I am fascinated by food trends as they develop over the years here in Britain and of course in Birmingham in particular. In medieval times people of various strata of English society consumed the same food for centuries depending on their social status - a peasant could not eat what a king ate. Now, there are many dishes available to the reasonably well off as they are to a monarch, even the less well off may eat them if only by stretching their purses or more likely their credit cards, to give themselves a special treat. And people are not eating what they have had for centuries, rather tastes change rapidly in line with the advance of communications technology - if television shows a notable chef producing a new dish then other chefs may copy it and the watching public will demand a chance to try it for themselves. Now we not only eat our food but photograph it and some of it is indeed very photogenic.
Chefs and restaurateurs have cleverly made us want to go to them so that they can serve us the cheapest cuts of meat in tiny quantities along with cheaper types of fish, odd bits of viscera to which the English thought they had said goodbye when rationing was ended in the early 1950s all served with odd grains and minute amounts of vegetables which of course are said to be good for us all served very prettily but extravagantly priced.
With the arrival of Fine Dining all sorts of food stuff found it's way on to restaurant plates. The new items which no restauranteur would have dreamt of serving previously unless he were French and accustomed to the dreadful quality of food originating from that country which had satisfied the taste of peasants for centuries, were excused by all sorts of fatuous reasoning:- "I want to use the WHOLE of the animal", "I want to use SUSTAINABLE fish" "This (cheap) cut of meat is much TASTIER". A lot of spinning went on and the English dining public fell for it.
How far can it go? We have already plumbed the depths of cheap ingredients and it's hard to think of items which can cost less for chefs to use. Well I suppose, 'I'm a Celebrity' fashion, there's still kangaroo anuses and witchetty grubs and no doubt someone will get there in time even if there isn't a Chef who has yet arrived there. But we've pretty well reached the end of the road of what an Englishman will eat and pay a large sum for the torture of doing so.
But it's surprising what has survived for 15 or more years and is still out there. A particular bête noir of mine is pork belly. I remember when it was a cheap cut and respectable people thought it was below their dignity to consume this fatty lump in need of slow slow cooking. A dear elderly aunt of mine loved it - she called it belly draft which may just be a term local to The West Midlands - saying she preferred the fat, full of flavour, to the meat but to be honest the texture to me was just unpleasant no matter what it tasted like.
I wish chefs could forget about the existence of pork belly and consign it to history and give chefs in forty years time the chance to rediscover it. And if chefs must cook it then at least cook it well. I used to cook it for my aunt and it really was rather good even if I say so myself. I had a very good pork belly dish last year at Paul Foster's Salt and Glyn Purnell still serves it up reasonably admirably from time to time. But this week I had one of the most horrible pork belly dishes that I can recall, not in the West Midlands I might add though it was in a restaurant I have found to be generally very pleasing, which usually represents good enough value and with a seaview to boot which ought to be good enough to put it in the running for a Bib Gourmand. But this one dish would have been enough to spoil its chances of even a Michelin Plate. I have the feeling that the committed young Head Chef must have been away to enable such a dish to be let loose in his restaurant.
A large lump of belly was served containing a thin streak of not-very-nice-tasting meat and a vast array of fat between it and the spongy skin with no hint of crispiness about it. There was some crispiness served on the plate, adorned as it was by the thinnest sliver of crackling which was actually hard and potentially tooth-breaking and little black pudding bon-bons which added to the complete failure of the dish by being pleasingly crispy on the outside but horribly overcooked inside with the contents being dry and unpalatable. Nor did the disaster end there - the mash potato was claggy and lacking in any butteriness, the remarkably large half-'slow braised vanilla carrot' was seriously overcooked and I have no recall of being aware of the Thatcher's cider sauce being present on the plate so unmemorable was it. And then there were leaves, probably pea shoots, strewn inappropriately over the dish and, attempting to add a bizarrely twee finish to the dish's appearance which was otherwise particularly rustic, a couple of seriously out-of-place edible viola flowers. No wonder I retain my dislike of pork belly. This dish did nothing to make me want chefs to keep the cut in their repertoires.
It had all started so well. Now we step back a couple of eras. The Sixties to the Eighties. Fondly remembered by all those old enough - Prawn cocktail - martini glass, little crustaceans, Marie Rose sauce, lettuce, finely chopped and hopefully not too limp, a slice of almost tasteless English-grown tomato and a couple of slivers of cucumber. The starter gave Chef's rendition of the classic item, reproducing it nicely and serving up a somewhat improved version. Served with mildly toasted white bread which was the only failure of the rebirth as the dish would have been so much nicer with little slices of nicely buttered thinly-sliced fresh white bread as it was in its own proper time in history. The only other problem with this starter was the way the cocktail glass was balanced precariously on a narrow board which was attractive visually but practically difficult because it was too narrow to use without its falling off the board. Oh yes!, there were more violas though I admit they looked more appropriate on the prawn cocktail than they did on the pork belly. Still, it was a splendid presentation and a tasty dish.
At other times during this week I have had a couple of delicious fish dishes - below is shown a gloriously rustic but thoroughly tasty dish of pan fried hake (not a water bath in sight), samphire, crispy capers and nicely sautéed potatoes. When you're dining at the seaside there's something special about a well-cooked fish dish especially when it's up against a rather less well-cooked plate of pork belly.
Which eventually brings me round to where I was intending to be. Food trends. In 2011 The Caterer published an article on the various eras of food offered in British restaurants in the 60 years that The Good Food Guide had been published since its first edition in 1951. As I was born only a couple of years after this first edition it pretty well tells the story of the food eaten in England since I was a child.
Mercifully I was spared rationing with the final parts of it ending about the time I was born, the now, in this era of Corbyn, much admired Labour government of Clement Attlee having allowed it to continue for many years after the end of the Second World War and causing it to earn the general opprobrium of the population which had voted for it in 1945. I was therefore born into a world of fresh fruit and sweets and good quality cuts of meat which the generation before me could only dream of. Unlimited quantities of eggs and real good quality bread and bacon and anything that a hotel guest here in England might now expect as his right as part of his 'Full English breakfast'. If anyone who thinks that a Labour government is a good idea let them read the annual novels of Angela Thirkell who records the demoralising and sapping nature of rationing when imposed on a population which is no longer at war. It's no wonder that Britain earned a reputation for poor cuisine in the Fifties - no-one had had anything edible to eat for the previous 13 or years or so.
The Caterer labelled the 1950s the age of Good Pubs and Steakhoses and you can hardly blame the British of that time for enjoying the cuisine emanating from such establishments since good beer and good steaks were prizes they had long been denied by War and the socialists' political dogma. The dishes which came into vogue included Game soup, oeufs en cocotte, pâté de maison, salmon mayonnaise, chicken Maryland, mixed grill, sherry trifle, crêpes Suzette and rum baba (if you must, baba au rhum). Ah yes, I may have been very young then but I remember them well and some of these old friends, having travelled through a phase when chefs felt they should serve them 'deconstructed' (presumably because that was easier than serving them 'constructed') are, like the poor, with us always.
And so The Sixties sprung themselves on us with rock and roll giving way to pop. The Caterer labels the time, 'The Rise of The Restaurant' which resulted from Britain's growing wealth reaching the middle class and the skilled working class who felt a social status pressure to start dining out. In came previously unimagined foods which resulted in dishes such as avocado with prawns, smoked fish mousse, melon with port, coq au vin, steak Diane, trout with banana and almonds, zabaglione, chocolate rum mousse and omelette flambéd with rum, kirsch or Grand Marnier. Much of which, viewed now, sounds rather gruesome.
The Seventies - 'The Culinary Greats' - brought Britain, but not Birmingham of course, the Roux Brothers, Raymond Blanc, Niko Ladenis and Anton Mosimann - not an English name among them - and foodies, if they existed and I suppose they did, were in raptures about mushrooms with Gruyère, garlic and white wine, smoked mackerel pâté, scampi provençale, duck a l'orange, beef en croûte, chocolate roulade, chicken Kiev and crème brûlée - presumably food was sophisticated if a number of vowels in the titles of the dishes were adorned with accents or had names taken from continental places or were, quite simply, a painful Franglais.
The Eighties - 'Home grown talent' - 'home-grown' chefs including Shaun Hill (see Blog 7) who was Chef Proprietor at The Merchant House in Ludlow as well as others influenced by Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson using native produce from small local suppliers. Nouvelle cuisine which had arrived in the seventies was still hanging about in the early eighties. Trendy dishes were Twice cooked soufflé, gravad lax, watercress mousse, steak au poivre, mignons of Angus beef with Marsala and pink peppercorn sauce, steamed fillets of salmon and sole with a leek sauce, medallions of veal with tarragon and saffron sauce, tarte fine aux pommes, lemon tart, summer pudding and passion fruit soufflé. Still a lot of words with accents and still a good smattering of Franglais.
The Nineties - The Rise of the Pub and Grand restaurants - British dishes have finally become trendy and more casualness ensures an extension of the gastronomic franchise to most of the population. Now we have chicken boudin with fennel and saffron, marinated fillet of salmon with lime, ginger and coriander salsa, layered terrine of fois gras and chicken on a Californian muscat jelly, rack of lamb with red pepper and olive compote, blackened rib of beef with Cajun spices, sea bass steamed in a parcel with spring onions, ginger, shiitake mushrooms, lime juice and sesame oil and caramelised lemon tart. The Gastropub had arrived.
The Oughties - The rise of Britain (and Birmingham) as a culinary destination - Television promoted the restaurant industry's profile and raised awareness of food with the general public. Celebrity chefs further raised the profile of Fine food and the public was keen to try the glorious-looking dishes and confections they found on the various media. Those would could afford it were prepared to pay a lot of money for fine dishes but had high expectations of what they were spending their money on. Culinary fashions gave us Beetroot and black pudding salad with a poached egg, smoked haddock risotto with saffron and curry oil, slow-braised pig cheeks (cheaper even than pork belly) with potato purée and grain mustard sauce, saddle of venison with red cabbage and beetroot beignets, wild sea bass with scallops, rocket, asparagus and caviar beurre blanc, mackerel fillets with pine nuts, rosemary and apple sauce, vanilla pannacotta with Alphonse mango, warm chocolate fondant with pistachio ice-cream and, finally, passion fruit soufflé with passion fruit and banana sorbet. Not many accents and Franglais virtually extinguished.
The Teenies or whatever we call this decade - The Rise and Fall of Fine Dining - where does one go when one has found the cheapest food possible and dressed it up to make it look exquisite, subjected it to extraordinary gastronomy to make it taste exquisite and sold it at such a price that you HAVE to belief that it is indeed exquisite? Forage on land and sea for ever more obscure herbs, cater to the increasing trend to vegetarian - nay, vegan - food, concoct dishes centred on ancient varieties of fruit, vegetable and animal and continue to resist the philanthropic urge to dump your water bath. So now we have Lamb sweetbread with asparagus, girolle mushrooms, garlic and parsley, Coquelet with hispi cabbage, apple and mushroom, Cornish mackerel with a salad of heritage tomatoes, lumpfish roe and basil, Cornish crab, chorizo mayonnaise and honeycomb, Black oyster with cucumber and charcoal, Orkney scallop with nasturtium and bonito butter and Foraged mushroom dashi with sea spaghetti (all these have been on recent menus in leading Birmingham restaurants).
English society has changed beyond recognition since I was eating my off-ration sweeties as a child. Now we live under a new tyranny of suppression of free speech lest it result in the causing of offence. There is also the offence of using someone else's culture to one's own ends. Few people do this more than chefs as evidenced by the above dishes which borrow something from other people's cultures around the world. Perhaps this will be the culinary trend of The Twenties - the imperative to avoid offence and not use dishes from other people's cultures. Which means I suppose that we may all be back to dining on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, faggots and peas, Lancashire hotpot and Cod and chips again, all no doubt with scatterings of freshly foraged wood sorrel and burdock and, of course, edible violas, to jazz them up a bit.
