Variety Is The Spice of Life: Challenging The Great Myth of Spices In British cuisine
‘Britain conquered half the world for spices and decided it didn’t like any of them’ is a caption usually accompanied by a photo of a mound of anonymous boiled stodge. The internet is littered with this sort of thing, it’s a joke which recurs with reliable regularity. Certainly, I have my own qualms with the cuisine of my home country: it’s often bland, usually heavy and always beige. However, flicking through Dorothy Hartley’s 1954 Food in England and Elizabeth David’s Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, published some sixteen years later, I find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the meme of British cuisine does not hold up to historical scrutiny. Though this epithet of the United Kingdom’s cooking is little more than a harmless quip, I did find it interesting how far removed the great joke of British gastronomy is from reality. Spices are found in some of the most unexpected of recipes, and though British palates of the past couldn’t handle the heat, there does seem to have been a national taste for aromatic luxuries from far flung corners of the world. Of course, those luxuries ultimately came to fill the kitchen cabinets of Britain due to imperialism, and it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that the history of the spice trade is a story besmirched with exploitation and subjugation.
Food has seldom been more diverse and delicious than it is in 21st century Britain, with London boasting of every cuisine under the sun. Many of these cuisines do indeed use spices as a means of enhancing the dish, a sublime contrast to the bland fodder usually associated with this grey and rain-soaked isle. Multiculturalism has undeniably enriched mealtimes across the country, broadening palates from Wadebridge to Wick. However, the story of spice in the cuisine of Britain begins long before the British Empire, indeed, it begins when Britannia itself was under the yoke of Roman imperialism – central heating and roads aside, one of the great contributions of Mediterranean civilisation was the food, supposedly bringing exotic delights such as cherries, garlic and rabbits. Some spices, such as mustard, were already present in Iron Age Britain, but it may have been the Roman colonisers who first showed how these could be utilised for culinary purposes, though, as Hartley suggests, ‘there is little that the average cook can pin down to them.’ The answer to what exactly the Romans did for us in the kitchen is actually rather unclear.
In the millennium following the Roman evacuation of the island, spices remained a feature of the cooking, though not for everyone. Certainly, returning crusaders seem to have had a taste for Middle Eastern cuisine, a far cry from boiled root vegetables and the occasional scrap of meat back home. Beyond the flavour benefits of using pepper and cloves and nutmeg etc., there seem to have been two major motives behind the use of spices: firstly, given the lack of refrigeration and food hygiene certification, strong flavourings could be used to mask the scent of rancid meat, secondly, and most importantly, spices symbolised status. Even something as humble as a pork pie, available from any petrol station today, was treated as a celebratory dish, with one fourteenth century recipe calling for it to include ‘pepper and salt, and nutmeg, and large mace’ and a ‘good store of raisins and currants’. Recipes from this time do not reveal what the average peasant was eating, but rather the sort of luxuries the nobility would have cooked for them. Indeed, one fourteenth-century recipe for haggis seasons the pluck with pepper and saffron, before it is stuffed into a sheep’s womb and boiled. This is surely the most high-end haggis had ever been. Elaborately flavoured feasts of this ilk were created to invite the admiration and envy of guests - occasionally, it would appear, at the expense of being edible, so heavily spiced were some of the courses.
The cost of importing spices was truly astronomical, often being exchanged for gold and silver by local elites. In the ensuing centuries the Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch and, of course, British, jostled for control of the trade, with new routes to India and beyond opening up new markets. After the emergence of the British East India Company in 1600, effectively an early modern cartel, an influx of ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon came into Britain, and it is around this time that spices began to become part of everyday eating. Merchants not only imported the ingredients, but they also brought back new dishes which utilised this spicery. Though spices became more affordable and therefore accessible in Britain, the indigenous populations of these distant lands paid dearly. Neither Hartley nor David mention the massacres and enslavement which took place over control of these substances. They were, after all, cookery writers who grew up during the death throes of the British Empire. Whilst their writings on food are as valid as they were half a century ago, thankfully other writers and historians have since filled in the uncomfortable omissions.
What a cockatrice is supposed to look like
The fact remains that food in early modern Britain was transformed by the spice trade. Those who could afford such exquisite aromatics treated them as the main ingredient, with everything else they were served with merely providing a vehicle for the consumption of spices. It appears that Britons were hooked on the stuff - the sheen of status was still present, and there was a (not entirely inaccurate) belief that they possessed medicinal properties. As spices became more available, they became fixtures of everyday cooking, though they were still costly. Samuel Pepys records multiple instances of backstreet deals for nutmeg and cinnamon. Most of the savoury dishes flavoured with spice would be inoffensive to a modern diner, including roasting joints, hams and pickled fish. After all, what would a Cumberland sausage be without copious quantities of pepper? But there were plenty of somewhat more polarising recipes too. An edible effigy of the mythical cockatrice would be created by the unholy union of a pig or rabbit with poultry, once roasted it supposedly resembled a dragon, though most of the attempts I have seen look more like an abomination, though Hartley claims that when it is the centrepiece of a banquet it ‘delights children’. It was stuffed with a highly spiced forcemeat intended to be eaten cold. Alternatively, one might go for the brined boar’s head, or roasted swan with mace and allspice, or cockle pie with ‘a dust of nutmeg’. These recipes seldom specify the precise amount of spice to be used, probably because that was dependent upon the freshness of the meat. With improvements to the longevity of food storage, it seems that spices became less overpowering, being used as seasonings instead.
Of course, it’s perhaps more common to find spicing in desserts, and Britain boasts of a veritable selection of puddings and cakes, some so dense that dining tables groan in anticipation of their delivery. One of the most ubiquitous flavourings for sweet treats comes from the unassuming, shrivelled pod of an orchid: vanilla. Few desserts would be complete without custard, though even today fresh vanilla pods are exceptionally costly, second only to saffron (which is included in some medieval custard recipes, incidentally). Again, not every spiced dish would sit well in modern stomachs: ‘pudding in skins’ is the rather unappetising name for an Elizabethan dish which was effectively a rice pudding, cooked with cinnamon, mace and probably anything else the cook could get their hands on, mixed with suet and dried fruit, and then pumped into intestines, tied up, and simmered. The actual execution of this sweet sausage is probably very delicious, though even I slightly wince at the thought of eating an animal casing wrapped around something sweet. Perhaps this is hypocritical though, besides I will gladly eat something with suet or gelatine in. Thankfully, with the invention of the pudding cloth, guts became less common, and new spiced puddings emerged, including that brandy doused monstrosity we force ourselves to have at Christmas.
nutmeg and mace
If ever a time of year were synonymous with spiced dishes, it would be Yuletide, and one iconic festive treat straddles the divide between sweet and savoury – the traditional mince pie. Not, it should be noted, the mince pie of today, a saccharine, booze-infused medley of dried fruits, but instead, as the name might suggest, something rather meatier. Boiled ox tongue was paired with suet, salt, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, orange peel, apple, currants, fortified wine and baked in a crust shaped to resemble the manger of the baby Jesus. Other variations seem to have used bits of mutton too, or added some lemon, or, in recent times with the rise in veganism, omitted the tongue and suet entirely. What remained fairly consistent were the spices, and even now, in an era when we have access to any number of highly-flavoured dishes from around the globe, the aroma of cinnamon is still evocative of Christmases from long, long ago. The writer most associated with the most wonderful time of the year, Charles Dickens, kept a nutmeg grater on his person, and a small fortune of the seed, so that he could dust it over desserts and drinks. On the subject of drinks, in A Christmas Carol Scrooge, having seen the error of his ways, agrees to discuss raising Bob Cratchit’s salary ‘over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop’, a concoction made by mulling port with mace, all-spice, cinnamon, ginger root and a roasted orange, studded with cloves. Whether the Cratchit household could afford such luxuries is another matter – presumably it came at the expense of medical treatment for Tiny Tim.
The British certainly enjoy their alcohol, and in recent years gin in particular has become incredibly fashionable, with much of the marketing emphasising the botanicals it is infused with. Certainly, it has not always enjoyed such a high brow reputation, one need only glimpse at Hogarth’s prints to understand why the spirit was given the epithet ‘mother’s ruin’. It is the pungent juniper berry, or in Latin ginepro, which gives gin its name and most of its flavour, whilst everything from coriander seeds to cardamom pods can be added in order to change its profile. Historically, it was not uncommon to mix spice with alcohol – one of my personal favourite recipes, purely for how niche its target audience is, is a ‘Beer Flip’: egg yolks mixed with sugar, orange juice, hot strong beer and spices into a creamy emulsion intended to be served ‘for bell-ringers before a long peal’. It continues to startle me how eclectic the boozy beverages of the past were, and makes me slightly regretful that I always end up resorting to lager at the pub. Then again, I’m not a bell-ringer.
What becomes apparent from looking at recipes from our past is that so much of British cuisine was in fact strongly spiced, though not spicy, and yet it has a reputation for blandness. The provender of Great Britain has been a recurring joke in Europe for centuries, and certainly many of the recipes I have mentioned do seem worthy of ridicule. But the one thing it didn’t seem to be was boring. So, what changed? Well, it is first worth reiterating that these dishes are not representative of the average person’s diet – they are exotic oddities deemed worthy of recording in a recipe book. The most significant change was probably rationing in the Second World War. Britain’s climate isn’t particularly favourable to growing spices, and the drive for self-sufficiency in the face of food shortages resulted in a frugal, austere approach to cooking. The flamboyant use of spices became a thing of the distant past, and British cuisine languished in the doldrums beyond 1945.
The culture to which Britain owes its centuries-long spice obsession to more than any other is, of course, that of the Indian subcontinent. This love affair with chutneys and curries reached new heights during the reign of Queen Victoria, with curry being served to her twice a week on average. It resurged again in the mid-twentieth century with increasing migration from South Asia into Britain. Curry houses are now held to be as British as anything, and though 90s lad culture and vindaloo slightly tarnished their reputation, there is no denying that the cuisine of that region, and its use of spice, has profoundly influenced British tastes. Though it was the dark spectre of imperialism which made spices widely available to British cooks, spices which defined centuries of gastronomic history, it is multiculturalism which has made the food of this Sceptred Isle as highly esteemed as it now is. Having emerged from the dreariness of rationing, Britain has recaptured the vibrancy of its old cooking and then some, and instead of nefarious dealings on street corners, one can procure most spices for incredibly cheaply at any supermarket. British cooking has never been better: a mongrel cuisine for a mongrel nation.
