, however fabricated it is, that is certainly one element of it. The other element is informality, that you can have a dining experience with that sense of the informality that you might experience if you actually went to Italy. That it wasn't going to be Claridge’s where you'd be absolutely terrified to talk to the waiter, or it wasn't going to be you know, the Berni Inn, which was going to be like a three course, heavy business style kind of experience. 

None of this is to say that eating pasta is actually posh, or middle class. According to recent survey evidence, spag bol is the number one favourite family meal in the UK. Number two was found to be pizza, number 7 pasta and sauces, 12 lasagne and 13 the humble pasta bake. The same research suggests that in the 1970s, the only Italian sounding dish on the list of 20 family favourites is spag bol at number 13. So Italian food, or at least, like Indian food, a British version of it, went mainstream. And the modern European food movement played an important role here, particularly as it helped to spawn this guy:

CLIP From the Naked Chef: So this is spagatini, just get that in there, go on my son…!

AT: I think for a lot of my generation, more so than necessarily like Simon and Alistair and Rowley, I wouldn't underestimate the effect and importance that Jamie Oliver had on my generation. I watched his shows all the time. He is part of the reason I started to enjoy cooking as a young person. 

If this was a democratisation of good food in England, then it was a very English process. There was no revolution. No heads met the blades of guillotines. No republican tri-colour flags. Instead, like the extension of the vote, the movement rolled out gradually, slotting into the mould of the British class system, beginning with the middle class, before eventually arriving to the rest of us in a transformed state. Jamie Oliver, who trained at the River Café, played an important part in popularising this way of eating, creating demand for Italian indigents that were willingly supplied by British supermarkets and popular restaurant chains. We have Jamie to thank for the ubiquity of Italian ingredients sold in shops and served pubs. He progressed the very English eclecticism that the first wave of modern European food had effected upon otherwise highly conservative food traditions. Essentially, in Jamie’s eyes, pineapple is welcome on pizza.

But the legacy of this movement is broader than its impact on our diets. As the the invented modern European cuisine was popularised, it was shaped by our divided society. In this way, European cuisine has often appeared to designate what is or isn’t middle class. But reality is far more complicated. On one level, it’s obviously false to say that only middle class people eat this thing that I’m calling modern European food. Clearly, as we’ve already seen, that’s not the case. Just as almost everyone eats British Indian food, so too does almost everyone today eat some version of pizza and pasta. Yet on a different level, the high end of modern European cuisine can be pretty pricey. Extra virgin olive oil of a good providence or peasant inspired dishes served at a modern European restaurant is for most people in England an infrequent treat, if that. But things get complicated when we factor in that many affluent people in England don’t value spending money on food, while many people who, for example, can’t afford the deposit for a house might reasonably spend their limited disposable income on pleasurable experiences. 

The problem gets even more complex when these culinary markers of class are mapped onto the cultural debates surrounding Brexit. Quiet clearly, the 49 million people who voted in the referendum cannot be neatly divided by class. Yet the modern European food movement has helped to create a pervasive image of the Remainer as a middle class bohemian, who fears the rising cost of olive oil. By contrast, is an image of the leave voter, whose culinary home is a pie and mash shop and who, according to this pervasive idea, is comfortable with importing chlorinated chicken. 

This image of Brexit corresponds in part to the fact that some of the most vocal opponents of leaving the EU share the same social world as the original protagonists of modern European cuisine – including holidays in Europe, political perspectives and economic and educational backgrounds. This means that high end European food items have been elevated as a potent symbol of a social divide, even where they fail to represent who is or isn’t middle class and who supported leave and remain. 

Speaking about Brexit to the chefs and food writers for this episode left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I sympathise with aspects of the catastrophic way in which they view leaving the EU. On the other, I can’t help think that, for better or worse, this might be a culinary movement has run out of road. That leaves me with the question of what next? What might, and what perhaps already has, taken its place? Must it be a nativist movement of kippers and Yorkshire pudding, as conjured up by the media spectacle of leave voters? Might it be Asian, American and Australian foods, as could represent the idea of a so called global Britain? Or… what else?

In the next episode we’ll begin to answer this question by asking first just what is a national cuisine, and second who has the power to make one? 

Credits

You’ve been listening to The Full English. This podcast was made by me Lewis Bassett.

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Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

Episode four: Factory farms

Matt Chatfield: I would say that ruminant poo that's drug free is one of the most important substances on earth, and I would say dung beetles are as equally important to the future of mankind as bees basically. 

Lewis Bassett: That’s Matt Chatfield, a sheep farmer in Cornwall who you might remember from episode two. As well as being incredibly passionate about the flavour of mutton, Matt is great believer in farming methods that work in harmony with nature and which encourage healthy soils. That, Matt tells me, is the route out of the mess we’re in.

My name is Lewis Bassett and you’re listening to the Full English. In this episode we’ll be looking at how industrial agriculture changed how food is produced and consumed in England. Given the negative consequences of factory farming for climate change and for the health of soils, plants and animals, are ecological farming techniques the solution? Should the world’s growing population eat less meat? Or might modern processed foods play an important role in lowering meat related greenhouse gas emissions? We’ll be looking at these global questions and more in this, episode four of the Full English on factory farms.

Lucy Williamson: if you go back to the sort of mid 1800s just about everybody in the country was attached to the bread making process in some way, whether you owned a mill whether you were the farmer growing the wheat, whether you were doing the milling, and it was just a part of everyday life.

This is the Lucy Williamson, a nutritionist and advocate for good gut health. She told me how the white flour that goes into a supermarket loaf of bread is so heavily processed that all that remains of the wheat is the starch. This gives modern bread its uniformity and helps improve its shelf life. The nutrients that are lost in that refinement process are often added back in, but, Lucy says, we don’t know for sure that they are as easily absorbed by the body in this way. The fibre is also lost; the yeast that is added is homogenous, which can cause intolerance; and our gut processes the starch in white bread very quickly, meaning our hunger and energy levels spike and dip. The same kinds of processing happens with other foods as well.

LW: As a nutritionist and a health professional we're definitely trying to encourage people to move away from processed foods. What that industrialization has done is its enabled food to be produced in vast quantity and it's let go of quality. At the end of the day that's how we sum it up. 

David Edgerton: there is a quality quantity trade off.

This is the historian David Edgerton. 

DE: There's a move to transform British agriculture, through investments through subsidies, through the more general encouragement of national production, because it's not it's not confined to agriculture. And it's a programme which has an extraordinary success. So by the 80s really, the United Kingdom becomes essentially self sufficient in food. Something like 96% self sufficiency in things like wheat, beef, lamb, pork, vegetables, local fruit. That is an extraordinary transformation. It takes the United Kingdom back to where it had been in the in the 19th century, in the mid 19th century. And that means that for the first time in many generations, the food that British people eat is grown in the United Kingdom.

LB: But it’s industrialised production at this point? So it's being grown with modern techniques, involving intensive farming, the use of sophisticated machines, and high productivity, high yield crops and so on?

DE: Exactly. The transformation of the countryside is really extraordinary, the rate of labour productivity increases much greater than industry. So we have an increases in output. The yields per acre, or hector, go up very radically. The number of animals goes up. And the peak for sheep and cows comes in the 1970s and 1980s. So, yes, agriculture is intensified to an extraordinary degree. 

During the Second World War, essential imports to Britain, including food, were threatened by a Nazi blockage. So by 1945, and as the cold war dragged on, politicians sought to increase the UK’s self-sufficiency in food. But that period of self-reliance began to decline from the 1990s.

DE: What happened since is that the economy is that the opened up. So opened up first to Europe and then through Europe to the world at large, and that, again, has profound consequences for our everyday life and we no longer expect to drive a British made car or to use a British made telephone or for our furniture, or our floor coverings, or our curtains to be British made. I mean, it's hard for recent generations to understand that in the 1970s and earlier, this was the expectation. It was really rather surprising to see manufactured goods from other parts of the world.

As we discussed in episode one, the combination of free trade and industrialised food production has meant that England hasn’t had a particularly strong agricultural tradition for some 150 years. That doesn’t mean we’ve always lacked food though. The government’s focus on increasing food output after the war, combined with investments in public health, had a dramatic positive impact on public nutrition, captured in the data showing growing average hights, for example. Afterall, quantity is a kind of quality. But this industrial approach to food has had some serious costs as well. 

Liz Bowles: Certainly within agriculture, what we strived to do was to maximise yield at all cost, and to specialise farming. 

This is Liz Bowles, the associate director for farming at the Soil Association. 

Liz: Nothing comes without a quid pro quo. And certainly, that availability of calories through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s has driven population increase, and it's reduced the incidence of famine. But it's come with those unintended consequences for biodiversity, for soil and for water and for air. And I think now, now we understand those consequences. We also know that given the precarious situation of the planet now we have to make changes in order to meet the nature and the climate crises we face.

So are ecological farming methods the answer? This is Matt Chatfield again talking about how his grandad’s generation farmed:

MC: It was after the war, chemicals were available because basically weve been building ammunition and they discovered that nitrogen as a chemical actually stimulated photosynthesis and made plants grow. So basically what happened is my gradfather would have been doing a mixed rotation. But then the government said we need to feed the nation and the best way to do it is plough up all your land. Plant the rye grass that grows really quickly if you add chemical fertiliser. And then drain all your fields. So you put drains underneath so all the water runs off. So basically he did that, and it meant that he could grow a lot of grass very quickly and produce a lot of milk for the area. But he had to continually produce ditches to drain the water. And basically over time it actually destroyed our soil. As soon as you put chemical fertilisers on the land your killing the soil. And all the micro-organisms have been killed. 

By the time Matt inherited his grandfather’s farm, his soils were entirely dependent on chemical inputs. As a result, he’s adopted an approach to farming called regenerative agriculture.

MC: To improve soil, you need ruminants, and that are as chemical free as possible. And then you start realising that it's poo that kick starts the whole system. So re-gen ag, what you're trying to do is feed the microorganisms that are in the soil, and you feed them by using carbon, and you get carbon either from carbon dioxide or from plants that get trampled down and then from worms that come up and grab them. And it’s as simple as that really.

Matt’s system basically uses sheep to regenerate his soils by eating grass and shitting out nutrients that the sheep eventually compact into the earth. The product is both incredible tasting mutton and improved biodiversity that, Matt says, starts with healthier soils.

Liz: To farm agro-ecological means that you're farming in tune with nature, not fighting it all the time. I'm thinking, as a farmer, all the time about the habitat  and the food availability for everything that we'd like to call my farm home. I think in the past, we haven't thought like that, we've just thought about the crops and the livestock we're producing and making sure they're looked after. But we haven't thought about everything else: the birds, the wildlife, vertebrates, insects, flowers, soil, soil micro bacteria – all of those need to exist in order to produce a functioning ecosystem. We're talking about much more complex rotations, mixed farming, not using artificial fertilisers, using natural and not using agrochemical anything like as much and livestock production based predominantly on forage rather than intensive livestock being fed on cereals and proteins.

This all sounds fantastic. But I can’t be the only person left wondering if this ecological approach to food production can feed a growing population? Referring to evidence that the Soil Association has published, Liz says it can, but only if we make changes to our eating habits.

Liz: Yeah, it's the one thing that people always ask me: ‘but surely, Liz, you can't feed the world if you follow organic farming practices’. So my response to this is always that actually we can't afford not to, simply because unless we can get to net zero in agriculture, as well as a properly addressing the nature and soil crises, we're not going to combat climate change. But it won't come without some changes to how we live. When it comes to our food, we're going to have to minimise our food waste as much as possible. And yes, we will need to be eating more fruit and vegetables and less meat and dairy from intensively farmed systems. So that there's some behaviour change needed in order that agro-ecology can feed everybody. But it's certainly possible given those two caveats.

Of course, it’s not only the Soil Association who are arguing for us to change how we eat.

Michael Clark: Hi, I'm Michael Clark. I'm a researcher based at the University of Oxford and I focus on researching the impact that dietary choices have on the environment and human health.

Michael and his colleagues recently published a study that looked at what we should eat for public and planetary health.

MC: So, the three main findings are one, very generally the healthiest foods are all also often among the most environmentally sustainable. The second is that the converse of that is that the least environmentally sustainable foods are also often the least healthy. And then the third is that there is a general relationship across the foods that we examine, that healthier foods are often more environmentally sustainable than less healthy foods.

At its most straight forward, Michael’s research suggests we should eat less animals and more plants.

MC: So things like nuts, whole grains, cereals, legumes, fruits and vegetables. They have very low environmental impacts and their increasing consumption of them seems to be associated with reduced risk of diet related diseases. So again, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and death.  At the very high end, you have red and processed red meat, so things like beef, pork, mutton, lamb, and then processed meat to be things like beef, turkey, bacon, and so on. Those are associated with an increased risk of things like cancer and diabetes and heart disease and stroke. And they also have environmental impacts that in many cases are about 50 to 100 times higher than the environmental impacts of plant-based foods.

Although this is the finding of his research, Michael doesn’t think everyone being vegan is a realistic answer. And in some cases, like Matt Chatfield’s farm, animal agriculture can even be part of the solution. But overall, our current consumption of meat and dairy just isn’t sustainable. It needs to fall significantly if we want to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Which is a problem because globally demand for meat is set to increase.

Aaron Bastani: I think right now we need basically three earths for what we consume. Right now we’ve got seven and a half billion people, we're looking at about 10 billion people at some point in the century. And the average human consumption hopefully will go up because right now, you know, a half billion people aren't actually eating enough calories.

AB: My name is Aaron Bastani. I'm the co-founder of Novara Media where I'm still a presenter. I'm also the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which talks about the interface between technology and politics and how things could change quite significantly over the rest of this century.

AB: I think, you know, if you're, if you're saying these 10 billion people just need to behave like this, and everything will be fine. I don't think you're engaging with reality, I think you have a strange theory of change. I mean, clearly, people need to eat more, eat more vegetables, clearly, we want to have a diet that's lower in saturated fat, and so on. But in many countries, in particular in the global south, Sub Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia, there's rising demand for these products, you know, it's not less demand for these products. So the idea that even keeping demand stable, right, for dairy for meat for eggs, is a hugely ambitious idea. So the idea that, oh, we're just gonna get rid of it. And we're gonna say to, you know, aspirational people in Shenzhen and Mumbai, and, you know, Jakarta, ‘sorry, I know you've been seeing images in the West that people eating you know, Happy Meals and Big Macs for last 100 years, but you don't get to do that. We've decided as a society’. I think that's ridiculous.

Aaron says that it’s not just hypocritical to tell people in poorer nations that they can’t eat more meat and dairy, but this appeal to people’s morality is also not going to achieve results within the timeframe that we need them.

Ellie Walden: People today don't eat meat because of how it's produced. They eat it, in spite of how it's produced. I know nobody sits down to a meal and says, ‘I really want to eat this meat, because I really want this animal to have been raised and slaughtered’, they eat meat, because it tastes good. And it's a protein rich option that can feed themselves and their families.

EW: My name is Ellie Walden, I'm a Policy Manager at the Good Food Institute Europe.

EW: Our current food system is heavily reliant on industrial animal agriculture just purely to meet the amount of demand we have today. And in the future, that demand is also set to increase substantially. So we're predicted to go up by 70% between now and 2050. Just taking greenhouse gas emissions, for example University of Oxford a few months ago released a report that found essentially even if we just cut out fossil fuels entirely from our energy system, we simply cannot meet our Paris Climate Agreement targets without looking at our current food system. So if we're going to tackle the climate emergency at the, at the scale and at the speed necessary, we basically can't rely on dietary change alone. In other words, we can't just rely on convincing people at an individual level to, to give up the food that they clearly want to eat. 

That’s why people like Aaron and Ellie advocate for cultivated meat, also known as cellular agriculture, which is essentially creating the experience of meat without the use of animals. 

EW: Cultivated meat is exactly the same as the conventional beef, pork, chicken and seafood that we enjoy eating today. But instead of raising and slaughtering animals to get that meat, you essentially grow it directly from cells. The way that works in practice: so cellular agriculture basically involves taking a small sample of cells from an animal and growing them in what's known as a cultivator which is essentially a large tank, it looks a lot like a beer brewery. And inside the cultivator that essentially facilitates all the same natural biological processes that happen inside an animal. So you essentially provide that small sample of cells with the warmth and all the nutrients they need. And then they transform into kind of the cells of meats, so water, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins and minerals. And the result after you go through that process is essentially genuine animal meats. It's identical in taste to conventional produce, conventionally produced meat, but it's made in this much more sustainable and overall kind of safer way.

AB: But it's important to say, with cellular agriculture, there are two ways of fabricating these proteins which resemble animal proteins. The first is you edit, essentially a vegetable protein to more closely imitate an animal protein. So you're, you're editing, for instance, the proteins in yellow split peas, I think it is for the Just egg product. And you grow that with a genetically modified yeast. And that is in no way an animal, an animal protein, but it resembles that the texture, the flavour of eggs. With the Impossible burger, it's quite similar, they effectively get this thing called heme, which gives a burger it's kind of bloody irony flavour. And they do something similar there. But with some of the products that you know, we're going to see over the next year, two years coming to mass market, you know, chicken nuggets, beef burgers, those actual meat proteins, say from Just chicken, for instance, so that the Just egg products uses the vegetable proteins process, Just chicken is using a process whereby you actually grow meat. It's quite literally meat without animals. It's exactly the same, you know, chicken burger or minced beef burger. But without the animal without the animal suffering. 

If many of us already eat meat while knowing the animal came from a horrific factory farm, then there’s no reason to think that meat grown in a large vat of water should be off putting. But, I asked Aaron, can part of the answer to climate change really be something that feels so distinctly unnatural?  

AB: What is natural? As a species, Homo sapiens, there were people with brains that could more or less think like ours in the African savanna around 400,000 years ago. You know, we have a bunch of technologies like fire in the meantime but actually the human beings that you and I know, the ones that engage in agriculture, produce surplus, have cities, written language, numeracy, etc, that's all the last 12,000 years and so a lot of the foodstuffs that we think are natural have emerged since then. So you look at for instance, wheat, you look at barley, you look at chickpeas. Another example is bananas. You can’t have bananas without human intervention. Bananas can't reproduce. Right? You know that this is a crop, I think it was initially from Southeast Asia, and it's a very unnatural thing, a banana. It hasn't got any seeds when you open a banana, you know, where are the seeds? Where is this coming from? It's a completely unnatural kind of thing. Equally carrots, you know, we have orange carrots, they've only been orange since I think about the 16th, 17th century, people used to cultivate carrots actually for the for the leaves, not for the root vegetable. So this thing about, ‘oh, it's natural, it's unnatural’. You know, carrots aren’t natural, wheat’s not natural, bananas aren't natural. So, you know, where would you like to end this? So we're gonna say ‘I'm only going to eat’, you know – and you do get some people like this, right – they'll say, ‘I'm only going to eat einkorn wheat or speltz’, whatever, it's still not, quote unquote, natural, you know, because this stuff has been, it's been interbred by, you know, by Neolithic humans, and even pre Neolithic humans probably started experimenting with it. So yeah, what is natural? Cellular agriculture is a classic example of this. Ultimately, we've been doing hereditary breeding, you know, breeding features in and out of flora and fauna for 10s of 1000s of years, like I say, properly, really, for 12,000 years. And I think actually more importantly, in a world where we have to decarbonize by 2050, 2060, you know, this is this is a point of political urgency. 

Changing the way we consume meat is not only a question of technology and consumer adoption. Aaron explains that if we want an equitable transition to sustainable food sources, who owns the product and what they charge for it really matters. 

AB: Could we have global cellular meat production, which means we live within the planet's bio capacity? Yes. Could that be led by capitalism? Plausibly. Does that mean, we would solve global hunger? No, that's a political question. That's a question of social relations. And so, yeah, technology, will it save us? Sort of, yeah, but who's it gonna save as the big question. 

While there’s a lot of hype – and a lot of money – orbiting cellular agriculture companies in Silicon Valley in the US, alternative proteins are not exactly new. Tofu and Seitan have been eaten by some meat avoidant Buddhists in China for centuries. Medieval chefs in England made eggs out of almonds and bacon out of salmon during lent – a subject which deserves its own episode. When I was growing up, Quorn in the form of pies and ready meals often appeared at my family’s dinner table, particularly since my Mum and Dad are vegetarian. In fact, originating in England, Quorn remains an industry leader for meat-alternatives. 

Tess Kelly: So I'm Tess Kelly. I'm a farmer's daughter, a committed vegetarian, and I'm Sustainable Development Manager at Quorn foods.

TK: So it actually arose out of, you know, a real food crisis in the 1960s. There was a real concern around providing the right amount of food for people. 

Quorn’s story begins at the start of the cold war, the period in which the British government was seeking to ensure that the UK had a domestic source of food for the first time in a hundred years. And globally there were huge concerns about food security as well. This context helped give birth to quorn.

TK: There was a philanthropist and filmmaker called Lord J. Arthur rank, you may have seen some of the old black and white films with a man striking a gong. And that was the rank company that produced the films but he was a really fascinating character actually. And really engaged with this, this crisis of food, and wanted to put some of his investment into finding a new way to produce food, finding a new source, particularly of protein. At the time, carbohydrate was really plentiful. You know, we had, you know, a lot of starchy vegetables, a lot of crops were available, but the protein question was still really unanswered. So he set on an incredible mission really to set his scientists out to find the first new food since the potato, or so the legend goes. 

Arthur Rank’s scientist went out in search of a micro-organism that could be grown at scale. They took over 3000 soil samples from across England. the one they eventually began to develop came from a compost heap in Buckinghamshire. 

TK: As the development took place it was discovered that we could feed it with a relatively small amount of energy, it could be grown at scale and more importantly, it had some of the fundamental qualities that we were looking for: it was really high in protein and a great quality source of protein and most importantly it could replicate and imitate the taste and the texture of meat.

Making Quorn requires two 50ft high tanks. The micro-organism is fed in one tank and as it grows it floats up and into the other tank from where it’s harvested and processed in order to create the textures and flavours of the end product. Arthur Rank’s initial research was sold to a huge company called Imperial Chemical Industries, who manufactured a large number of products from fertilisers to explosives. It then took over 20 years for the first Quorn product to come onto market in 1985.

TK: So the first product was a launched in Sainsbury's actually, and was a meat alternative vegetarian pie. And from there we developed our kind of core products that most people will be familiar with in terms of our mince, our pieces. And the rest is history. And now we have everything to your midday nuggets to escallops and all the rest of it. 

As with many other firms in Britain’s economy, Quorn has since been globalised, now being owned by a parent company in the Philippines and listed on the Philippine stock exchange. Recently, Quorn estimated it had served more than a billion portions of its product – but the company has incredibly ambitious plans to expand. By 2032, Quorn wants to be serving 8 billion portions a year. While the product was developed to tackle a perceived protein shortage, it was initially marketed as a product for vegetarians. Now, as Tess explains, Quorn wants to be seen as healthy and sustainable option for everyone.

TK: We did some interesting comparison statistics a couple of years ago. So if you took all of our micro protein that's produced from our fermenters and turned that into chicken products, for example, if that was to be actual chickens, it would equate to roughly 33 million chickens worth of protein, which I just find absolutely astonishing. And again, you think about the energy and the food and the time that it takes to grow a cow or a chicken or you know an animal and then convert it into protein compared to the efficiency of our process to get you know, the same sort of quality of a product at the end I just find that absolutely astonishing. 

If alternative proteins like Quorn achieve their goals, the net result in terms of the climate is a probably benefit to us all. To achieve that, Quorn, and the newer cultivated meat companies following in its wake, have had to challenge the idea that their products are exclusively for vegetarians. But understanding the extent to which products like Quorn will play a role in a sustainable food system requires a shift in our attitudes towards factory foods in general. Just as some types of fresh food are often associated with being elitist in England, foods made with modern process are often looked down upon. 

Pen Vogler: we've become obsessed with avocado in this country and I’ve been trying to figure out why we are so obsessed with it being middle class. 

This is Pen Vogler. 

PV: The metro newspaper had a headline about avocado hand, which is where you stab yourself by trying to get the stone out of an avocado with a knife and you end up at A&E and why is the most middle class injury ever? And why are people so exercised about millennials spending all their money on avocado toast, when they could be saving for a home, or whatever it is, like a home is more affordable than avocado toast. And so I tracked it back to this campaign that the avocado growers association started which was to position the avocado as heathy, Mediterranean-style, Californian super food, and what was interesting was they expunged it of all references to Mexico and South America. They just pretend its Californian thing. It gets picked up by Gwyneth Paltrow and the healthy eaters and all the rest of it and it just fits right into this map that we've made for ourselves in Britain of foods being related to class. We have a place for it. We have a slot for it. We know how to understand it.

PV: I think it's that you can only eat it in a certain way, you can only eat it fresh, you can't tin it, you can't freeze it, you can’t dehydrate it. And so it’s healthy and it’s got to be eaten fresh. Those two words healthy and fresh, we’ve decided, go with a certain population. 

Pen is the author of a book called Scoff. In it, she says thatmuch of the time, what we eat isn’t determined by how it tastes or whether a food is sustainable or healthy, but it’s determined by where it fits in our preconceived ideas of class. This cultural framework often means that processed food is seen as inferior.

PV: Historically we've focused on the things that are not to do with the food. We've focused on judging each other by what we eat. So we say “I eat, lovely fresh sourdough therefore I’m this kind of person and you eat Mother’s pride therefore you’re that kind of person”. We might look at each other’s cupboards or shopping baskets and go ok you’ve got this kind of marmalade, this kind of tea, these kinds of sweets, and making judgements about people. So we've done that. And historically we've talked about what's appropriate for different kinds of people in different times. In the mid 18th century for example there was a lot said to the working classes or the agricultural classes about how it wasn’t appropriate for them to drink tea, or eat white bread, because it wasn’t a requirement of their station. Or robust peseant types needed robust brown bread. So food is used to distinguish people, to identify the individual as part of a group and therefore to separate people them. And so we've ended up with this kind of two teer system where you have mass produced highly processed food on the one hand and on the other hand you have – you’ll recognise the vocabulary – the farmers market, local, organic, and all the rest of it. 

And this is the thing: the English have a habit of telling people who they consider inferior exactly how to behave – both globally and domestically. Because in our class obsessed society, what you eat is meant to signify your social status. This becomes a problem if we want to create a sustainable food system since, on the one hand, it’s unrealistic to expect people to give up meat on the basis of moral appeals from those who claim to know better, while, on the other, welcoming meat alternatives as part of the answer to environmental issues will be limited when these products are read in class terms as a type of processed convivence food.

Tom Kerridge: It's very easy to be food snobby and middle class about convenience foods. But for many, many people, it's incredibly important.

This is the chef and restaurateur Tom Kerridge

TK: I grew up - it was a single parent family. So I grew up in Gloucester, myself and my brother and my mum, who had two jobs. That was it. So we grew up with very little in the way of money and disposable income – we were known then as latchkey kids, so that you'd let yourself in and cook tea for my brother. So yeah, I get it in the evenings be things like fish finger sandwiches, Findus crispy pancakes, those sorts of things. So as tins of ravioli oxtail soup, you know, just like that child of the ‘80s 

TK: it's very easy to talk about in a bad way, like you can say it’s processed food, it's really poor ingredients it’s cheap, it's whatever. However, at that point, it was necessity, it was food that works, it was food that it meant that for my mum's point of view, she knew that a 13 or 14 year old could light the grill and grill some fish fingers or turn the oven on and you know, heat some stuff up, Birdseye potato waffles or whatever else, tins of baked beans. Ensure us kids, you know, we're eating something warm. It would be lovely if everybody had the time and the money to cook lots of fresh ingredients and always be able to do it. But the reality of life is something that's very, very different, I think, to the to the perceived perception of what should be going on, with this kind of make-believe world that I think politicians and dieticians and, you know, try to create. When the reality is that people's lives are very different to that.

While the development of industrial agriculture successfully fed a growing population in Britain, it’s had negative consequences as well, including being an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. But that doesn’t mean that ecologically produced food combined with behavioural change is the only solution. It might sound ironic, but factory foods like Quorn are needed to tackle the issues caused by industrial agriculture. While it’s hypocritical for wealthy individuals and wealthy countries to ask aspirational people to eat less meat, it’s also unrealistic to expect moral appeals to achieve meaningful results in the shortest time possible. 

That means creating a sustainable food system will require both regenerative agriculture from ecologically conscious farmers like Matt Chatfield and factory foods like Quorn and cultivated meat. To recognise that means challenging the binary between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural foods’ and their associated social status. Or, as Pen Vogler puts it, we need to stop scoffing at what other people scoff. 

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Credits

My name is Lewis Bassett and you’ve been listening to The Full English. We’ve opened a huge can of worms in this episode concerning England’s intimate relationship with processed foods, whether food really does tell us something about a person’s class and what class means in England today. We’re going to cover some of these topics in episode five, but to really get into them will require separate episodes. So if you want that to happen then please support the show. You can sign up for as little as £3 per month at pateron.com/fullenglish. By signing up you can get access to exclusive content such interviews and recipes, including some vegan ones.

You can follow the Full English on Twitter and Instagram @fullengpod.

Music and sound engineering for this show was provided by the very talented Forest DLG. You can find him on Twitter and Insta @ForestDLG.

If you want to support this show, please head over to Patreon.com/fullEnglish. For less than the cost of a fry up you can gain access to tons of extra content, including full interviews and recipes related to the show. Relevant to this episode you’ll get a recipe for devilled kidneys, Bombay toast and stove cakes. You’ll also be supporting us making future episodes of this podcast. So please sign up. That’s patreon.com/fullenglish.

Thanks for listening. 

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Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Matthew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

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Episode Three: A Nice Cup of Tea with Sugar

Intro

David Webb: “If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilization in this country, as well as in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.”

That was man behind the music in this show FOREST DLG reading from George Orwell’s essay “A Nice Cup of Tea.” I’m Lewis Bassett and this is the Full English Podcast. In this episode we tell the story of how English merchants traded heroin for tea and how that bitter leaf was sweetened for British and palates by the work of African slaves in the Caribbean. This is a story about the British Empire and two things that are deeply synonymous with British taste, as well as England’s place within this history. This is Episode three: on tea and sugar.  

Tea

It was wool and war that put English ships on the seas at the time of the enclosures. Later, slaves, tea, opium and sugar would form four deeply entwined commodities through which England, and eventually Britain, would build its empire. In fact, tea and sugar helped to bind Scotland with England and Wales into a single nation. But let’s start with tea. And what could be more innocent than a nice cup of cha?

Seren Cherrington-Hollins: You know the history of tea is far from something that's soothing. But it's the answer to everything. The British do two things, we tell you about the weather, or inquire about the weather, and we make tea. That's what we do in times of crisis. We just make tea.

This is Seren Cherington-Hollins, a food historian and the author of “A Dark History of Tea”

Tea is just one of the most familiar drinks in the world. And so I think today we sort of think of drinking tea as being quite subdued. It's something you can give your grandmother, you can take it to the village fete, mothers meetings, you know, church committees, you know, it's safe, isn't it, it's not like saying, oh, you know, come back and we'll have a bottle of whiskey, you know. No, tea’s, tea is safe, you know, sort of insipid almost. But I think for me, what I love about that is it's got this innocent façade …. But it's caused wars, it's boosted the trade in slaves and hard drugs. And it's like, we all sit there and go, “let’s have a nice cup of tea”. And I love the fact that, you know, in amongst this murky history, that basically tea is so dark, and it's got this, you know, dreadful history to it. And we just all sit there and it doesn't matter what's happened. Your husband could have run off, you could have lost your job, your house burned down, people go, “would you like a nice cup of tea?” As if that's going to solve everything. 

SCH: Once upon a time, it was seen as quite dangerous, you know, especially if you were a woman, I mean, you can't have women sitting around spending all the housekeeping on, on tea! And, you know, they might get ideas of politics and things. So tea used to be a quite dangerous thing, once upon a time.

Markman: Tea was first discovered by Northern Europeans as a result of travels, but travels were undertaken not only for curiosity, but also for commercial advantage. And perhaps also missionary activities. But so trade routes with areas which had direct contact with China, which were sort of forged by the Dutch and the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. Britain was also a really active player in that region, but its main focus was in India, in the Indian peninsula, and they didn't have so much contact direct contact with Chinese commerce. 

That’s Markman Ellis, who with Matthew Mauger and Richard Coulton, wrote a book called Empire of Tea. We’ll hear from Matthew later.

Markman: And so travellers started writing accounts of seeing tea from China in late 16th century. In the 17th century it became more common to have British travellers coming back and writing histories of their travels, which mentioned this drink that they encountered. This hot herbal beverage, which was quite distinctive and odd, and bringing back samples of it, some of which people were drinking in London in the 1630s, for example. At this early stage it was more common in Amsterdam, and in Holland. And it was astonishingly expensive as a result, so in fact, one British scientist had heard about tea but he said it's too expensive for me to experiment on it, I can't get any and then eventually, he got given some by a China merchant who had connections and an Amsterdam and said, it works. I mean, you know, it definitely is a product with qualities which make a difference to your to how your body feels, which is what he was looking for. 

LB: So it had a medicinal status in this really early period?

MM: Yeah, I think I think it's primarily people that are interested in the fact that it does have these physiological properties. It is a medicine. They were also curious that it was so popular in China and so expensive. I mean, why is it so expensive? And could it be as expensive in, in Northern Europe as well? Because it's a really long way to China. So you need to bring back products, which are small and light and really expensive.

Two things combined to give tea consumption its lift-off in Britain. On the one hand, the elite and exotic nature of the drink itself made it desirable and sought after by consumers, particularly when presented in its accompanying fine china. On the other hand, the East India Company – a jointly owned enterprise with its own army and whose influence on English and British taste deserves its own episode – was as ever on the lookout for new profitable income streams. The Company found an immense new market with tea. 

Matthew Mauger: The East India Company, the British East India Company, is granted the monopoly on a trade with the region of the world called the East Indies, and it gets that monopoly at the very end of 1599. 

This is Matthew Mauger

And what Britain calls the East Indies is this enormous sector of the world, it's defined as the, as the land east of the Cape of Good Hope, and west of the Straits of Magellan, and the Straits of Magellan are kind of down at the southern point of South America. So half the globe that the East India Company gets the monopoly on that trade. And of course, at that moment, no one had ever heard of tea, it was more intended to be a kind of a fabric and spice trading company. And tea is something that the East India Company only really discovers and begins to experiment with in the, in the late 17th century. And, and even then, you know, is a little bit behind the curve really in picking up tea. As Markman has implied, the Dutch East India Company sort of gets there first. There are even kind of British competitors who illegally compete with East India Company on tea to start with, but then soon, you know, the East India Company starts importing more and more tea. And of course, what happens is that extremely quickly, the price of tea begins to fall. And so even by 1710, there's a sense that in London, tea has been drunk quite a lot. Certainly, then by the 1720 1730s, there's an increasing sense that it's that it's spreading around the country, the government begins to get interested in it starts to increase taxes, here's an opportunity for revenue, that creates a black market in tea. 

Markman: at the beginning it was extremely expensive, which also obviously means that it's accessible in a very small number of people. But it was also associated with, with the social practices of the royal court, and especially with the elite women of the royal court. So tea drinking was not only super expensive, but also was the kind of thing that went on amongst elite women. And that kind of made, it's not branding, but that cultural association of tea with the sociability of women and women's values and things carried on all through the late 17th century in the beginning of the 18th century. So even though men were drinking tea, it was still coloured by that by that association and that the Association for sort of refinement and politeness, and in a way you know, compared to coffee, especially, teas flavour ranges are much more subtle and the flavour landscape is quite delicate and the appearance of the brewed tea, its green tea in this period, is a delicate, translucent product which looks beautiful and is served in expensive porcelain, for example, unlike the black brew, which coffee is. So there's all sorts of ways in which it's associated with sort of refinement and politeness. And and the expense is also maintaining that. And then as tea becomes cheaper and stronger, it gets consumed in a variety of different ways, and appeals to a much wider number of people. There’s lots of satires in the 17th and early 18th century, about servants, drinking their master’s tea. So there's a way in which the tea, tea consumption sort of spreads out from that from the elite. And as tea becomes cheaper, reaches out to a much broader audience.

Once the consumption of tea drinking starts to take off, the state begins to tax it. But this creates a huge black market for tea. Tea quickly becomes one of the most smuggled commodities in the 18c. To deal with this, the state proposes to cut import duties on tea and to make up for the lost revenue with a tax on windows instead.

Mathew: The legislation question is the communication act of 1784, and that modelling for that, you can still see it in the archives, is about the degree to which people in houses that have different number of windows, how much tea they typically drink. So one can see whether there's going to be a kind of a bad impact on national revenue. And the conclusion that they reach is that no, this will work, this replacing of the tea revenue with a windows tax, because the assumption that they clearly arrive at is that everyone who lives in a house with windows is drinking tea by the early 1780s. So there might be sectors of the population that have no fixed abode, perhaps who aren't drinking tea, but that's it. Tea has entered every cottage, one of the, one of these assessors writes, by the 1780s, it is everywhere, which is, which is different to saying that it's necessarily being drunk several times a day, it's probably not the case. The preparation of, of hot drinks is an expensive business in terms of bringing water to the boil, for example. So tea might be a drink is being consumed in the poorest households once a day when you might have a pot of water coming to the boil over the same heat source that a family has used to cook its meal perhaps. Samuel Johnson in the mid 18th centuries can say oh, my kettle is always on. But I don't think that was the experience of the poorest people in society not until the 19th century at least when you know heat sources and having boiling water at hand becomes something which is more easily achieved.

But having solved the problem of smuggling, two other issues arose. The first was a moral panic around tea drinking.

SCH: There were so many critics. And they basically said that they thought tea was going to stifle economic growth, and they thought it was going to be just basically feeding reckless behaviour. And it was going to lead to a nation of lazy work shy individuals. And amongst the working classes, you know, tea was a complete waste of time and money, what did the working classes and women need to drink tea for? They don't need that they needed to instead spend their money on adequate nutrition. And basically, you couldn't have when in being lured away from the kitchen sink. And you know, and childminding, by things like drinking tea. So there were real, real concerns over this, and they really did, you know, have whole conferences on this, you know, the British Medical Association, all sorts of pamphlets were circulated warning about the negative effects of tea. 

Opium wars

The second, related problem, was that the popularity of tea was becoming a drain on English silver. Which brings us back to smuggling. Only this time the smuggling isn’t being conducted by pirates off the coast of Cornwall, it’s being conducted by the state sanctioned East India Company in China. 

SCH: Now China only traded tea for silver. And, you know, we tried to sell China, our cloths, I mean, but we have a very different climate. They had fine silks and things and we'd got sort of very heavy cloths like sort of flannel and things. And quite frankly, it just didn't have the appeal. And so they were like, “No, the only thing that we're going to trade with you is silver”. But that was hard to come by in England, you know, England didn't want to let go of all that, that silver. 

Matthew: That was one of the intense frustrations of the early traders that there was nothing China wanted from Britain, apart from the silver, and a lot of the early voyages are experimenting with all sorts of, of commodities that they take over from England woollens, and other kinds of fabrics, and they try to develop, you know, in other areas of trade in Indonesia, and in India, they're trying to find stuff that they can take to China that can be exchanged for tea. But, you know, the only thing that that the Chinese merchants want is silver, until the discovery of the value of opium in the later decades of the 18th century, and then suddenly, the East India Company can barely contain its joy that it's got access to a cargo that there is demand for in China. 

Markman: So what they discovered was that opium was a product which they could exchange. So they were effectively pushing this drug onto the Chinese population, and which is a drug that creates its own demand. And that drug was available in India, another one of the places where the East India Company was active, of course, and so they could, they could grow it and manufacture it in India, an increasingly industrial scale, relatively cheaply, take it to China and sell it at a higher price high enough to pay for some of all of the tea which they wanted to take back to, to India, but also to to England. And so there's a there's a kind of transnational trade being developed there by the East India Company. So the ships would leave England with English textiles and metals and things that sell that India, pick up the opium and take it to China, sell opium in China, and bring the tea back to England. And that each stage that's an extra profit or another profit. But you know, no one in China was perfectly welcoming to the to the opium, they knew that it had a terrible effect on their population. They were hostile to opium well before the Opium Wars, and in a way, what the, what the conflict that erupts in an 1840s is caused by British merchants persuading the government to use the Navy to force the Chinese authorities to accept British traders selling opium 

SCH: I think you've got to understand that the India, China, opium trade was really important to the British economy. And that's the issue. Britain was making a huge, huge profit from tea importation and sales. I mean, the sales on tea, the taxation, they were making a huge profit. I mean, the coffers swelled. And, you know, at the same time, the opium addicts were swelling as well. And so we've got this sort of created this massive addiction and political instability in China. And essentially what we did as Brits was just like, turn a blind eye really, because it was so financially viable to us.

Mukta Das: I guess they experienced a Britain that Britain wouldn’t want to recognise in itself. I think Victorian Britain at that time, probably would have thought of itself as, despite being a colonial power, never mind was still kind of delivering civilization into other places in the world. 

This is the scholar Mukta Das

MD: And so civilization means a kind of a fair mindedness, you know, a kind of higher ideal, right? But actually it was the reverse, right? There was no higher ideal around this, there was a greed and there was a sense of entitlement to the to, to trade on their terms, right? No more silver will only pay you in x. And we'll, we'll extract as much as we can. Welcome to capitalism. Welcome to extractive capitalism.

Mukta explained to me that these events continue to be a subject of shame in China

MD: there's this island in Guangzhou, which is basically all European architecture, but a built from money from tea money from opium money, from the Europeans settling in and trying to get trade going and enriching themselves. And so, you know, the, the actual history is very immediate. When you do talk to residents, it's also really immediate in sort of their cultural history, you know, it was a really humiliating concession that was, you know, imposed on this area. There's a kind of Chinese exceptionalism, this kind of discourse of Chinese exceptionalism, which is emerging now, now that China has become a huge economic, and now geopolitical force. And so this, this, the Opium Wars, the, these European concessions, these kind of European cities within Chinese cities, are a mark of this part of history that is really difficult for them to kind of digest and move forward with and integrate into their understanding of themselves. So actually, even though we think of it as a historical study, Tea, Canton, Guangzhou, the Opium Wars, Hong Kong, the leasing of Hong Kong, the return of Hong Kong to China – all of this is very immediate.

How tea becomes British 

At the same time as the British Navy were forcing the opium trade upon China in the opium wars, the East India company was opening up new supply routes for tea via plantations it was helping to establish in the parts of India that the private company had begun to control.

LB: So it seems that there was a kind of snobbery on the part of the elite towards the popular classes drinking tea, so when did that slowly became some sort of acceptance?

Markman: When tea becomes British, I.e. grown in British colonies, then that argument that it's a product which is leaking money out of the out of the economy evaporates, in many respects, because they're now British companies growing British tea in India, rather than just importing it from China.

Matthew: That's right. And there's a sense then that it becomes your patriotic duty to be buying Empire teas, rather than Chinese teas.

It’s only via the common project between Scotland and England in the form of the empire that tea achieves the kind of British status it has now. You have to remember that it’s only really after WWII that Britain thinks of itself as a nation without an empire. Prior to that, what was Indian was also seen as British. And that has had lasting effects. Think about the difference between tea and wine. Even though we don’t grow tea in the UK at any real scale, and even though wine from France grows far closer to the UK than tea leaves from Asia, somehow tea feels far more homely and British. And that sentiment was created in the transition from Chinese tea to Indian tea.

SCH: Tea becomes British tea becomes British when we found the Indian plantations. And part of its to do with a very clever Victorian marketing. And the Victorians were nothing if not, you know, sort of loving nostalgia and the idea of how great Blighty was, they really did embrace fully what it was to be British and how great it was to be British. And we suddenly come out with things like Imperial tea. And we have all these wonderful images of young children, you know, picking tea leaves, and it all looks so delicate and beautiful. I mean, far cry from what it was. And we start talking about how British tea is, and how you know, tea is certainly something that's very pure. And we do use things like pure tea, and you'll see on a lot of the old designs for tea and the tea merchants, you know, they talk about this purity, and purity guaranteed. And all these wonderful, idyllic pictures. Well, you know, I mean, the British just loved it, you know, because this was suddenly the tea of Britain. So it's actually that point that we go from it coming across, and it's rare and exotic and it's just for the wealthy to this being the tea of Britain. Because, you know, tea is so valuable. We've had our trials and tribulations, we've swept everything under the carpet, we've now got these Indian tea plantations, which were, you know, I mean, they were shocking. The conditions were shocking there. But nobody knew about that. Because everybody's looking at the beautiful tea and the beautiful illustration saying pure tea, you know, purity guaranteed. And we are just now thinking, “Well, isn't this wonderful?” And we've given these wonderful tea pickers this wonderful opportunity in life, you know, and, and we're doing our bit for Britain, and we're being British, because we are drinking tea. And so we yet again, the great, you know, British culinary magpies swept in and, and nicked tea, and said “we’ll, have that!”

LB: quite literally in some cases

SCH: quite literally. Yes, we did, quite literally.

The drink itself also changes. It becomes darker and stronger, and while not the first to do so, the British made tea their own by drinking it with milk and sugar. It becomes, in essence, an important cultural signifier of British nationhood. One which helped to overrode distinctions between England, Scotland, Wales and even Ireland to help formulate a distinctly British trait. Eventually, tea and sugar are so synonymous that that demand for one spurs demand for the other.

Sugar

Catharine Hall: The English cup of tea with sugar became a crucial part of working class diets. So the sugar gave energy. Now, of course, both tea and sugar are not indigenous to Britain. They're both Imperial products.

This is Catharine Hall, a Professor of history at University College London

CH: Sugar was a luxury item in mediaeval and early modern period. In the 18th century, it becomes an item of mass consumption. And I mean, it's just extraordinary the way the consumption of sugar goes up from the late 18th century into the 19th century, and how sweet dishes you know, all the all the puddings and flowers and buns and what have you become incredibly popular. The consumption of sugar explodes across Europe and the US. Means that sugar is the source of such wealth for so many people and why slavery becomes so important in the Caribbean and in other places. Because white people were seen as incapable of working in the tropics, so it had to be somebody else. But it had to be for sugar. Because sugar was white gold.

PS: So sugar is something that starts out as a spice, and becomes a kind of every day staple. 

This is Padraic Scanlan, he’s an expert on the Atlantic slave economy and an assistant professor at Toronto University

PS: It was available in Europe for a very long time, long before there were plantations, long before enslaved Africans worked those plantations, but it was available in very small quantities, it would be something that that a very wealthy person or somebody of royal blood would produce on their table to show their wealth. 

Padraic say’s that sugar a bit like the cocaine of the 18th century, at least if there was no limit to how much cocaine you could trade. Without restrictions, the production of such a commodity could be scaled up to enormous levels. In the 18th Century, just like tea, it seemed that the more you produced of the thing, the more people wanted. And traders worked out that brining sugar across the Atlantic was way easier than bringing it over from India, where it had been growing for centuries.

PS: It needed to be grown in the tropics, so you know there's a certain latitude above which the sugar won't grow and It needs a very large and very kind of concentrated workforce. Because sugar canes, if you cut them, the juice starts to ferment very quickly. So unlike other crops like tobacco, and that's not to kind of, you know, like the the lives of enslaved workers on tobacco plantations were horrible. But to work on a tobacco plantation was less, less dangerous to life and limb than to work on a sugar plantation, in part because tobacco picking was less intensive, you could leave it on the ground, you didn't need to harvest it all and get it to the mill as quickly as possible, you know, within under 24 hours, you didn't need to boil it right. The production process of making sugar from cane requires a tonne of energy, kinetic energy, fuel, it requires boiling sugar, again and again and kind of letting it sluice through a series of big kind of refining pans, and then eventually be contained in sort of huge barrels to separate the sugar from the molasses that drips at the bottom. It requires a lot of labour. And so it was the kind of crop that required a substantial, concentrated, very controllable and exploitable labour force. And so it was the kind of crop that lent itself to mass enslavement. 

The first people to make that deadly connection between sugar and slavery were Portuguese and Spanish merchants in the 16th century. But with all the wealth that started circulating around the Caribbean and across the Atlantic came pirates. And that’s where England’s involvement with slavery really began: with English pirates seizing Spanish and Portuguese ships, loaded either with sugar or enslaved people, and then selling them on.

PS: It was really only in the 17th century, first with the founding of the colony of Virginia, and then with the founding of the colony of Barbados, English colonies, in the, you know, the early 1610s and then in the 1620s, 30s, and 40s, that plantations became a more significant part of the English Imperial imagination. So Virginia was a tobacco planting colony. And that began with a labour force of largely indentured workers. But over time, it became clear as it be had become clear in in Spain and Portugal and I think the Virginia colonists knew this from the Spanish and Portuguese example, that enslaved African workers because they had been taken away from everything they knew. They often spoke different languages from one another. They were very far from home. They were easier to control than indentured workers who spoke the same language as the people who commanded their labour, and moreover expected their indentures to end right after seven or 10 years, an indentured worker would become a landowner or at least have the potential to become a landowner. And so slowly, kind of over time, the workforce of Britain's plantation colonies stopped being white indentured workers who were exploited and abused and became enslaved African workers who were exploited and abused. And so the 17th century is kind of the moment of transition from a an indentured or apprenticed white labour force to a permanent enslaved African labour force. And then in the 18th century the demand for sugar in Europe increased rapidly, the number of white settlers moving to Britain's colonies in North America increased rapidly. The number of enslaved people coming from West Africa or being brought from West Africa to the Caribbean, and the Americas experience increased exponentially, and the profits increased exponentially. So the 18th century was sort of the boom time for sugar. 

As the boom in slaves and sugar began, Scottish merchants invested heavily in the Darien scheme, a plan for a Scottish colony in Panama. Widespread investment followed by the spectacular failure of the scheme left much of the Scottish Lowlands in financial ruin and this in turn provided a crucial context for the unification of Scotland with England and Wales in 1707. After which, African slave labour supplied the sweetness that accompanied what increasingly became seen as a distinctly British drink, that of tea. But did sugar really make Britain rich and powerful? 

David Edgerton: I think we have this this particular image of Empire as central to the economy of the United Kingdom. 

This is the historian David Edgerton 

DE: But in fact, the majority of imports came from outside the Empire. And a lot of imports came from countries which were rich. Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Uruguay, United States, Canada, had very high incomes per head. And these were the major traders with the with the United Kingdom outside Europe. So the idea that the UK depends on the hyper exploitation of people through trade. I mean, it's partly true, but it's not generally true. I mean, trade amongst nations have similar levels of income per head, was much more important than trade between the UK and poorer countries.

PS: So when it comes to trying to figure out exactly how slavery increased British power, there are a couple of ways to think about it. And one of them, which I think has muddied the waters is to think purely in terms of numbers, right to try to determine, okay, the sugar trade was X percentage of Britain's trade in the 18th century that paled in comparison to say the world trade. Or the cotton trade or the trade in manufactured pottery, or industrial products, and I think it's clear from that perspective that the trade in enslaved people in like in in human beings and the trade in the stuff that enslaved labourers produced wasn't anywhere near the majority of Britain's trade, even at the peak of the slave trade. So it's not like slavery and enslaved labour contributed 30% of Britain's GDP or something like that in the 18th century. 

That’s not to say that slavery didn’t produce immense individual fortunes, as well as smaller beneficiaries as well. And it’s some of those individual stories that Catherine Hall has investigated, in fact.

CH: when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean and Mauritius in the cape. The slave owners received compensation for the loss of that human property. 

Just to repeat that: it was the slave owners that were compensated

CH: There was never any systematic work done on it, to see how many people received the compensation or what kind of money they got. So that's what we investigated. And we created the database the legacies of British slave ownership, which documents the 47,000 claims that were made for the 20 million pounds that was paid by the British government and British taxpayers to compensate slave owners. Now, of course, the great irony of that is that the whole campaign for abolition was fought on the basis that it was wrong to own people as property. Nevertheless, it was acceptable to compensate them for the loss of that property, just as you've compensated landowners for the loss of their land when a railway was being built, for example. So people were private property, of a very special kind, but nevertheless, they could be valued in monetary terms, which is what happened at the end of slavery. So in order to produce the records as to who should get the compensation, everybody had to make a claim for how many enslaved people they owned, and therefore what compensation they were owned. Those records have established beyond doubt that a very significant group of people in Britain, mainly in England, and Scotland got compensation at the end, at the time of emancipation, and of the 20 million pounds that was granted in compensation almost 50% of that came to those 4000 people. So in other words, the biggest slave owners were in the UK.

In todays money, £20m is roughly £1.8billion. So where did it all go?

CH: Well, first of all, there's the absolutely explicit ways in which money went into new forms of investment. So railways were important, for example, and significant capital went into that. It also went into the development of marine insurance and banking, Merchant banking. These were very important arenas, developing in the 1830s. And you know, very glad to get some extra capital. One of the really interesting things is how money went to new parts of the empire. So, for example some of the slave owners and their descendants gave up on the Caribbean, they decided that that was no longer a very productive place to make money. And they went to the new colonies of white settlement, as they were called. So Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Then, of course, some of the money went into conspicuous consumption. So the building of country houses the refurbishment of properties. Money went into buying art works, buying books. A small amount of money went into philanthropy, but they weren't particularly philanthropic lot. And then in a way, what I would say, is absolutely as important as the economic contribution which was made the ideas about race and about racial difference, which was circulated by the slave owners and their descendants. So the ways in which notions of racial hierarchy became well established in the Metropole, that wasn't something new. But it gets a new influx in the period after slavery. And what's significant about that is that as long as slavery existed then that was a way of justifying racial difference. But once abolition has happened, then on what basis are you claiming that Africans, Indians, etc, are inferior subject peoples. So new legitimation for racial hierarchy emerge from the 1830s onwards.

In fact, ideas, rather than money, are a better way of thinking about the lasting legacies of both slavery and the campaign to abolish it. 

PS: Slavery helps to build capitalism. And having been abolished, slavery doesn't disappear from capitalism. And all of the ideas about black labour all of the ideas about white labour as well and about civilization and about Britain's right to rule in the Atlantic don't disappear. And so in some ways anti slavery makes the British Empire more powerful than slavery did. For British abolitionists, it became a moment of transformative atonement. Having abolished slavery, Having abolished the slave trade, and then having abolished slavery three decades later, Britain had shown the world not that it had reformed part of its commerce or Reformed part of its of its colonial policy, but that it had morally transformed itself. And that transformation became an all purpose justification for Empire in the 19th century. Britain was able to say, “Well, we are the anti slavery empire. So our interests are equivalent to the abolition of slavery. And whatever we do is prima fasciae abolitionist because we're the abolitionist empire”. So if we shell Legos in the 1860s, and overthrow the local ruler and installed our own sort of client ruler, we can say. I mean, it is partly, you know, one of the reasons for the shelling of Legos in the 1860s was to establish anti slavery treaties and to force the abolition of slave trading on that part of the West African coast. But it was also to give Britain a stranglehold over palm oil. 

Palm oil, by the way, is a product that would make a fascinating episode for this show – but you need to sign up on Patreon make that happen!

PS: You know, anti slavery wasn't hypocritical. Like the abolitionists believed that ending slavery was the right thing to do, and they weren't lying about the earnestness with which they felt that they believe they hated slavery. But they also understood or believed that they understood that the abolition of slavery proved the superiority of British civilization, and in a kind of theological sense that the abolition of slavery had, at a stroke, atoned for all of Britain's sins with slavery. So they thought slavery was sinful. But they also thought that the that sin was instantly and miraculously forgiven, right in a kind of reenactment of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. And so consequently, after that moment of atonement, the legacies of slavery were gone, they had been forgiven, they had been erased. But of course, they hadn't been erased, because all of the infrastructure that slavery had built was still there, all the ideas about black labourers that slavery had insisted on, were still there. And it was just a different, it was an argument for a different kind of white supremacy. So, you know, that that moment of atonement does an awful lot of work for the British Empire. And it remains a very, very powerful all purpose justification for British imperial adventuring in the 19th century all over the world 

And then there’s the material infrastructure that slavery built 

CH: I mean, so many people are implicated in this whole process, the banks who received mortgages and so on, the lawyers who were involved, the trustees. Not everybody who got compensation was actually directly a slave owner. And that enables us to see the way in which this involvement with slavery runs deep into the society. It's not just a surface thing. It's not just 4000 people. Because then there's all the industries that were dependent, first on the slave trade, and then on slavery. So I like to think in terms of the slavery business, and the ways in which it involves so many sectors of the economy. And that wealth was coming into Britain long before emancipation all through the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century, and money going into the building of the infrastructure that made industrial capitalism possible. The roads, the canals, the transport systems, the lighthouses, you know, the formation of banks, these are all critical to the development of capitalism.

So, with all this in mind, it’s safe to say that the slavery that produced sugar changed who we are. Tea and the empire that produced it did the same.

CH: Certainly when I started working in this field, domestic history and imperial history were completely separate subjects. And the assumption was that British domestic history was not affected by Empire, that colonies were, of course, affected by Britain, but not vice versa. So really, you know, there's now a whole body of work which explores, which creates a different narrative, which is about the ways in which the history of Empire is totally interconnected with the history of Britain.

Things like Victoria Sponge cake, Christmas pudding, pineapple upside cake and tea with sugar – all of these things tell us that what we typically see as English is the product of deeply global ties.

CH: My husband was Jamaican. I mean one of the things that stays in my mind when you say that is he used to say “I am I am the sugar in your English cup of tea.”

Credits

That’s it for episode three. Coming up next we’ll be looking at how modern agriculture changed what we eat, and whether climate change means we need to eat less factory foods.

This show was made by me, Lewis Bassett. You can follow the Full English on Twitter and Instagram @fullengpod.

Music and sound engineering for this show was provided by the very talented Forest DLG. You can find him on Twitter and Insta @ForestDLG.

Huge thanks to all our guests. There are more details about them and their work in the show notes.

If you want to support this show, please head over to Patreon.com/fullEnglish. For less than the cost of a fry up you can gain access to tons of extra content, including full interviews and recipes related to the show. Relevant to this episode you’ll get a recipe for devilled kidneys, Bombay toast and stove cakes. You’ll also be supporting us making future episodes of this podcast. So please sign up. That’s patreon.com/fullenglish.

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Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

Episode 2: A Land of Sheep and Glory

Intro

[Street sounds. Sounds of fridges humming]

LB: How do we approach this?

Pen Vogler: I've no idea. I think we go in. 

LB: Yeah

PV: I think we just go in. Let’s go in

LB: Let's find an avenue

It’s 7am and the author Pen Vogler and I are at Smithfield’s meat market in search of mutton.

PV: Do you sell mutton?

Butcher 1: Nah. [Asking colleague] You aint got no mutton have you? Nah.

PV: Does anybody around here do you think?

Butcher 1: Up out on the left

LB: There's a sign here that says there's nothing left. Just blood stains. 

PV: That's because we're late.

LB: I’m not a late riser, but I thought 7am was pretty early to go shopping for meat.

LB: Do you sell mutton? 

Butcher 2: A leg of mutton? No. We've got lamb. No mutton, sorry.

The market is loud and full of carcasses, but as yet we haven’t found any mutton. In Oliver Twist, Smithfield’s is described as a dirty and bloody place where flocks of sheep are crowded into overflowing pens. Dickens campaigned against the slaughter of animals in central London, calling it a French Folly. Today, the market is clean and orderly. It sells meat, but it no longer functions as an abattoir. 

PV: Excuse me do you sell mutton?

Butcher 3: Good question dear. We do but I haven't got any. You want a leg of lamb? Cheaper.

LB: Why is it cheaper? Why would it be cheaper to have a leg of lamb than a leg of mutton?

Butcher 3: Supply and demand really. 

LB: Right. 

Butcher 3: We do legs of lamb for £15, frozen. From New Zealand. Very nice. 

PV: Oh it’s from New Zealand and where's the mutton from? 

Butcher 3: All over. Mostly the British Isles. Not a great seller really. Not a big demand for it. 

There’s a specialist butcher at the market that sells mutton but we’re too late. The trick, we were told, is to drink at a nearby pub till closing time then nip by the market on your way home

LB: So we've basically completed it. And no mutton.

PV: Well potentially.

LB: But yeah, we have to get here at five am.

PV: We have to get here at 5am. And be lucky.

LB: And I suppose this trip, even though it was unsuccessful, tells us that mutton. Even at the biggest meat market in Britain is available, but kind of isn't. It's a bit difficult to get. 

PV: It’s a bit niche isn’t it.

LB: Would you like that change? 

PV: In terms of in terms of, kind of, the national palate. Yeah, I think it should change because it's a great meat. It's a great taste. Of course it tastes like lamb but it’s slightly stronger. I suppose it's like a cross between beef and lamb in a funny kind of way, but it isn't, its really its own thing.

Why and when did mutton fall out of fashion? Up to the 19th century eating adult sheep was so common that the phrase ‘to eat your mutton’ was synonymous with ‘having your dinner’. And what does sheep farming have to do with the origins of capitalism? Welcome to the Full English, a podcast that looks at English identity through the lens of food. This is episode two: A Land of Sheep and Glory 

1: Origins of capitalism

Why capitalism appeared in England when it did is a question that has puzzled people for centuries. Why the English stopped eating mutton is a question that has puzzled me, well, for weeks. But the answers are related. 

LB: Should we dive right in then? Should we do the easy one first? So what is capitalism?

Maia Pal: [Laughs]. Well compared to the others, it is probably the easiest one. 

I’m speaking to Maia Pal, a lecturer at Oxford Brooks University. She’s an expert on the what, where, when and why of capitalism: 

MP: So, I guess the one important thing to always say about what is capitalism is that a common mistake is to always assume it's just about greedy profit making. I think an easy way to think about it is it's about the social reproduction of human beings. So human beings have to work to survive, they have to offer themselves on the job market so as to get money to buy goods and services they need from other markets. And that market dependence is essential. It's actually more than essential, it has to be imperative for there to be a capitalism system in place. So if people could get food, they can trade or survive by other means than through a market, then it's not quite a capitalism, or the capitalist market hasn't become predominant over other forms of production. So it's a unique system. And that's also something that tends to be forgotten, people will just assume it's been with us for a very long time, forever, even in various latent forms. But actually, it's really unique system that requires quite specific processes. But basically, it means people losing access to land, common land.

Under capitalism, you can’t get by on the resources you or your community possess, instead you have to engage with profit making markets. And for most of us, this will include selling your labour in order to buy your daily bread. 

MP: It can be a bit abstract, because people think, well, there's always been markets, people would go to a marketplace and buy food, right, that has existed for hundreds of 1000s of years. So, you know, just the incidence of a market is not something new. But it's the fact that production for a market becomes the main impetus, right? So that producers, peasants, people who are actually, you know, tilling the land, or producing food or, or raising cattle, etc, are doing it through dependence on what's happening on a market i.e. prices. So fluctuations of demand, on the market of prices, of specific conditions of various actors along the chain, the supply chain, right, who are the merchants buying their products, where are they selling them to, etc. So all those conditions come into play. 

Think of it like this. Rather than growing turnips in your garden and trading some of your turnips for carrots, it’s growing turnips in someone else’s garden, the owner of which determines whether to grow them and hire you to do so according to the market, and then being paid a wage to grow this other person’s turnips. It’s only with that wage will you be able to buy turnips of your own.

George Comninel: The key thing here is to understand enclosures. What it means and when it happened.

This is George Comninel, a professor at York University in Canada and an expert on the origins of capitalism. And this is where sheep come in.

GC: It’s in the aftermath of the Black Death that we begin to get the first signs of enclosure. There are varations on this but all of Western Europe was pretty much characterised as what’s refered to as the open field system. That means villages were tightly regulated in terms of what could be produced, when and how. Every single act was a matter of custom and custom was law, literally. But when the population droped to 25% or at most 50% of what it had been it threw everything out of wack. And this is the period when you begin to get enclosure. Of course, when you think about the place when you first notice enclosures, well it was in the higher regions of the Yorkshire Dales. What happened? Well the population drops catastrophically and people are lured away from their scrabbling on hill tops to the fertile river valleys. So where there had been fully settled communities, townships controlling production. And what do you do with an empty hilltop? You bring in the sheep. And you know, you bring in a few thousand sheep and you only need a couple of shepherds to take care of them and it’s a very profitable enterprise. But it completely is different from the type of production that is there before. 

George is describing a situation in which areas of common land in England went from being controlled by custom, to being controlled by private ownership for the profitable farming of sheep. Where commoners’ lives in the Middle Ages were once regulated by their feudal masters combined by their common laws and customs, their lives began to be increasingly disrupted by private profit making, specifically to produce wool. This important shift is taking place in the late 14th and 15th Centuries, particularly as the Black Death helped to clear the way for these new patterns of land ownership.

GC: This is the whole point, as the population began to grow again, nobody thought that what they should do is introduce the open fields. Once the traditional structure of common practices disappeared, people took initiative. And now what happened is once the profitability of this sheep and corn farming became clear, the enclosures not only continued but they spread as more and more people – lords primarily – wanted to have private property in their hands. And the market for mutton and for wool that was growing, there was a lot of economic demand for sheep and their products and in fact that same structure of what was called improved agriculture became the basis for self-sustaining population growth into the late modern age. And the whole point is that transition was fundamental in its effects.

MP: So this process of dispossession was gradually set in motion for various waves of enclosures. Which happens between the 14th and 18th centuries, there are different waves of it. It's quite a gradual process. But by 1700, we've got 70% of England being enclosed. That's obviously an estimated figure. But you know, by the end of the 17th century, we are in a new country. England has moved to being closed rather than not.

2: History of wool farming

Susan Rose: if you go to the House of Lords, you'll see that there's a throne at one end there's what looks like a very large red Ottoman / sofa.

This is Susan Rose. She wrote a book on how wool made England rich, and she’s describing the Wool Sack in Parliament

SR: It's in fact the seat of the Speaker of the House of Lords nowadays – it used to be the Lord Chancellor who sat on it – but now it's the Speaker of the House of Lords. And okay, it looks like a large squashy red sofa with a kind of backrest in the middle. And it was put there earlier as a symbol of the fact that the trade in raw wool was the basis of the wealth of the country. 

So how did wool make England rich, and when?

SR: Well, I mean, the first records of a trade in raw wool are from Anglo Saxon times before the Norman Conquest. The Anglo Saxons were exporting, in fact, not so much raw wool, as apparently they had a good line in cloaks, and they were exporting woollen cloaks to Charlemagne’s France. By the 15th century the cloth trade was more important than the wool trade. But together the cloth and World Trade customs duties made up a hefty proportion of the Royal income. Its economic importance largely came from the fact that it produced an elastic form of income for the crown. If you compare France and England, the French king was, by all accounts ever so much richer than the King of England. He had a much larger territory with much more varied agriculture and products. But the fact was his control over his more remote provinces was not strong. And it was very difficult for him to tax country to produce the kind of income that you need to wage war. Because if you like the main function of medieval kings was to wage war or defend from wars.

In contrast to France, England was relatively centralised and had the benefit of raising tax revenue through improving the wool trade. This, combined with the fact that parliament was stuffed full of land owners who benefited from the wool economy, meant the wool trade was encouraged, which in turn, meant that the wool economy percolated through English politics and culture.

SR: So you got a political system, which had a large mercantile element in it, and which was a powerful mercantile element, because the English nobility had no inhibitions against indulging in buying and selling sheep and running big sheep flocks. They are quite happy to do that. And you even got the situation where by the time you get to the 16th century, you can see that village people who'd managed to hang on did have sheep and sold the fleeces. So, you had an element of commerce and participation in what was a pretty large market going right down to the bottom of society, as well as involving the upper levels of society. And that, in my view anyway, produced a different mindset from other European nations where there was not quite such a, where the participation in the market was not so widely spread. And this, you know, affected the kind of politics that developed

3: Wool and meat consumption

So because of the boom in the late medieval wool trade, people are also eating a lot of sheep. Like grown up sheep, not lamb. They’re also making candles from the fat, or tallow, and of course sheep’s milk and cheese. The drive for wool and the enclosures also led to more land being used to rear cows as well.

Ben Rogers: So I think that Britain was by 1700 very much a nation of meat eaters and foreign observers when they came to the country and then went back home or wrote letters to people back home or, or printed books about their travels, always remarked on the vast quantities of meat eaten in cook shops and chop houses like the one we're currently in.

This is Ben Rogers who we met in episode one at the Quality Chop House in London.

BR: Britain was a very affluent country by global and European standards at that point. And meat was part of that. I think it's traceable back to the enclosures. It's in century which were first of all about enclosing land for wool production, but that produced, you know, meat and then it was a sort of short hop from that to rearing cows as well.

As Ben tells me, the English were famous for roasting their beef and mutton on great spits by open fires, or at home on spits power by clockwork or even, sometimes, spits driven by dogs

BR: It was not about roasting in the way that we understand it, you know, we don't really roast it today, we actually sort of part roast part steam it, you know, the way we do it. There’s was about putting in front of a fire and turning on a spit. There are a series of technologies that were developed at this time to make roasting your meat easier, including a sort of Clockwork Spirit and a device which involve putting a dog in like a hamster wheel. The dog would run around the wheel and turn the roast. And this this was, it was a bit like having a fridge or an oven or a washing machine, it was pretty much the sort of staple of every seventeenth century English household.

Well, not every household. But certainly in the households of the very rich and often in the homes the tenant farmers, or Yeomen, who as former peasants had benefited from the privatisation of land and who could in turn afford to hire their own labourers. Eventually in the cities and towns on the 17th Century, the figure of the free born, beef eating Yeoman played a central role in how the English middle classes viewed themselves. Tales of the strength and good standing of medieval Yeomen are central to the proto-nationalism of this time. But to get to this point wasn’t straight forward. As Maia mentioned previously, many of those had their access to common land removed resisted the change. There were uprisings and riots across the areas where enclosures took place. There was legislation from parliament both to promote enclosure and legislation meant to restrain it. And in the early 16th century there was widespread panic about enclosure and the growth of sheep runs. Writing at that time, Thomas Moore referred to this in his book Utopia.

David Webb: Your sheep,

Thomas Moore wrote

DW: That were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

Sheep were devouring men

MP: People might think of capitalism first as industrial capitalism, right? I mean, the big factories, the big mills, you know, intensive labour. But that's, that's more the end part of the process. And before we have these agricultural transformations that are happening, based on enclosures, on dispossession, and on sheep farming, which is really transforming the way people relate to their basic means of survival. But people didn't just go into industries in factories and towns, for no reason they went there because they've been dispossessed from their land. 

4: Why mutton disappeared

But men were devouring sheep as well. In fact, the rise of wool farming made eating mutton so common that references to it litter English literature from Shakespeare to Jane Austen. But then, as many of you listening will know from your own diets, it almost disappears. 

Pen Vogler: In the 19th century, everybody ate mutton. It wasn't the meat of the poor. It was the meat of the kind of middle, normal middle class table. It was the most common meat so I think people didn't even talk about lamb. I suspect what happened is when the bottom fell out of the wool market, what's the point of growing sheep up to full size, you know, when you're not getting anything for fleeces? And also, I think kind of around in the middle of the century, sheep breeding enabled lambs to kind of just put on weight much faster. 

While wool farming may have created the conditions for industrial capitalism, once factory production came along, raising sheep for wool failed to make much sense. Particularly as cotton poured into Northern England from the slave plantations in America. And if, as a sheep farmer, wool is no longer your objective, then why raise sheep any longer than is profitable? Consider the fact that a chicken can live for around six years but they are typically killed for meat at the age of six weeks. Sheep can live for up to twelve years, but are slaughtered for meat at around 6 months. And so once England lost its interest in wool, our taste for mutton was replaced by a taste for lamb.

5: Cornwall visit

[Sound of a car window opening]

LB & Evelina: How are you doing Matt. Hi!

Matt Chatfield: Hi! You can park in here tonight.

I’ve come down to Cornwall with my partner Eve to visit the farm of Matt Chatfield. Unlike conventional sheep farmers who raise their flocks for lamb, Matt is focused on making delicious tasting mutton for high end retailers and restaurants.  

[Outside field sounds]

MC: Greeting the sheep

MC: So this is Lou Lou. 

Lou Lou: Bahhhh. 

Eve: Hi Lou Lou. 

LL: Bahhhh. 

LB: She's so friendly with you. 

MC: Oh we're very good buddies. 

Eve: Can I touch Lou Lou? 

MC: Yeah ofc you can. 

MC: Lou Lou was brought at the market. Lou Lou came running up to me. Basically I was like I can't kill him. 

LB: It's kinda like a retirement community

MC: Yeah It's pretty chilled. Rule number one is they have a brilliant retirement. Rule number 2 is flavour. Rule number 3 is that I work in balance with nature.

MC: So with my system, we get the sheep that are too old for breading. Or meant to be. For some reason the farmer's decided they're no use for breading. So the farmer replaces the flock. So I buy those and I keep them for a good three to six months. Fatten them on grass and then hang them and sell them. So it’s a bit of a new thing. And with my system I want to put fat on them as quickly as possible. And so they’ll go out and graze. Then you want them lying flat out and just fermenting. And the more relaxed they are the more nutrients that go into building fat. And flavour. 

What Matt is doing is making flavourful mutton. But he calls it Cull Yaw. I asked him why.

MC: Basically everyone calls it culled sheep. So sheep that aren’t going to bread anymore and are going to slaughter. They’re picked out as culled sheep. And yaw is the colloquial name for ewe. You basically there are different names for ewe around the country. Ewe or yaw or something. But around here it’s cull yaw.

Jeremy Chan: We do a lot of things, we bake the fat and we infuse it with aromatics and then we poach different parts of the meat in its own fat - because there’s so much fat. 

This is Jeremy Chan, head chef at Ikoyi. The Ikoyi team are also down in Cornwall visiting Matt.

JC: We use the fat in different recipes too. We use it to baste fried chicken. Which is incredible, to have beautiful fried chicken with aged sheep fat. It's an interesting type of meat, like a retired, older sheep that can be treated as a kind of luxury, beautiful, product. To cook it whole on the bone that is something very kind of involved and respectful of all the work that has gone into rearing the animal and its life I guess.

And how can that not sound delicious? Because honestly, it really is. Mutton is delicious. 

6: Did mutton disappear? 

[Restaurant sounds]

When setting out to explore the rise and fall of mutton in England I had assumed that the English had more or less stopped eating it. But then, was that even true? Perhaps, I realised, that depends on who you count as English. 

I've come to Brick lane in London to meet Rez, a chef who cooks Bangladeshi food in a traditional way at his pop up Nanizi's. The pop up is named after his grandma.

Rez: I was 18 and I didn't really know how to cook. And my grandma was just like, Okay, come to my house, and I'll teach you how to make a few things. She taught me the basics along with my mum by my side as well. And, yep, so that's kind of what I went off to when I went into university. And so I'm still learning how to properly cook it. As you know, these women have been cooking for 20 plus years. 

For Rez, as for many people of a Bangladeshi heritage, mutton is often on the menu, not necessarily because it can be a cheaper cut of meat, but, as Rez explains, it’s often seen as more desirable. 

Rez: For us, it's, it's that dish that you're always going to find whenever you go to an occasion. Whether it's your wedding, or just like a family gathering is always going to be there. It's like the epitome of dishes I would say. Or the meat dishes. 

LB: So that's what’s at the top basically, that's like the top of the pyramid. The best of the meat?

Rez: Yeah. I think it’s the flavour. It’s a bit stronger than lamb. From my experience it makes the curry richer. We normally spend a couple of hours making it, I would say. So what we do is just, we'll prepare the sauce first. I think a lot of people prepare the meat first, but we prepare the sauce first. So it's like the onions, the garlic, ginger, we use our spices, we cook it for like an hour. And you can either have it with tomatoes, or potatoes, I think. I think it's different with different families. And they use different spices as well. But we just use, like a simple four spice blend that we create. And we just, we stick with that. And we've found that it gives the best sort of flavours. I think less is more, you know, without dissing my friends’ mum’s curries and stuff, I've been to their houses sometimes. And sometimes they use so many spices that actually it smells really nice and fragrant, they put garam masala and all this other stuff, but it's just so complex, right? You don't need to be like that to be flavoursome.

And so while high end producers may be returning to the meat, there are communities in England that have never stopped eating mutton. You might say that these communities are continuing an English tradition as old as the birth of capitalism. Bangladeshi or Caribbean curry mutton, and the Turkish Adana kebab are potentially far more traditionally English than a cheeseburger or a bowl of cornflakes.

Credits

You’ve been listening to episode two of the Full English. In this episode we’ve covered the birth of capitalism and the taste for mutton in England. Next we’re covering the dark histories of tea and sugar, so make sure to subscribe to the Full English wherever you get your podcast.

This show was made by me, Lewis Bassett. You can follow the Full English on Twitter and Instagram @fullengpod.

Music and sound engineering for this show was provided by the very talented Forest DLG. You can find him on Twitter and Insta @ForestDLG.

Huge thanks to all our guests. There are more details about them and their work in the show notes.

If you want to support this show, please head over to Patreon.com/fullEnglish. For less than the cost of a fry up you can gain access to tons of extra content, including full interviews and recipes related to the show. Relevant to this episode you’ll get a recipe for devilled kidneys, Bombay toast and stove cakes. You’ll also be supporting us making future episodes of this podcast. So please sign up. That’s patreon.com/fullenglish.

Thanks for listening. 

And yet, and yet…The Full English is also not not a Vittles podcast, in the sense that over its six episodes, it expands and enriches many of the themes Vittles has been covering over the last two years. I’m thrilled and excited that The Full English team has chosen to debut it through Vittles before it launches later this year.

A little background for you: soon after he wrote the storming opener to Season 3 entitled ‘Fuck Fine Dining’, writer, chef and researcher Lewis Bassett asked if I would be interested in being involved in a podcast about English food, examining the country’s often unstable national identity through its cuisine (or lack of one). The pitch was ambitious, not just in terms of scope but in the range of voices it needed - a part of me wondered if it was doable. I said yes, Lewis disappeared and then came back a year later with an incredible transcript that he has whittled down and shaped over the last few months with musician Forest DLG into six episodes that cover Breakfast, Sheep, Tea and Sugar, Factory Food, Modern European in England, and Fish Finger Bhortas. Lewis’s doggedness over the last year means that the The Full English has exceeded the ambition of the initial idea, and is served by a variety of exceptional voices: academics, farmers, food writers, critics, historians, anthropologists and journalists, all in the service of finding out what English food actually is.

I’m going to leave it to Lewis to explain more in further detail, but I hope you enjoy listening (or reading the transcript, if that’s your thing) to these six episodes over the coming weeks. The first episode is open to all subscribers and the next five will be for paid subscribers only. If you would like to subscribe to Vittles for £4/month or £40/year, please click below — the price of a subscription will be going up soon so I recommend doing so if you have been thinking about it.

Subscribe now

Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

The Full English, by Lewis Bassett

The idea for a podcast about nationalism first occurred to me during Rebecca Long-Bailey’s campaign to become the leader of the Labour Party in early 2020. During that campaign, Long-Bailey made a pitch for ‘progressive patriotism’. But this appeared to please no one. Conservative nationalists accused Long-Bailey’s patriotism of lacking any substance (it being simply overcompensation for Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent hatred of Britain.) Meanwhile, some left-wing commentators rejected any engagement with patriotism outright, and staunch Remainers saw the more-or-less empty slogan as pandering to swing voters in Labour’s so-called ‘red wall’. In the end, Long-Bailey rowed back on the idea.

The campaign slogan highlighted to me the extent to which Englishness is a relatively mute and sometimes taboo topic, especially on the political left. I’ve often wondered why. In episode six of this first series of the Full English, the Scottish journalist Adam Ramsay suggests that just as men are less likely to think about their gender than women, English people are less likely to think about their Englishness than people of other nations. This, Ramsay claims, is because England developed a modern economy and society ahead of others; when England assumed a prominent position in the world it did not need the stimulus of nationalism. England has also lacked the dynamic through which a nation is born in its struggle for independence from colonial control: witness the far more overt nationalisms of the United States, Ireland, Jamaica and countless other nations. In this sense, the confused and muted nature of English nationalism is a lasting legacy of Britain’s Empire. 

The pandemic has also shown us the hidden state of Englishness. As important decisions affecting public health were handled by the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (hence the different policies and outcomes in each region), the British government based in Whitehall became in effect the government of England. Yet England is the only part of the UK which lacks its own political institutions. It appears the English don’t accept that devolution has taken place, or else that despite it, we still don’t recognise ourselves as a distinct polity requiring distinctive institutions. Were we to do so, then the debate over what new institutions we might want could be the source of a truly progressive conversation.

As someone who has spent half of their adult life working in kitchens, as I do now, I’m keenly aware of the extent to which food is a medium for these debates. Many chefs reject traditional English fare, as do many eaters. In popular restaurants in England, the preference is often for food from France, Italy, India and China. Equally puzzling is the matter of whether there is a distinctly English cuisine, rather than, say, British or regional British cuisines. This sentiment – which is examined in the first episode on the English Breakfast (one of the few dishes with ‘English’ in its actual name) – seems to reflect the confused state of opinion around Englishness more broadly. It’s as if there is a lack of language with which we can identify a distinct, national repertoire of habits and traits.

Food is an important key into all of this, and much else besides. Food isn’t just about nourishment; but even when it is – such as in the form of protein shakes – this too can tell us something about the social worlds we inhabit. Considered through the lens of the English nation, food can help us understand the origins of capitalism, the lineages of Empire, the meanings of climate change and the power dynamics, tastes and status of groups and individuals in English society. But the episodes in this show are not solely about England or Englishness because nations are always porous, and this wide remit is also necessary in the context of a hidden nationalism, one submerged within a post-imperial Britain.

There’s an endless number of topics to explore in future episodes of this podcast: from whether high bread prices still make us angry, to what Greggs and Pret can tell us about the North-South divide, to the English’s extreme relationships with drink. But to do that requires your support. Sign up on Patreon to help make future episodes of the podcast happen. And get in touch to let me know what you think of the show via Twitter and Instagram.

If you live in London and would like to attend a live episode and event to launch the podcast, you can buy a ticket (which includes food and drink) here

Episode one: Breakfast

Introduction:

Lewis Bassett: Welcome to the Full English, a podcast about English food and identity. Because: who are the English, where do we come from, why do we eat the things we do and what do our eating habits say about who we are?

My name is Lewis Bassett, I’m a cook and a researcher and I’m fascinated by food.

In this series we’ll be digging into the meanings of England and Englishness by looking at what we eat. From mutton and the birth of capitalism, to cellular agriculture and the proteins of the future. 

In this first episode, we’ll begin by looking at the what the English breakfast can tell us about how food in England has changed, and we’ll also be finding answers for why England has such a bad reputation when it comes to food.

Welcome then to episode one of the Full English.

1. Why England

But why England? Why not the United Kingdom or Great Britain? Why not European food? Or how about food in Nottingham, where I was born, or food in London, where I live now?

Well, I have a feeling that England – specifically England – is confused about who it is. It’s been a turbulent time in politics, and I think events like Brexit, particularly in its consequences for Northern Ireland and the rise of nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales  have shaken up our understandings of national belonging. And I’m not the only one who thinks this:

David Edgerton: In many ways, the place we live in, is a country with no name.  

DE: I'm David Edgerton, I'm a historian of Britain and of Science and Technology at King's College London.

DE: I mean, if you look at war memorials, it says things like, “gave their lives for King and Country” without specifying what that country is. And very occasionally, you see a war memorial that specifies England. But I've never ever seen a war memorial that says somebody died for the United Kingdom. I've never seen one that said that, that memorialised for Great Britain. So we have a very strange situation of a country with, with no name. 

According to David, it’s only after the second world war that many people saw themselves as belonging to Britain, rather than the Empire. But that relatively brief period of British nationalism has been unravelling. 

DE: So we have the rise of Scottish nationalism of, of Welsh nationalism, a new dispensation for Northern Ireland in, in good time. So a whole set of assumptions about what it was to be this thing called Britain come apart. And I think it is important to recognise that we now have a new discussion, I think, about England and Englishness which arises I think because of the limited self government that now exists in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That raises some very important questions about what, what England is, what its place is in the United Kingdom, and what its democratic structures ought to be.

2. Vox pops

But there are other reasons to look at English food as well. And that became clear to me when I went on the streets of London with the artist and producer Forest DLG who makes the music for this show. We wanted to know from people what they thought about English food.

LB: Excuse me, can I ask you a question? We’re making a podcast about English food. Do you have any views on it?

Person 1: Yeah, but I haven’t got time sorry. 

LB: But you do like it?

Person 1: Yeah – whatever it is!

Forest DLG: Can we ask you a quick question about food?

Person 2: Yes – have you got any?

LB: We’re making a podcast about English food…

Person 2: English food? Why?! It’s bland most of it. I prefer a bit more spice

Person 3: Indian food, Jamaican food. That’s where all the flavours are. 

Person 4: Well there’s a reason why there’s no English food stall here at the market?

LB: What’s the reason

Person 4: Because it’s just not as, erm, diverse a pallet as other cusines

LB: Would you say it’s bland

Person 4: Yes. That’s what I’m alluding too!

Person 5: You occasionally have a nice fish and chips but meat and two veg doesn’t cut it.

Person 6: I hate fish and chips, I have to say. It’s not for me

Person 7: Fruits and veggies, they’re just not as tasty

Person 8: It’s shit! That’s why we’re queuing for falafel. 

Person 9: Yeah it’s not too bad. The English fry up will often go down nicely.

Person 10: I think typically the best English food is the food that’s been borrowed from other cultures. Isn’t the national dish a chicken tika masala? Which actually has nothing to do with Asian culture. It’s an invention to make Asian food more acceptable to an English palate. But even things like pizza, fish and chips, all these things are borrowed. So traditional English food – I don’t even know what that might be. Maybe it’s the home of fusion. 

It seems that on the one hand, a lot of people think our food is rubbish and on the other, some people born in England aren’t always confident that we even have a distinctive national cuisine. 

3. Breakfast

[Breakfast sounds: kettle boiling, people arriving at the door, chatter in Italian]

Back at my flat, I’m making a traditional English breakfast for my partner, Eve, and three of her friends. My partner and our guests are from Italy and I want to see what they think of what is probably England’s most widely known national dish.

Italian 1: What is this? 

Italian 2: Is it tripe? 

Italian 3: Spleen? Lungs! 

LB: It’s kidney

Italian 1: That’s disgusting. I’m not eating it!

I’m serving an English breakfast, Victorian style. That means kedgeree, a mixture of rice and fish flavoured with curry powder, as well as Bombay toast, which is bread fried in butter with anchovies and cayenne, and a Victorian favourite: devilled Kidneys

[Sound of breakfast being served]

Who is gonna try this, only Zuli? 

I'm going to try it

Really?

I'm gonna try 

Wow you’re so brave 

Um guys. It's good!

No I'm scared

Omg that toast is so delicious

Alissandro are you gonna try a kidney?

Not at all. I mean if I was closer to Bianca I would like sniff it from her plate.

You can still sniff it

You can sniff it.

Can I sniff it?

Sniff? A sniff is okay. Is it chewy?

Hmm. It's okay

It's ok? You should have more. There's a big one there look. 

I think that for today that was quite a big achievement

Bombay toast is fantastic

Mama mia this potato thing –

Bombay toast is amazing

So that went down surprisingly well. And it shows, whether you like it or not, England certainly has a strong food tradition. The fact we have an explicitly national meal – an English breakfast – makes that obvious.

4. Kaoiri O’Connor

Okay, one of the ways that we often test the sound is we ask people what they've had for breakfast.

KOC: Oh yeah, yeah black coffee with a Jordan skinny syrup, coconut macaroon. I am a sort of a black coffee no sweet person but with this book two things have hit me. One is the Jordan skinny syrups - thank god otherwise it might have been the real thing – and chocolate, for which there is no substitute. It's all bad for you though and it all ends up on the hips and the jowls, what can I do?

This is Kaoiri O’Connor, a researcher based at University College London who wrote a book on the English breakfast.

KOC: when it burst upon the world, I suppose it was at the beginning of Victoria's reign, there was a huge, a huge promotion of national identity, a huge building up of the image of England, subsuming the other parts. And so that's when you have the promotion of England, and the emergence of this meal coming together, and therefore the English breakfast.

LB: What is so distinct about the English Breakfast compared to others?

KOC: It is the only breakfast. I mean, there may be imitations now but the distinctive thing about it is it was a cooked breakfast. A meal in itself. Whereas in most other places, let's say the whole of Europe, it's very much a scratch meal, you know, you have your coffee, and then you have croissant, toast, or perhaps nothing at first, then you get perhaps 11 o'clock and you get the pastries and things. And quite a lot of places are like that, you know, it isn't something that you get out of bed and sit down to a big cooked breakfast. And in Scandinavia, you do get more, but that's very much a buffet and you get a lot of pickled things and you get a lot of cold you know, meat sausages, hard boiled eggs, not this great big cooked thing, like we have here. So that's what made it distinctive. I mean, there wasn't anything like it.

And if you want proof that we can understand a nation by what it eats, the invention of the English breakfast is it.

KOC: At the time of Queen Victoria it was felt important to emphasise Englishness in everything. Because you see, the great thing about Victorian life is it's suddenly, lots and lots and lots of people had lots and lots of money or, you know, various amounts. And all over Europe, this is a period of revolution and change. And, you know, governments were rising and falling, and there was a great deal of concern. So what happened in this country is people became wealthy, but it was tamed in the sense that they were told, all right now we should all try and be civilised, and to emulate the upper classes. And so everyone became very refined, and very genteel, each in their own way. 

A new rising middle class who had profited from the growth of industry in Victorian England sought the stability and status of the older land-owning upper classes. Members of the newer monied group did this through their dress codes, through their speech, through etiquette manuals, through being able to distinguish a soup spoon from an asparagus fork. But no less, these new middle classes in England sort to project their status by eating the kinds of breakfasts that the older upper classes ate in their country manors. To some extent, toward the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, even factory workers followed suit. And where workers in cities didn’t have access to fresh ingredients, cheaper, processed foods – from tinned baked beans to margarine instead of butter – increasingly filled the gap, giving rise to the fry up style English breakfast that we know today. But the important thing to note, as Kaoiri explains, is that it was the desire to emulate the upper classes, with whatever means available, that helped to popularise the English breakfast.

KOC: It was it was sort of gentility at one or two or three removed, but it was very important. Because it was something about the English that, you know, this idea of bettering yourself is what, what we should aim for.

Kaoiri, as you can probably tell, isn’t from England. She’s from Hawaii. But, she says, not being born in England is one of the reasons she so obsessed with English breakfasts.

KOC: You can only talk about the English Breakfast if you're not English. Because it's famous throughout the world. And particularly, you know, the fringes of the old Empire. And you think of it as the most distinctively English thing. And you have a vision of the sideboard covered with silver dishes and being in a country house and you know sort of working your way along the row and picking it up and you've got kippers, you've got mushrooms, you've got eggs done several ways, several kinds of sausages, bacon, and you make your own combination. And that is the English breakfast, with masses of toast, jam and so on. And this is what you think there is. And of course, if you look at the literature, the English Breakfast dances across the pages, I mean, this is what you expect to find here, which is part of the background to the wallpaper, its culinary wallpaper, you take it for granted, right? So you get here, and you can't find it. I remember my first encounter was, I guess you'd call it a fry up in a chippy. And there was chips and then there was fried egg. And then there was the beans and I thought “oh my god, where's the real thing?” And, and I went for a very long haul for it. And that's how the book came about. But it was, it was a hunt that took a long time. 

LB: And did you find it? 

KOC: Yes, I did find it. But you do have to pay for it. See that's the thing, it is not an everyday kind of thing. If I have to, you know, if someone asked me right now “I want an English breakfast”. What I would do if it were open is I'd head straight to the Wolseley because that's as close as you can get for a restaurant. You know, of course it's not on the sideboard, but you have a choice. And they do a wonderful dishes there that were part of the old sideboard, which is like kedgeree: wonderful! You know, which is an old Empire dish, which is fish and rice and a curry sauce on the side. 

But is a food tradition like the Victorian breakfast still a tradition if few people eat it today? The fact that one of the few places you can get an old school English breakfast is a five-star hotel tells me it’s not really a widespread tradition in England. That also explains why my Italian guests were so surprised by the food I made them. Like Kaori, they had only come across the breakfasts served in greasy spoon cafes, with beans and chips and fried tomatoes. Maybe that, and not the wonders of a Victorian sideboard, are the real traditions of England today. And whether you like these more modern kinds of cooked breakfasts, perhaps it’s these far more everyday foods that England is to be judged upon. And so maybe it’s some of these foods that have given England’s cuisine a bad reputation. 

5. Reputation

Rowley Leigh: despite the proliferation of restaurants and the vast improvement in restaurant food over the last 40 years, I'm still slightly sceptical about us having a food culture. And I rather suspect after 10 years of Brexit, we might be back to where we started. 

This is the chef Rowley Leigh. His view on the current state of English food is deeply pessimistic. 

RL: Because there isn't. There isn't honestly, really, the infrastructure. You know, that places like France and Italy have in terms of production. If you look at the Fens, which is the most fertile soil in Europe. We produce frozen peas, sugar beet and cannabis oil. You go to Brittany and see what they produce there. It's rather different. And you know, yeah, we've got a great cheese industry. But the fact is, when there was the listeria crisis in ‘91, almost every single cheese milk maker in Britain started to pasteurise their milk, sort of kill their cheese. And anybody who didn't got in terrible trouble. And, you know, do you think the French started pasteurising milk? Like fuck they do. I don't know. I just I just, as I say, you know, I mean, real proper food culture comes from the field. It doesn't, you know, come out of a chef's head. And we'll see. You know, without Italian and French produce coming into London every week we'll be eating sea buckthorn and lingonberries.

[Restaurant sounds]

Clearly England’s culinary reputation has changed over time. To explore this further, I’ve come to the Quality Chop House in London to speak to Ben Rogers who wrote a book about food in 18th century England. Like Kaori’s research on the Victorian breakfast, Ben’s book, focused on the century before the Victorians, shows that England once had a very proud food tradition, one that even foreign observers were impressed by.

Ben Rogers: So here is the French traveller Henri Misson writing in 1698. “It is common practice, even among people of good substance to have a huge piece of roast beef on Sundays, of which they start, or they can swallow no more, and eat the rest cold without any victuals, the other six days of the week.” Another 25 years later, the Swiss traveller Mr. Moreat wrote “the pleasure to the table in this happy nation to be put in the same rank as the ordinary everyone is accustomed at good eating. They consist chiefly of a variety of puddings, golden Pippins, which are an excellent kind of Apple, delicious green oysters and roast beef, which is the favourite dish as well as at the Kings table as at the tradesman. It's common to see one of these pieces weigh from 20 to 30 pounds”. This might be said is the emblem of the prosperity of the English. 

Food – and above all beef – was for many people in 18th century England a way of displaying your patriotism

BR: France was the arch national enemy, associated with Catholicism you know, and a sort of military rival throughout this period and a more hierarchical society with a very strong tradition of court cooking which was on the English British view ridiculously effeminate, over refined, dishonest. Roast beef was defined in opposition to that

Paul Freedman: So in the 18th century, these beefsteak clubs were formed in England, with the purpose of combating French, I think the implication is, effeminate food with a lot of sauces, as opposed to good old Hardy John Bull, the food that made Britain great. And you get the same kind of things where politicians feel they have to eat mushy peas in the north of England, that famous gaff I forget who it was of the Labour Party politician who was served mushy peas somewhere in the north and thought it was guacamole.

That’s Paul Freedman. He’s a historian at Yale University. We’ll hear more from him later. The politician was Peter Mandelson, a close ally of Tony Blair. 

BR: It wasn't just a defined against the French. It was also defined against what was perceived to be a sort of a cosmopolitan upper class, sort of Frenchified upper class, a sort of Metropolitan Remainers of their day, if you like, who dominated government in the Georgian period, and viewed France in particular as a sort of, you know, model of sophistication and looked to France for inspiration when it came to the fashion to art architecture, and food. So, to go against the, against Walpole and against the aristocracy of the day, you were in favour of roast beef and that sort of cooking and this sort of and this culinary patriotism found expression not just in the kitchen, but in arts, in the art of Hogarth above all, the literature and buildings. … it found especially expression in beef steak clubs that I guess were a sort of fore runner of gentleman's clubs today, when people gathered, good English patriots, patriots gathered to eat roast beef and have fun and moan about the French and the Frenchified aristocracy. 

Hogarth, by the way, was a famous nationalist painter and satirist of his day. And beefsteak clubs were not too dissimilar to the Quality Chop House, where Ben and I are sat now. But that’s not the only parrel between the past and the present that Ben points out.

BR: I'm struck by the really strong similarities between the politics and the sort of particular sort of cultural politics of late 17th century, 18th century Britain and today's divisions over Brexit and the Metropolitan elite. The way in which English roast beef eating, Bulldog owning, John Bull, patriots in the 18th centuries would characterise their enemies both internal and in this case European. This is very, very similar to the way that Brexiters characterise remainers and no doubt remainers look down on Brexiters a bit like sort of how the court looked down on roast beef eating John Bulls

In fact, it’s hard to ignore how John Bull, the buffoonish, rotund caricature of roast beef eating old England that was often depicted in cartoons in the 18th century, shares a few characteristics with Boris Johnson. 

[Clip of Boris Johnson: “But when it comes to chilled meats, the wurst is behind us” 

5. Why is English food so bad?

But while we can find continuities with England’s past, we should look closely at the changes as well. Does industrialisation, as we mentioned before, account for a decline in the quality of English food? Paul Freedman, the professor at Yale that you heard from earlier, certainly thinks so:

PF: Part of the answer is early industrialization, certainly in the case of England, that you get a rapid breaking of rural traditions and the creation of big cities with a population that doesn't have access to producing its own food. So that the food of Britain in the 17th century, was not regarded with contempt by foreigners. But by the late 19th century, when a vast majority of people were living in the cities, and were poor and subsisting on tea, bread bought from a store, jam, and, you know, maybe meat drippings, the food traditions were quite poor. 

However, Paul says that industrialisation isn’t the only thing that explains England’s bad reputation when it comes to food

PF: You have some of the same thing in the United States, but also, in both places, the upper class culture regarded France as its example. So the best chefs in Britain and the United States were French chefs, the fancy restaurants were French restaurants. In New York in the 1960s, the top rated three star restaurants in the first New York Times guide, with only one exception we're all French. And you'd get the same kind of rankings for restaurants in London at that time. And then finally, the cultures of the two places shared a contempt for people who fuss about food, who make food, a kind of item, like music or art that is worth talking about and fussing about. So there's, to this day, a kind of tendency simply to say, food is functional, or food is whatever I like. And cuisine is kind of an affectation. In France, on the other hand, cuisine has, since the 17th century, been an expression not only of taste, but of national skill, and the wedding of pleasure, to prestige. And so, from the 17th century until I would say, around the 1980s, French food was the great standard of international haute cuisine, and only in the past 40 years has this diversified so that other countries such as Italy, or Denmark, have become prestigious or, you know, leaders in world gastronomy.

Paul says that England has a comparable food culture to the US, both of which contrast starkly with places like Italy

PF: So the love of processed food comes from a love of efficiency and health and being modern. But processed food actually doesn't taste as good as seasonal and local food. So what do you do, the ice cream may not be very good, but it comes in 30 different flavours. So variety is a distraction from quality. My epiphany on this was in Italy. So I was in Bologna, and was taken to a restaurant and we had to order tortellini that was one of their specialties. That's a specialty of bologna. They were the best tortellini I've ever had and my host said in other parts of Italy they make tortellini sometimes with cheese or with spinach. And I said, in a very American remark without intending it to be, “Oh, do you ever just get tired of meat tortellini and just have spinach tortellini for a change?” And the guy looked at me like I was an idiot. He said, “No. We're in Bologna. In Bologna. We eat meat tortellini.” We never find that in the United States. We have I mean, my supermarket has 10 kinds of tortellini. I could go there right now and get, you know, three cheese tortellini, pancetta tortellini, portabella, mushroom, tortellini, spinach tortellini, but it's not very good. I mean, it's not as good as these lovingly made Bolognaise tortellini.

DE: Well, the United Kingdom doesn't really have a peasantry.  

This is David Edgerton again

DE: It has, in fact, a tiny rural workforce already in 1900, we're talking about less than 10%. And that's radically different from France or Germany, or Norway or Sweden, or indeed any part of, part of Europe. So, the agricultural population is essentially being eliminated by 1900. And food has become much more industrialised than elsewhere. And food is brought to the country by giant enterprises. And goes through all sorts of industrial processes. And we can mention canning. I mean, British people eat enormous amounts of canned food from a very early date. And as many commentators have pointed out, poor people in cities ate enormous quantities of unfresh food, which would not have been the case for a French or German peasant, for example, they might have had restricted diets, but they'd be they wouldn't be diets that came out of a can or out of a fridge. So, there was a profound effect I think on the British diet.

So industry – both industrial processed foods and industrial poverty – has had a big impact on England’s food habits. But, again, that’s not the whole story. 

DE: There's another element, which is that the United Kingdom is free trading. And that's, that's really important and quite, quite distinctive. It means that half the food roughly that is consumed within the United Kingdom comes from overseas, I mean, from Europe and from the other side of the of the world. And that's true of no large economy at that, at that time. I mean, that gives you a very different sense of what the, of what the nation is. There's no expectation that you should, you should eat British flour in British bread, there's no expectation that, that you eat the roast beef of old England, you eat the roast beef of, of Argentina, and, and Uruguay and so on.

6. Is English food even English?

So it’s not just industry that has defined British and English food over the past two centuries. On the one hand, is our attitudes towards food and on the other is the consequences of empire. England and Britain’s ability to organise the world in its own image in order to reap the benefits of trade and sometimes direct extraction has meant it never needed to invest in an agricultural workforce: because why have a peasantry at home if you can outsource one to the Americas, India and Africa? But doesn’t this raise a question about the Englishness of our food? Surely, if you’re taking wheat from Canada, tea from China and spices from India, how can you then call what you eat and drink English or British? 

KOC: That's the difference. I mean, if you have got an empire, it's your food, it becomes yours. That's the whole, the whole thing about conquest, it becomes yours. And so, you know, back then, I mean, of course it was foreign, but it was our foreign, right. And because kedgeree was really a colonial dish, I mean, there's nothing quite like it. In the original, it was taking elements of, you know, traditional cuisine and mixing it together in a way that would be palatable to the colonials. So that's another way that it It's ours.

In fact, and as contradictory as it might seem, English and British nationalism went hand in hand with the expansion of empire during the 19th century. As Kaori explains.

KOC: So, there was a huge rise of interest in the mythic past and one of the heroic figures was Alfred, you know, who had done so much to bring the foundations of England together. 

Kaori tells me that a story that was popularised at the hight of England’s empire was that of King Alfred and the stove cakes. The story goes that in the 8th Century, before England even existed, Alfred, the Anglo Saxon King of Wessex, had been fighting Vikings and had sought refuge in a peasant woman’s home. Not knowing he was a king, the woman asked Alfred to watch some stove cakes. But the great king’s mind wondered, and Alfred let the cakes burn. When the woman found out she gave Alfred a telling off. And the king, in spite of being a king, accepted the punishment. 

KOC: The Tale of the cakes was a kind of a test of character. Here he was, the king driven out, in a peasant woman's house, having burned up all her food, and, and he apologised, he let her berate him, and, you know, from then he went on to succeed.

LB: it just feels like such a contradiction to be at the peak of Empire and at the same time to be so heavily invested in constructing a pure domestic origin story?

KOC: You have to. You're constructing the homeland to which, you know, the motherland the father land, to whom the new subject peoples may now feel a family relationship. I suppose anthropologically, the point is you say, we are ancient, we spring from the soil we are we are pure, we are English. But what you want to do is you strengthen your own identity at the point at which you begin to dominate others. Yeah, there's no point in being sort of fluffy and saying oh, well, we're all sorts of people were really cosmopolitan. That will not do not at that early stage, you want a very, very strong image.

Conclusion

Empire and industry are two inescapable features of England’s past that continue to animate who the English are today, evident in what we eat. Already, we find that defining who and what England is has a lot to do with the country’s relationships with places and people outside its national borders. The English breakfast itself is fundamentally similar to an Irish and Scottish breakfast. At the same time, a full English served in Cornwall is often distinct from one served in Yorkshire. That’s because nations share features as well as contrasts with other countries externally, while they’re not as homogenous internally as nationalist myths tend to imagine. 

If England is a country in crisis today, having left the EU and existing within a frayed union with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, then understanding what England has been will be the first step in asking what those who live here want it to be now and in the future. 

For the rest of this series we’ll be digging a little deeper into some of the themes we have just covered, starting in episode two with sheep farming and the birth of capitalism in England. In episode three we’ll be looking more at England’s place within the history of slavery and the British empire by examining our taste for sugar and tea. And from there, we’ll hear more about how modern agriculture changed the way we eat and how it continues to do so in the context of climate change. We’ll chart the invention of what is often referred to as modern European cuisine in England. And finally, to end season one, we’ll examine who has the authority to make a national cuisine, and whether immigration changes how we might view Englishness.

Credits

That’s it for episode one. This show was made by me, Lewis Bassett. You can follow the Full English on Twitter and Instagram @fullengpod.

Music and sound engineering for this show was provided by the very talented Forest DLG. You can find him on Twitter and Insta @ForestDLG.

Huge thanks to all our guests. There are more details about them and their work in the show notes.

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Thanks for listening.