The last thing anyone needs is another ‘hot take’ on the Royal Family, the Queen, the Jubilee, or anything of that ilk. So I won’t be bothering with that. For the record, I have a strange, begrudging, soft spot for the Queen. I wish her well on her victory lap. The rest of her gang though, I’m less than enamoured with. I suspect that once Queenie leaves us, the whole Royal house of cards might just come tumbling down.
Even a casual perusal of the popular press or social media over the last few days reveals, as always, aggressively polarised views on all of it. It’s been full to the brim with unhinged euphoria, on the one hand, vitriol on the other.
I believe lively discourse around things is good. Breezing along leaving perceived wisdom completely unchallenged can a flabby mind make; being aggressively dogmatic to the point of allowing only one viewpoint on any topic can a bore make. Being capable of holding two polarising opinions in one’s mind and coming to your own conclusion, even if aligned with one perceived wisdom or the other, can a person with whom you might want to share a couchette on an overnight train make. Not the most original or succinct expression of this thought you’ll ever read, but you get my point.
I really don’t want to splash about in that paddling pool of division. What I do want to do is take a minute to consider the food of our Great Nation.
No matter which side of the “quaint old Royal family” vs. the “bunch of complete Royal wrong-uns” spectrum you fall on, it is hard to argue against the fact that for centuries, and certainly, during our greatest era of Imperialism from 1815 to 1915, we force-fed the world Britishness and strong-armed the Royal Family into dominance around the world through the British Crown’s influence within the East India company. The East India Company were a deeply malignant force, and to offer your support as a rubber-stamp for their colonising robber-Barron escapades around the world was to align oneself with an organisation of pure evil - so that’s not great, is it?
Considering this over the weekend (on my own you understand, no one else I was with would countenance such boorish conversation,) I wondered if we haven’t all behaved a little like Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, who unceremoniously light-fingered the Parthenon marbles from Greece back to his home, over the course of about a decade, because he claimed he’d received clearance to do so from the head honchos within the Ottoman empire (who controlled Greece at the time.) I contemplated, therefore, writing up a listicle of culinary dishes we’ve stolen and should return.
I don’t want to be completely negative though. That is not to say I want to ignore colonialism's ills and wrongs, but to tarnish everything with those ills and wrongs is to miss some of the upshots. For example, in a mirror image of our own later colonising, we have an adopted culture of smoking and curing fish in the UK because the Vikings came marauding through our island quite roughly in the 9th century. Similarly, much of our cuisine’s historical leaning towards classical French cooking is because of the Normans and their quite aggressive conquests. On the flip side, our earliest introductions to, and subsequent infatuation with, spices came about due to big Rick d’Lionheart marauding through the Middle East on his crusades. We’re far enough from these historic incidents to simply observe these facts without getting too emotional one way or the other. We’re not quite as far from our recent colonial exploits, though, especially from our penchant for exploiting the human assets of Ireland, India, the West Indies et al, or our one-sided deal-making with the various territories we ‘saved’ with our systems and rules and ruling families.
What I am trying to get to is that whilst we’ve perhaps stopped short of rolling into countries and demanding they stop cooking anything we don’t like and start cooking only puddings, pies and Sunday roasts, we’ve certainly not been delicate with the translations of the dishes we have brought home with us.
In more recent history, for instance, the heftiest of our culinary plundering has been from India. Having got a taste for spices, it was our continued quest for said spices that drove the rapid rise of the empire, and India just so happened to be the jack-of-all-trades on that front: cumin, cinnamon, pepper, turmeric, and coriander were in abundance, all spices now commonly found within the kitchens of most British cooks. So we set up shop, we enforced ourselves upon India, and, to oversimplify something nuanced and complex, we brought home and bastardised some wonderful Indian cookery.
Of course, there is something charming about developing a taste for foreign techniques and ingredients. Taking something as low rent as Spam, for instance, it is possible to chart a fascinating tour of the globe to places such as Hawaii, the Philipines, Puerto Rica, China, Japan and South Korea, simply taking in the ways it is used. That Spam tended to arrive in these places due to a triumvirate of war, scarcity and US tinkering, is perhaps not the most positive of origin stories; but that the humble processed meat has now taken on a life of its own in each place is a positive upshot of the challenging circumstances that facilitated its existence in those places at all.
I can feel I am tying myself in knots.
All I set out to do this week, really, was to consider a few dishes that we love as our own in Britain and suggest a recipe for a version of an original dish that the version we know might likely have come from. I cast no aspersions. It is simply something I’ve been cogitating about this weekend, and as such, I thought I might share it.
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