The Rest Is History - 49. Food Glorious Food

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook tuck into the history of British food with author Pen Vogler. They debate the origins of curry and debate our obsession with beef. Plus, they discuss a curious historical obsession with cooking pigs and chickens, stitched together. 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 club. That is therestishistory.com. You cannot trust people who cook as badly as that. After Finland, it is the country with the worst food. The words of that notable culinary critic Jacques Chirac. Of course, Monsieur Chirac's not exactly alone. It's commonly said, even by the English themselves, that English cooking is the worst in the world. And that's George Orwell in In Defence of English Cooking. So Tom Holland and I have come to The Rest is History, not to bury English cooking, but to praise it, at least I

hope so. And our guest, Tom, well, would you like to introduce our guest? Our guest is Penn Vogler, who has written the most sensational book on the entire history of British food. It's called Scoff. And because it's about Britain, the subtitle is A History of Food and Class. Everything's about class in Britain. Everything in Britain is about class. And it's an absolute feast, not just of historical information, but of facts for pub quizzes. So, Dominic, just to try a couple. I know you've read it because it was one of your Sunday times.

Some time ago. Yes, it was a book, wasn't it? Okay. So what is Penn talking about here? In 1748, the French government banned the cultivation of what on the grounds that they caused leprosy? Artichokes potatoes potatoes okay and richard bradley the professor of botany at cambridge said in 1728 that what was agreeable to look at but was definitely dangerous Definitely dangerous. Carrots, sheep, pen, pen. Come on in and put him out of his misery.

The cousin of potatoes, it's tomatoes. We're not very good in Britain at kind of absorbing vegetables from, you know, foreign countries. I'm doing that with little quote marks around the foreign. We're very happy about getting new meat on board like turkey. But when it comes to things like tomatoes and potatoes, it's taken centuries of us to get used to them. So how long did it take for us to kind of get to use the potatoes? Because we have a question here from Jordan Carr, who says,

my girlfriend, who is Latvian, Russian, and her friend, joked that British food is just made up of different variations of potato dishes and proceeded to laugh at jacket potatoes with beans. I don't see what's wrong with jacket potatoes, except for the beans, actually, which I think is slightly... Rich being criticised for bad food by russians i think by latvians i've heard of i've heard they had potato lacquers yeah um we're quite keen on potatoes but i think they're not the only yeah i think that's i think that is slightly harsh actually because we've've had a long and rather vexed history with potatoes.

And we've we've come to love them. But I wouldn't say that I wouldn't say that the basis. Oh, gosh. I mean, they were introduced into that. Well, they introduced to Europe, weren't they? From the you know, when the Spanish first went to South and American Central America. So a mere kind of four or 500 years, really. But Penn, do you agree with Jacques Chirac? Are we the worst country after Finland for food? I mean, a lot of our foreign listeners will be laughing at this and saying,

of course you are, but they are quite wrong in my view. What do you think? It's so funny. I was in my early 20s. I went to go and teach English in what was then Czechoslovakia. And I thought, you know, I was in the markets of Czechoslovakia.

You couldn't get fresh food anywhere at the time. I'm sure you can now. Everything was kind of fried cheese, pickled cabbage, delicious in its own way. But they all knew for a fact, my students, that English food was the laughing stock of the world. They'd never been to England, they'd never had it, but it was just a fact that they'd kind of learned somewhere. And I think that's a very post-World War II reputation. And really, that late? Yeah, probably. Probably kind of richly deserved, in fact, and all sorts of things kind of got together in World War Two, you know,

post rationing and all the rest of it to make our food quite bad. But I think it's probably is it harsh? I think it's probably harsh now. Because, you know, all sorts of people, all sorts of gastropubs and chefs have done all kinds of extraordinary things with um you know some kind of english dishes but for a few yeah exactly but for a few decades i think it might have been fair the first raymond postgate when he introduced a good food guide in the 1950s, said, he said, yes, it does look a bit strange. I'm trying to pretend that there is good food in Britain, but you've got to start somewhere. And maybe if we start encouraging people to recommend to each other restaurants that they liked, maybe it will just help us, you know, increase a kind of food culture.

Have you read any of those old oh good food guides because i did when i was writing my book on the 80s even in the 80s and a lot of the entries in the 80s i mean these are the good food guides and it would say this is the best restaurant in newcastle don't order the vegetables they're absolutely atrocious or something you know these these descriptions of these it sounds absolutely ghastly and that's kind of how I remember it, actually. 70s, 80s. But, Penny, you think that's because of the war? Because of rationing?

Because the habit of cooking gets broken? Or what happens? Oh, I mean, I think, no, I think when I say post-war, I think we have a very sort of particular post-war diet, which, but I think actually, no, it goes back longer than that. I think if you go right back to kind of where it all went wrong, it is in a way it was probably when because we seem to be going the right way in the kind of long 18th century, that's when the English palette is laid down, when you have female housekeepers who were producing, you know,

locally grown, good food, lots of vegetables, lots of meat, always lots of meat. And then I think what really goes wrong is Britain becomes obsessed with kind of social climbing. And one of the ways to socially climb is to have French food. And everything is French food. All the focus goes on French food in that 19th century.

So it's the fault of the French? No, it's the fault of us trying to be the French. I think we can end the podcast here, can't we? I think we've established it's all... Yeah. No, I think it's the fault of British focus, us trying to kind of imitate French food in a way that just probably didn't suit quite sort of modest English kitchens.

So if we could dial it sort of back in time, is there a point at which you can say there is a British cuisine? And if so, when is that point and what is the food? I think if you look at the family dinner that Mrs. Bennett is trying to cook for Darcy and Bingley at the end of Pride and Prejudice. That is probably your British cuisine. And she's very proud of the fact that her venison is really good. The partridges are better than anything that the French chef of Mr. Darcy could produce. She has the right kind of soups. And they're probably made,

she doesn't say, but they're probably made made of there's probably a fresh pea soup and then a you know a white soup made from chicken or something um and you might have duck and peas a lot often though in those years we do have lots of vegetables but they sort of come with the with the meat and they sort of get forgotten about and hidden so we think so so, aren't there, many of them? But people did eat them. So I think that's probably when it could have got better, you know, from that kind of long 18th century onwards. And somehow the focus just went wrong.

Thinking about the relationship with France in the 18th into the Regency period, I mean, it is a of british self-congratulation that we eat better that we have roast beef and all the french have is kind of scrawny vegetables yeah yeah there's some kind of amazing passage you quote in the um in the book about was it thackeray saying that that if you got an equal number of Britons fed on beef and Frenchmen fed on Episcene cheese, the plucky Brits would hold the field. He's probably ribbing us, you know, because I think he is sitting in a French restaurant in Paris as he's kind of pontificating about how brilliant British food is.

Hogarth, that famous cartoon of Data Calais. Yes. But this has to do with beef, isn't it? And that's what's really interesting, is that the 18th century is the point where the roast beef of old England is established. What's all that about? I think it's partly about cows getting bigger.

It's kind of agricultural revolution and breeders figuring out that you can breed if you can read breed racehorses you can breed livestock and so over about 200 years the weight of cows probably doubled really but i think we've always been quite keen on our beef you know we're beef eaters shakespeare talks about you, beef eating Brits and English rather and all the rest of it. And I think there has been an obsession with and a pride, but an obsession with beef. And like you say, Tom, the on kind of one level, we love to kind of mock the French because their peasants are poor. They can't afford meat. They're having this pathetic soup maker, which is, you know, like a, just a vegetable soup. And actually, at that, you know,

in the early 18th century, quite a lot of people thought that English peasants were better fed than French peasants. In the same way that, and you know, obviously, those assumptions change. And now, you know, people think that in France, people are fed better than in England. So what's the role of the Industrial Revolution in that? Because that's another kind of vague idea I had is that we're eating well and the Industrial Revolution comes. And that's what really torpedoes the traditions of British food, because they get lost when people move from the country to the towns. Is that not true? I think it is true, but I think it's probably tangentially true. I think it's partly true because of the enclosures. So when people stop

having ground that they can grow food on, that makes it much harder. And you know, that idea of the kind of that we don't have a peasant cuisine in the way that France or other countries have peasant cuisines. I think that partly gets destroyed by the enclosures and all kind of just, you know, picking people up off the land. But I think when you have the industrial revolution, yes, people go into factories. Yes, people go into urban areas. And yes, there are problems of distribution, which, you know, the railways and everything help sort out. But there shouldn't, because there's also a rising middle class, because there's also a rising wealth that should have offset the, you know, the kind of availability. But then the French menus come in.

Yeah, but then the french menus come in yeah but then the french menus come in so if you look at something like the way that kind of dickens and his family would would be eating in the 1840s for example horrible detail that you've got about and this this segues very neatly into another theme yeah um her culinary pièce de résistance would be rabbit curry smothered in white sauce yes yes no wonder he ran off. White sauce, yes. Oh, and a curry, yeah. Over a curry, yeah. So no wonder Dickens ran off with Ellen Turner. But food and Dickens, Penny, you've written about food and Dickens a lot.

Dickens's books are full of... So the food they have in Dickens, is that fantasy or is that what people ate at the time, genuinely? I think sometimes it gets a bit Baroque, you know, when he kind of, he has a stew which might have 10 million things in it, including cow heel and, you know, sprue grass, which is asparagus. I think he's pretty much describing what most people would have eaten. And what's interesting about Dickens is it's very unfrench.

He isn't trying to kind of cope with the, you know, the kind of the French menace in his literature, but not in his life. I mean, I guess there are two famous meals, aren't there? There's Oliver Twist asking for more in the workhouse. Yes. And being hungry is kind of the essence of everything that dickens is appalled by because the other famous one is um in christmas carol with scrooge turning up and turkey buying a turkey with a turkey so always acceptable so talk us through about the history of the turkey because that's a really really interesting one one. Well, the turkey was extraordinary. As I say, whenever meat comes, anything kind of meaty comes into this country, everybody adopts it immediately. It comes in the 17th century, the 16th century,

with a trader called William Strickland. And we don't know exactly the year, but he adopts the image of a turkey on his kind of coat of arms. He's allowed a coat of arms as he becomes kind of more and more ennobled. And when he comes in, there's still this kind of division between landfowl, this idea that if you're a farmyard fowl doesn't quite have the status of meat that you hunt. So, you know, going back to kind of 1066 and William and all this kind of idea of the venison is the best meat,

it's the most noble meat, and grouse and partridge, anything that you hunt somehow gives you the status of kind of nobility. Whereas if something comes from a farmyard chicken or turkey it has a slightly less status but having said that the turkey is very acceptable to everybody and it comes at a time when the population is growing there probably isn't quite enough meat to go around because the the you know beef hasn't yet done the thing that we were talking about where cows haven't yet kind of doubled in weight and it's very welcome but it comes in such a way where you can you know it's not seen as something which is just kind of for

the aristocracy so far a farm a farmer might eat it or a kind of small landowner or yeoman. And it gets adopted and it's good in the middle of winter, you know, when there's not much else around and it becomes our kind of our Christmas meat. How big a role does Dickens play in that? I think Dickens, it's always eaten around Christmas, but then meat is always eaten around Christmas. Because they eat beef. Yes. You i eat beef yes i mean yeah you might eat beef around christmas you might eat venison because before before breeders had learned to keep animals alive literally over the winter they had to slaughter most of them in november or december um because otherwise the animals would be competing with us, you know, for very, very sparse kind of cereal and grain resources over the winter.

So most animals get eaten around Christmas and turkey. And yeah, Dickens kind of anchors it to the Christmas day. So he has this beautiful description, this brilliant description of, you know, this lovely big turkey and Christmas pudding. But that's the thing that the reformed Scrooge brings him. Whereas the meat they're actually going to have before, you know, before kind of Scrooge sees the light is going to be a goose. I was going to ask about that. Yeah, yeah.

See, to me, a goose is, I had a goose at Christmas. goose at christmas oh lucky you is infinitely superior to turkey in my yeah yeah not not then yeah so why did people so what there was a sort of turn again there was a period wasn't it when the goose kind of dropped out totally i didn't know anyone had a goose in the 70s or the 80s yeah and now the goose has come back as a bit of a status symbol i think so they're quite tricky to cook geese very fatty they're very fatty yeah your whole house knows about it for a few days afterwards i think when you so we had a goose for two of us and when i say two of us me and a nine-year-old because my wife doesn't eat meat so it was incredibly self-indulgent yeah very very satisfying did you carry it back from the market and did an urchin knock your top hat off with a snowball?

Yeah, I got an urchin. I shouted out of the window, what day is it? Christmas Day. Oh, here's a shilling. That's normal life in Chipping Norton, Tom. But actually, what you should have done is done what Mrs. Cratchit did, is send it to the baker to be cooked, because then you wouldn't have all the fattiness in your own house.

So I've got a question about that. Did people people because you see that a lot in dickens that people will buy a pie and they'll take it to the bakery although yeah so so how does that work if you don't live with the cook if you don't have a big kitchen you take you buy stuff and you send it to a bakehouse and then go and get it because you don't have an oven basically um. You know, the Great Fire of London, probably because everybody had to use massive, not communal ovens, but bakery ovens to cook their things because most people were too poor to afford their own ovens. And you know, pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man? Oh, yeah, yeah.

You know, you prick it with pee because you need to mark it. You need to say, this is my pie. Get off everybody else. Well, Pen, I reckon that's the first course done. So we should take a break and then come back and have the second course. And Pen, I would love to go back to that rabbit curry cooked by Catherine Dickens. Oh, you wouldn't oh you ask you about curry because that also has an intriguing history so we'll come back and we will be talking curry

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Welcome back to The Rest Is History. With me, Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland and our guest, Penn Vogler. And Tom is very keen to talk about curry. Tom, please. Because curry is now basically our national dish, isn't it? And essentially, it's much, much older than I had realised. It's much older, say, than fish and chips. It's much older say than fish and chips. It's older than in Britain yes. Just tell us about about the antiquity of curry and its

relationship to gravy. Oh yeah so the first recipe for curry in a British cookbook is probably Hannah Glass in 1747 and if you compare it to fish and chips fish and chips didn't get together really as in as a kind of married couple until the probably 1900s but um so hannah glass is writing a recipe for curry it's not that nice to be honest uh it's kind of curry most of the heat comes from white pepper but it's okay i have cooked it yeah i have cooked it but it's interesting because some some of the other things i've cooked and compare it to if you go back to very early um kind of medieval food a lot of that is uh is flavored by the tastes of spices that the crusaders brought back and all the things that we put into curries now, like galangal, you know, ginger, long pepper,

you know, black pepper and all that stuff, not chilli, obviously, because that's a New World thing. They were being used and enjoyed by our kind of wealthier medieval forebears. So a curry is kind of closer to the tastes of English medieval food than fish and chips. Yes. Oh, yes, I think so. I mean, I think English medieval food is a little bit,

it's a little bit halfway between a curry and sort of North African tagines. You know, it's a little bit more sweet and sour in a way. But some of those, you know, medieval recipes do feel quite contemporary, unlike Hannah Glass's curry. But Hannah Glass was cooking at a time when a lot of people were working for the British, you know, the East Indian company, going to India, falling in love with this amazing food and wanting to taste it back home and people were selling curry powder in kind of coffee shops and just starting to kind of roll out the idea of curry from about the sort of early early eight seventeen hundreds. Can I pick you up on something you just said which is about the medieval cooking being I mean that's fascinating that that the sort of I mean obviously we're

talking about people at the top I assume. Right at the top. So what they're fascinating that the sort of, I mean, obviously we're talking about people at the top, I assume. Right at the top, yes. So what they're eating is a sort of, you know, somewhere between a curry and, you know, Moroccan tagine or something. But the question then is, at what point does that fall out of the equation? So why does British food acquire this reputation for unspiced blandness when clearly it was very spicy in 1400 or 1500 or whenever i think um the civil war probably um is probably if you want one point that probably gives us the best civil you know the best point because the puritans were very against spice they were very against kind of you know uh this what they called an abominable growth, which is probably a kind of potage of spiced fruit.

They thought it was papist, basically. They thought it was papist. They thought it was basically a waste of money, I think. The poor should be spending their hard-earned money on something decent. I don't know, bread and beer or something. Bread and meat. Water. Bread and water and meat water bread and water

yeah or or you know bread and bibles or puritanical tracts you know like the flying eagle or whatever they're called um but after and i think but it's partly it's not just the puritans i think also it is that um tastes are changing because like like you said, in the kind of Tudor period, it was the very, very kind of top families who were just determining that kind of when you get the middling sort I suppose when you get this kind of middle class that begins to grow up and it tends to be the person who's in control is the menu is probably female she's probably a housekeeper and she's probably going to look around her much more locally for food than kind of expensive spices. Pen when when do cocker pigs are you familiar with the cocker pig dominic well i i've probably i've erased that from my memory well i googled it and i wish i wish that i had a cock is it a bit like a turducken yes yes a bit a bit sequential rather than yeah so you get you get the front of a cock. Right. Cockerel. Nice.

Yes. And you stick it onto the back of a small pig. Or the other way around. Or the other way around. Yes. Have you tried that, Ben? Have you cooked that? Because that was Richard II's favourite food, wasn't it?

And he'd have... Serve it gilded. Come with a gold leaf. Yes, yes. I really, really want to try that. Well, how do they do that? So they'd have a big tray or something, and they'd have the front of a cock and the back of a pig. More likely the front of a pig and the back of a hen or cock or something.

And they'd sew it on. Wow. That's like something from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But is that another thing the Puritans ruined? Yeah, I think that's quite... In the kind of the most kind of highest tables in medieval times, they loved things that just looked different. You know, they loved kind of display and things to look odd.

So they would actually really like, you know, Heston Blumenthal does his meat fruit things. Meat fruit, yes. I think meat fruit comes from medieval. So actually that, because I wondered whether he was pushing that a bit too far, but it doesn't sound like he is at all. Actually, he's not going far enough. I think his recipes are based on recipes that he's found, actually.

But they love things to kind of look like hedgehogs or um and that would be an international taste at that time would i mean if it's being served to the king presumably these are the kind of flamboyant things that are going on on royal tables a lot of our christendom yeah i think a lot of our kind of our highest tastes come from either Italy or Spain at that time. You know, things like ice cream when they kind of come into this country come via Spain, then Italy. Yeah, Spain, then Italy and then up here, chocolate, coffee, all those things we kind of absorb from there. And do you think the fact that Britain's an island and we have sent ships around the world, how influential has that been on the patterns of our taste? Are we unusual to the degree that our national cuisine is kind of shaped by influences from across the world? I think we are very absorptive. What we're quite good at doing is taking some tastes like tea,

for example, and kind of British-britishifying them or anglicising it. Tea, cocoa is the same. So if you look at tea, you know, it first was grown in China. Our trade with China was a bit patchy. It was quite unreliable. And so somebody had to go and steal some seeds and some plants of tea from China and plant them in good British, in inverted commas, plantations in India. And that's when the Indian, you know, kind of tea plantation takes off. Yeah, and then it kind of powers the rise of the Raj and the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But the question with tea though, Penn, surely, the question that I think hangs over so much world history,

America's founding story is about tea yes throwing tea into the harbour america is an offshoot of britain this great tea drinking nation and yet as all our listeners will know you go to america this fantastic dynamic rich country and it is simply impossible to get a proper cup of tea i think it's a political repudiation they have long political memories i don't know i have no idea why you know i think when you ask for a cup of tea and they give you a tea bag and a cup of hot water warm if you're lucky make it yourself yes and lemon yeah the lemon that's just poncified isn't it dominic don't go broad it's a terrible mistake no i mean i i go i genuinely do you know can you i mean this is i'm not even exaggerating this for That's just poncified, isn't it? Dominic, don't go abroad. It's a terrible mistake. No, I mean, I genuinely...

I mean, I'm not even exaggerating this for the purposes of the podcast. I genuinely take tea bags when I go on holiday. I mean, my wife thinks it's ludicrous, but we always travel now with colossal quantities of tea. Have you come across biscuit tea? No. What's biscuit tea?

It's the single greatest British cultural achievement since Sgt Pepper. Is it tea in the form of a biscuit? Yorkshire tea, and it's just a hint of a biscuit. Yeah, you get a hint of biscuit in my house by dipping your biscuit in the tea. So is that like you've dipped your biscuit in the tea and you've left it a bit too long and it's kind of crumbled into the tea? Yeah. So whenever I despair of Britain, I have brewed myself a cup of that and wow all my confidence in the country is restored i want before we get into the questions from the audience

i also want to ask pen a question about pies what is it about britain and pies because i think the pie is that great culinary achievement obviously the pie is very unfashionable now which is sad to me anyway but why are we so good at pies compared with other people they don't really have them do they john bull asks i don't know why we're so good and compared with other people but uh we are good at pies and i think um probably because partly because we've always been good at meat and a pie sticking a bit of meat in a pie is a good way for it not to dry out you know if you're going to put it in the oven if it's going to be massive so hannah glass her she of the early curry recipe has this recipe for a yorkshire pie and that's where this myth of the

turk duck and comes from because that's actually i haven't seen a recipe for that but she does have the turkey and then inside it the duck and then inside it the capon and then inside it the blood of partridge or whatever and that's in a pie and that's it and with stuffing all the way through so when you cut into it you should have nice kind of little colored layers you know you might have a green stuffing a red stuffing so and that would keep you could put it in the oven and you'd keep it all, you know, you'd keep it from drying out. And so our early pies, like our early pasties, you might have a venison pasty and they might be made with really solid rye flour, pretty heavy. You'd plug it, you'd make your pasty, let it cool, plug it with butter.

So like a tin, so, you know, to keep the air out. And it would keep for ages. But you might not even eat the pastry. It might be just too hard and too solid, but you'd still have the bit of venison left in the middle. And so we used pies partly as a kind of a storage jar. And you can decorate them beautifully. Like in Cornwall. Like in what, Cornwall?

Like in Cornwall. Yeah, exactly. Pasty. and you can decorate them beautifully you know there's early like in what cornwall yeah exactly exactly the cornish pasty whatever that used to be well didn't pasta used to have different opacity was a whole meal wasn't it jam at one end and vegetables and stuff at the other isn't that right and tin miners had them yeah but opacity can be anything you know there's i've got this lovely uh book that i talk about in my book. It's the Cornish Federation of Women's Institutes. And in 1934, they poll all their members and get them to send in their pasty recipes. And you might have a rabbit pasty or a windy pasty.

And I can't quite remember what that is. Yeah, a windy pasty. Yeah, it's probably spinach or something and you might put dates in it you might put herring in it but what you but herring herring on the topic of pat of herring here's quite and it's a topical one bearing in mind um the the brexit agreements about fish casper asked why does fish play such a small role and has it always been like that so we're surrounded by fish we're surrounded by sea we have so many rivers it's probably because fish was popish you know fish yeah probably

before the often it was probably a protestant, before the Reformation, you had these enforced fast days where you couldn't eat meat or milk or eggs. And about, in really early medieval time, about a third of your year or more, you know, if you were in the church or particularly holy, you'd be on a fast day. But fish, or they might, they were sometimes called fish days and flesh days. So if you were fasting, in inverted commas, you might be able to eat fish because it was allowed. And I think fasting wasn't very popular. When you get to the Reformation, it's a very confusing time for people. They don't know what they're allowed to eat. So on the whole, they decide that they're going to eat meat rather than fish.

Thanks very much, because that's a bit popish. Also, I think a lot of our fish was salted. So you'd have had salted fish, salted codfish. I've got one recipe for codfish from the 14th century that says beat it for an hour to tenderise it. It didn't have the greatest reputation. And I think people just kind of use this as an excuse to kind of veer towards meat because meat is the status thing. We're all pretty upset. You know, we're pretty obsessed by status

and meat means you've got money or land to show that status. Since we're talking about status, maybe we should talk about class because it plays such a huge part in your book. So let's get into dinner, tea, supper. Oh, yes. Now, I was brought up,

I think my parents said lunch and dinner kind of interchangeably for the midday, mid sort of meal, and then tea in the evening. I suppose a lot of children would have tea in the evening because that scene is slightly infantilising, isn't it, to have tea, I suppose. But Tom is very much a supper man, which I regard as foppish.

Yeah. I am a fop. I'm not going to apologise for it. Where do you, what's your position? I mean, you must, I know you're trying to be an objective observer, but you must have a personal position on this, as well as a historian's one. Well, my position is middle class northerner so

my position which is probably why i'm so interested in class anyway because when i grew up my parents had lunch in the middle of the day and we had tea when we were kids but then dinner as we were older in the evening but none of my friends at school did they all had dinner in the middle of the day we went to yorkshire schools you know i went to school in leeds so we had dinner ladies and school dinners um and then we would have dinner in the evening we kind of didn't see any no two dinners yeah you have two dinners what's not to love yeah you're like a hobbit with their two breakfasts but but you know the the meal that's uncontroversial is breakfast. Yes, it's the only one.

We have a question from Richard Banks, which I know you're going to be able to answer, which is when did the full English breakfast first appear and what did it include? But let's just break that. When did the elements of the full English breakfast start to appear? Well, the elements have probably always been there, but they've been in different parts of either the British Isles or different parts of the world. So the world, you know, if you're talking about kedgeree, for example, which was a very kind of Victorian breakfast,

but the things like, you know, your black pudding and your sausages and particular ways of kind of doing eggs or something. Some of those are, and porridge, obviously, some of those come from Scotland, Wales. And they were kind of brought together with some of the best kind of elements of the home farm, your home produce, on the Edwardian country house table. So this idea that the full English breakfast has this really long history is probably not true. You might have a full Scottish breakfast, you know.

I've got Sir Kenelm Digby. Oh, yes, of course. He likes collops and eggs, doesn't he? Two punched eggs. Yes, with collops and pure bacon are not bad for breakfast. They're not bad for breakfast. So that's 17th century, surely. 17th century.

That is 17th century. Because he invented the wine bottle, didn't he? As well, I think. Yes, yes, yes. He was a great inventor. That's true. That's true. But if you talk about that, I would just say that was B and E. But if you're talking about the full English, the seven deadly sins, the kind of groaning plate, you know. The Costa del Sol, as I actually think. I mean, there was so much in your book that kind of made me salivate. But this was one I particularly noted. And it was somebody called George Borough in 1862. Oh, yeah.

In Wales. Wild Wales. Pot of hair. Ditto of trout. Pot of prepared shrimps. Dish of plain shrimps. Tins of sardines. Beautiful beefsteak.

Eggs. Muffin. Large loaf. Butter. Not forgetting capital T. There's a breakfast. there is a breakfast for you when did that go out of fashion i mean that sounds amazing yeah why has it gone out of fashion i think we've got very focused on very specific uh

um elements of the breakfast it's a bit like the afternoon tea as soon as it starts becoming a thing that cafes or hotels offer it has to become much more straightforward for them because it's it's just too difficult isn't it for most kind of cafes and hotels to offer all that stuff when you sort of read about people having steak at breakfast i mean they'd have a lot of breakfast wouldn't they you never see that now generally unless you were having something incredibly extravagant or pork bones you know pork uh ribs and boiled eggs or something yeah but i think on the whole before that kind of edwardian breakfast i suppose or kind of late victorian breakfast you might have a big old solid breakfast if you were traveling or going off to go hunting for the

day or working for the day but on the whole whole, most people would just eat bread, toast, cake, maybe, you know, pound cake or something like that. If you were very grand, you might eat French bread, which was more like a brioche. It was kind of enriched with egg and butter and quite delicious, really. When I went on my French exchange, I was dumbstruck to find them drinking beer at breakfast. Oh, that's very interesting.

Which I thought was just wrong. But that's what they did in Shakespeare's time, isn't it? Yeah, well, that's what I was going to say. At what point did we stop having alcohol so early? Or indeed, as a sort of standard drink. Unless you're in an airport. Yeah, exactly. The quick trip to Wetherspoons. I think there's an overlap with tea.

And, you know, you'd have to have alcohol. Before you had tea and you didn't know that boiling water would make your water safe, unless you had a very safe well, you know, a well where you knew the water was really pure, you'd have to have alcohol. You know, it'd be called small beer because you'd press everything twice and the first lot would be kind of big, you know, not big beer, but ale with a bit of a heft to it.

And the second lot would be small beer, so it might have half a percent or one percent alcohol. But people knew that it was safe to drink. Do you think there'd be a market for you know a restaurant providing that welsh breakfast obsessed with that welsh breakfast yeah but but combine that with beer small beer yeah do you know something i think i think and this is my my my first post-lockdown uh voyage i think that uh hotel or pub still exists actually does it in in? In Ballard, in Wales, yes.

I'm quite tempted by that. Whether it does or not, I'm not sure. Whether it serves that breakfast, I don't know. So to move to something much more austere for a second, almost depressingly austere and sort of very lockdown-ish, Carrot of Fire has a question. Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great name.

It says Tom and Dominic, but I think this question's open to you as well, since you're on the programme. Could you elaborate on the origins of the sandwich? And that is a good question, because it's not really invented by the Earl of Sandwich, is it? Is that just a myth?

Well, a myth with some truth in it. I mean, I think the myth bit about the Earl of Sandwich is that he was a gamer because his biographer says that he actually worked apart, that needs a really sharp knife to cut it well. It needs something to cut the middle stuff well to put it together. So actually, people would have been eating those component parts in the fields, agricultural workers, you know, just forever. But they'd have never called, it wouldn't have been a sandwich, they'd have had a hunk of, you know, a hunk of bread and a crust of bread and something else in their hands. So I don't know if he invented it, but he definitely popularised it. I think it's probably safe to say.

So that's a historical myth that's true. Yeah. That's great. But before we do that, can I ask one more question? Yes. Can I jump in one more question? If there's one thing from the past that you would like to bring back as a staple you know not as a treat but as something that we don't eat enough of that we used to eat what would it be cock a pig surely yeah for breakfast yeah i think it's

probably mutton um it's slightly odd how we've moved away from mutton. We're obsessed. Well, we're not actually even obsessed enough with lamb. You know, we have however many sheep, 36 million sheep in these isles, and we're not actually eating that much lamb. But we seem never to eat mutton any longer. But the New York Times says we do. Yeah. The New York Times said that all we do is eat mutton.

Well, they were running some ludicrous story, weren't they, saying British cooking has moved on the days of eating mutton five years ago when they had boiled mutton and and gruel and that's part of the new york times's campaign to do down britain as you know it's very low okay he's off i really think we've got to stop at this point thanks so much for coming on. That was great. Thank you so much for having me. It's whetted my appetite. I might go and have, well, I don't know what I'm going to have. Go and eat your cockapoo or whatever it's called.

Go and roast some mutton stuffed with oysters. And Penn's book, just to repeat, is Scoff, a history of food and class in Britain. It's brilliant. I swallowed it down in a couple of evenings. And the Sunday Times critic on the back says it's sharp, rich and super in Britain. It's brilliant. I swallowed it down in a couple of evenings. And the Sunday Times critic on the back says it's sharp, rich and superbly readable. Vogler reveals why we eat what we do today. And it is fascinating. And I think that Sunday Times critic was Dominic. So it must be true. Thanks ever so much. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye.