In Partial Defense of British Cuisine

A study of how culture arises—or does not

I have recently been getting into British cuisine—yes. Last weekend, I watched a very fun documentary, and one which is discreetly fascinating if you’re into food history: Marco Pierre White’s Great British Feast.

I have also become a bit of a fan of the young English chef Thomas Straker, and not just because he has been accused of racism. I found him originally thanks to his very appetizing series of videos on “All Things Butter.” As a Northern Frenchman, butter flows through my veins (as we say here, le gras c’est la vie, fat is life) and Straker’s butters are incredible. But then I found out that he did a series of videos of him going around the British countryside—including Islay, an island I’m fascinated with—finding local products and cooking them in the wild. This is basically everything I enjoy.

This gives me an opportunity to write in partial defense of British cuisine—yes, moi, a Frenchman, and in the process talk about what makes a great cuisine, and a great culture.

Yes, I, a Frenchman, believe that British cuisine is unfairly maligned. As Marco Pierre White, who is certainly most qualified, points out, where it truly shines is in simple, peasant food, made from local ingredients. White’s “Great British Feast” menu sounds like it was specifically made for me: venison tartare, marinated herring, fatty cured ham with celery rémoulade… As a Frenchman, there is nothing here for me to sneer about.

The documentary does include some moments of involuntary humor, as when White visits some British wine growers, and he and his maître d’hôtel put on a great show of British politeness, deeming one of the wines “er…earthy.” (With climate change, the Southeast of Britain can now produce acceptable whites, but for reds I’m afraid there’s still progress to be made.)

Anyway: why is British cuisine good? And if so, why does it have such an awful reputation?

The latter is easy: thanks to post-war Beveridgian socialism, Britain had food rationing for longer than any other Western European country. The parents of my British friends remember rationing, and French, German, or Italian people of the same generation do not. Even after rationing, Britain had such indebtedness and bad trade balance that foreign foodstuffs were a luxury, severely limiting Britons’ food options. The reason those awful tinned beans feature so prominently in British pub food is because for decades they had little else.

Britain has another clear handicap in the food wars, a cultural factor which is hard to identify but clearly present. I could here unfurl a theory about how the Anglo-Saxon Protestant is uniquely alienated from his own body, and therefore less able to have a healthy relationship to carnal pleasures. Less contentiously, I will say that cultures from the coldest climates are more focused on the most efficient way of filling the body with all the calories it needs, and less on enjoyment. Think of Swedish meatballs. Or Russian cuisine, which I personally enjoy very much, but is hardly ranked next to, say, Italian.

With all that said, nevertheless, I still maintain that British cuisine is underrated. Why?

Well: a great food culture requires three ingredients. These ingredients stack on top of each other, each being a prerequisite for the one that comes before, like a three-stage rocket. They are:

1. Great terroir, from which great produce can be grown

2. Great peasant traditions (note that when I use the word, the term “peasant” has absolutely nothing pejorative about it, it is in fact one of the most noble occupations there can be)

3. An aristocratic culture that takes the above two and refines them and takes them to a new level

Let’s take these one by one.

Great terroir is pretty self-explanatory. Some parts of the English countryside are downright marvellous; it’s no wonder that Oxfordshire gave J.R.R. Tolkien the inspiration for the Shire. And, of course, Scotland is a land of magnificent wild beauty. Really English terroir only looks bad when compared to countries like France or Italy, which is unfair, since these countries make the entire world look drab and sad. By the way: yes, there is a direct causal link between the physical beauty of a place and the quality of the agricultural produce to be found there. Source: trust me, I’m French. It is absolutely true, however.

Great peasant traditions. Again, this is a place where Britain only looks bad because of the comparison to France and Italy. A key French skill is what we call aménagement du territoire, a term for which there is no English equivalent. Wherever French people settle they modify the physical environment towards greater beauty and harmony. All civilized peoples do this to an extent, of course, but in France this is oriented not just towards efficiency, but towards beauty and the fostering of the French art of living. The reason why the French countryside awes the world is because it has been maintained, curated, subtly modified, over 1500 years. This is a distinctly Latin and Catholic trait: the first things Romans did when arriving to a new place was to build camps, and then roads, designate certain plots of land for cultivation of certain produce—to organize the land. Monks also do this. Catholicism, the uniquely incarnational and civilizational religion, reshapes the land itself. This is most staggeringly obvious in Italy, a land whose beauty is so very clearly and directly linked to having been shaped and civilized by Catholicism, but can be seen everywhere where the Church has been able to put down deep roots. In Germany, you can tell the difference between Catholic and Protestant lands from the beauty of the architecture and the lushness of nature. In Burgundy, the various apellations, the sets of rules about where you can grow which kinds of grapes for which kinds of wine, were determined by Cistercian monks 1000 years ago, and to this day, with all the modern scientific knowledge, no one has been able to come up with a better arrangement. With all that being said, England was Catholic for close to a thousand years, and the British, cousins of the French, are a great people, and they have been caring for their environment. In Britain, gardening is the national past-time. Few things are as beautiful as a British garden. So the Brits are also very talented at aménagement du territoire, as can be seen in many places in the British countryside, and so, in spite of a disfavorable climate, the Brits have been able to create great produce, great breeds of beef and sheep, excellent cheese (yes), and so on. This is key: great produce does not grow out of the ground, it is the product of human work and ingenuity over many generations. Nothing that ends up on your plate, nothing, is from “nature”, whether vegetable or animal. They are all strains and breeds that have been selected and bred over generations by your agriculturalist ancestors, and have little in common with their “natural” cousins. The British have excelled at this and have produced great breeds of cattle and vegetables.

Aristocratic culture. Why is French gastronomy the greatest in the world? Apart from the above two ingredients, which other countries also possess? There are many reasons, but the fundamental one is that Louis XIV created Versailles and created a royal court where he, and other aristocrats, competed based on, among other things, high-cultural entertainments, and specifically, gastronomy. Louis XIV’s head chef, Vatel, famously committed suicide after finding out that a fish course had been ruined. Greatness only comes from this level of dedication.

Why must this culture necessarily be aristocratic? For the following reasons:

• Money and free time. Mercantile elites have money, but they do not have free time to worry too much about great dishes. They are always busy. Aristotle, a representative of Greek aristocratic culture, writes about the necessity of free time for the advancement of civilization.

• Taste. Nothing is more aristocratic than taste. Nothing is more unequal than beauty. Sadly, perhaps, to have good taste one must be born with it, and one must be brought up in it from infancy, exposed to beauty and refinement from the earliest years. It is a much-observed historical fact that democratic cultures lead to a degradation in cultural quality while it is aristocratic polities that produce great art and craftsmanship.

• The pursuit of excellence. Costin Alamariu has noted that Ancient Greek aristocratic culture was marked by the agon, a spirit of competition. This is true, and status competition between aristocrats or aristocratic houses is historically a great impetus for creation, but it goes farther than this. The aristocrat is haunted by the idea of proving himself worthy of his ancestors. They are the “Joneses” they most want to “keep up with”—a very high standard. It is a higher standard than merely comparing yourself to your contemporaries, and it is, importantly, a standard which isn’t utilitarian.

All those traits are easily seen in one of the greatest eras of cultural flowering in human history: the Italian so-called¹ Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. In histories of the era, the focus is usually on the great artistic and literary geniuses of the time, and with good reason, but all those works were patronized, those geniuses, as admirable as they were, were responding to market demand, a market demand created by the agon of the aristocratic culture of Northern Italy at the time. All those works were patronized by men like the Warrior Pope Jules II, a model for Machiavelli’s Prince, and a member of the great Della Rovere family, a man of both great power and great taste and a lover of glory, the glory of his House and the glory of God, which in his mind were indissociable.

This “model” or “ecosystem” is most clearly and easily seen in the Italian “Renaissance” but it is really behind almost every great cultural achievement in the history of the West, and arguably every civilization—including the birth of French high gastronomy in the culture of the court at Versailles in the 17th century. (A culture which also gave us classical French literature with Molière, Racine, and Corneille, the classical revival in architecture, French baroque music, French ballet, and all the cultural achievements of the grand siècle.)

The link between aristocratic culture and gastronomy can also be seen in the two great non-Western cuisines: Chinese and Japanese. Chinese cuisine is the most refined outside Europe. It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine whether Chinese historic elite culture can be properly called aristocratic, but I will just mention that the notion that China’s elite was purely meritocratic-bureaucratic has been exaggerated by Western writers projecting their own mental models on China (as Tocqueville already pointed out in his time); for starters, in many periods of Chinese history, a lot of court or state positions that were theoretically appointed on merit were de facto hereditary, and secondly, many ruling dynasties in Chinese history were non-Han conquerors from the steppe who saw themselves as a warrior aristocracy. For our purposes here, what matters is that high Chinese gastronomy grew out of a court culture, where status competition included displays of advanced refinement.

This is also the case of court culture in Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868). Under this regime, Japan moved past feudalism and semi-permanent feudal warfare to a centralized bureaucratic state, and as a result its aristocratic class developed a court culture very reminiscent of Versailles. Most of the high refinements we associate with Japanese culture, such as the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and so on, and high Japanese gastronomy, reached their apex under Tokugawa court culture.

Anyway, this long excursus is to show why British cuisine is sadly underrated: it missed the “last step” as it were. It never developed its own aristocratic food culture. The reason is simple: British aristocracy, sorry Brits, is really French aristocracy, and so its food culture was always in imitation of French food culture.

To put it in a simplistic but clear way, if you were invited to have dinner with a duke in 1750, if it were in Burgundy, you would eat highly refined versions of the local cuisine; if it were in Oxfordshire, you would eat French food made from local produce.

The best example of this is Beef “Wellington”, the most iconic “aristocratic” “British” dish—which is one of the world’s earliest example of “Freedom Fries.” Beef Wellington is really boeuf en croûte, one version of plats en croûte which is an entire category of French cuisine. During the Napoleonic Wars, British aristocrats preferred to rename their favorite French dish rather than stop eating it. Marco Pierre White’s British food documentary includes a very funny segment where he bends himself into a pretzel to claim crême brûlée, maybe the most famous French dessert, as an authentic British dish, because it was popular among students at Eton and Cambridge a hundred years ago. (Who do you think was at Eton and Cambridge a hundred years ago?…)

What’s The Point Of All This?

Well, several things.

The first is that British cuisine is really good. Britain produces great produce, and it has great peasant traditions that have produced excellent dishes such as pies, roasts, and so on. The lack of a tradition of high refinement and clichés dating from Britain’s era of post-war malaise should not obscure that fact.

The second is that, in the great debates comparing national cuisines, we have a heuristic that allows us to rank cuisines properly. There are three criteria: terroir, peasant traditions, aristocratic culture. And so, French cuisine is the greatest in the world, because it is the only one that gets a 10/10 on every one. Italian gets a 10/10 on the first two, but a lower grade on the third. British gets (let’s say) 8/10 on terroir and peasant traditions, and 0/10 on aristocratic culture, leading to a bad average grade, but one which obscures excellent spots.

The third and most important one may be obvious at this point: the three ingredients I have mentioned, a great land, a great people producing bottom-up traditions over generations, and an aristocratic culture focused on excellence, each building on the other, is not just how great national gastronomy is produced, but how every great national accomplishment—and therefore every great accomplishment, period—is produced.

And finally: the French and British are cousins. Friendly ribbing is all well and good, but in an era where the very survival of Western civilization is uncertain, recognizing our respective merits is more important. So, as a Frenchman I say, two and a half cheers for kidney pie and warm beer.

1. The idea that there have been distinct periods, on one hand the “Middle Ages” and on the other the “Renaissance” is false, though I don’t have time to explain here.