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As dusk falls in the Djemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakesh the
snake charmers and story-tellers make way for a myriad
dazzling food stalls. Walk gingerly through the smoky,
inky, ill-lit haze of this, the biggest and most timeless
market square on earth, and as you try to adjust your eyes
to the middle ages the traders will try to guess where you
are from. If they think you are English they might well
point at you and cry “Fish & Chips, Fanny Craddock,
Jamie Oliver!”
While to us this may seem to be a rather crude reduction
of the English identity to UNESCO it is all evidence of
a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of
humanity". Well, um, yes, probably. The Moroccan traders
are, for sure, making a no-nonsense leap across seemingly
impassable cultural and historical divides: street food
speaking to street food. They are hardly going to link their
market snacks to some of our other great contributions to
the world; the legal system, the telephone, photography
and television, electricity, constitutional monarchy or the
internet say. We must show humility. And, my goodness
in this bunting-rich year of all years, why not the
retro-reference to the formidable Fanny Craddock whose
culinary empire fell in 1976 in the wake of the Gwen
Troake Dessert Scandal just as Rome fell to the Goths
& Vandals. And Jamie Oliver? Why not? Is he not a fine
example of the British art of telling the other man what’s
good for him and what is not?
And actually fish & chips are really quite good for you.
During World War II Dr. Magnus Pyke, in his role as a
young nutritionist at the Ministry of Food, sang the
praises of the fish supper. Mind you he also suggested
mass-producing black pudding for human consumption
from left over blood donation stocks. Really he did.
Properly cooked, fish & chips is essentially steamed fish
in a crust - a valuable source of protein, fibre, iron
accompanied by potatoes packed with vitamin C.
Fish & chips taste good and they make you feel good.
We should all be proud of fish & chips as a unique
contribution to the world food map. It’s the meal that
fuelled the industrial revolution and helped Britain win
two world wars. It’s quite a story.
Flavour Flees into Exile
Rude people from abroad have occasionally described
British food as bland. Indeed it has sometimes been
suggested that the British Empire was created as a
by-product of generations of desperate Englishmen
roaming the world in search of a decent meal. It wasn’t
always so. Blame must largely go to the puritans who put
a stop to centuries of tasty food by condemning spices and
exotic vegetables as agents of the devil: inflamers of
sinful passions and politics leading to lecherous behaviour
and, God forbid, Roman Catholicism. Thus we gave up
good food and focused our energies on good table
manners instead. Flavour fled our foods and went into
exile in the glass jars that congregate on the English
dinner table as sauces, chutneys, extracts and ketchups
.
W.S. Gilbert summed up the Victorian upper class attitude
to food when he said “It isn’t so much what’s on the table
that matters, as what’s on the chairs”. Eton educated
George Orwell, who also come from the class that had
endured endless “cold collations” understood this too but,
as a fly-on-the-wall observer of how the other half lived,
he also understood the importance of food for social
harmony. If for Marx religion was the opiate of the
masses for George Orwell it was fish & chips. In his
1937 work
The Road to Wigan Pier
, Orwell put
fish & chips first among the home comforts that helped
keep the masses happy and "averted revolution".
It was a sentiment shared by the British government -
throughout World War II, ministers bent over backwards
to make sure fish & chips were one of the few foods that
were never rationed. Forget never had it so good we
certainly never had it so healthy.
With both quantity
and variety limited, only a balanced diet was possible.
It may well have been a bit bland but it greatly improved
the overall health of the British.
Join me then for a guided
tour through British food history with special reference to
the iconic fish supper.