The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat

The moral munch

Rose Prince's subtitle, "changing the way you shop, cook and eat", makes her book seem as if it belongs with that category of bogus transformative self-help that clutters both television screens and bookshops. Buy this book and become a new person! Never eat a carb again! "Changing the way you shop, cook and eat" seems to promise yet another vogueish diet plan so as to appear ten years younger. In fact, it is the opposite. One of the main premisses of The New English Kitchen is that it would be better if we could all cook like our grandmothers -- or at least, like some idealized version of the good sensible cook of the past -- the kind of kitchen wizard who knew the virtue and cheapness of ham hocks and bones, purchased from the butcher for almost nothing; who knew "how to squirrel food away, storing it to save not just time but money, too"; who understood the value of making apple jelly from windfalls; who knew that the dripping it left behind was the best part of a roast rib of beef.

Prince, who has written about food for various British periodicals, is nostalgic for a time when the seasons really meant something, when asparagus or tomatoes could be greeted like a "friend you haven't seen in a year". She advocates buying eggs from the farm gate and gathering gluts of elderflowers to make cordial. She is extremely keen on such things as watercress and potted shrimps and brawn.

Prince, is not, however, advocating a return to the drabness of the post-war British diet. This is where the "new" part of The New English Kitchen comes in. Prince's idea is to combine grandmotherly know-how and respect for ingredients with zingy modern flourishes, provided by quantities of lime, cumin seeds and chilli. "I loathe the notion of typically English food", Prince complains. "People drone on snobbishly about pork pies, roast beef and Marmite, but I really don't want to rediscover the great bland dishes of England, the cow-heel pies or suet puddings. I'd rather see fields of artichokes growing in Lancashire, and twisted, sweet peppers in Cornish greenhouses."

One of her main culinary debts, as she herself frequently mentions, is to her sister, Sam Clark, the co-creator of Moro, "the Moorish-influenced London restaurant", whose cuisine has proved such an enlivener of the modern British table. Prince confesses that she often "begs" her sourdough bread from her sister's restaurant, and "honestly, no sibling conspiracy, I believe that their experiments at their restaurant, Moro, have resulted in the absolute best there is". She defers again to "my sister Sam" when it comes to "couscous, bulgar and other grains", remarking slightly ungrammatically that Sam Clark and her husband (also named Sam Clark) "know more about grains and allied North African dishes than I can shake a stick at". This sisterly self-deprecation may leave the reader wondering whether, assuming they have already purchased the two excellent Moro books (The Moro Cookbook and Casa Moro), there is any point in buying this one too. The answer, despite its occasionally odd phraseology ("I set off to find out how the whole damn fruit of the ocean thing ticks along" -- apropos of fish) is "Yes".

The New English Kitchen has two genuinely original aspects. The first is that it attempts to combine two genres of food writing which have, for the most part, remained disturbingly apart: the epicurean genre of recipe-writing and the anxious genre of food politics. Prince writes of her "furious determination to connect the paths of two parallel stories". The first story is that told in countless newspaper supplements, "a happy tale of lovely food, made using good recipes created by television chefs", whose message is "consume": "Enjoy! Chargrill some more tiger prawns -- to hell with the devastating effect warm-water prawn farming has had on the mangrove forests!". The second story is entirely at loggerheads with this. It appears on the news pages and is the story of a food chain "in crisis": diseased livestock, overweening supermarkets, obese children, adulterated Worcester sauce, scarce fish, Turkey Twizzlers. Its message is not "consume", but "abstain" or else worry yourself sick. By attempting to combine the two stories, Prince is trying to unite a feeling for the pleasures of food with an awareness that pleasure cannot be bought at any cost, if it is to remain a pleasure. Once you know about how battery hens are kept -- each hen trapped in a space equivalent to an A4 piece of paper -- there is no pleasure to be had in eating their eggs. Hence, all of Prince's recipes are prefaced by sections on the ethical ins and outs of buying a particular ingredient. This approach has already been employed to very good effect by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his River Cottage Meat Book (reviewed in the TLS, December 12, 2004). The difference is that Prince applies food ethics not merely to meat, where the problems are starkest and bloodiest, but to the whole spectrum of ingredients, from herbs to bread to tinned tuna. Before a recipe for tuna cakes -- a sort of bechamel-enriched croquette to eat for supper with a green sauce -- she advises that we should buy skipjack tuna, as the only tuna not to be endangered. Preceding the recipe for this green sauce (a kind of salsa verde), Prince counsels either growing your own herbs (she give the useful tip that supermarket basil plants are actually "30 or so plants crammed close together", which can be separated out and repotted to great effect) or buying them in bulk from Middle Eastern shops where they are "impeccably fresh" and likely to be "ten times cheaper than the triangular plastic containers sold in supermarkets".

This is the second original aspect of The New English Kitchen -- its insistence on the economics of food. Most cookbooks now operate under the assumption that all things are available to all of us at all times. Prince, by contrast, sees that there are constant limits to our desires. Apart from the seasons, the chief among these is money. One feast of grouse, say, may necessitate many other meals of eggs, pasta, rice or lentils and some ingenious juggling. Prince reckons that she saves 300 Pounds or more a year baking her own bread -- "money for treats". She returns to the practice of Mrs Beeton in offering costings (though not for every dish). The point of this is partly to convince that such things as organic rare-breed loin of pork are not beyond the modest budget, if treated with care. In Prince's calculations, 2kg of the best pork loin (costing 25 Pounds) can actually furnish seven meals, with an average cost of just 1.14 Pounds per portion, if every last scrap of meat is used, some hot with crackling and gravy, some cold with sesame dressing, some added to a spiced lentil stew. Admittedly, by the last six portions, the pork component is nothing more than stock made from bones. The principle, though, is a sound one, and Rose Prince's recipes are good. I followed her instructions for stretching a rib roast of beef for many meals and found them excellent -- from a sour-salty lime dressing for cold beef to a ragout-like sauce for tagliatelle.

It is unlikely that reading this book will change the way many people eat. The jaws still tend to move up and down, as before. In its particular combination of pleasure and principle, however, The New English Kitchen can claim to be a subtly transformative work.

Bee Wilson is a Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at St John's College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us, published last year.

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