Calf's Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest

in English food.

It's become world-class. It's cheeky. It's even sexy.

But it's also steeped in history.

If we are to find out about who we are and what we were

and where our food comes from, then we really need to look at past,

because the past, actually, is our biggest human resource.

'I'm heading off on an adventure into the past, to try and discover

'what I consider to be the cradle of contemporary English cuisine.'

It's an extraordinary range of flavours.

'It's an Epicurean epic...'

Have a little chew. '..that begins in Roman Britain.'

Ha-ha-ha!

They're all right!

Hey, fantastic!

Yeah, believe it or not, they are!

'I'm going to recreate 300-year-old recipes in a 21st century kitchen.'

I've got my drill out!

I think if I'd lived in the 18th century, this would be all I would have eaten.

'From the page to the palate, it's a story that brings to life

'the smells, the tastes and the sights of the past.'

It's very thick, very rich, and absolutely delicious.

'It's the period where, like any good recipe, the ingredients combine

'to form something that's much, much greater

'than the sum of their parts.'

Perhaps we're in a bit of a rut when it comes to flavours.

Coffee and sedition, salad and first editions,

this is the golden age of English food.

There is no nice way to say this.

For 150 years, British food was less of a national cuisine

and more of a national disaster.

The French president Jacques Chirac said that

British food was the second worst in the world, behind only Finland's.

Ha-ha.

But the trouble is, the insult hurt, because until pretty recently,

it was true. Our food was blooming awful, and I should know.

I grew up in the '70s, and I am largely built of frozen

economy burgers, oven chips and margarine.

I've always been fascinated by a forgotten hundred-year period

hidden deep in our history, when English food, our produce,

our cooks and our writers, were as good as any in the world.

It was a wildly exciting time, when food defined

and shaped England, and a rich national cuisine developed.

But then, somewhere along the way, we lost it all.

Over the last ten years,

there's been a huge culinary renaissance,

but what is extraordinary is how much the Renaissance owes to

that forgotten golden age of food.

Now, you might not give the history of your food a second thought,

but the truth is that every time you go to the supermarket,

you're buying a little bit of the past.

All of these ingredients have their roots in the period

that I'm fascinated by. It's 1650 to 1750.

But the tastes and flavours that we think make up English food

actually go way, way back.

I think that one of the quintessentially English flavours

that we think of now as modern and unsophisticated

actually has its roots thousands of years ago.

It's this stuff.

Brown sauce.

This national culinary treasure, a simple, everyday condiment,

owes its existence to invaders 2,000 years ago.

The Romans brought together what we now know as England under

one rule for the very first time.

So at the end of the last ice age, the ice retreats,

leaving Britain as an island, but it's not until this gets

built that we get the first interesting phase in British food.

This is Hadrian's Wall. So, off to the North, savages.

Everything to the south of here, the Roman Empire, and it's the Romans

who really kick-started the first exciting phase in British food.

Vindolanda, a Roman fort established around 92 AD.

Archaeological excavations here have revealed how ancient Roman trade

and Empire changed our culinary habits.

So, the Romans arrived with their power and their love of food

and the wealth to be able to supply that.

That's right.

What do they change to the relatively primitive

food landscape of Britain?

Oh, they bring so much, because, of course,

they're networked into a vast empire, so the first thing you'll

notice are the wonderful spices and flavours, and then just variety.

So it is a real sort of explosion in the food culture here,

-as well as just having the foods themselves?

-It is.

-People begin to cook on a different level.

-They do.

-Flavours change.

-They do, and the real key to this,

the thing that gives the game up, in pre-Roman Britain,

you don't get these, or you don't get them very often,

which are the mixing bowls, the mortaria,

where you're mixing your spices.

It's where you're grinding things around.

Exactly. Pretty quickly, pretty much every household that you excavate

or you look at in Roman Britain has one.

-Yeah.

-It's a legacy of Roman Britain, this.

So is it a simplification to say that flavours didn't really exist

before, it was more about nutrition, and about getting enough energy?

Nutrition was the key, it was the absolute key.

You'd have the odd feast day, where you'd broaden the table

the little bit, but daily food was a fairly mundane experience.

But suddenly, you're networked into a much bigger thing,

where flavour starts to play a much more important role.

This is the first development of a recognisable food culture

in Britain, that has imports of food on a grand scale,

and we're beginning to use elements from around the world

and incorporating them into the British diet.

It's the first, I think, great age of British food,

when everything's available to make whatever you want, basically.

Whatever you want from, effectively, the known world.

'The Romans left behind the Vindolanda tablets,

'the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain.'

'Like wooden postcards from another age, they tell us

'what people were interested in, and what they were eating.'

'But if our understanding of flavour really did begin then,

'what will I find when I put an ancient recipe to the test?'

I'm going to recreate a recipe

from one of the oldest-known Roman cookbooks.

"De re coquinaria" - On The Subject Of Cooking.

Recipes compiled in the fourth century AD.

The trouble with history is that it's very difficult to evoke

the sensations and the emotions that people would have had,

but when it comes to food history, it's a bit different.

If you want to experience what a Roman soldier experienced,

nip down the shops...

..and get yourself some of these.

Because oysters are, in many ways, the classic ancient food,

and there are huge mounds of oysters found at lots of Roman sites.

And right here at Vindolanda, there is one of the written records

that one of the fragments they've got

refers to a gift of 50 oysters that somebody received.

To really get a sense of the flavours that the Romans used

to add to the natural foods,

because these were just growing in the estuaries, I guess,

this is a sauce that features a lot of the flavours

that they used to have.

A pinch of pepper, and then they would add a little bit of celery seed

that's been crushed up, which is similar to lovage,

which was very popular as well.

A couple of egg yolks.

And then acetum was very important.

It was a vinegar that used to be added to water,

and was watered down for marching soldiers.

And then they used to have a substance that was called liquamen.

It was basically made from fermented rotted fish. Very, very pungent.

We get the same sort of sensation from either nam pla,

which is Thai fish sauce, or from Worcester sauce.

Little bit of olive oil. Italian olive oil, obviously.

And then honey.

It's an extraordinary range of flavours,

from sweet to deeply sour to that fishiness, as well.

So there we go.

A Roman supper.

Might have a little try.

I think I should be first, seeing as I made it.

And now for this oyster with Apicius's oyster sauce.

Mm-hmm!

That's extraordinary.

It's like having an oyster with brown sauce.

Let's see what everyone else thinks.

So, it's an oyster, fresh oyster, uncooked,

with a sauce straight from a Roman cookery book.

Try it, and tell me what you think.

What do you think?

Different!

Ha-ha!

Have a little chew.

They're all right!

Yeah, fantastic.

Believe it or not, they are.

As well as aqueducts and roads, the Romans brought with them

the first great age of flavour.

I'd say that when they left in the fifth century,

England was plunged into a culinary dark age.

Of course, people don't just stop eating when the Romans leave,

but our food culture does go into decline.

Then, from the mediaeval period onwards,

we rediscover old ingredients, and we discover new ones,

but it's often through invasion.

William the Conqueror invades,

bringing tastes from the continent, and we invade the East

during the Crusades, bringing back tastes and flavours from there.

But this isn't a national cuisine.

It's a European cuisine, and was mainly eaten by the nobility.

It doesn't really filter down to the lower classes.

Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries

and the split from Rome is a seismic shift in society and class,

but it takes time for that to affect the way we eat.

Now, yes, 1,300 years after the Romans leave is full of interesting

food, but it's after that that things get really exciting.

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries,

he sold off the ecclesiastical lands to raise funds for the Crown.

Suddenly, the emerging merchant class had a chance to rise up

the social ladder, and the English country house entered a new era.

Before this, our food habits were closely intertwined with

religion, but now the table was set for a whole new

relationship between the English and their food.

Can you paint a picture of the state that Britain's been

left in by the Tudors by around 1650?

I think the most fundamental change

was that more people had more wealth.

Suddenly, we found, through trade, through the East India Companies,

whether it was the English or the Dutch, it was generating wealth.

And that wealth filtered its way right down to the lower levels.

The big country houses were powerhouses.

They were generating wealth throughout a big

proportion of society.

So is there a fundamental social shift?

Absolutely.

And there's wealth that filters down,

and a lot of that comes from trade, because of relative peace,

you get the prosperity, and that's reflected and defined,

I guess, by food, because a lot of that trade is in food.

And also the objects needed it to consume the food.

Because the dining table was the most important part

of a country house establishment, and also in the farmhouse, as well.

So the fashion starts right at the top with the upper levels

playing around with new ideas, something new has come in,

it's a novelty, and it slowly starts to filter down,

so it does have a tangible effect on society as a whole?

Very much so.

Food had become aspirational, a way to display new wealth.

It was generating trade, and with it, a city.

London, 1649.

We've just cut the head off our King,

and so begins the most radical period of English history.

There are seven years of bloody Civil War,

where families are wrecked apart, brother fights brother,

and society is thrown into chaos.

When the dust settles, it is clear

that nothing will ever be the same again.

We've killed our King, we have a new political landscape,

and there's a chance to remake society

in entirely unthought-of ways.

New ideas are not only introduced, but they're spread.

Over the next 50 years or so, we fight a series of successful wars,

and we begin building our empire.

The spread of trade and commerce is unstoppable.

In 1660, we restore our King to throne in the shape of Charles II,

but the changes brought by the revolution are here to stay.

In 1660, London is the third largest city in the world,

but over the next hundred years, it becomes the largest.

In many ways, the world comes to London,

and with it, the world's produce. Whether it's power, prostitution

or dinner you're after, London is where it's at.

This is the beginning of a national identity, and with it,

a national cuisine.

Now that might seem like a tenuous link, but the reality is that

food, politics and Englishness are inextricably linked.

Nowhere was this interplay more apparent than in the emerging

coffee house scene.

1652 sees the first coffee house open in London,

and within decades, there are over 500 in the capital,

and many more in every town across the land.

'Food and drink can change the world,

'brewing political change in a cup.'

Why did coffee become important?

At the start of 1650, were people drinking much tea,

coffee and chocolate?

From about 1650, you start to get what is almost an explosion

in all three beverages, and that's really driven by coffee houses.

And, famously, Pepys talks about coffee houses.

Yes. He goes from coffee house to coffee house to go and celeb spot.

And he's a political mover and shaker, isn't he?

Yes, very much so.

And so why does coffee become associated with politics?

What's the connection?

I think because they're called coffee houses,

apart from anything else.

They serve tea, they serve coffee, they serve beer,

but they're known as coffee houses, and coffee is one of those things

which almost revolutionises the whole political landscape.

For once, we're able to do our business dealings not over beer

or brandy or wine, we do it over coffee.

And that turns the coffee house into a sort of arena,

or forum for thought, politics.

For everything.

They're known as the penny universities,

because you pay an entrance fee,

or perhaps you just pay for your cup of coffee,

depending on the house,

you go in, you have access to the newspapers,

you have access to the foremost thinkers of the day,

and each coffee house gains its own character,

so there'll be a coffee house where literary gents hang out, there'll be

a coffee house where the political movers and shakers hang out.

There's a coffee house for the early financial industry,

and it's out of the coffee houses that a lot of financial institutions

such as Lloyd's Shipping List grow.

They are so interesting and so potentially seditious

that Charles II tries to close them in the 1670s.

So they're a genuine force?

They are a real force.

Charles sees this as a real threat to the court,

because he is trying to concentrate power back into the court,

having just been restored, and it fails.

The bill goes into Parliament, but it's never enacted, because

the power of the coffee houses is such, and these are male-dominated.

It's extraordinary, because it's a drink. It's a powder.

But it changes the world, and it changes England a lot,

because of the way our political landscape works in the 17th century.

They really do become an alternative forum to the court,

and that's very, very important going forward,

because that's part of 18th-century development,

that we are not completely focused on the monarchy, that we

have this alternative forum, and that's where an awful lot

of national development comes out, the national cuisine starts

coming out, and that feeds back into the greatness of the 18th century.

So this is the tea,

but this isn't tea as in the sort of common tea that we drink now.

It's back to green tea.

Yes, green tea was very, very popular.

In fact, green tea, when you look at 17th-century depictions of tea,

it's always green tea.

Black tea triumphs in about 1720,

and black tea tends to be drunk with milk.

Green tea, without, or possibly with.

But it's very much a delicate drink, very quickly associated with women,

partly because it has this proliferation of stuff with it,

which means that women can show their gentility, their taste,

their ability to hold and use delicate porcelain objects.

So it's about the kit involved as much as the drink?

Yes.

-Feminism through tea?

-Mmm.

That's brilliant.

-I drink my tea, I salute feminism throughout history.

-Excellent.

Chocolate. Sinful pleasure!

-Is this how they would have drunk it, with a bit of milk?

-Yes.

Basically hot chocolate.

Er, yeah. It was initially drunk with water.

In South America, it was drunk with water, sometimes thickened with

maize and usually sweetened with honey, if it was sweetened at all.

But over here, we very quickly started drinking it with milk,

and Madame de Sevigne, over in France, records drinking it

with little milk bottles, specially designed for it,

by the 1670s, and at the time,

we are using effectively cocoa mass, so 100% cocoa.

Hearty, sort of, spicy affair, isn't it?

It's very thick, very rich and absolutely delicious.

There's a wonderful pamphlet by Dr Duncan called The Wholesome Advice

Against The Abuse Of Hot Liquors.

And hot liquors meaning tea and coffee, rather than spirits.

Tea, coffee and chocolate, but mainly coffee.

With tea, it's a slightly different argument.

There, it will feminise us, so you have rants against the fact that we

are turning from a war-like nation into a nation of effeminate sippers.

And with chocolate, again, just as you say that nothing is new,

with chocolate, these days we associate it with sex and luxury,

and advertisers tell us that

if you drink chocolate or eat chocolate, that it's an aphrodisiac.

Well, then, there were an awful lot of pamphlets in circulation that

suggested that if you ate chocolate, you would become randy

and a nymphomaniac.

And did they think that was a good thing or a bad thing?

I think most of them thought it was quite a good thing.

There's a very, very long poem all about the wonderful effects

of chocolate, and there's a line in it that says...

The glint in your eye when you say this is quite scary.

In The Due Praise Of Divine Chocolate was published in 1652.

The written word holding a mirror up to the interests of society

in the 17th century, just as it does today.

Over the last ten years or so,

there's been an explosion in British food writing.

Our fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time was recently

published, and it was a cookbook, although bizarrely, not one of mine.

But for me,

the first truly exciting age of food writing was during the restoration.

The Brotherton Library holds one of the nation's most important

collections of historic cookbooks.

They're a culinary conduit into the past.

There's some really exciting books right here in front of us.

Can you tell me about the development of the cookery book?

The first cookery book is published is by Bartolomeo Scappi,

or Platina, as he's sometimes called.

The fact that this has been translated into Italian

out of Latin shows, actually,

more and more people are wanting to appreciate and to try these recipes.

The same process occurs in England during the 16th and 17th centuries.

More and more becoming available in your own language,

and that's a very important step.

Is that a function of the Enlightenment,

or is it just cookery, people needed to be told how to cook things?

It's part of the Renaissance.

Renaissance people always see it as something that's going back

to the ancient Greeks, Greek and Latin language, but actually,

it's also a new emphasis on,

"Well, my language is actually just as good."

It's a revelation.

It is, and, "I can make it into a learned language."

We have an example here of Hannah Woolley's The Queen-like Closet,

or Rich Cabinet, and this is by a woman,

one of the very first cookery books we have published by a woman.

Hannah Woolley has almost a little industry.

She's an early Beeton, in a way.

She compiles all of these recipes, and it's actually not

aimed at Kings and Queens, it's actually about giving you

a little insight into what you can do to make your household better.

Yes. And food has always reflected what somebody has to say

about themselves, and food is a marker of cultural identity,

and I think people are more aware of that in the 17th century, perhaps,

and are more likely to write about it and publish it, maybe.

And they like all the things that we would expect.

We don't need forks in our cookery books,

but we would like measurements. These tend not to have that.

Some of these authors here will expect you to actually go out

and milk your own cow, or they will expect you to have gone to

the butcher, or indeed, even to have done the butchery yourself.

Yeah.

As you get more urban society, more people living in the city,

they do actually forget that knowledge of how to milk a cow,

and they may or may not have their own oven,

-and that process of educating through cookery books starts.

-Yeah.

We're still with that, and we now do...

Delia Smith had to explain how to boil an egg.

'I'm intrigued by the ingredients

'and flavours these books might have brought into an English household,

'so I'm going to try cooking a recipe from one of them at home.

'How will golden age cookery writing

'translate to a 21st century kitchen?'

I'm going to cook an amazing recipe,

which really represents the absolute peak of Restoration era food.

It's quite challenging, it's called "A calf's head surprise".

And here is a calf's head,

and this ought to be an absolutely era-defining dish,

but I've got a hunch that it's also going to be, oddly, quite modern.

"You must bone it".

So this means I need to take away the skin from the head itself.

As you follow the bone against the skin,

you can then begin to peel it back a little bit.

'It's hard to know how common this exact dish was,

'though calf's heads were hugely popular,

'but only the rich had ovens, and as I'm rapidly realising,

'it's neither an easy nor a quick dish to cook.'

And there is the empty calf's head.

This dish is a real spectacle dish, really.

You need quite a lot of skill,

a lot more skill than I've got, to be able to do it really well,

and so it would be something done in one of the big houses where you

had the staff that can really pull it off, and let's flip it over.

I'm chopping through the base of the tongue now.

These look pretty gruesome, but tongue was a very,

very popular piece of meat.

I mean, this whole thing is not the sort of throwaway bit

of an animal that it is today.

These were the expensive bits.

The reason why this is going to be an era-defining dish is that, first

of all, this is beef, and British beef was absolutely fantastic.

We were renowned for it. We ate a phenomenal amount of it.

It crops up so often.

But also, this is something that takes a lot of skill.

Oh!

Went straight through.

I've done a lot of strange and wonderful dishes in the past,

but it's quite a brutal affair handling

and dealing with something quite as graphic as this.

But I guess, in the Restoration, they were simply less squeamish.

This was food, and this was a refined food.

It takes quite a lot to get into that mindset, I have to say.

So, really strong umami flavours, those fifth taste flavours,

which, again, are so common these days.

Now I'm going to try and sew the whole thing up.

This is going to be the tricky bit.

Ha-ha!

This is unbelievably difficult to do!

The skin is so tough

that I just simply can't get my needle through it.

But it's fine.

I've got my drill out!

Using a bit of new technology. Even that is quite tricky.

And it just shows the extraordinary level of skill that they must

have had to be able to pull something like this off. Oh!

Just like I've pulled it off!

I do think it's amazing that you can just pick up a cookery book

from hundreds of years ago and experience some real,

visceral experiences that a Restoration cook

and a Restoration eater would have had.

Going to get a bit more structure to him that way,

and I'm a bit worried he might just sink, but that's not bad going,

for somebody who doesn't really know what he's up to.

That is the head, stuffed and ready to go.

'If you're thinking of trying this at home, set aside the entire day.'

Oh!

Move it along a little bit... to there.

Doesn't fit.

Rethink.

And...

There we go.

It's sort of like a massive chicken nugget.

Better have a little try of this and see what the flavours are,

what the experience is.

Wow!

Look at that. Oh, my gosh!

Never seen anything like it in my life.

Roast.

It's like a tour of beef cookery.

What makes this so amazing is the inventiveness and the skill,

the playfulness of it.

It just shows a level of skill, but a set of flavours which is

so modern.

All of those deep, deep umami flavours that are in the meat,

that's everything that modern chefs are always talking about.

The use of nose to tail eating is an enormously important

force in restaurant culture in Britain now,

and there's the whole idea of using the head.

I haven't seen any calves' heads on menus yet,

but pigs' heads and entrails and spleen, they're all over the place

at the very top level of restaurant eating.

I've had some strange dishes in the past.

I've had rotten walrus, I've had radioactive soup,

I've tried some of the strangest foods on the planet,

but nothing is quite as stunning, as an overall experience, as this.

It's no longer gruesome, it's theatre on a plate.

The average person may not have been rustling up such a challenging

dish every week, but my golden age is the period where the

quintessentially English meal of roast beef is born,

thanks to advances in animal husbandry,

techniques and technology.

I'm off to meet Ivan Day,

one of the world's leading experts on historic food.

'At Ivan's house, we can cook food not only according to

'the original recipes, but with the authentic equipment,

'any mod cons are strictly 18th century.'

This is a fillet of beef,

and we're going to roast it according to a recipe from 1660,

which is the year of Charles' restoration to the throne.

This is the best of British food you could ever possibly experience.

Beef and Britain. This is a special relationship, isn't it?

It certainly is.

I mean, if anything, we're a nation of cattle drovers,

but we're renowned for our beef.

And across the world, we are the "rosbif".

Exactly, and already in the 17th century,

farmers were beginning to think about how

they could improve their strains, and by the 18th century,

we are producing the best beef in Europe,

so we actually accelerated forward with cattle improvement.

And this is why it's such a tragedy that we had BSE in this country,

because it seemed to wipe out all that heritage that we'd built up,

where British beef was just phenomenally good,

and in a flash, the world sees British beef has something negative.

Yeah, it was a pariah.

So the fact that the British were interested in animal husbandry,

is that a function of the Enlightenment, the idea that

a little bit of science can come into pastoral matters?

Absolutely.

I mean, the Enlightenment really starts in the Renaissance,

particularly in botany, where the herbalists are trying to identify,

first of all, the plants identified by the ancient medical writers

like Dioscorides and Pliny.

And then...

Bonkers.

Totally bonkers, yeah.

So there were people experimenting in the 16th century,

and gradually that really hotted up in the 17th and 18th,

so really, the scientific revolution at the end of the 17th century,

we tend to think of people like Newton and Robert Boyle,

but there were other people who were exploring the plant world

and looking for new foods, or how to improve food crops,

so, you know, it was a very important movement,

and we had the Royal Society founded during the reign of Charles II,

which gave impetus to this.

So you can actually eat the Enlightenment.

I like that idea!

This is the experience of the Restoration kitchen.

It's just unbelievably hot in here.

Right. If you grab hold of pulley on the end of that.

Yeah.

What we're going to do is we're going to see

if we can get that right down the middle, it's a very tender joint,

it'll go through that little hole, and it'll come out.

Gosh, that really is tender.

If you go round that side.

This goes over here?

Put it on the second hook down, OK?

And then we'll grab that chain and turn it into a figure of eight.

That's it, and the hook is on the bottom of the pulley.

OK. Now, if you just grab this handle, and put it onto here,

and wind it towards the wall, you can turn it much more quickly

if you like.

RATCHETS CLINK

Symphony going on here!

Well, it's the sound of an 18th-century kitchen.

Yeah.

And just watch it so that it doesn't go up too high.

Great, that's it.

Right, take the handle off and just hang it on the front

of the thing, give that a little bit of a spin, that way, that's it.

Off she goes.

This is quite high-tech, really.

I didn't expect to see something of this sophistication in a kitchen.

Well, that's surprising in a way, because the very best clocks

that were ever made in Britain were made during this period.

So it was a very advanced technological culture going on?

Oh, yeah. Clock making, the horologists of that period, I mean,

think about Greenwich and making chronometers and things.

I mean, that was much more skilful than making these things.

This was the very lowest common denominator in terms of clockwork.

But to find it in the kitchen is wonderful.

It was very common.

By the end of the 17th century, a friend of mine

who did a survey in Bristol found that about 40% of the homes

in Bristol had these things,

so they weren't in just very wealthy houses.

They were often in inns and taverns and merchants' houses.

Yeah.

If you look through old cookery books, you often find

frontispieces, and if you look up here, you can actually see the jack.

Oh, yes.

See the woman playing with the chain?

Yeah. In front of a ferocious fire!

I'm surprised that Tom the cameraman isn't actually burning himself,

because this is so hot,

and the women would be working in this kind of heat?

Yeah, and look what they're wearing.

These incredibly long gowns and aprons would catch fire.

And there were the most horrific accidents.

Oh, my word.

So there weren't any fire extinguishers.

Is it just romantic nationalistic nonsense to talk

about a British cuisine, an English food, or a golden age, or do you

think there is a genuine national identity seen in things like this?

In this country, in the last 20 years,

there has been a considerable watershed in food culture.

We've got fantastic food in our restaurants,

we have more ingredients available.

Our restaurants are winning best restaurant in the world.

And so they should,

but when we look back at the '70s and the '60s and the '50s

and the '40s, we see a graph that goes down like that,

and we assume it goes like that all the way down to

the Neanderthals, but actually, it's not quite as simple as that, because

it goes down like that, and then it might just go up a bit, and then it

might dip again, and then it might go up even higher than we are now.

So the current renaissance, it's actually a reawakening,

in some ways, of traditions

and developments that were laid down hundreds of years ago?

I think we have a golden age philosophy

underlying our current interests in food.

Let me give you some examples, like, for instance,

the buzzwords are regional, are local,

are organic, are seasonal.

Now, all those words indicate that we're trying to get back to

something we used to have, because at one time, all food was organic.

There was no choice.

There was no choice, so built into our current interest in food

is a kind of golden age syndrome, if you like.

But I think it's very important to understand that,

because I think it's propelling our interest in food,

and food history is only just awakening.

I mean, there's only a few lunatics like me 20 or 30 years ago

who had any interest in it at all, and now it's the new sex, basically.

There are food historians popping out of every orifice,

you know, trying to make a point,

and if we are to find out about who we are and what we were

and where our food comes from, then I think we really need to look at

the past, because the past, actually,

is our biggest human resource.

We've got the experience, not just of everyone alive now,

but everyone who's ever lived, in a way,

and that comes through the food, because they're the people who

actually invented the vast majority of what we call traditional dishes.

And some of the inventiveness of past centuries

is on an extraordinary level that puts today's molecular gastronomists

not to shame, but it certainly doesn't make what

they are doing as extraordinary and new as people would make out.

There is absolutely nothing new.

I mean, there was a recent craze for what I call cuckoo spit,

you know, on your plate in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Cappuccinos and foams.

Foams and things.

You know, we've had foams, we've had syllabubs

and lots of other frothy, light things

which were very important at one time,

so that's a kind of sensual experience other generations have

enjoyed, and we've forgotten that they actually like that, you know.

And actually, some of their foams are much better than the ones

that are made now, to tell you the truth, and there was

specialist equipment to serve them, too, believe it or not.

So there isn't anything new under the sun.

Look at that. It's a work of art.

OK, and then if you help yourself to a little bit of cucumber ragu.

They look extraordinary, don't they?

Yeah.

What we're eating here is the golden age of English food.

That is absolutely extraordinary. It's so soft inside.

The herbs are very gentle. It's not a huge, overpowering...

It's not a sauce that's been developed by boiling

lots of meats like you get in French cookery.

Exactly. What it is, though,

you're learning about the sensibility of these people.

They had very good taste.

This age of reason saw enormous advances in thought

and technology which changed the way we ate.

The expansion of market gardening was a key development,

allowing a huge variety of produce to be cultivated on a huge scale.

So what are the big changes that happened in food production

between 1650 and 1750?

Well, it is a century that precedes what is classically

known as the agricultural revolution.

There was a general increase in commercial gardening

and private gardening for vegetables and fruit.

So market gardens.

Market gardens, yeah.

Land cultivated with the spade and hoe, and the rake,

rather than with the plough.

The techniques of producing vegetables

got more and more sophisticated in the gardens.

And all these developments actually changed the substance

that's on the plates of Britain.

They did, because it meant you could produce things out of season,

or you could produce exotic things.

An extreme example of producing crops which should never have

been produced in the UK is the growing of the first pineapple.

And that's a huge technical achievement, isn't it?

It is, and as with all technical achievements,

once the first one had been produced,

everybody wanted to produce pineapples.

In the late 17th century, the pineapple enjoyed something

like celebrity status in the English fruit and vegetable landscape.

By the early 18th century, pineapples were still expensive,

but they were becoming more common, and they were available

in the emerging fruit and vegetable markets, like Covent Garden.

People like John Evelyn,

who was very interested in eating vegetables and eating salads.

In fact, this is his book on salads, Acertaria.

Acertaria.

Which tells you everything you wanted to know about making a salad.

It's a beautiful book, isn't it?

And this is sort of a first, isn't it?

This is the first really big book which says,

"Come on, eat salads, and here's how to do it!"

It's way ahead of its time.

Evelyn goes through every conceivable type of salad,

radish, purslane.

Purslane's a really interesting one, actually, isn't it?

There's a whole range of nutrients in it

that it has in a huge concentration.

Yeah, although, according to Evelyn, purslane is accused

"For being hurtful to the teeth, if too much eaten."

And there's a sort of extraordinary spreadsheet in it, isn't there?

Yeah. This is a typical Evelyn invention.

He first lists all the major vegetable crops,

and then what's in season.

Then he gives you combinations of these in season crops.

Finally, what sort of salad dressing you should use

with them, so you could put that on your kitchen table

and instantly whip up a salad according to the best directions.

'I'm fascinated by the idea of salad, 1699 style.'

'So I'm off to my local greengrocers to pick up some ingredients

'to try out Evelyn's ideas.'

What's extraordinary is the connection that my local

greengrocers right now makes with the past.

These salads start with a celery castle in the middle.

Now, celery is really interesting, because...

Oh, it's a bit mucky.

It really sort of started as a flavouring,

and it was only in the 1600s, really, that celery became

something that you could actually have as an ingredient on its own.

So this should, with all of these flavourings and ingredients,

be pretty spectacular in sensual terms, in the taste and flavour.

'Evelyn calls for a panache of celery as a centrepiece.

'He is unusual in just using vegetables.

'Other authors suggest mounds of meat or pastry architecture.

'Well, in the spirit of inventiveness

'which permeates the period,

'for my salad, I'm going to construct a celery castle.'

I haven't a clue how I'm going to do this. It's so complicated!

What I need is John Evelyn here, now, in my kitchen.

Which, actually, I've sort of got, because you can download a lot of

these beautiful old cookbooks on the Internet,

so I've got a copy of John Evelyn's Acertaria here.

All these recipes are wonderfully, and in a modern way,

they are relatively vague.

They sort of say, "If you've got this, you can use it.

"If you've got that, you can use it."

Trouble is, they sort of assume some level of expertise.

A level of expertise that I don't have.

Hmmm.

Less of a castle, more of a folly.

Quite a lot of effort for small returns.

You wouldn't do that for a kid's birthday party.

Bit weird, but there's my centrepiece.

Now it's a question of doing concentric rings of different

vegetables and salads, and this is all stuff that I've picked

up from my local grocers, which is pretty cool, I have to say,

but there's some extraordinary things.

This is purslane, and purslane crops up

so often in recipes of the period, and I was wondering why,

and they may well not have known this at the time,

but purslane has more Omega-3 fatty acids in than almost

any other leafy vegetable,

so it was incredibly good for you in some ways,

and it tastes, it's like a very, very succulent, lettucey,

slightly garlicky herb, and it's almost slimy on the tongue,

but in a really lovely way.

Evelyn also talks about things that you shouldn't put in your salads,

and he specifically says that varieties of spinach

may lead to the runs.

So we'll keep those aside. We'll use some chard instead.

Dried peas were the food of the poor, they were a staple food,

but around this period you get a mania for garden peas,

and people lose fortunes by spending so much money on peas,

because they love them so much.

I think that looks pretty spectacular.

I'm going to do one final thing,

just to make it even more ridiculously ornate.

Have some little palm trees going all the way around the outside.

I think Evelyn would have approved.

The amazing thing about John Evelyn is he wasn't just a salad writer,

he was a famous diarist, he was a contemporary of Pepys,

and obviously Pepys wrote a huge amount about food,

and there's the famous story about him

burying his palms under his garden around the Great Fire of London,

but also he talked about things like the first time

he drank orange juice, and these contemporary accounts

of somebody being fascinated by something they're drinking

that we find so ordinary, I find absolutely wonderful.

'I've tried these recipes in the comfort of my own kitchen,

'but how do they transfer to the modern palate?

'I've borrowed a restaurant in York for the afternoon

'for my most audacious experiment yet.'

It's all very well discussing events that happened 300 years ago,

the comings and goings of monarchy and Empire,

but if you're really going to evoke a golden age of food,

I think you've got to taste it.

'Food historian Dr Annie Gray and I

'have put together a golden age menu.'

'We've assembled a team of helpers to prepare a selection of recipes

'from 17th and 18th century cookbooks.'

'From porcupine of beef to Parmesan ice cream,

'these recipes sound surprisingly modern.'

'Although some of the ingredients

'have fallen out of mainstream cookery.'

-You've got to look at this. This is just the most extraordinary stuff.

-It's gorgeous.

It's so funny. It's as thick as Clingfilm, but it's got this beauty to it.

It's very strong.

These days it's a throwaway bit of old beef,

but this would have been quite expensive, a kind of rarefied cut.

It's something that is used an awful lot.

Neater than that!

-We are in a hurry!

-Sloppy!

Snip that off! OK, we'd better get moving,

because everybody's going to arrive any minute now. Where do we put these?

'We've chosen each recipe to reflect a specific aspect

'of this golden age, such as the introduction of new vegetables,

'the rise of the English identification with roast beef,

'or the lost flavour combinations.'

So, everyone's here.

It's a mixture of food-heads and historians and people who I hope

will be able to put some words to the experience they're having.

And they're quite hungry, so I'd better get started.

I am intrigued to find out what's going to happen, what they're

going to experience, because this is such a modern setting.

This is 21st century York we're in,

and we're going to bring out dishes from 300-odd years ago.

I've no idea whether they'll get a sense of the fact that it's

steeped in history or not.

Better get started.

'If we were being sticklers for historical accuracy,

'we'd serve these dishes all at the same time.'

Oh, wow.

That is extraordinary. It's a very sort of clean, pure flavour.

What's amazing about this soup is that

we don't really cook cucumbers any more.

We don't really cook lettuces, and if you get cucumber soup,

it's usually gazpacho.

It's basically raw.

So this is an old technique that is pretty much forgotten.

As you'd expect, it's a really delicate, delicate flavour,

but absolutely fantastic.

Ever so slightly aniseedy, I guess, which I wasn't really expecting.

I don't know what it looks like!

Quite a good discussion going.

Mmm.

Er, it's, hmmm. OK.

OK.

It's like a fried breadcrumb.

So, what you've got here is lumber pie, and it's a fat-based affair,

but it's a combination of sweetness and meat.

And inside there's grapes, there's little, basically faggots,

again, wrapped in fat.

Covered in a pastry where you can see inside,

you can see what's going on.

There's a little sneak preview before you get started. So, enjoy.

This does actually work quite well.

Sausage and grape, you wouldn't normally think, "Mmm!"

I'm enjoying this.

I think it's extraordinary that it is sweet

and meat in one mouthful, but quite a lot of spice,

quite delicate, but highly spiced at the same time.

By modern tastes, it's a very unusual set of sensations.

There is a whiff of Cornish pasty, definitely.

Yes. Sausage and gooseberry?

Sausage and gooseberry.

Very fragrant.

It goes right up your nose and opens up your nasal passages. Really good.

I think that if I'd lived in the 18th century,

this would be all I would have eaten.

That one was considerably nicer than that one,

because this one is sweet and tastes like a dessert.

-This one just tastes like feet.

-Yeah.

So, what was your experience of Restoration era food?

It's more like a chaos of flavours, rather than a blend of flavours.

There's nothing in there that nobody has ever eaten before.

There's nothing in there that was incredibly unusual.

It was just things that we don't have in that combination.

The fact that is surprising is potentially slightly worrying,

that it shouldn't be.

We should be trying different things together and having a palate that

can anticipate and deal with different combinations.

Perhaps our palates are trained in some particular way,

so then we look at this and say, "It doesn't work."

But perhaps we're just in a bit of a rut when it comes to flavours.

I think we've lost a lot.

I think our expectations are lower, and I think we don't delight

in complex flavours, or even a succession of flavours on the palate,

as they obviously did then.

'Over a glass of wine,

'there's time to reflect on our Restoration restaurant experiment.'

Well, what an amazing range of reactions to the food!

It's extraordinary. When you say to people, "OK, this isn't my supper.

"We are creating something from the past,"

the gloves are off, and some people absolutely loved it

and were fascinated by it and inspired by it,

and some people just went, "Urgh, it smells of socks!"

Which is fair enough, if it smells of socks.

There's nothing wrong with that, but, yeah,

interesting that they could feel able to...

-Yeah.

-We did set out to provoke reactions.

Every single dish was chosen to represent a facet of this era,

and, you know, we didn't tell people what the facets were,

but we were seeking to get something from people, and it's much better

that we created, in some cases, quite a polarised set of opinions.

I mean, I think the Parmesan ice cream was really,

really interesting, because it was a proper Marmite dish.

There were people virtually vomiting across the table,

and yet I know, later on, one of the people that was at the dinner,

one of the ladies was desperate to put it on the menu at her own cafe.

Do you know, that's exactly what I like from meals.

I don't want people to sit there going, "Mmm."

Eating it away. I'd quite like people to say, "Do you know what?

"I loved that. I really hated that."

Well, the interaction with the food is very much part of this period,

the idea of playfulness that was apparent in some of the dishes,

like the lumber pie.

That's something where food is something that's exciting,

it needs to be talked about.

This isn't the Victorian era, where you cannot comment on your meals,

so I think, in many ways, what we created was quite a good thing.

I do find it remarkable that this era is neglected,

pretty much, in popular history.

We know about the Tudors, we know about the Romans,

we know about mediaeval feasts,

but this era people don't really talk about.

I think this period is one that has been neglected.

People have heard of Victoria, they've heard of Henry VIII,

they've heard of Queen Elizabeth.

They tend not to have heard of William III or Queen Anne,

and it's a real shame, because under these monarchs,

in this period of history, everything happens.

All the foundations that we know and love like the Stock Exchange,

the Bank of England and the National Lottery come into being,

and that also applies to our cuisine.

I don't know what I really expected from it,

but it was brilliant to recreate these dishes that I'd only really

seen in books, and to get people to give their honest reactions.

I was really impressed.

-Yeah.

-Well done.

-Here's to it!

-Pulled it off!

'I think the seeds of contemporary English cuisine

'were unquestionably sewn in this golden age.'

Now, it is true that between then and now English food did

lose its way, but I wonder if that's part of the current renaissance.

We had to have these wilderness years,

when we begged, borrowed and stole from other food cultures,

because we'd simply lost our own, and now, when we're

rediscovering these wonderful dishes, we're not tied to the past,

we don't get criticised for being moribund, which French cuisine sometimes is.

But the most important thing for me is this -

if generations of kids grow up in a country that's reconnected

to its food history,

that truly loves and understands everything that's good and

decent to eat, then the future for English food is incredibly exciting.

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