British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History

摘要

What has happened to British food over the last thousand years? In this book ColinnSpencer chronicles many sea changes and to hear him tell it, they make a dismalndescent from the British food of the past. Indeed, were our respondent transported tona table in medieval times, when “real” British food was spicy and complex, usingnvarious and rich-tasting home-grown foodstuffs, he would mostly likely decry suchnfood as “foreign spicy muck.” Over the centuries, as Spencer relates, and culminatingnin the food of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British food sufferedndepradations. During the Victorian age it increasingly relied on inferior ingredients,nunhealthily fatty and stodgy, cooked badly, and bland to a fault. Those of us who havenvisited and eaten in the UK have often felt that without (1) the colonies, namely Indianand (2) the arrival of European immigrants, namely Italian and Greek, eating innEngland would be no fun at all. Reading Colin Spencer, I now wish I’d visited GreatnBritain hundreds of years earlier when I might have enjoyed, among other wondroussoundingnfoods, a syllabub of wine, sugar, nutmeg and lemon frothed with milkndirectly aimed into the pot from the teat of a contented cow.