English cuisine

Curry was introduced from the Indian subcontinent and adapted to English tastes from the eighteenth century with Hannah Glasse's recipe for chicken "currey".

After the rationing of the Second World War, Elizabeth David's 1950 A Book of Mediterranean Food had wide influence, bringing Italian cuisine to English homes.

English cooking has developed over many centuries since at least the time of The Forme of Cury, written in the Middle Ages around 1390 in the reign of King Richard II.

[1] The book offers imaginative and sophisticated recipes, with spicy sweet and sour sauces thickened with bread or quantities of almonds boiled, peeled, dried and ground, and often served in pastry.

[2] It was not at all, emphasises Clarissa Dickson Wright in her A History of English Food, a matter of large lumps of roast meat at every meal as imagined in Hollywood films.

An example of such a sweet purée dish for meat (it could also be made with fish) from the Beinecke manuscript is the rich, saffron-yellow "Mortruys", thickened with egg:[3] Take brawn of capons & porke, sodyn & groundyn; tempyr hit up with milk of almondes drawn with the broth.

[3]Another manuscript, Utilis Coquinario, mentions dishes such as "pyany", poultry garnished with peonies; "hyppee", a rose-hip broth; and birds such as cormorants and woodcocks.

[4] The early modern period saw the gradual arrival of printed cookery books, though the first, the printer Richard Pynson's 1500 Boke of Cokery was compiled from medieval texts.

[6] New ingredients were arriving from distant countries, too: The Good Huswifes Jewell introduced sweet potatoes (from the tropical Americas) alongside familiar medieval recipes.

The book provides recipes for various forms of bread, such as buttered loaves; for apple fritters; preserves and pickles; and a celebration cake for 100 people.

[17] James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson gives a good idea of the sort of food eaten in England in the eighteenth century by those who were reasonably prosperous.

Every decent labourer also has his garden, which is half his support; and common farmers provide plenty of beans, peas, and greens, for their hinds to eat with their bacon.

One of the first was Mrs Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1806; it went through sixty-seven editions by 1844, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain and America.

[25] Where Acton's was a book to be read and enjoyed, Beeton's, substantially written in later editions by other hands, was a manual of instructions and recipes, to be looked up as needed.

His 1846 book The Modern Cook ran through 29 editions by 1896, popularising an elaborate cuisine described throughout with French terminology, and offering bills of fare for up to 300 people.

Kitchen servants with time to make custards and puddings were replaced with instant foods in jars, or powders that the housewife could quickly mix.

[42] Written at a time of scarcity, her book began with "perhaps the most evocative and inspirational passage in the history of British cookery writing":[42] The cooking of the Mediterranean shores, endowed with all the natural resources, the colour and flavour of the South, is a blend of tradition and brilliant improvisation.

It is honest cooking too; none of the sham Grand Cuisine of the International Palace Hotel[43]All five of David's early books remained in print half a century later, and her reputation among cookery writers such as Nigel Slater and Clarissa Dickson Wright was of enormous influence.

Post-David celebrity chefs, often ephemeral, included Philip Harben, Fanny Cradock, Graham Kerr ("the galloping gourmet"), and Robert Carrier.

[45] The sociologist Bob Ashley observed in 2004 that while people in Britain might agree that the core national diet consisted of items such as the full English breakfast, roast beef with all the trimmings, tea with scones, and fish and chips, few had ever eaten the canonical English breakfast, lunch and dinner in any single day, and many probably never ate any item from the list at all regularly.

In any case, Ashley noted, the national diet changes with time, and cookery books routinely include dishes of foreign origin.

[50] English cookery has demonstrably been open to influences from abroad from as early as the thirteenth century,[72] and in the case of a few foods like sausages from Roman times.

[46] Curry was created by the arrival of the British in India in the seventeenth century, beginning as bowls of spicy sauce used, Lizzie Collingham writes, to add "bite to the rather bland flavours of boiled and roasted meats.

[89] The post-colonial Anglo-Indian dish chicken tikka masala was apparently invented in Glasgow in the early 1970s,[90][92] while balti cuisine was introduced to Britain in 1977 in Birmingham.

Chinese cuisine became established in England by the 1970s, with large cities often having a Chinatown district; the one in London's Soho developed between the two world wars, following an informal area in Limehouse.

[112] However, restaurants serving French haute cuisine developed for the upper and middle classes in England from the 1830s[113] and Escoffier was recruited by the Savoy Hotel in 1890.

[45] Despite this, the new dish was popularly attributed to France; The Times recorded that "potatoes chipped and fried in the French manner were introduced in Lancashire with great success about 1871.

In the mid-20th century, pubs were drinking establishments with little emphasis on the serving of food, other than "bar snacks", such as pork scratchings,[123] pickled eggs, salted crisps, and peanuts, which helped to increase beer sales.

"Pub grub" expanded to include British food items such as steak and kidney pudding, shepherd's pie, fish and chips, bangers and mash, Sunday roast, and pasties.

The years of wartime shortages and rationing certainly did impair the variety and flavour of English food during the twentieth century, but the nation's cooking recovered from this with increasing prosperity and the availability of new ingredients from soon after the Second World War.