This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The detective story was 86 years old, but the news item seemed to echo it: young bloggers in America are astonishing their readers by praising English food.

I laid aside Edgar Jepson’s entertaining ironies to read all about it, although his description of the detective’s dinner in The Murder of Augustin Dench had fascinated me:

It was not food which called for thoughtful eating, for it was the ordinary food of the English countryside; the mutton chops, imported from a colony or Dominion, were of a texture which demanded the most sturdy exercise of the inspector’s powerful jaw, and that texture had not been improved by the country cook; the tart was composed of Czechoslovakian currants and Jugoslavian raspberries … surmounted by a sodden crust of that sogginess which goes far to account for the pasty complexion of the village maiden and her attendant swains … the cheese, imported from another Dominion, had a disquieting bite … the butter, diluted with considerable scientific skill with mutton fat, was … imported from another colony; the bread, of the finest American white flour, was of an indeterminate flavour and not much of that.

No copy editor nowadays would let you go for that long without a full stop — and few readers would endure such laborious humour. But the horror of dinner in England rings true and demonstrates, in a novel of 1938, that the misery of Englishmen’s meals pre-dated wartime austerities.

My father — an anglophile, always willing to exonerate the English even from the most objective obloquy — believed the myth that war had impoverished national cuisine. I recall from my childhood his wrinkled nose and curled lip at odours of lamb fat and puddles of aqueous vegetables.

I, on the other hand, admired the austerity that preserved puritanism more tenaciously in the kitchen than in the Church. Nancy Lancaster’s account of her uncle filling in his lunch ticket at the Athenaeum seemed representative: “Boiled haddock, boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes; the hand,” she wrote, “shaking, but the principle as firm as ever.”

Although the English think Elizabeth David and continental holidays rescued them from their dreary culinary tradition, the grim international reputation of their food remains hardly modified. The evidence is that U.S. readers are awestruck at the counter-intuitive tenor of the bloggers’ praise.

It turns out that the blogs are either equivocal or nonsensical. They praise England for curries rather than crumpets, Chinese takeaways before Lincolnshire chine. One woman in Delaware names seven dishes, including haggis and falafel. The “Tennessee Tik-Tokker” condemns ice cream and commends Welsh cakes.

The vaunted renaissance in English cookery has not redeemed English traditions, but merely disguised them with modish trappings, fusion flavours, foreign influences and fancy presentation. The greatness of the English in the few arts at which they have excelled — landscape gardening, comic writing, war and engineering — has always relied on simplicity.

In the glory days of British agriculture, good basic ingredients came to the tables of princes and peasants; French “gewgaws” and elaborate sauces were unnecessary. Plain roasting and boiling could not ruin what was fine and fresh.

There is no prospect of good ingredients nowadays, except for the prosperous

With industrialisation, however, cost displaced quality as the commanding criterion. If you start with poor produce, uninventive preparation is an abjuration of the cook’s responsibility.

There is no prospect of good ingredients nowadays, except for the prosperous. Even the most modest supermarkets designate good stuff as “premium”, “finest” or some other weaselly adjective, and charge accordingly. What most of England needs to eat well is therefore a culinary style that retrieves traditional simplicity with modest ingredients.

I propose a widely condemned English food: bubble-and-squeak — a typically greasy, stodgy fry-up of leftover cabbage and potatoes in bacon fat. “Bubble-and-squeak, was it?” I recall a comedian of my childhood asking his hostess. “I’m not surprised. That’s what I’ve been doing since I ate it.”

The secrets of transforming it are to use fresh ingredients and exploit their contrasting textures. Toothsome varieties of cabbage need only the slightest blanching before combining with puréed potato, crunchy lardons, finely chopped garlic (the wild, mild English variety) and an egg to bind the mixture.

Doused in flour, then fried until crisp in the fat left from the lardons, the dish will recall England’s past and make her present palatable.

Colourful, roughly-chopped tomatoes and spring onions, stirred to warmth in a double boiler with abundant Worcester sauce, are a perfect garnish.