The Modern Peasant, by JoJo Tulloch – review

You know that something’s afoot when Lakeland says so. Lakeland is the kitchenware company which has more of a finger on the pulse of Middle England than most MPs. So when the company declared that it can barely keep pace with demand for home mincers it’s a sign of the times. It attributes the home-made everything trend to the horsemeat scandal and a food supply chain that looks like the Tudor family tree. Its line of cheesemaking products and sausage casing is doing well.

The surge in the number of DIY/artisan cookbooks is telling too. The title of one of them sums up the mood: The Modern Peasant by Jojo Tulloh (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). She observes that

city-dwellers are cut off from the countryside and the chain of production that served our ancestors so well. In the past, we grew, reared and caught our food or procured it from producers we knew and trusted. Now supermarkets bring the world to our door, in one long monotonous season.

The DIY/artisan cookbooks talk you through making your own bread and cheese, yoghurt and faggots and foraging your own nettles (I draw the line, myself, at home-made kimchi). Very different, then, from the cooking in popular food magazines, in which, one writer mournfully told me, you’re not allowed to give recipes for anything that takes over 30 minutes.

The individual at whom all this is aimed is what you might call the Urban Peasant, or UP — the city dweller cut off from things being grown and creatures reared. These books are about more than recipes; more a yearning for a way of life recoverable by making chutney. Think Country Living magazine in cookbook format. That urge to pull up wild garlic and make cream cheese may be a spiritual one.