The Blackberry Walk

It goes without saying that what Britons eat today is alien to what they ate in the past. Some dishes remain in our repertoire: what is English cuisine without the roast, the cottage pie, or the fish and chips? But other dishes, like the traditional stuffed chine, a delicious-looking joint of pork sliced with incisions, each incision stuffed with parsley and other herbs, have disappeared. And it's not as if the aforementioned dishes have been part of our cuisine forever either. The potato, a crucial component of the cottage pie's cap, is a New World crop, and wasn't used in England until the early seventeenth century; and the humble chip, half of a fish and chips duo, only arrived in England through Belgian immigrants in the late Victorian era. These staples are hardly as old as they seem. It's something I've noticed generally, that food history is hard to remember. Just as the tongue and the nose are far rougher organs, and struggle to discern or categorise as well as the eye or the ear, so too is our culinary past, the history of the rougher organs, far murkier than that of the history concerning our precise organs. We struggle to recall as a culture how pasta was an alien food only a hundred years ago, and a mere seventy-five years ago the BBC were able to pull the wool over the eyes of the English public and tell them spaghetti grew on trees. Yet now spaghetti is eaten in every household and is seen as one of the most simple and essential dishes. A sense does remain that spaghetti is foreign and Italian, and perhaps if you're making a specific dish like bolognaise or carbonara it feels a little more exotic and Italic, but for the most part spaghetti has been warmly embraced under the large tent of 'British food'. Curry has been named a British staple too. This I don't think was some kind of choice to anger Reform voters or who have you, but an expression of the many changes occurring to what we eat, how we eat, and how quickly our diets change without realising. Dishes the English want have changed, and there are patterns to those changes. The clearest change is that of dried fruit. Dried fruit were in every British desserts, from Christmas pudding to raisins in your bread and butter pudding; but now with younger palates they have fallen out of favour. I confess, I'm part of this change. To tell the truth, I don't really like raisins in cakes and in desserts, and talking around work many others my age don't either. But it's only the young ones; over a certain age, it becomes a non-question. Around the office, we were discussing jam as well. I too am not the biggest fan of jam, and again many others my age at work concurred, to the shock and amazement of our seniors. "How can you not like jam?" one lady said at work in astonishment and disbelief. These dried fruit have stepped aside for chocolate chips, and the jams have made way for chocolate spreads, to cater for the contemporary taste. Will these fruity flavours of old disappear and fall by the wayside? Will they be cast away into the history of British cooking? Probably, I suggest. A change to our palates is occurring. We see similar patterns in main courses. English cuisine has many strong flavours like stilton, pickled herring, and fried liver. However the most common complaint about our cuisine is that it is bland and flavourless, as if all British cuisine can be found in a Greggs and is as pale as pastry. But those who have tasted the breadth of our cooking know that English cuisine is anything but: if anything, it is too flavourful for the modern taste. I think the same is true of Continental foods: the salamis and cheeses of the French are far too strong a flavour for most to comprehend. And yet it is common today flee from the cuisines of Europe in favour of something else. Many my age flock to oriental and subcontinental cooking in search of 'flavour'. And these cuisines are flavourful, please don't misunderstand, but there's something there which I can't quite express, they're somehow... less aggressive? Less challenging? I can't quite put my finger on what it is. These flavours are somehow straight and tell you exactly what they are, whilst a stilton has a complexity in its flavour, as if it's hiding something, and so too does a salami. Cured meats done properly are never simple flavours, eating them there's always a sense they're hiding something from you- same with strong cheeses, it's like they are showing one aspect of their flavour today, but they could show another tomorrow. This may be a strange comparison, but I feel the same way about pistachio nuts. Each nut hits a different flavour, and each one is a bit of a surprise when you bite in. The spices of the East on the other hand are more direct: cumin has the flavour of cumin, coriander tastes like coriander, and cloves taste like cloves. The chef of the East uses these flavours like a painting palette, each flavour a different colour with which to craft his dish. There's something different with strong cheeses. Usually, they're served on a cheese board because they're harder to pair, and are instead paired with wines, another unfathomable array of subtlety and complexity. Our cuisine so often attempts to highlight the individual flavours. The roast in a kind of pantheon of the best flavours, all bathed in gravy; and the success of a roast is found in each of the components being individually flavourful and delicious. The parsnip is a great example. The parsnip in a roast is ever-so-flavourful, and, well roasted to sweetness, has an incredible flavour; but the parsnip is merely part of the supporting cast. He's an extra beside the big players, but one instrument in the orchestra.¹ This article may have rambled a little, I must apologise, and much of its contents I must've written elsewhere. But what I wanted to get across is that our palates are changing. What we want to eat and enjoy eating is changing. I've only lived for a quarter of a century, and even in my lifetime what people eat and want to eat is changing. The foods people choose in restaurants, when they want to try something exotic, is not so much of interest as what they eat regularly, what food feels homely and comforting to them. As I've talked about elsewhere food defines us and our personalities. As the old adage goes, we are what we eat. Our gut flora are fed, affecting our mood and thoughts, and the nutrients we derive from the food we regularly eat affect our hormones and how we think. The British people have changed and have always been changing, and so too have our diets. Diets both determine how we think, whilst simultaneously how Britons think affects what they want to eat: it's a chicken and egg system where we symbiotically change with our diets. And as the British people change over time, which we most certainly have over the past fifty years both demographically and in thought and belief, it is no wonder that our diets and our taste buds have moved in lock-step. Certain flavours have fallen out of favour and others are becoming popular, for better or for worse. In our endless striving for authenticity in cuisine, the humble Hong Kong takeaway or the British East Indian takeaway, where the flavours are made appealing to our sensibilities, may fade also. When the palates of a people change, the foods of the past make way for the dishes of the future. And when the palates of a people change, the people themselves change. 1. Perhaps the English roast is the perfect metaphor for traditional English political life? That sounds like a thesis to write up on a rainy day...