The novelty rule

I am, however, falling into a very English trendy-foodie trap here – equating ‘good’ food and ‘genuine’ interest in cooking with novel, foreign ingredients and new ways of preparing them. My foreign friends and informants find the frantic novelty-seeking of English foodies somewhat bizarre, and laugh at our constantly changing fads and fashions – from nouvelle to Cajun to Fusion to Tuscan to Pacific Rim to Modern British. One minute it’s sun-dried tomatoes with everything, the next minute these are passé and it’s raspberry vinegar, or garlic mash, or polenta, or, oh, I don’t know, confit of black pudding and potato rösti layered into a precarious tower in the middle of a huge white plate, with goat-cheese filo parcels and a balsamic reduction or rosemary jus or horseradish sabayon or something.

This current novelty-obsession is not peculiarly English; the same trend can be observed among our colonial descendants in America and Australia, but they are much younger nations, composed of immigrants from a variety of cultures, with no traditional indigenous cuisine to speak of, so they have some excuse. We are supposed to be an old, established European culture, with centuries of tradition and a sense of history. Yet when it comes to food, we behave like teenage fashion-victims. Presumably because, when it comes to food, despite our seniority, we are actually in much the same position as the teenage former colonies, having no great culinary tradition of our own. Some historically-minded food-lovers claim that English food has not always been so undistinguished, citing the great banquets of former times, with rich game pies and exotic spices and so on. But these things were largely the preserve of a very small, wealthy minority – and foreigners have been complaining about the poor quality of most English cooking for centuries. Now they marvel at our indiscriminate mixing and matching of foreign influences.

‘I thought the English were supposed to be resistant to change?’ said one of my confused foreign informants. ‘This is not what I see in your restaurants. In Italy, we are much more traditional, much less open-minded about food. And the French are even more . . .’ He put his hands close together in front of his eyes, in a gesture indicating tunnel vision or narrow-mindedness. He had a good point, I thought. The English have a reputation as stick-in-the-muds, but our attitude to food suggests that we can be remarkably flexible, willing to try new things and absorb different culinary practices. The wilder extremes of the most recent novelty-seeking trends are mainly confined to the young and fashion-conscious, but Greek, Italian, Indian and Chinese food have been part of the English diet for decades – as familiar and established as meat-and-two-veg. Indian food in particular is now an integral part of English culture. Our customs revolve around it. No Saturday night pub-crawl would be complete without a visit to the local Tandoori or Balti restaurant. And when the English go on holiday abroad, the food they most miss, according to the latest surveys, is not fish and chips or steak-and-kidney pie but ‘a proper English curry’.