In this article by Julian Barnes, about how he came to love EM Forster, I found this vivid description by Forster of a rather horrid meal:
‘“Porridge or prunes, sir?” That cry still rings in my memory. It is an epitome – not, indeed, of English food, but of the forces that drag it into the dirt. It voices the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, prunes clear him out, so their functions are opposed. But their spirit is the same: they eschew pleasure and consider delicacy immoral ... Everything was grey. The porridge was in grey lumps, the prunes swam in grey sauce ... Then I had a haddock. It was covered in a sort of hard, yellow oilskin, as if it had been in a lifeboat, and its inside gushed salt water when pricked. Sausages and bacon followed this disgusting fish. They, too, had been up all night. Toast like steel: marmalade a scented jelly. I paid the bill dumbly, wondering again why some things have to be. They have to be because this is England, and we are English.’
I remember from somewhere a sentence running roughly "One recognizes the English notion of breakfast as punishment, used to intimidate the French and other lesser breeds." I can't say where this comes from: the writers Guy Davenport, Paul Fussell, and Florence King (Americans all) seem possible. But I can't at the moment track it down.
ReplyDeleteI have only read praise for English breakfast, if backhanded, as in Somerset Maugham's advice that if you want to eat well in Britain you must eat breakfast three times a day. It is certainly fairly reliable, in that you rarely encounter anything you don't expect on the plate if you order breakfast in England.
DeleteLord yes, a disgusting meal – but what a lot of it, course after course, and it's only breakfast! Once again (as when reading the novels of, say, Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym) I'm staggered by the sheer quantities of food people got through every day in the not so distant past. And yet there was no 'obesity crisis' and most people seemed remarkably trim. Why was this?
ReplyDeleteI suppose Edward VII slightly undermines the trim theory? I remember all sorts of bottled all-purpose medicines (Dr Collison is a name I have lodged vaguely in my mind?) being advertised in the back of colour supplements, and I imagined they were mostly purgatives to alleviate all that eating. Maybe houses were so cold that you would use up masses of energy just keeping warm? Looking at old menus most of the dishes look unrelentingly disgusting too so maybe everyone just played with the food on their plates?
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