The dishes that made us great

Apr 18 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

MAYBE I’d have been better off if it hadn’t happened, but I bumped into an old girlfriend recently. And both “bumped into” and “old” are apt words as she was considerably bigger than how I remember her and much older than I expected.

Once shock gave way to logic, I realised it wasn’t surprising she looked so middle-aged as she is actually the same age as me – but obviously I’ve managed the maturation period better. But while I can accept that the years may have been financially kind to her and enabled her to eat enough to acquire the extra weight, could it really be that she was always so unappealing? Wasn’t she even a little bit pretty once?

It can be so disconcerting how things change. Most of us have what we’re told are rose-tinted memories of how good things were in our past.

I used to adore really good fish and chips but find them so hard to find these days. I’m convinced that they were better more often than they are now.

And if you think about it, all the classic dishes that we think of as quintessentially British wouldn’t exist in folklore if they hadn’t been good once. For too long now we’ve been ashamed of British cuisine. We’ve cowered under the ridicule of the French as they sneer at Les Rosbifs and our attempts at cooking.

We seem to be spellbound by the French and their cooking methods. Much of this is down to the genius of Escoffier, the 19th Century chef, but we don’t need to be a slave to his dishes and their language. There’s actually nothing wrong with boiled beef and carrots but it sounds like a joke. A pot roast of beef in the British way is a dish fit for a king or a president – if you know how to cook it and use the best ingredients.

Austerity during and following the Second World War, where ironically my parents’ generation gave so much to help stop the French being forced to eat sauerkraut, made us accept poor food and forget how good our long-established dishes could be.

For instance, steak and kidney is a marriage made in heaven.

Sometimes it seems we don’t know how clever we once were and have forgotten how to do our own thing.

But things are changing and now there’s a movement to rediscover our proud and talented past.

Prawn cocktail, pork pie, Yorkshire pudding are all delicacies as good as any food in the world if prepared, cooked and served correctly. It’s why they now appear on our menus along with Stargazy pie and corned beef hash – with the beef corned by ourselves.

But thinking back to my old girlfriend, I should have had faith in my initial judgment. Of course I didn’t go out with a gargoyle all those years ago. Just like the steak and kidney pie, she was once obviously quite a dish. However, these days, the pie’s more attractive.