I picked up a book the other day which almost everybody knows about but which most, I suspect, have not actually read: Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England. It was published in 1954, which most of us would consider the nadir of English food: rationing, the beginning of industrial production, lack of variety, lack of flavour, lack of interest, awful cooking; the darkness before the dawn of Elizabeth David.
And yet.
The book looks backwards rather than forwards: there is no longing for the flavours of the Mediterranean; barely a nod to olive oil. Equally, it does not dwell on those things that David loathed: the ‘flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles…corned beef toad in the hole’ that were the result of years of severe rationing – which, remember, continued for a full 11 years after the end of World War II. Imagine Covid lockdowns continuing to the present day: how grim, how pointless.
Instead the book is a slowly unfolding reminder of what was lost: the detailed knowledge of ingredients, seasonality and techniques. ‘People who do not keep hens may not know why poultry is cheap at some seasons and dear at others,’ she says. Eh? ‘Chicks are generally hatched in spring, but some, in incubators, before Christmas. These autumn-hatched hens begin to lay in spring, when eggs are scarce and valuable, but, as only one cock is required, the young male birds are sold off’ as ‘spring chickens’. Or the differences between different breeds of sheep: ‘the mountain breeds never put on fat like the Lowland mutton… All recipes for cooking mountain mutton, therefore, should be studied to bring out the special qualities of a rather lean and very well-flavoured meat.’ Southdown sheep are well-flavoured, with lots of fat; the ‘really large Midland breeds are not well-flavoured, and should be cooked quite differently’… salt-marsh sheep ‘require pungent condiments, such as samphire or laver’.
There are parallels here with wine: endless choice has in many ways produced a narrowing of choice. Everything is perfectly good but most things are not very different from anything else. And if they are, they’re difficult to sell.
Chicken is the same year-round; not too much flavour, nothing to frighten anyone, not even skin, if you buy chicken breasts in nice hygienic plastic trays and don’t mind too much about the environmental consequences. Lamb? Mercifully it can’t be factory-farmed. But try asking in a supermarket, or even many butchers, what the breed is. Uniformity is the ideal. Call it reliability if you prefer.
The same thing happened in the 19th century with opera, funnily enough. Orlando Figes, in The Europeans (2019), tells how railways opened up one country after another; cultural exchanges increased, and by the 1870s you could visit any European opera house and be faced with much the same repertoire. The number of new productions and new works plummeted: uniformity ruled.
And wine? True, it doesn’t have to be Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay or Sauvignon. We have Pinot Noir, we have Tempranillo, we have Garnacha/Grenache, we have Assyrtiko! We have Viognier! We have Bacchus (unfortunately)! We have lots and lots of grape varieties, and once they’ve been tidied up round the edges so that they are recognisable as ‘wine’ to anyone brought up on the first four, people will like them and even seek them out.
Yes, that tidying-up is generally an improvement in quality. Rough, rustic tannins are not our idea of quality; nor is oiliness and top-heaviness. Extremes have to be ironed out if growers are to make a living; and with luck enough individuality will remain for such wines to seem different but not too different. Greek wines are a case in point: we love them for being different, but they still have to fit into our template. Retsina, I’m told, is a hard sell. Xarel-lo is a great grape, but challenging in its austerity. I opened Recaredo’s Turo d’en Mota 2009 the other day and it was fabulous with food, able to sing in harmony with spiced beef and pickled walnuts. But it’s not an easy grape. It always reminds me of my school headmistress, Sister Marie. She was formidably intellectual, formidably disciplined and altogether formidable. My parents said she was also very witty, though she didn’t waste that on 12-year-olds.
I’m not criticising winemakers; they have to sell to a market that at heart wants familiarity. Maybe the popularity of orange wines proves me wrong, even though most of my non-wine friends wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. A generational thing, probably. According to Hartley, people could be the same with food: she quotes venison on sale in a country market-town during wartime: cheap, unrationed, delicious and unsold. Unsold, at least, until the smart, expensive butcher down the road bought it all up, upped the price and ‘sold out to the knowledgeable town evacuees by lunch-time’.
And Sherry? Shouldn’t that be the first stop for anyone seeking something different? I poured Tio Pepe en rama for a friend the other day – not a particularly winey friend – and she loved it. Sherry is better than it has ever been, yet remains genuinely different and genuinely not massively popular.
As does Madeira. A visit to Blandy’s (who say they sell everything they make, but then they don’t make all that much) recently showed just how much they’ve raised their game and brought grace and definition to their 10-Year-Olds. And Sherry and Madeira have one big thing in common: the terroir that gives them their detail is above all the terroir of where they are aged. Temperature and humidity, the breeze from the sea and therefore altitude and exposure, and how these affect every barrel differently depending on where it is in the warehouse, give minute and not-so-minute differences in flavour.
This is a difference that is so easily eradicated – put the whole lot in an air-conditioned shed and it will all turn out the same – and so it seems precious; more precious perhaps and more useful than Hartley’s tips on making rook pie (‘the breast and the top part of the thighs are the only parts which are edible’).
Victor Urrutia of CVNE says similar things about the cellar for Imperial: he talks about the ‘churchy’ nose of the wine, which mirrors the smell in the cellar. If you age other wines in the Imperial cellar they will, he says, pick up some of that smell. Precious, fragile differences.
Some vineyards are as individual as such cellars; most are not. When I see a flat surface striped with manicured rows of clonally identical vines, all other plant life eradicated, and I’m told that the wine gets 100 points, and 100 points is exactly what it tastes of, or when I listen to David Guimaraens of The Fladgate Partnership talking of his old mixed vineyards and how he believes that the growers of 100 years ago and more selected each vine variety (of probably 30 or 50 or more in each site) according to the sun exposure and drainage of that particular height and curve on the hillside, I think I know which wine Dorothy Hartley would approve of and which she wouldn’t.
The pursuit of perfection and the pursuit of reliability have both given us uniformity – how could they not? Both, ironically, get dressed up as the pursuit of typicity, and perhaps they are, in a way. The optical sorter, that extreme weapon of self-styled seekers of typicity, has probably done more to eradicate differences than anything else.
Hartley does not comment on whether all the dishes of the past were actually enjoyable. They would have been tasty, certainly: a kitchen garden would contain over 40 aromatic plants, and another 25 medicinal herbs. Before lemons were in every shop, there was verjuice from crab apples. Young bracken fronds, cooked like asparagus and served with melted bacon fat, sound rather wonderful – I might try some next spring.
And rook pie? I’m not desperate to make it, but if someone could provide me with the raw materials I’d have a go. I think it might be rather good with Turo d’En Mota.
Photo by Michael Hamments on Unsplash