I came across this today and thought I’d share. It made me hungry!
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Like all of Orwell’s essays, that is a great one. I first read it as a hungry teenager and I remember licking my lips at the discussion of baked goods.
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Interesting. Orwell is some 40 years ahead of his time.
Our native British cuisine suffered during the 1920s and 30s when “good food” meant “French food”. In the 40s and 50s, it took a further hit due to wartime food rationing. Farmhouse cheese making is probably the classic example. It used to be tradition of small scale production but, during the war, milk production was centralised and only the major generic regional cheeses - like Cheshire or Lancashire - were made. It’s only in the last 30 years or so that small scale cheese making has returned.
And Orwell mentions a whole host of traditional British foods that were still the mainstay of family cooking but were not “cuisine”. It wouldnt be until the 1980s that chefs, such as Gary Rhodes and John Tovey, started to take traditional dishes and put new spins on them, developing what has become known as “Modern British” cuisine.
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