Great British Cooking

And other lies?

I’m working with a niece who still lives in the motherland, she is an amazingly talented professional photographer. She does a lot with food styling, making simple food look inviting and casually elegant for an up coming book which she is creating with my sister in law, her mum. What a tribute to a great relationship. The American version will require a little translation, not just for the metric measurements but also the language itself and the ingredients, their availability and their frequency or not, of use. That’s where I am trying to be of assistance. I can remember going to the Isle of Wight where they lived and ran a B and B, one of England’s best traditions, watching these darling little girls, Lucie and Catherine standing on chairs at a gas range making crepes before they could read! My visits home in those days were rushed as I left all five of my kids in the capable but not limitlessly patient hands of my husband. So I would snatch five days here and there to visit my ailing mother, how many times can you say goodbye to someone you love who is dying so slowly from Alzheimer’s? My nieces were raised in the manner in which Europeans in general seem to differ from their American counterparts, that is to say with a sense of trust in their own good judgement. I don’t recall there being a lot of interference, not too many rules but a great deal of freedom to express, that produced these two extraordinarily creative young women. The children ate when they were hungry and mostly things they prepared themselves, or helped in a very real manner, their mother to prepare. She was a gifted cook, trained in France in the old ways but used to conjuring up country meals from fresh local ingredients found on the island long before we began to do this in America again, thinking of course that we had invented it. I say again, because this was the only way we fed ourselves before the onslaught of mass produced factory farm foods, long range preservation methods and super sized fast food restaurants that took over the landscape of our appetites. 

The girls were taken mushroom hunting and knew about wild berries, how to make a gooseberry jelly and what to grow in a garden. They learned to drive my dad’s wreck of a car found with actual moss growing on the inside of the leaking cabriole roof and left abandoned in the fields at their house, mostly on their own. They are world traveled both of them, and sophisticated in a way that is wholly different from my girls; fascinating really because no one would accuse me of being an in-depth, helicopter parent. I too thought they could learn more on their own and from one another than from being constantly supervised by me. But back to the cooking. Since living in these here United States of America, I have learned to cook. Self taught as with most who are good at something, I found trial and error to be the best method, but have always been deeply offended and defensive about the manner in which English food is spoken and presented here. One only has to listen to the menus proffered at the ever present “Downton Abbey” events that keep cropping up. They only want to showcase Spotted Dick and Toad in the Hole because of course who doesn’t want say those things. If you look at Southern cooking from America, especially at chefs like Sean Brock, you can find references to things we have been cooking in England since the 15th century. He adds bacon grease to them and becomes a sensation. I’m not knocking his food it is amazing, a trip to either of his restaurants in Charleston will confirm that. You’ll fall in love, of course, with the city and its streets and gas lamp posts and the menus in its restaurants. For me however, it’s like a trip down memory lane. In England.  

Charcuterie is the new black in culinary fashion of late, and what that means basically is meat fat. That’s right, the bits we used to throw away are now sourced from thrifty butchers who brine it and present it with some “artisan” cheese and charge you sixty bucks a plate for it.  We no longer hunt or gather food either, we source it. It is locally sourced and organically sourced, it is special because we pay more for it to come from further away, or closer to home, and it won’t last as long because it’s not chemically enhanced or preserved. Unless it’s supposed to be preserved, in which case it is brined. This cookbook coming from my homeland is full of country food that is made simply and presented photographically in the way you would want anyone to see your home, or life. It looks generous and easy, it looks exactly the way I love my food to look on a plate, like you can’t wait to take that first bite. Lucie’s photos catch the shimmer of sunlight through a damson jam, the glisten of the remains on a used knife as it lies, satisfied, across a thick slice of soft, warm bread. Her pictures allow you into a kitchen that holds lovely memories for me, of visits back home with my parents and these two little nieces, stories from my brother’s days in the police force and when we all went to school together. Plates of cheeses in hues of deep blue and yellow, soft goats milk blends that slather easily across a biscuit or cracker as you would say. The recipes containing ingredients such as sprats and pidgeon, elderberries and rocket, bring memories I can smell and taste. 

Food is an intrinsic part of our memory muscle and brings us the deepest of pleasures when we re-connect to it. I am currently trying to cook for my poor old father in law who is undergoing dialysis and is on a very restrictive, bland diet. I have found a website that helps to show us how to make things he is permitted, that still have taste and flavor, but I am here to tell you there is nothing he can have that will ever replace ham, bacon, salt and animal fat. My mother used to fry bread in drippings, the stuff that came from a Sunday roast, or left in the pan after she cooked rashers of bacon. Great gobs of opaque, white, grease really, that she let melt into a cast iron pan, into which she would then toss salted and peppered bread. She’d brown it on both sides and I can still smell and taste that salty goodness fifty years on. If you slice that real thin and present it on an aged cutting board then call that a “groaning board” you can get a hefty prix fix in a trendy eatery for it. The black stuff at the bottom of the roasting pan is comprised of what is the main ingredient in the much maligned Marmite of my people. Used here it is the basis for any good stock. Still when we have guests for dinner they love to thank me for a great meal by teasing me unflinchingly about the risk in accepting an invitation to a British cook’s house for dinner. 

The food of your people, be it ever so humble is the stuff of your life. The aroma of something you make that you had as a child will comfort you as nothing else can. Marketing gurus have known this since the first time we put something in a jar and sold it to others. Chef Boyardee knew this just as well as the Lee brothers, Matt and Ted, again from Charleston. So if you are lucky enough to get an invitation to the Smith house for dinner, just say yes…and tell me where you’re from first so I can cook you a memory.