English cuisine
English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but is also very similar to wider British cuisine, partly historically and partly due to the import of ingredients and ideas from the Americas, China, and India during the time of the British Empire and as a result of post-war immigration.
Some traditional meals, such as bread and cheese, roasted and stewed meats, meat and game pies, boiled vegetables and broths with herbs or spices, and freshwater and saltwater fish have ancient origins. The 14th-century English cookbook, the Forme of Cury, contains recipes for these, and dates from the royal court of Richard II.
English cooking has been influenced by foreign ingredients and cooking styles since the Middle Ages. Curry was introduced from the Indian subcontinent and adapted to English tastes from the eighteenth century with Hannah Glasse's recipe for chicken "currey". French cuisine influenced English recipes throughout the Victorian era. After the rationing of the Second World War, Elizabeth David's 1950 A Book of Mediterranean Food had wide influence, bringing the cuisine of that region to English homes. Her success encouraged other cookery writers to describe other styles, including Chinese and Thai cuisine. England continues to absorb culinary ideas from all over the world.
History
Middle Ages
English cooking has developed over many centuries since at least the time of The Forme of Cury, written in the Middle Ages around 1390 in the reign of King Richard II. The book offers imaginative and sophisticated recipes using seasonings including nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cardamon and cloves, with spicy sweet and sour sauces thickened with bread or quantities of almonds boiled, peeled, dried and ground, and often served in pastry. Foods such as gingerbread are described. It was not at all, emphasises Clarissa Dickson Wright in her A History of English Food, a matter of large lumps of roast meat at every meal as imagined in Hollywood films.Instead, medieval dishes often had the texture of a purée, possibly containing small fragments of meat or fish: 48% of the recipes in the Beinecke manuscript are for dishes similar to stews or purées. Such dishes could be broadly of three types: somewhat acidic, with wine, vinegar, and spices in the sauce, thickened with bread; sweet and sour, with sugar and vinegar; and sweet, using then-expensive sugar. An example of such a sweet purée dish for meat from the Beinecke manuscript is the rich, saffron-yellow "mortruys", thickened with egg:
Another manuscript, Utilis Coquinario, mentions dishes such as "pyany", poultry garnished with peonies; "hyppee", a rose-hip broth; and birds such as cormorants and woodcocks.
Sixteenth century
The early modern period saw the gradual arrival of printed cookery books, though the first, the printer Richard Pynson's 1500 Boke of Cokery was compiled from medieval texts. The next, A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye, was published sometime after 1545. The Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piermont was published in 1558, translated from a French translation of Alessio Piemontese's original Italian work on confectionery. The number of titles expanded rapidly towards the end of the century to include Thomas Dawson's The Good Huswifes Jewell in 1585, the Book of Cookrye by "A. W." in 1591, and John Partridge's The Good Hous-wives Handmaide in 1594. These books were of two kinds: collections of so-called secrets on confectionery and health remedies, aimed at aristocratic ladies; and advice on cookery and how to manage a household, aimed at women from more ordinary backgrounds, most likely wives of minor aristocrats, clergymen, and professional men.File:The Good Huswifes Jewell Frontispiece 1610.jpg|thumb|left|Thomas Dawson's The Good Huswifes Jewell was first published in 1585.
English tastes evolved during the sixteenth century in at least three ways. First, recipes emphasise a balance of sweet and sour. Second, butter becomes an important ingredient in sauces, a trend which continued in later centuries. Third, herbs, which could be grown locally but had been little used in the Middle Ages, started to replace spices as flavourings. In A. W.'s Book of Cookrye, 35% of the recipes for meat stews and sauces include herbs, most commonly thyme. On the other hand, 76% of those meat recipes still used the distinctly mediaeval combination of sugar and dried fruit, together or separately. New ingredients were arriving from distant countries, too: The Good Huswifes Jewell introduced sweet potatoes alongside familiar medieval recipes.
Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, compiled in 1604 gives an intimate view of Elizabethan cookery. The book provides recipes for various forms of bread, such as buttered loaves; for apple fritters; preserves and pickles; and a celebration cake for 100 people. New ingredients appear; a recipe for dressing a shoulder of mutton calls for the use of the newly available citrus fruits:
Pies were important both as food and for show; the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence", with its lines "Four and Twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie. // When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing" refers to the conceit of placing live birds under a pie crust just before serving at a banquet.
Seventeenth century
The bestselling cookery book of the early seventeenth century was Gervase Markham's The English Huswife, published in 1615. It appears that his recipes were from the collection of a deceased noblewoman, and therefore dated back to Elizabethan times or earlier. Women were thus becoming both the authors of cookery books and their readers, though only about 10% of women in England were literate by 1640. Markham's recipes are distinctively different from mediaeval ones; three quarters of his sauces for meat and meat pies make use of a combination of sweet and sour, and he advises:Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook was published in 1660 when he was 72 years old. The book included a substantial number of recipes for soups and stews, 38 recipes for sturgeon, and a large number of pies variously containing fish, meat, and sweet fillings.
French influence is evident in Hannah Woolley's The Cooks Guide, 1664. Her recipes are designed to enable her non-aristocratic readers to imitate the fashionable French style of cooking with elaborate sauces. She combined the use of "Claret wine" and anchovies with more traditional cooking ingredients such as sugar, dried fruit, and vinegar.
In 1699, John Evelyn published Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, considered to be the first book on salads. It explores the philosophical significance of salads, reflecting 17th-century beliefs that spiritual purity could be regained through knowledge of nature.
Eighteenth century
's The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary, still with rather few precedents to go by, chose an alphabetical treatment for its recipes, from Al to Zest. The book covered everything from soups and salads to meat and fish, as well as pastries of many kinds, confectionery, and the making of beer, cider, and wine. Bills of fare are given for each month of the year.The anonymously published Primitive Cookery promoted economical lacto-vegetarian dishes, though some recipes included meat.
James Woodforde's Diary of a Country Parson gives a good idea of the sort of food eaten in England in the eighteenth century by those who were reasonably prosperous. To welcome some neighbours on 8 June 1781, he gave them for dinner:
Another country clergyman, Gilbert White, in The Natural History of Selborne recorded the increased consumption of vegetables by ordinary country people in the south of England, to which, he noted, potatoes, from the Americas, had only been added during the reign of King George III:
Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy was the best-selling cookery book for a century from its publication in 1747. It ran to at least 40 editions, and was widely pirated.
Nineteenth century
English cooking was systematised and made available to the middle classes by a series of popular books, their authors becoming household names. One of the first was Mrs Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1806; it went through sixty-seven editions by 1844, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain and America. This was followed by Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families 1845, which Bee Wilson has called "the greatest cookery book in our language", but "modern" only in a nineteenth-century sense.An example recipe from Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families is her "Quince Blanc-Mange ":
Acton was supplanted by the most famous English cookery book of the Victorian era, Isabella Beeton's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1861, which sold nearly two million copies up to 1868. Where Acton's was a book to be read and enjoyed, Beeton's, substantially written in later editions by other hands, was a manual of instructions and recipes, to be looked up as needed. Mrs Beeton was substantially plagiarised from authors including Elizabeth Raffald and Acton. The Anglo-Italian cook Charles Elmé Francatelli became a celebrity, cooking for a series of aristocrats, London clubs, and royalty including Queen Victoria. His 1846 book The Modern Cook ran through 29 editions by 1896, popularising an elaborate cuisine described throughout with French terminology, and offering bills of fare for up to 300 people.
Three of the major hot drinks popular in England, tea, coffee, and chocolate, originated from outside Europe and were already staple items by Victorian times. Catherine of Braganza brought the Portuguese habit of tea to England around 1660. Initially, its expense restricted it to wealthy consumers, but the price gradually dropped, until by the 19th century its use was widespread. Introduced in the 16th century, coffee became popular by the 17th century, especially in the coffee houses, the first opening in Oxford in 1650. Hot chocolate was a popular drink by the 17th century, long before it was used as a food. Chocolate bars were developed and marketed by three English Quaker-founded businesses, Joseph Fry's, Rowntree's, and Cadbury's.