The Rest Is History - 286: England: Beef and Liberty

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

England: Roast Beef and Liberty While it has now been dethroned by the mighty Tikka Masala and the moreish fish and chips, Britain's most iconic dish was once - indisputably - Roast Beef.  In the final episode of this World Cup marathon, Tom and Dominic chart the dish’s prominence over the years and how, as an affront to the French, it became a rallying point for British patriotism and conservatism. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the fields of Cressy and Agincourt. The renowned King Arthur is generally looked upon as the first who ever sat down to a whole roasted ox, which was certainly the best way to preserve the gravy. And it is further added that he and his knights sat about it at his round table, and usually consumed it to the very bones, before they would enter on any debate of moment. The Black Prince was a professed lover of the brisket, not to mention the history of the sirloin, or the institution of the order of beef eaters,

which are all so many evident and undeniable marks of the great respect which our warlike predecessors have paid to this excellent food. The tables of the ancient gentry of this nation were covered thrice a day with hot roast beef, and I am credibly informed by an antiquary who has searched the registers in which the bills of fare of the court are recorded, that instead of tea and bread and butter, which have prevailed of late years, the maids of honour in Queen Elizabeth's time were allowed three rumps of beef for their breakfast. Now that, Dominic, as you will well know, because you sent that quote to me, was Joseph Addison writing in the Tatler in 1710 about roast beef yes and today we are looking at England our own native land um and you have chosen as your

theme this great theme of roast beef and the role that it's played in notions of liberty and distinctiveness and John Bull and all that kind of stuff. Yes. Well, England, Tom, I mean, so much to choose from because, of course, we are both English. But I thought, why not choose one of the most English things of all, which is roast beef or indeed beef and liberty? That's the theme of today's podcast. Now, of course, for you, this is slightly, it's ambiguous ground, isn't it? Because while I'm sure you would style yourself a very patriotic Englishman, you are not, it's fair to, isn't it? Because while I'm sure you would style yourself a very patriotic Englishman, you are not, it's fair to say, one of life's great beef eaters.

No, not really. As in not at all. Yeah, not at all. No. Well, I mean, listeners can draw their own conclusions about the patriotism or otherwise of Tom Holland. Well, but I love liberty. You love liberty. So beef and liberty, that's the slogan that's stamped on the buttons of the waistcoat of the members of the Beefsteak Club.

It is indeed, and we should be coming to the Beefsteak Club. So roast beef, today roast beef, I suppose, competes with fish and chips, doesn't it? And chicken tikka masala is one of the great emblematic national dishes. We probably eat less beef per capita than at any time, I would guess, for centuries, wouldn't you say? Because there's so much suspicion of red meat now for health reasons and all this sort of stuff. And also, of course, mad cow disease, I'm sure, delivered quite a fatal blow.

I think it did deliver it a blow. But the idea of the English as beef eating, so the French, french of course call us so it's not purely our self-image it's also the way we are perceived as we call them yeah as we call them frogs and we should be coming to frogs and the contrast between frogs and roast beef in a second but the association between the the english in particular and, is an old one. So in Shakespeare's Henry V, which I think is commonly agreed to have been written in 1599, there's a scene just before the Battle of Agincourt, and the French are talking. The Constable of France and various other knights and commanders

are talking. And one Frenchman says, that island of England breeds very valiant creatures. Their mastiffs are of unmatchable courage. And the constable of France says, the men do sympathize with the mastiffs in robustious and rough coming on, leaving their wits with their wives, and then give them great meals of beef and iron and steel. They will eat like wolves and fight like devils. So even there, at the end of the 16th century, you have a hint of some themes that will become very familiar in this episode. So the association of the English with beef and with mastiffs or bulldogs and with bulls and with fighting like animals and with this sort of

primitive animal spirits and lack of sophistication. Now, this, of course, is Shakespeare talking. It's not the French talking. And why would beef seem to matter? Well, an obvious reason, Tom, even though you don't eat beef, is that in Tudor England, a lot of people did. So obviously, people let beef all over Europe. But I think it's pretty fair to say that the Tudors eat more meat than their neighbours do. Tudor English men and women. And why is that? Well, so there's a brilliant book on this, which I should have flagged up already, actually, called Beef and Liberty by a chap called Ben Rogers.

It was published about 20 years ago. An absolutely wonderful journey through this topic from which I have stolen mercilessly balance and poems and so on. And he's speaking to you, isn't it? Because the image is, well, I suppose John Bull.

Well, we'll come to John Bull. John Bull is literally, I mean, he, he begins as a bull, doesn't he? Well,

I'm not sure whether he does. There is an association between the English and bulls. I think John Bull, well, we'll come to John Bull. I shall with his waistcoat. Yes, okay, I'm sorry. His pewter tankard and all this sort of stuff. But it's the embodiment of non-metropolitan.

Yeah. The solid sense of the English gentleman, country gentleman, his waistcoat straining as he devours yet another haunch of beef yeah that's pretty much solid common sense exactly absolutely right um outraged of chipping norton i think it's it's not even outraged perhaps i mean no no it's pragmatic and phlegmatic yeah i mean you know hysterical overreaction that's the kind of thing that Frenchmen and Londoners get up to. Exactly. That enthusiasm of all kinds, I think, Tom, is the enemy.

Episcene. Right. I've got some great quotes coming about Londoners and their metropolitan foppish ways, which you will be delighted by. So Ben Rogers, in his book, he says there are obvious reasons why people would eat more beef. As we've talked about many times going back to our Anglo-Saxon podcasts, England is very rich in farmland compared with a lot of European countries. You know, it's got lots of lowlands, green verdant lowlands. It's perfect for dairy farming. It is producing a lot of kind of milk and butter and beef. Over the course of the

16th century, although there are general price rises, so it's a time of great inflation then as now, the price of beef falls relative to other products. So beef is much more readily available. And the one way we can tell how much people ate and how distinctive this was is from travellers' stories. So first of all, English travellers who go abroad. So Ben Rogers gives a brilliant example of a chap called Sir Richard Morrison, who goes to Venice in the 1570s. And he says he is astounded by the food. And he says there is more meat eaten in two months in London than an entire year in Venice. So he's struck. Well, not many cows in Venice. So he's struck. Well, not many cows in Venice.

Not many cows, exactly. But also there's an Italian traveler called Alessandro Magno who comes to London about the same time. And he writes in Italian, I assume, it's extraordinary to see the great quantity and quality of meat, beef and mutton that comes every day from the slaughterhouses in the city the beef is not expensive and they roast it whole in large pieces for those who cannot see it it's almost impossible to believe that they could eat so much meat in one city alone and as time goes on i think over the next let's

say 150 years beef becomes steadily cheaper relative to other meats partly because of enclosures. So farmland is becoming much more productive. So there's just more meat, more butter, more of this sort of stuff being produced. And also there's the agrarian revolution. Exactly, the agrarian revolution. So there's just a sort of sense that there's just more of it, and probably better quality. And travellers from abroad remark on it more and more as time goes on. So in 1698, a Frenchman called Henri Misson,

he says at that point, as early as 1698, it is common practice to have a huge piece of roast beef on Sundays, of which people stuff until they can swallow no more and they eat the rest cold

the other six days of the week. Now, of course, he could have been writing that as late as the 1950s, but he's writing that in the 1690s. Is there a kind of an association on the part of foreign observers between the eating of beef and the sense of the English as simultaneously violent and phlegmatic, which seems to be a kind of an abiding theme?

No, I don't. Well, I don't think they make a direct association, but it's absolutely right that the same travellers will be making those points. So you're absolutely right that the English are perceived as being very violent, disputatious, and yet at the same time... Ponderous.

Gruff and stoical and all these sort of things. Like bulls or oxen, perhaps. Exactly. Yes, exactly. So you can sort of see why people would make that, the sort of red-bloodedness, if you like. And the converse is that presumably when the English go, say, to France and they see them all eating frogs and vegetables and onions and things,

they think it's very poor. And I suppose the archetype of that is William Hogarth's painting. Well, we should come to Hogarth. He will play a key part. Okay, sorry. So I'm jumping the gun again. That's fine, Tom. It's good to anticipate.

Slacking it up. Okay. So the English are definitely eating an awful lot of beef. Ben Rogers calls us the Texans of the early modern world. I like that. And I think that's, for our Texan listeners, that's a comparison I welcome. If it's associated with any one class in particular, he thinks it's associated with yeoman, so yeoman farmers. So people will-

Okay, so not the gentry. Well, the gentry will eat beef. And in fact, French, some of these travelers do remark on this. A Swiss traveler in 1726 called Monsieur Mural, he says they'll eat roast beef as well at a king's table as at a tradesman's. So there's actually an odd sense in which the eating of roast beef is, is it democratic? That's probably the wrong word, but it's universal. But also an index of wealth, presumably. Yes, although it's not that expensive. Again, the point is, it's not that expensive. So if

you're eating stuffed quails or something, then you're rich. But presumably, it's quite expensive on the continent relative to the expense in england yes exactly i think that's absolutely right i think it's because england has that still this farmland or whatever i'm not a massive agrarian specialist it's fair to say tom um it's up there with my knowledge of portuguese sailing technology uh but because we have all this beef is readily available slaughterhouses pumping out all this stuff if slaughterhouses can i mean the stuff they're pumping out actually i don't even want to think about i think that's sausage factories yeah exactly food manufacturers but it's associated with yeoman farmers and of course the yeoman of

the guard are known as beef eaters of course they are yeah and um and how long does that go back how far does that go back well i think does that go back? Well, I think that goes back centuries, actually. There are various explanations about why they're called beef eaters, but Rogers points out that right up to the 19th century, if you're a yeoman of the guard, you are given a ration of beef every day. So if you're a yeoman of the guard at St. James's Palace, you are still being given 24 pounds of beef a day, which is a lot of beef. Yeah, it is. Now, here's a key thing. How do people cook it? You day, which is a lot of beef. Yeah, it is. Now, here's a key thing. How do people cook it?

You might think this is a bit abstruse, but actually this comes back to this point about liberty, and we'll get to it. I'll explain why. Not with garlic. Right. If you're in Italy or in France, the way they have their meat in the early modern period is they will often fry it or braise it or stew it.

The English like to roast it. Now, I didn't know this, actually. I find this fascinating. The word roast and rotate have the same kind of derivation. Roti. So they're basically the same word. And the way you would roast it, you've got an open fire, you put it on a spit and you rotate it initially by hand. But over time, I mean, that's very time consuming and boring. And you need a scullion. What if you don't have a scullion?

You get a dog to do it, Tom. How do you get a dog to do it? So they basically trap a dog on a treadmill. The dog revolves the spit. Wow. Beef or liberty. Yeah. Well, not liberty for dogs.

No liberty for the dogs. But over time, they develop these things called meat jacks, which are mechanical, and they have weights. How do they work, Dominic? It's a complicated system of weights, Tom. I know you wouldn't understand. Weights going up and down and the thing rotating. I think that's a technical explanation.

Thanks for clearing that up. So by the – Dr. Johnson, I think, grew up in a home in Litchfield with a meat jack. He talks about meat jack. Of course he would. Dr. Johnson is the physical embodiment of a beef eater. So a Finnish writer called Per Kalm, he visited in the late 18th century, and he said they have meat jacks in every house in England, which was clearly an exaggeration. But maybe they had them in every house he visited. I mean, that's perfectly plausible. So roasting meat is absolutely part of the sort of national, it's a national custom, I suppose you can say. So how do you eat it? So you've roasted it, you have it in its own juices, you have it in, that's its gravy. You do not have it with a fancy stock or a sauce, which is why Voltaire said the English have a hundred different religions, but only one sauce.

And this is the sauce, you see. So you don't have any fancy sauce. You have it with this gravy. You have it with condiments. So traditionally, English mustard, I don't really know why, possibly, I guess, lack of access to spices. But English mustard had always been stronger than continental. Surely that reflects our love of liberty.

Maybe. We're just strong people, Tom. Yeah, there's just no Frenchified nonsense about our mustard. In England, mustard was mixed with horseradish to make it stronger. And horseradish itself was mixed with vinegar. In France, they mixed it with cream, which made it more mellow, mild. Typical. But in England, people mixed it with vinegar. So these continental travelers who were tucking

into their beef were kind of... Yes, exactly. Sort of sobbing with agony as they eat their horseradish and mustard. The other thing you would have it with, Tom, are you a big believer in puddings? I am. Yes. Because it's my father. What kind of puddings do you like? We never go out for a meal. And he will always say, is there any pud?

And there always is. But he would eat that after his main course. Am I right? Yes, he would. Yes. Well, you see, if you were in the 18th century, that would be very strange and outlandish behavior. You would eat your pudding alongside. and it would be a pudding. Yes, of course. So made of suet or something, or conceivably a pie.

And so originally, we in England, I know we have a lot of Australian and American listeners who probably find it weird, our terminology for what they would call desserts, that we call them puddings, even when they're not a pudding. Originally, a pudding was a kind of cousin of the sausage. So it was like a sort of skin. So it's like a kidney pudding. Exactly. Ben Rogers says the closest you can come to a pudding

is actually eating haggis. Haggis is basically a pudding. So skin stuffed with stuff. And interestingly, at this point, so early modern England, people didn't distinguish between sweet and savoury, and they'd shove the two in together. And that- So sweet meats.

Well, this explains to me something that has always puzzled me, which is if I say to you, would you like a mince pie? Yeah. It could mean- It's the sweet one. Right. Yes. A pudding with mince in it. Go and buy me some mince meat, Tom. Yeah. What would you come back with? Will you bring a mince pie yeah it's it could mean it's the sweet one or right yes a pudding with mince in it

go and buy me some mince meat tom yeah what would you come back with will you bring a minced meat or mince meat which is completely different and is sweet so christmas pudding is a kind of the last remnant one of the last remnants of this world is a plum pudding but people would have had puddings where they'd have shoved all kinds of stuff in them. I mean, this is an astonishing diet then. So you're having your roast beef and then you're having a meat pudding at the same time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, no wonder we're rushing around conquering the world with all that amount of meat. And you're washing this down, not with French wines, but with ale or porter or fortified wine port.

Yeah. You know, from Portugal. From our oldest ally. So it's fair to say it's quite heavy yeah it's quite a heavy diet yeah i mean gout must be a constant risk well this is i mean who is it who was a three bottle man was it william pitt the younger yeah we were talking about in our prime minister's podcast so three bottles puddings beef i mean it's a great diet it's amazing that people live beyond the age of 40 and again am i i hope i'm not jumping the gun it's a great diet it's amazing that people live beyond the age of

40 and again am i i hope i'm not jumping the gun there's a famous gilray cartoon isn't there of a weedy thin frenchman gnawing on an onion exactly yes a massively fat englishman with gout and bright red nose yeah slot with tucking into an entire roast haunch of roast beef and gravy dribbling down his waistcoat that's exactly right tom and you're not jumping the gun at all so what the french are doing is really important in this story hence the beef and liberty so the french cooking is very different so what's happened by the 18th century is that french cooking has evolved from the court it's very top down and as you would expect in a kind of absolutist court, sophistication and order

rather than simplicity is the sort of watchword. And so by the 18th century, you have the birth of something called, would you believe, Nouvelle Cuisine. So this is where the expression Nouvelle Cuisine comes from. The Nouvelle Cuisine of the 70s and 80s, kind of tiny portions, is merely the latest iteration of this so it's the french who divide sweet and savory into different courses which we wouldn't have done in britain uh it's the french who say vegetables are actually worthwhile and you could um you can cook them and fry them up or whatever or put them in a sauce it's also the french who have soups rather than broths and the french who have so what's the difference between a soup and a broth?

Well, a soup will be creamy and based on a stock. It'll be smooth and creamy and there'll be lots of stock. Basically, it's not like a broth where you'll just shove a load of stuff into some water. And let it all... Yeah. Yeah. And crucially, they will serve their meat very differently. So they will stuff it, they will often stew it in stock,

and then they'll serve it with a special rich sauce. And this is why if you go through 18th century English culture, novels and whatnot, you will see all the time the dreaded words ragout and fricassee, which are regarded with absolute scorn and contempt. So French cookbooks of the 18th century will say, here's a recipe for a lovely ragout. This is very much a la mode. So funnily enough, even though we think of French cooking now as very conservative, in the 18th century, of course, it's very forward-looking. English cookbooks at the

same time will say, there's nothing fashionable in this book. This is traditional, old-fashioned. Unless it's being, you know, Holland House and similar Whiggish strongholds. Tom, have you been secretly reading up on this? No, but I- These are great insights. These are very good insights. Thank you. It is worth doing this podcast with you.

You do, you have great historical instincts. Thank you very much. I may not know where Uruk-I is, but- Yes, exactly. Well, as we discovered- I know what they ate at Holland House. Exactly. The aptly named Holland House

where people are eating metropolitan fancy foods. So yes, the key thing is that the French have their way, the English have theirs, but the French way is making great inroads in the course of the 18th century. So in 1747, a guy called Robert Campbell writes a book called The London Tradesman, advising people about apprenticeships. And in the course of this, he goes off on a massive rant in which he says, in the days of good Queen Elizabeth, so harking back as in that quotation from the Tatler at the beginning that you started with, to this idea, this fantasy that under good Queen Bess, Protestant England, everybody ate beef six times a day or whatever. He says,

in the days of good Queen Elizabeth, when mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food, our cookery was plain as plain and simple as our manners. It was not then a science or mystery and required no conjuration. But he says, we have of late years refined ourself out of that simple taste and conformed our palates to meats and drinks, dressed after the French fashion. The natural taste of fish or flesh has become nauseous

to our fashionable stomach. We abhor that anything should appear at our tables and its native properties. He says all this new-fangled French food is dressed in masquerades, seasoned with slow poisons, and every dish pregnant with nothing. Sounds quite Daily Mail. I was going to say, it's like one of Giles Corran's Sunday Times restaurant reviews. I'd like him to end one of his reviews if he's listening. Every dish was pregnant with nothing. But why is he having this rant? Well, it is precise, as you say, because people,

they're aptly named Holland House, are eating a lot of French food. So Ramonas. Right. In the course of the 18th century, there is a kind of transformation of manners. We really should do more podcasts about the 18th century. We're going to, aren't we? It's such an interesting time. We're going to. So people are adopting China and glassware and cotton and tea and coffee and all these things. And there's this kind of european it's perceived europeanization of english customs and this has a a distinct political meaning because as you said it's associated with the wig grandees with robert

ballpole and in particular with the pelham family who basically succeed him and dominate british politics in the 1740s and 1750s thomas and henry pelham so thomas pelham who's the duke of newcastle who's our fourth prime minister, colossally, unbelievably rich and associated with this sort of Whig world of all these mercantile links and travel and diplomacy and sort of sense of cosmopolitanism, I suppose. But also not necessarily sound

on the fundamentals of British liberty. Is that right? I think there's a slight perception that the Whigs are bad. I mean, the categories are so slippery in the mid-18th century. I mean, they've changed from what they were in the early 18th century. But I think there's a sort of sense of corruption, of having lost touch with this kind of broad base of the country and the common man.

By the time of the heyday of Holland House in the backdrop of the French Revolution, they would basically welcome Jacobin. They are citizens of the world. To set up a guillotine in Trafalgar Square and all that kind of stuff. I don't know whether that's true earlier on, but definitely they're associated with the Tories, will associate them with greed and corruption, with luxury.

And with the city. Yeah, with the city, with continentalism. And the city is interesting you say that. So in his book, Ben Rogers says basically it sometimes seems like the 18th century is one long moral panic. One long sort of howl, even though England is actually doing so well in the 18th century the one long howl of hysteria about foreign ways so there's a preacher he's got a lovely quote from um um john brown who attacks what he calls the town effeminacy of uh of london and rogers says to most rural gentlemen that's me the capital was a malignant growth a place where courtiers and placemen pimps and fops

pastry cooks and hairdressers united to drain the country of its wealth and i did think of you tom did you because he says the key figure in the tory imagination of the mid-18th century is the aristocratic fop or bow a snobbish mincing thing as smooth and rich as a french pate yeah well whenever i see a french pate. Yeah, well. Whenever I see a French pate, Tom, I think of you. So cookery becomes this terrific battleground. And you did the quote from the Tatler. That's 1710. So it's happening quite early on, and it runs all the way

through the 18th century. Just to kind of close this half of the podcast, you see this in cookbooks. And the most famous cookbook of the 18th century is hannah glass's cookbook the art of cookery made plain and easy which was published in 1747 we i think we talked about this a little bit in the podcast we did right at the beginning of the rest is history with pen vogler remember that tom history of food yeah and um hannah glass's book is published it's only just a couple of years after the 45.

So the French have behaved very badly in the 45, kind of tacitly supporting Bonnie, Prince Charlie and whatnot. It's also, I think the War of the Austrian Succession has started. So we're fighting the French. We're basically always fighting the French, aren't we, in the 18th century. And Hannah Glass says in this book, I mean, the title itself tells you, cookery made plain and easy. That speaks of this ethos. She says, don't use French sauces. Don't copy French food. It's too rich. It's too expensive. It's bad for you. It's unpatriotic, all this sort of stuff. But she knows that Frenchness is kind of seeping into the country because she says so much is the blind folly of this age that they would rather be imposed upon by a french booby and give encouragement to a

good english cook well i think that's a very stirring and patriotic note on which to end our first course which has consisted of beef uh if you come back for the second half we'll find out what's what's being served up in the second course i suspect it may be beef i see you saying for more beef i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to the second course of our serving of roast beef. And as promised, Dominic, have you got more beef for us?

It's nothing but beef. There's an American phrase, isn't there? Where's the beef? It's here. It's here. That's exactly where it is. So what turns this into a kind of national crusade? Where does Beef and Liberty comes from?

Well, Tom, I know that we have one or two actors who listen to this podcast. For example, the actor Samuel West sometimes contacts us on Twitter. I think it's fair to say he's not a man who's likely to address a benefit of the young conservatives. Isn't that true, Tom? But he plays vets, doesn't he? Does he? Yes. So he'd be very much all over beef.

Well, he'd have his hand up. He would. Anyway, listen, surprisingly, the heroes of this story, the champions of patriotic cookery, are actors and artists. So very much not the people you would think of to be standing against the sophistication of the continent. Brian Blessed, you could imagine. Yeah.

Beef. Was that how Brian Blessed, you could imagine. Yeah. Boof. Was that how Brian Blessed would do it? Yes. So I think you've lost all our international audience. Oh, they've seen Flash Gordon. Gordon's alive. Boof. That's how he talks.

Brilliant. This is top historical analysis. So actors have been very concerned about foreign influence all through the 18th century because something terrible has happened in 1710. Do you know what that is, Dom? No. It's the arrival of opera. Oh God. Yes. So the Spectator and the Tatler, these two landmark journals, which had been founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, I think it is, which were great sort of advocates of beef. They had been campaigning very vigorously against the opera.

They had demanded a return to manly entertainments. So what is a manly entertainment? An old-fashioned English play. Torturing bulls? No. Killing dogs? Cock fighting? Killing rat?

Ratting? Who needs opera you wouldn't see that on the stage though would you you wouldn't watch a rat being tortured on the stage

no probably not I'm going to campaign for that in my column the arts column yeah bring back

cockfighting yeah brilliant that'll go down well in middle England. Anyway, listen, Jonathan Swift was also an opponent of Upridge. You know what he said about it, Tom? What did he say?

He said it was wholly unsuitable to our northern climate. Why? He said it was unnatural. Would you believe? Well, it's not natural, is it? It's not natural. I mean, no one could claim it's natural. But that's the point.

Well, I know that's the point. Anyway. That's the whole genius of it. There was a great movement in the theatre to resist this. And we, a year ago, did a podcast about Anglo-Italian relations. We were talking about macaronis. Yes, we did. And the resistance to macaronis.

And this is actually part of that whole spectrum. So the idea of sort of foreign cookery, foreign music, foreign fashion, all being wrapped up together in a great ragu. Yeah. So the real person who sort of drives this is a great friend of the rest is history. It is top investigator, novelist. Oh, brilliant. Ghost hunter.

And ghost hunter, Henry Fielding. So Henry Fielding writes an attack on Walpole in the 1730s called The Grub Street Opera. Important to stress, it's not really an opera. It's more a musical, an old-fashioned, good, traditional English musical. And he has a cook who sings a song in the musical. She says she hates French ways and French politeness.

And she sings this song, which I shall not sing, but I shall read it to you. When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food, it ennobled our veins and enriched our blood. Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good. Oh, the roast beef of old England and old English roast beef. But since we have learnt from all vapour in France to eat their ragouts as well as to dance,

oh, what a fine figure we make in romance. Oh, the roast beef of old England and old English roast beef. Then Britons, from all nice dainties refrain, which effeminate Italy, France and Spain, and mighty roast beef shall command on the main. Oh, the roast beef of old England, and old English roast beef. It would have been lovely to hear that being sung on the terraces, wouldn't it? It would. I'd love to see that.

Well, if you are interested. So that play was actually never performed. It was suppressed. But Fielding later reused it in another play, and he gave it to his friend Richard Leverage, who was a kind of playwright and songwriter, and he found a catchier tune for it. And by about the middle of the 18th century,

there was a fashion for audiences to sing it before and after other plays. So you went to the theatre to see some other play, and everyone's singing about roast beef. But presumably not before operas. Well, no, I think a very different audience. Yeah, different crowd. I think there, you're there with the Duke of Newcastle, and you're looking forward to his French cook serving you up some dainties.

Yes. So you're not part of the roast beef crowd. But, Tom, if you really want to sing that, do you know where it will be sung? At a formal mess dinner of His Majesty's Royal Navy today. Wow. They have the roast beef of Old England. The Royal Artillery at their dinners, at formal dinners of the United States Marine Corps. Goodness.

And of the Canadian Armed Forces. They sing the roast beef of England, of old England. They use the tune. I don't think they do the words. I was going to say, that would be odd, wouldn't it? I think they're maybe piped into the dinner or something. So it's basically the tune and the sort of the the ethos i suppose it has endured across the world in armed forces that were once related to to to britain basically

so and this is the name of the famous painting the hogarth paints the hogarth painting which we should come to because hogarth is a member of a club so what the actors do so people like people who are associated with fielding, people of that kind of disposition, they start to set up from about 1705 beefsteak clubs. The first one was associated with the Drury Lane Theatre. There was an actor called Richard Escort, who was kind of the master of ceremonies. And he wore a little badge with a kind of gold gridiron or grill around his neck to show his fondness for roast beef. And the most famous one of these was set up in 1735 called the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks.

So you mentioned Hogarth. Hogarth was a member, the great British painter and engraver. John Wilkes, the sort of radical gadfly, parliamentary gadfly. He was a member. Dr. Johnson was a member. Another associate of the show, future fat king, George IV. He was also a member. And they would meet above the Covent Garden Theatre.

They would wear a special blue coat. You said about their waistcoat, special waistcoat with brass buttons that said, had Beef and Liberty written on, they were a badge um a sort of silver medal of the gridiron and again beef and liberty so there you have the association between liberty which is a great watchword against catholic france and beef eating and obviously what you would eat if you're a vegetarian this was i mean tom you would not be welcome at this club. You had to go and you had to eat beef, mustard, and horseradish, and baked potatoes, interestingly.

They would have it with baked potatoes. Not chips? I don't think there's any chips. No. The Beefsteak Club lasted for about another 130 years. It was wound up in 1867, by which time the idea of beefsteak clubs is incredibly unfashionable. But we mentioned Hogarth.

You could argue that beef is personal for Hogarth because he'd grown up in a Smithfield market. Yeah, he's baptised in St. Bartholomew the Great. So there you go. We saw it. So for people who don't know, his career flourishes between the 1730s and the 1750s. I always think, I mean, Tom, I know you love

Dickens. Do you think Hogarth is a bit of a forerunner of Dickens, the same kind of character and colour and love of London? He's a kind of Dr. Johnson as a pitbull, I guess would be the way to describe him. He's more spiky than Dr. Johnson, isn't he? Yeah, he is. He is. There's a kind of aggression to Hogarth and a sort of slight element of misanthropy, would you say? Yeah, I think so to a degree. Yes. If he was a political cartoonist, I think it's fair to say he'd probably be writing,

he'd be doing his work for one of the more feral newspapers. Yeah. So you mentioned him doing the roast beef of Old England. So the original painting was called The Gate of Calaisais and he'd actually been arrested as a spy in calais while sketching it and he shows himself doesn't he in the painting yes doing a sketch exactly and he'd actually shown sketches to the french to say look i am actually a painter i'm not here spying and you can look it up online um you can google it basically the scene is at the gate of calais and it shows a huge side of beef being transported from the harbour

to an English-owned tavern, while a group of sort of ragged, half-skeletal, sinister-looking French soldiers and a very fat French Catholic friar look at this beef. It's sort of slavering, you know, with great envy. And this was turned into a best-selling print and renamed oh the roast beef of old england and one of his friends at the beefsteak club a guy called theodosius forest he'd written the club anthem of the beefsteak club which i'll come to you later and he wrote a cantata based on hogarth's painting which was performed at the haymarket

theater and to give you a sense of the sensitivity of the cantata, there's a French soldier who is given the following lines, and they are written in kind of cod franglais. So the French soldier says, Ah, sacre dieu, va-t'o ici yonder, That looks tempting, red and white, Bega, I see the roast beef from Londres, Oh, grant me one little bite. So it's literally written in this appalling um uh then he does another um you see he said about frogs hogart did another picture

about 10 years later called the invasion so this is during the seven years war and there are as usual invasion fears and in that it's the group of french preparing to embark for england and they are roasting frogs over a fire it's a snack dr valverde very like dr valverde from the costa rican podcast for which tom you've i believe promised to do a charity benefit in in uh to benefit dr valverde's family having maligned them so cruelly. Do listen to that podcast if you want to find out what Tom did so disgracefully. So in the invasion, the French are roasting frogs. And this time,

another of Hogarth's friends and sort of beefsteak eating chums, who's a guy called David Garrick, great actor, whose theatre and club still stand in London. He wrote an accompanying caption with lantern jaws and croaking gut. See how the half starved Frenchman theatre and club still stand in London. He wrote an accompanying caption.

With lantern jaws and croaking gut, see how the half-starved Frenchman strut and call us English dogs. But soon we'll teach these bragging foes that beef and beer give heavier blows than soup and roasted frogs. So this is very much a thing. And I think there's an element of self-parody beginning to creep in here. So by the 1760s, so the peak of this stuff, I would say, is probably, I don't know, 1740s, 50s. By the 1760s, it's slightly becoming a caricature that people

are living up to. So Tom, I know you love Johnson and Boswell. So Dr. Johnson, the great lexicographer and critic, James Boswell, his Scottish biographer. Boswell came to London in 1762. And in December, he deliberately does his best to live up to this because he writes in his journal, the enemies of the people of England who would have them considered in the worst light represent them as selfish, beef eaters and cruel. In this view, I resolve today to be a true born old Englishman. I went to the city to Dolly's Steakhouse in Paternoster Row and I swallowed my dinner by myself to fulfill the charge of selfishness. I had a large fat beef steak to fulfill the charge of beef eating. And then I went at five o'clock to the Royal Cockpit in St. James's

Park and I saw cocking for about five hours to fulfil the charge of cruelty. That is very English behaviour. It is very English behaviour. But the staggering thing about that, actually, now that I only noticed it when I read it out, he watched the cockfighting for five hours. For five hours, yeah. That's a long... It's almost like going to cricket. Five days. So by that point, it's become a bit of a caricature, I think, that people are

living up to. It's in the 1760s that you get the... So first of all, you get the caricature of the Englishman as a butcher. You see this in Prince. So it'll be a butcher accompanied by his bulldog or his mastiff. It's like going back all the way to Henry V, talking mastiffs there. And then what takes over from the butcher is John Bull. So John Bull had been created in 1712 by, again, a Scottish writer actually called John Arthbuthnot, kind of teasing the English. But he really peaks between 1760s and the end of the century,

especially during the French Revolution. He's a fat man, as you said, Tom, he's stout, he's in his waistcoat. He's often shown with a tankard of beer in his hand, eating a pudding or eating a beefsteak or something like this. He's bluff, he's sceptical, he's anti-intellectual. Yeah, thanks. He's me. But actually, you get the peak of John Bull, and that's really during the French Revolution

when he is juxtaposed with skinny, enthusiastic, idealistic, cruel, rationalist, atheistical kind of Jacobins. And you get the very, very famous quote from Edinburgh, don't you, about the metropolitan, the chattering classes that's right yeah because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink while thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the british oak chew the card and are silent pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field there you go that's a kind of recalibration of the whole theme, isn't it?

It is, absolutely. But John Bourne is kind of the last flowering of this because by that point, the kind of beef stuff has become a little bit, it's not just that it's a joke, it's become yesterday's theme. So I think that with the end of the French Revolutionary Wars, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, then all the stuff about beef and liberty, all those people are dead now.

Hogarth, Garrick, all those characters, Dr. Johnson, they are absolutely yesterday's news. The Industrial Revolution means that Britain is becoming much more urban. So the invocation of the kind of rural, I mean, now actually in the Victorian period when rural squires and stuff appear in fiction and popular culture, they are not the soul of the nation.

They are just ludicrous backward figures who are being superseded by railways and industrialists and businessmen. Lord Deadlock. Exactly. Yes, actually, that's exactly right. Celeste Deadlock in Bleak House is perfect. See somebody who 100 years earlier would have been squire western wouldn't he yeah and kind of tom jones and now it's always raining and miserable and exactly deadlock goes

rushing off to london yeah yeah exactly right um but also because the french threat has kind of gone with the aftermath of waterloo you know there's there is a there's a degree of sort of performative anti-frenchness left i suppose but by and large you know, there's a degree of sort of performative anti-Frenchness left, I suppose. But by and large, you know, that battle is won. And so the threat of French invasion and of frog eating or whatever, and of people sort of dodgy stocks and sources has abated. And the sort of roast beef of old England stuff just feels old fashioned. But where I think it, so it does live on a little bit. It lives on, if you, do you know the restaurant chain? I mean, you'd be ill advised to visit it, Tom, given your proclivities.

Hawksmoor in London. No. You've never been to a Hawksmoor? No. They're excellent restaurants. There's only a few of them. They are, they're basically specialised in steaks. And their logo is Beef and Liberty.

So they reproduce the- Do they serve anything else apart from beef? Yeah, they serve seafood. They serve Dover sole. They might do stuffed mushrooms or something, Tom. The other places where I think this lives on, now you can tell me whether you think this is completely spurious and mad. Obviously, Ben Rogers called the early modern the texans of the early modern world

there is a definite sense isn't there in america like text the idea of the texan with his massive stake i wonder if that's a slight derivation because that's also associated with it's very american very patriotic very kind of macho manly red, red-blooded. I'm going to have a massive steak in a Texan steakhouse. I wonder whether there's a slight element there of the food having, the sort of meat-eating having a kind of political meaning. I mean, I'll tell you somebody who is the embodiment of this spirit is Ian Botham, whose nickname is Beefy. Yeah, absolutely.

And he's kind of a paradigmatic John Bull figure. He is, absolutely so ian botham is a english cricketer who was probably the most famous cricketer in the world in the 80s for our american and non-cricket playing yes australians will not have recognized him immediately and be laughing with joy at the mention of serene both more lord botham lord botham now lord botham of beef lord botham of brexit i think people call it don't they because he's a very outspoken they sometimes call him lord both of beef they do they do absolutely well i wrote about this in um and he did who dares wins my book about the early 80s and i i struck me at the time both them is

such a kind of 18th century figure smiting foreigners eating eating beef, behaving badly, slightly issues with his weight, all of that sort of stuff. So both in beating Australians, race is the other thing I was going to ask about. Now, you will, I'm sure, say this is completely spurious, whether there is a tiny hint of an association. So the way that Australians think about their barbecues, they're quite kind of red-blooded. It's a manly thing to do. You had a beer, have a barbecue. It's not fancy. There's a simplicity and a sort of authenticity to it. No, because I think that's more to do with hunting. Hunting, right.

Isn't it? It's the idea of the- I don't know. I've never been to Australia, so I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. I wouldn't have thought it's a direct line of descent from that. Okay. Well, I didn't think it was direct, but I was just wondering whether... Because I think one of the fascinating things about food, some people will say, oh, this is... Sometimes when we veer off from politics and wars, some people say, oh, this isn't proper history. But actually, I think things like food, culture, customers, they're wonderful windows into how a society thinks.

And obviously now in Britain, Tom, we really have lost touch with that beef and liberty, haven't we? Do you think those days will ever return? Well, as we said at the beginning, I think the mad cow disease was emblematic of something being rotten in the state of England because the folk memory of beef as an emblem of England did remain. Yeah. Which is why the site,

the site of, you know, the thought of cows basically being fed, being made into cannibals and then going mad was such a kind of potent metaphor. Yeah. Yeah, it was.

Depressing metaphor. Well, that was actually what inspired. So I mentioned Ben Roch's brilliant book. I'll mention it again because I've stolen so much from it. Beef and Liberty. He says that's what inspired him to write the book, was the reaction to mad cow disease.

So, Tom, I think we should end on an upbeat note. I mean, for all we know, so we don't know when we're recording this and we don't know whether England have crashed out of the World Cup. They've begun well. We've only seen one match, haven't we? So I don't know whether us mentioning that match will now have a poignantly ironic ring or whether that was the first step on the road to glory.

Nobody knows. But I think we shall end with the anthem of the sublime society of beefsteaks. I won't sing it. You'll be pleased to hear. If you want music, go to the Uruguay podcast and the beautiful Tupamaros theme. Or indeed the Tunisian one.

Yeah, for Tom's opera. Yeah. But this is the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, their club song. No more shall fame expand her wings to sound of heroes, states and wings, a nobler flight the goddess takes to praise our British beef in steaks, a joyful theme for Britain's free, happy in beef and liberty. Throughout the realm where despots reign, what tracks of glory now remain? Their people, slaves of power and pride, fat beef and freedom are denied. What realm, what state can happy be, wanting our beef and liberty?

Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.