British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History by Colin Spencer

British Food is a magnificent work that celebrates our greatest gastronomic hour. Once a kingdom fabled for its gastronomy and one that rivalled those found at the courts of Europe, our culinary heritage has been forgotten. Filed away in a dusty corner, gathering cobwebs, until a knight in shining honour, Colin Spencer, happened upon its former glory and with all the ardour of a crusader, set himself the task of resurrecting it to its rightful position and place in our social history.

British food had an enviable reputation: it was designed to please and tease the senses, reflective of our travels around the globe in the use of spices. The stigma that our forebears had to make do with rancid meat is nonsense. The spices were used to enhance flavours, not mask them. Food historians have, of course, known this all along but in British Food, Colin Spencer aims to set the record straight. He believes that the food of the past was as good as it is today.

Poverty reduced people to diets of bland and monotonous subsistence food but they did, at least, make an effort to cheer it up. But you can also use fashion as a yardstick to counter claims that we were uninterested in our food. The courtiers who were concerned about the length of their hair and the buckles on their shoes would surely have metered out that same precision when it came to food.

Events in our history have dictated our diets too. Colin Spencer traces these changes and influences on our food in Britain through sometimes cataclysmic periods. The dramatic events of the Black Death led to improvements in the economy of peasants and the onset of rural baking, which was just as quickly destroyed by the Enclosures Act four hundred years later.

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, our culinary reputation was assured but then it all went wrong. We became a nation derided for our food. We had excellent produce but was it spoiled by lack of culinary skills? The subject became woefully neglected as our food was allowed to become mediocre. Its hasty decline was in part responding to the fact that we had given up talking about food. In polite society, you simply did not comment on whether food was good or bad and therein lies the problem. The renaissance that we are experiencing today is as a result of this. Food is now the password of cool and we are all talking about it.

British Food is beautifully written, divided into short essays which can be easily digested. It shines a light in an area that we once thought dull and at the same time fills the reader with hope for our culinary future. It is of immense interest, if only one had the wherewithal to remember everything. Years in the making, Colin Spencer has put his heart and soul into this seminal work. Published in association with Fortnum & Mason, this masterpiece will sit handsomely alongside Alan Davidson's epic work The Oxford Companion to Food. Longevity is in both these books' sights.

Colin Spencer is indeed the greatest living writer.

Publication details:
400 pp. £25
ISBN 1904010164. Published by Grub Street
2002

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