British Make Hash of Jokes About Their Food

A young British chef has had it up to the top of his toque blanche with jokes about English cooking and is ready to parboil any blokes who jest at a culinary culture that knighted Sir Loin and whose glory is in a trifle.

Head chef Keith Stanley at the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly has the beef to back up his beefs about critics who dismiss this sceptered isle as “a nation of beefeaters and beer swillers,” as Jean Brillat-Savarin, the guru of French gourmets, once scoffed.

This 34-year-old chef weighs in at 15 1/2 stone (217 pounds) and plays second row--a sort of defensive tackle--on the Ritz rugby team that recently made hash of the Dorchester team in the hotel employees’ version of the Super Bowl.

“All right, so we have bubble and squeak, spotted dick, bangers and mash, toad-in-the-hole and all those absurdly named dishes,” Stanley concedes, fingering a carving knife meditatively, while Timmy, “the best-fed cat in London,” dozes beneath the butcher block.

“You Americans have your hot dog and hush puppies and blackened redfish, and they don’t sound too appetizing. Yet people don’t laugh at hot dog, which is similar to our Cornish pastie.”

He pronounces “pastie” in proper Queen’s English: to rhyme with “nasty,” not “tasty.”

Stanley can’t quite see why laughter should escape from behind menus offering cullen skink, bloaters, rook pie, Dundee and droppings, and pigs trotters. Or “why you Yanks cry ‘yuk’ at the mention of steak and kidney pudding?”

Bubble and squeak, he admits, might sound like an abdominal disorder resulting from frying up leftover cabbage, potatoes and Brussels sprouts with day-old onions, as the recipe requires, “but it really is quite delicious, although young chefs in our generation are trying to coax the public palate into a more imaginative direction.”

Having trained at the Bristol in Paris and then in London’s elegant Savoy Grill, Stanley thinks Britain’s food image stems less from the quaint names for the dishes than from the even quainter customers who keep coming back for more of the same.

“A lot of our clientele are from what you call the old school: retired generals and colonels, repatriated colonials, members of gentlemen’s clubs like White’s and the Reform Club,” he says. “They like home cooking, the way mother used to do it. Their idea of haute cuisine is the Sunday joint, which is fine, because every country in Europe sticks a bit of beef in the oven and calls it something. But it’s taken the British catering industry a long time to re-educate these people into trying more subtle Continental fare. And we still have a way to go.”

Geography is often blamed for England’s stodgy cuisine. While the rest of Europe was developing an appetite for pungent sauces, smoked meats, spicy sausages, subtle soups and vintage wines, the insular and isolated British clung to the basic meat and potatoes of the ale house. In Napoleon’s time Paris had 500 restaurants. Except for coaching inns, London didn’t have a deluxe hotel until 1880.

Sensitizing John Bull’s taste buds has been an ongoing process since Auguste Escoffier confounded the kitchen staff at Buckingham Palace by sending frogs legs to the Prince of Wales. Cesar Ritz, who in 1906 added the London Ritz to the string of European hotels bearing his name, imported the celebrated chef from Paris. With Escoffier came Nguyen Ai Quock, a Vietnamese pastry chef who, perhaps in despair at altering British eating habits, became a revolutionary under the name of Ho Chi Minh.

Britain’s ancient eating regime could never quite swallow Paul Bocuse’s nouvelle cuisine , although chef Stanley has noted a recent trend “away from red meat to low-cholesterol fish and white meat.”

Vegetarians such as George Bernard Shaw have always been regarded as more than mildly eccentric. “The habit is harmless enough,” allowed Sir Robert Hutchinson when he was president of the Royal College of Surgeons, “though apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.”

When Michelin issued its first Guide to Great Britain and Ireland in 1975, only a handful of restaurants rated even a single star. In the 1992 edition, England boasts a pair of three-star restaurants “vaut le voyage” --well worth the journey--London’s LaGravoche and the Waterside Inn at Bray-on-Thames. Now there are five with two stars and 34 with one. This still leaves a large gourmet gap with France, which counts 19 three-star restaurants, 87 with two and 495 with one star.

“But all this is terribly unfair,” protests television producer Jane Garmey, whose “Great British Cooking: A Well Kept Secret” is being reissued in paperback with an introduction by food laureate Calvin Trillin. “Michelin is totally prejudiced against English food. I was in Spain recently where they gave out so many stars to restaurants serving food nowhere equal to England’s it was outrageous.”

Born in Henley-on-Thames and “raised on good home cooking,” Garmey has aimed her book at teaching Americans how to cook British. “When I first came to New York, I prepared a lot of wonderful old English desserts, like trifles and syllabubs and gooseberry fool. People would say, ‘This is absolutely delicious. What is it?’ When I’d say it’s English, they’d just laugh. Foreigners rarely get to taste good British food because the English aren’t terribly hospitable. You don’t often get invited into homes.”

She believes British cooking “got a bad reputation with the Americans who came over during and just after the war when our food really was dreadful. Very little meat or fresh produce was available, and rationing went on until 1949.”

A decade after rationing was lifted, Audrey Gorton, a lecturer in Shakespeare at Vermont’s Marlboro College who survived the London blitz, authored “In Defense of British Cooking,” which pointed up food’s place in English lore and literature.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, she noted, were all told over dinner at roadside inns.

Henry VIII, that most voracious of royal trenchermen, slapped a slab of succulent beef with his sword and knighted it “Sir Loin.”

Diarist Samuel Pepys delighted in “lamprey pie.”

Samuel Johnson, in his endless flow of table talk, warned Jamie Boswell that “he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.”

After a hard day’s night at the gaming table in his club, John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who ran the British navy in Lord Nelson’s time, persuaded the kitchen, which already had closed, to invent the sandwich.

The novels of Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope and Priestley abound in food, glorious food.

In our generation, Sir Laurence Olivier soliloquized over the kippers British Rail served on the Brighton Belle, and Noel Coward boasted of concocting “a consomme devoutly to be wished.”

When TV’s “Upstairs, Downstairs” crossed the pond, American audiences were so impressed by the lavish meals Mrs. Bridges prepared for the Bellamy household that a cookbook culled from her fictitious fare became a bestseller. Kate Bridges intuitively grasped the relationship between semantics and the skillet. “The servants all like my potato soup,” she told Hudson, the butler, in one episode. “And when I’ve added a little cream and a handful of croutons, it goes upstairs as potage Parmentier.”

So what’s in a name? Prewar English menus often listed a selection of “offal,” which the Oxford English Dictionary still gives as the second definition: “parts cut off the carcass of an animal killed for food, including the head and tail, kidneys, heart, tongue and liver.”

You won’t find steak and kidney pudding or bubble and squeak on the embossed menu at the Ritz, but you could find them on your plate. “If that’s what you want, we’ll serve it,” sighs chef Stanley. “At the end of the meal, it’s the customers who pay the bill. I’m in the profession of satisfying them, not some food critic or social arbiter.”

He empathizes with the tragic tale told in the trade of an Irish hotel that imported a top French chef from Lyon to upgrade la cuisine . The very next noon a pistol shot echoed among the pots and pans. It seems that on his first menu the chef proudly presented “cotelettes d’agneau Marie Louise, pommes de terre Pont-Neuf , pointes d’asperges , sauce Mousseline , et aubergines aux tomates gratinees .” Then he overhead the waitress asking: “Will you be having the spuds and the veg with your mutton, lovie?”

In a nation that calls a sausage a banger and a hamburger a wimpy, one despairing food critic paraphrased T. S. Eliot to sum up fare England:

“This is the way the world ends, not with a banger but a wimpy.”