A History of the World in Five Menus

By Howard Belton

This book investigates five menus, from England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. These dishes may seem truly national, or even regional, but the reality is very different. Few of the ingredients used originated in Europe, and many have travelled half way around the world. Tracing the history of the dishes opens up the whole of human history. We can see the importance of food in the ancient migrations and struggles to survive of our earliest ancestors, in the development of farming, trade and technology, and in the European exploration and colonisation of the world. This is truly delicious history, where the food we love takes centre stage and kings and politicians become supporting actors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781481791953

Howard Belton

Howard Belton earned an MA in Modern History from the University of Oxford. His business career with Unilever took him all around the world, to twelve European countries and to the United States, Brazil, Japan and the Philippines and back to the family farm in the beautiful Weald of Kent. He has written extensively about business, about his experiences and, returning in retirement to his first love, about the history of food.

Book preview

Part 1.

The English Menu.

Stilton and Broccoli Soup

Roast Beef, Yorkshire Pudding,

Carrots and Roast Potatoes

Strawberry Pudding

The first course: Stilton and Broccoli Soup.

Humans ate soup-like dishes from the moment they had containers to cook them in, and adding old cheese for flavour must go back to ancient times. However, I am sure that Stilton based soups are not ancient. The best explanation I can find was written by Prue Leith who cooked the first Stilton soup I ate: ‘I once thought I had invented a Stilton soup, because I went to Denmark, ate a Samsoe soup, thought This would be even better with Stilton, came home and made a celery soup heavily enriched with Stilton cheese. It became famous in my restaurant, Leith’s, and was copied by chefs all over London. And then one day, flipping through a 19th Century English cookbook I had just bought in Hay on Wye, I found a near-identical Derbyshire Cheese Soup. So much for originality!’ Today there are many Stilton soup recipes available. I have chosen one which contains, in addition to broccoli and Stilton cheese, vegetable stock, butter, double cream, salt, freshly ground black pepper and freshly grated nutmeg.

Stilton Cheese.

image005.tif

I am not going to write a history of cheese, although as far as I can tell no-one has done so. Suffice to say that it goes back into pre-history, and cheese is part of the ancestral diet of milk drinking cultures – I deal later with the development of lactose tolerance. Cheese falls into the important category of inventions or discoveries which made food last longer in storage and easier to transport. There will be many other examples of this later.

Blue/green cheese must have been part of human experience from the start as a result of natural decay. There is a legend about the creation of Roquefort cheese that goes as follows. A young shepherd was tending his flock when he saw a beautiful young women passing by, and he could not resist following her. He stayed with her for several days, and on his return to his flock found that the cheese in his packed lunch had become mouldy. He was so hungry after all his labours that he ate it, and surprising found it delicious. We may not believe the legend but blue cheese must have naturally arisen over the millennia, and someone somewhere must have found it delicious. Unfortunately we have little evidence of who and when. We do know that cheese was an important product of the sheep industry. The shepherd whose duties were set out in the eleventh century Aelfric’s Colloquies had milking, butter and cheese making amongst his duties. Langland’s fourteenth century Piers Plowman refers to green cheeses in his larder, but green may mean freshly made rather than coloured by bacteria and if the green was caused by bacteria would it be endured or enjoyed?

Actually, making blue cheese is very easy – just put holes in the cheese to let in the air, and wait. You can make the results more predictable by putting penicillium bacteria in the cheese mix.

Roquefort claims to be the oldest blue cheese, and to be recognized in Pliny’s Natural History around AD 79. Pliny certainly mentions several cheeses from different parts of the Roman empire but his geographic descriptions are general and there is certainly no mention of Roquefort or blue. We can trace Roquefort with some certainty back to the 14th century. The ancient caves in which the cheeses were traditionally stored are full of penicillium roqueforti. In the old days the local cheese makers used to store bread in the caves and once it was mouldy mix crumbs into the cheese. Roquefort, of course, is a sheep’s milk cheese, hence the shepherd story.

Gorgonzola which is made from cow’s milk, is also claimed to go back to Roman times, or at least 879 AD, but there is no evidence that it was blue till the Middle Ages. It is no less delicious for that.

The traditional story of the invention of Stilton is that the landlord of the Bell Inn in Stilton, on the Great North Road, served blue cheese which he got from a farmer relative, Frances Pawlett. However we have references to the cheese from before he became landlord and it now seems that Frances Pawlett was merely a large scale producer to meet increasing demand. In 1724 Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain notes We pass’d Stilton, a town famous for cheese, which is call’d our English Parmesan, and is brought to table with the mites, or maggots round it, so thick, that they bring a spoon with them for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese. Until reading this I confess I had thought the Stilton spoon as a modern conceit. The citizens of Stilton, famously banned from producing the cheese under EU appellation controlée laws, are furiously researching the history to prove that it originated in the town.

Stilton is, as far as I know, the only cheese which had a sonnet written in its praise. G.K. Chesterton wrote his Sonnet to a Stilton Cheese which was a parody of Wordsworth’s ‘London’, substituting Stilton for the great English poet Milton

‘Stilton thou should be living at this hour

And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;

England has need of thee and so have I –

She is a fen. Far as the eye can scour,

League after grassy league from Lincoln tower

To Stilton in the fields, she is a fen.

Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men

Like a tall green volcano rose in power.

Plain living and long drinking are no more,

And pure religion reading Household Words

And sturdy manhood sitting still all day

Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;

While my digestion, like the House of Lords,

The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.’

Stilton lovers who cannot resist it at the end of long dinners will recognise Chesterton’s heavy stomach.

Not so many years ago, Stilton was one of few English cheeses which could be a source of pride. It is good to see how artisanal producers of traditional and new cheeses have widened the choice. One of our favourite shopping places is Neal’s Yard Dairy, near Borough Market, where you can taste a rich variety of great cheeses. Sheer quality, and not patriotism, have made our cheese board largely British.

Broccoli.

image007.tif

Broccoli, Brassica oleracae variant italica, like cauliflower, is a cultivar of the cabbage family. The name comes from the Roman brachus (branch or arm) through the Italian brocco (shoot) and Italy is generally recognised to be central to its history.

The wild cabbage is said by some to have been a European native and to have been taken east by the Persians in a reversal of the usual flow of cooking ingredients. Whether or not this is true, the Rasenne, who became the Etruscans, seem to have brought cabbage with them to Italy from the East in the eighth century BC, and since then Italy seems to have been the centre of cultivation. We do know that Roman horticulturalists actively developed variants, turning an open leafed plant into tight cabbages, cauliflower and broccoli. Pliny mentions broccoli in his Natural History (around 79 AD) and Apicius, in his great work on cookery De Re Coquinaria of 230 AD, gives a recipe for broccoli boiled and flavoured with cumin, coriander, chopped onion, oil and wine which sounds delicious. Drusius, son of the Emperor Tiberias 37-14 BC, was so addicted to broccoli that his urine turned green, putting his father in fear for his life.

The Romans planted broccoli, like many other of their favourite food crops, throughout their empire, but we do not know whether it survived the dark ages. A comprehensive but unsubstantiated story says that it was reintroduced into northern Europe when Caterina de Medici married Henry II of France in 1533. She is credited with bringing her chefs and many recipes with her. The French gave her the demeaning nickname of ‘the grocer’– actually the Medici were bankers – but in reality Tuscan eating was far more civilised than that of France at the time. She is said to have introduced the custom of separating sweet and savoury courses. Also credited to her is the introduction of peas, artichokes and cauliflower. More upsetting to the French it is said she brought duck a l’orange – oranges were certainly an exotic import from south of Paris. It is also said that she gave France ice cream to which we will return later during our visit to Italy. This could, sadly, all be legend, and the first documented reference to broccoli in France does not come until 1560. However broccoli was certainly identified with Italy from then on. For example, the first UK reference, in Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary of 1724, calls it ‘Italian asparagus’ or ‘sprouting coli-flower’.

The three main broccoli variants today are Calabrese (the most common), Sprouting (which has thinner stalks and smaller heads) and Romanesco (with yellowy green heads). In Italy there have always been other varieties including purple which has now spread widely. We can thank the Italian community for putting broccoli on the North American menu.

Broccoli is certainly good for you – healthy enough to be rejected by many children. E.B. White produced a cartoon for the New Yorker in the 1920s showing a mother and son at the table. Mother: ‘It’s broccoli’. Son: ‘I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.’ This summarises my own attitude at the same age. I have to say that I have been converted to broccoli, but not yet to spinach.

Nutmeg.

This is the only one of the minor ingredients of the soup that I will cover at this stage, and I have to say it is an intriguing one.

image011.tif

Nutmeg, Myristica Fragrans, came originally only from the tiny Banda islands, part of the Moluccas in present day Indonesia. This evergreen tree, which grows up to sixty-five feet tall, actually produces two spices, nutmeg from the seed, and mace from the coating of the seed. It is widely used to this day in Indonesian and Malay cooking.

Although not as popular as some of other spices from the East, like pepper and sugar, with which we will deal later, it was known by ancient civilisations. It is named in Sanskrit which shows that it was an ancient resource in India where it was known as a cure for bad breath and stomach problems, and it is still widely used in cooking.

In Europe, Pliny mentions it in his Natural History but the Romans seem not to have appreciated it very much. On the other hand, the Arabs used it both as a spice and as a stomach medicine and traded it extensively – it could, conveniently, be stored for a long time. Probably the European knowledge spread through Arab colonies in Italy and Spain, and through the Crusades.

One early endorser of nutmeg was San Theodore the Studite, who lived in Constantinople around 800 AD. I cannot divert to his life story here, though it is fascinating to hear how this not so humble monk conflicted with three different eastern Emperors. Theodore, who came from a very rich family, did not like the staple pease pudding, and sprinkled nutmeg on it to make it more appetising. This would have been a very controversial action at the time as many devout monks considered any form of flavour enhancement to be sinful.

The impact of nutmeg in Europe was greatly increased by the voyages of exploration to the east. These started with the Portuguese, when Alfonso de Albuquerque conquered the Moluccas in 1511. The Banda islanders seem to have been very fierce, and Portuguese control was only skin-deep. In 1608 the Dutch threw out the Portuguese but only really took control of the Banda islands in the 1620s, when they had to kill or transport most of the population to do so. The Dutch increased the supply of the spice, and to this day you can find it used a lot in Dutch cooking.

The Dutch and the British fought over the islands, and much else, in the mid seventeenth century. Peace returned when the Dutch gained the islands in exchange for New Amsterdam/New York. However, the British sneaked back in during the Napoleonic wars and took nutmeg to plant in Zanzibar and the West Indies, especially in Grenada which to today has nutmeg on its national flag.

But long before that, nutmeg was known in England. The 1390 cookbook which we quote below during the dessert course mentions mace as an ingredient. Nutmeg itself was known as an aphrodisiac. Men were recommended both to apply it directly to increase their performance, and to carry a nut under their armpit to attract the opposite sex. Nutmeg charms in silver containers and even copies carved in wood were also very common.

You may know this nursery rhyme

‘I had a little nut tree,

Nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg

And a golden pear.

The queen of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me,

All for the sake

Of my little nut tree.

Her dress was made of crimson,

Jet black was her hair.

She asked me for my nut tree

And my golden pear.

I said "So fair a princess

Never did I see.

I’ll give you all the fruit

From my little nut tree." ’

No-one can prove it, but I believe the old story that the rhyme dates back to the time of Henry VII. In 1506, when he was already widowed, Juana of Castile, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, visited England with a view to setting up a marriage alliance. Unfortunately ‘Juana la loca’ as she came to be called was clearly not suitable. Actually her younger sister Katherine of Aragon did come to England to be married to Henry’s son Arthur, and after Arthur’s death married Henry VIII. Katherine will reappear in our story later connected not with nutmeg but with pomegranate.

The Second Course. Roast Beef, Carrots and Roast Potatoes.

image013.tif

The Roast Beef of Old England has a mythical quality about it. The diet of roast beef, showing England’s prosperity compared with its Continental neighbours, was held responsible for the superior strength and fighting spirit of the British soldier and sailor, before the industrial revolution and fancy foreign cooking weakened later generations. This idea of a lost golden age associated with roast beef goes back a long way. The song The Roast Beef of Old England, written by Richard Henry Fielding for his Grub Street Opera in1731 and set to music by Richard Leveridge in1735, laments the passing of the golden age.

When mighty Roast Beef

Was the Englishman’s food,

It ennobled our brains

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-vapouring France

To eat their ragouts

As well as to dance,

We’re fed up with nothing

But vain complaisance

Oh the Roast Beef of Old England

And old English Roast Beef

But now we are dwindled to,

What shall I name?

Half-begotten and tame,

Who sully the honours

That once shone in fame.

Oh the Roast Beef of Old England

And old English Roast Beef

Oh then we had stomachs

To eat and to fight

And when wrongs were a-cooking

To do ourselves right

But now we’re a… .

I could, but goodnight!

Oh the Roast Beef of Old England

And old English Roast Beef.

The importance of meat for the fighting men can be seen in the provisions loaded on that celebrated ship the ‘fighting’ Temeraire for her maiden voyage in 1799. Although she was only lightly crewed for a short voyage, she carried seventy-seven casks of beef and more than a hundred of pork. Later, one of her less glamorous duties was to ferry live cattle to the ships blockading the French coast. It is fascinating to hear that in the prelude to the battle of Trafalgar, as the English fleet was approaching and in sight of the enemy, the cattle on board were killed to prepare for action and the wind was so light that the crew of the Temeraire and the other ships had time for a good meal. For dietary balance I should note that by this date ships carried vegetables, fruit and lemon or lime juice to prevent scurvy, but the men preferred the meat. (This information comes from two excellent books on naval history: The Fighting Temeraire by Sam Willis and Trafalgar by Tim Clayton and Phil Cragg.) Early in the Second World War we can find Winston Churchill regretting that British soldiers seemed to have less fighting spirit than their fathers, and trying to increase the supplies of imported beef, fighting against the logic of the bureaucrats that home grown vegetables were more efficient sources of nutrition.

Wherever cows were domesticated, it certainly wasn’t England. Of course Ancient Britons had a taste for red meat. We know from cave paintings and finds of bones that, like other Europeans they hunted all the big animals they could find, including the ancient cow—the auroch – Bos primigenius. The auroch is believed to have originated from India, but it spread all over Europe before humans came to hunt it. Excavations show the herding of wild cattle in the Sahara by 8,000 BC – I will say more about this in my ‘after dinner talk’. Recent DNA analysis suggests that domestication of Bos Taurus took place in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia around 6,000 BC, although it is possible that domestication in India and China took place separately.

image015.tif

Egyptian cattle.

Domestication led to selective breeding, the improvement of the yield, and the development of distinctive local strains. It has to be said that once the forests were cleared, the English climate was very good for raising cattle. When the Romans came to England they reported with approval on the red cattle. My family has a beautiful farm in the Weald of Kent, through which a Roman road runs, and I like to think that the red Sussex cattle grazing on the farm are descendents of the red cattle the Romans found when they arrived. Originally used as plough oxen, as well as for meat, Sussex cattle only developed into the animal we know today from the eighteenth century. Arthur Young praised the Sussex breed in Agriculture of Sussex of 1793. He stayed at Petworth Park where the 3rd Earl of Egremont established a Sussex herd which is still there today. I was interested to discover that red cattle were also esteemed far away on the opposite side of the Roman Empire in Jerusalem. For the really rich the sacrifice of a lamb was not enough – a red heifer, if possible one with no white imperfection, was the most valued tribute.

Returning to the Roast Beef of Old England, I have to dispose of one of the favourite stories about beef, that ‘Sir Loin’ originated when an English king knighted his favourite cut of beef. Sadly this is just a legend, as the name came from the French and was originally SURloin – in other words above the loin. The complaint in the roast beef song about French influence on our cooking ignores the fact that this influence goes back a long way. The word cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon cu, but the word we use about food—beef—comes from the old French-Norman boef. We can be sure that roast beef was a central part of the diet of the rich English. Over the Sunday joint I often picture the great hall with the noble family sitting at the high table and the servants and retainers crowded onto trestle tables below. Archaeology in mediaeval middens shows that dogs were really waiting in the background to gnaw the bones.

As we glorify roast beef, it is worth re-emphasising how far it was from the regular diet of poorer English people, and how central was bread. An elegant illustration is from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, of around 1386, where he talks about the food of a poor widow:

‘And there she ate full many a slender meal,

There was no sauce piquante to spice her veal.

No dainty morsel ever passed her throat,

According to her cloth she cut her coat,

Repletion never left her in disquiet

And all her physic was a temperate diet,

Hard work for exercise and heart’s content.

And rich man’s gout did nothing to prevent

Her dancing, apoplexy struck her not;

She drank no wine, nor white nor red had got.

Her board was mostly served with white and black

Milk and brown bread in which she found no lack;

Boiled bacon and an egg or two were common,

She was in fact a sort of dairy woman.’

It is interesting to see how even then it was appreciated how much healthier was a simple diet than the rich food of the upper classes. Feast days must have had very special significance for poorer people, as they were virtually the only time when they ate good meat and other types of food normally restricted to the rich. Christmas was the feast when animals were killed which could not be kept during the winter- this feast has ancient roots as we can see from Stonehenge where the remains of hundreds of pigs slaughtered for the mid-winter feast have been found. Easter was the second great feast – after meatless Lent everyone gorged themselves on as much meat as they could afford.

A similar picture of a simple diet is shown in the 1510 How the Ploughman Learned his Paternoster. The ploughman is a fairly prosperous farmer, but to him ‘Martinmas beef was not dainty.’ His storehouse has plenty of bacon, eggs, butter, milk and cream, which with garlic and onions meet his needs. In France too the food of the poor was recognised as healthier than the rich. Philippe de Vitry’s Franc Gontier of around 1360 praises a simple meal of garlic, onions and shallots on black bread with salt. However there is little sign that the rich were persuaded to change their diet.

Definitive proof of the superiority of British roast beef can be found in the work of the great French chef Antoine Beauvilliers, who left the kitchens of Louis XVI in 1782 to set up what has been recognised as the first fine dining restaurant. French sources are silent about why he called it the ‘La Grande Taverne de Londres’ but his great work L’art du Cuisinier’ of 1814, despite being published at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, has several English recipes. One is ‘Veritable boeuf comme il se fait en Angleterre’. Beauvilliers ascribes the superiority of English roast beef to two factors. One is the killing of younger cattle. The other is the use of rump steak, which is tastier though tougher than the filet mignon preferred by the French. I can’t help wondering if he served his English roast beef throughout the ten years of war, or whether he had to change the name to ‘boeuf de la liberté’.

There was no fine dining restaurant in England in Beauvilliers’ time, but there were plenty of more homely cook shops. The best description comes from a French visitor called Henri Misson in 1698 (M. Misson’s Memoirs and Observations on His Travels Over England London 1719). ‘Generally four spits, one over another, carry round each five or six pieces of butcher-meat, beef, mutton, veal, pork and lamb; you have what quantity you please cut off, fat, lean, much or little done; with this, a little salt or mustard on the side of the plate, a bottle of beer and a roll, and there is your whole feast.’ According to Misson the crowd at the London cook shop was very democratic, from peers to merchants to porters. Another alternative place to eat your roast beef was at a tavern – the tavern was superior to an ale house having originally served wine, and many had excellent plain English food. Most private homes would lack the kitchen facilities to cook good roast beef, so for entertaining guests the tavern was a good option. Southwark, the area south of the Thames free of the regulations of the City, is remembered for its theatres, bear pits and brothels, but associated with these were a host of eating places. Roast beef and wine were favoured as a solid basis for debauchery. In the stews themselves customers came across the equivalent of today’s overpriced