Last year a friend who lives in Lyon came to visit me in London. It was only her second trip to the UK and she was determined to venture deep into our indigenous food culture. ‘So, where can I get good fish and chips?’ she asked me.
Now, if I was a citizen of Vienna and she was asking me where to find really good sachertorte, I suspect I wouldn’t struggle to reel off myriad cafes. If I lived in Athens and was questioned about where to get decent souvlaki, I would probably have a list as long as Hercules’s personal meat skewer. But fish and chips? In London? I could, in all good conscience, recommend only two places in which, during my quarter of a century in the capital, I’ve had a half decent chippie tea.
Slapping ‘traditional speciality guaranteed’ status on pie and mash won’t halt the slow extinction of venues such as Manze’s and Harringtons. In fact, it may well hasten it
The truth is that 95 per cent of fish and chip shops in this country turn out uniformly appalling approximations of our supposed ‘national dish’. You know the drill: cod the colour of a hobo’s duvet, loosely and reluctantly sheathed in batter that has the texture of a damp flannel, served with flabby chips that instantly turn into mashed rattan in the mouth. And if you’re in the capital, you will pay at least £15 for this. It’s embarrassing. So my Lyonnaise friend swerved it all in favour of a Turkish meal in Dalston. The pitta bread was lovely, apparently.
Maybe that’s the Faustian foodie pact we’ve made with ourselves in Britain. You can eat the entire world here – but we’ve long neglected our native cuisine in exchange for all those pan-global dinner options. From the Sunday roast to the English breakfast, our other national dishes fare no better than our fish and chips: either we’re terrible at making them, or terrible at promoting them. As Olivia Potts recently wrote in these pages: ‘For a long time, British food has been seen as a joke among other nations, but also nearer to home. Even when the dishes are near indistinguishable, we’re still happy to poke fun at our own fare: we love panna cotta but laugh at blancmange; we cringe at stew but revere boeuf Bourguignon. They’re the same, but that doesn’t stop us.’
The demise of one traditional dish in particular has commanded attention of late: pie and mash. Manze’s, a 100-year-old pie and mash shop in Deptford, is closing this month. In an attempt to save others like it, MPs recently backed a motion, proposed by Conservative MP Richard Holden, for pie and mash to get traditional speciality guaranteed (TSG) status, just like Melton Mowbray pork pies and Welsh lamb. To qualify for the TSG label, a food’s ingredients and production must be ‘traditional’ and it must be of ‘specific character’.
Claudia Leachman, whose family run Robins Pie and Mash, told the BBC: ‘We want to protect what my past generations worked so hard for… we don’t want it diluted and being sold anywhere and with any recipe.’ Claudia should be reassured. There is, as far as I’m aware, nowhere else on Earth that seems to have the slightest interest in setting up a pie and mash cafe.
Now, I’m quite partial to a good pie and mash at dinner time (and if you’re working class, then dinner is absolutely always eaten at noon and not the evening, which is, of course, when you have tea – the meal, not the drink). Harringtons in Tooting still offers a wonderfully flaky minced beef pie, served with a hillock of creamy, soft mash and then semi-submerged in the luridly green parsley sauce known as ‘liquor’. But while the cafe was once a Victorian tiled beauty complete with narrow benches and aged wooden partitions, the interior was ripped out a few years ago and Harringtons now has the bland, cynical, wipe-clean, disposable style of a truck stop caff near Consett. The locals still come, but they don’t seem to linger like they used to. The property is up for sale – and the family who have owned the business for 116 years say that once it’s sold the shop will close down.
But slapping a TSG garland on pie and mash won’t halt the slow extinction of venues such as Manze’s and Harringtons. In fact, it may well hasten it. Because a TSG stamp is not a mark of confidence in a product. It’s a form of state-sponsored life support.
To become obsessed with classifying dishes and insisting on there being only one ‘official’ or ‘designated’ way to make them is the wrong way to go about reviving our national cuisine, and it shows a singularly warped understanding of how we eat and cook in the UK. France may have decided it had reached the pinnacle of culinary excellence in around 1909 and spent the past century or so deriding anyone who might want to update their menus – but one thing that can be said for British food is that we have not attempted to preserve our culinary culture in aspic. We’re open to change, we welcome outside influence and we don’t really give a damn if a dish (whether it be suet pudding or Spangles) falls out of the conversation due to the natural ebb and flow of tastes.
If there was ever a time when this country needed state intervention to protect our national cuisine, it was during the era of rationing – the epoch when an entire generation forgot how to cook our indigenous dishes due to the simple fact that they didn’t have access to the ingredients needed. The ‘government cheddar’, powdered eggs or Woolton pie (a depressing travesty made with Bisto gravy and vegetable water) of that era are no less important than pie and mash in the narrative of our national food culture, but no one’s going to argue that they should be preserved for all eternity. And that’s OK.
Pie and mash should be left to rise and fall on its own efforts – or to evolve. It doesn’t need to be sealed and bound in recipe-regulated knots. If we want to save our national dishes – and finally make them something to be proud of – we need more people striving to make them better, not red tape stifling them. And if somebody from Gujarat decides to open a cafe offering pies filled with kadhi rather than cow alongside mash and liquor, they should be able to do that without getting missives from the protectionists. (Also, they should let me know, as I’d rather like to try anything with a Gujarat-meets-Greenwich back story.)
It’s a shame that there aren’t quite so many pie and mash cafes in London any more, but we have restaurants from Bengal, Bologna and Brazil which we could take some inspiration from. Although still no decent chippies. For now, when it comes to British cuisine, very little tastes good – but very few of us aren’t open to something that, just maybe, tastes a bit better than what we had before.
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