“And, most of all, the thing I liked about my time in England was shepherd’s pie!” She beamed at me as we stood in the middle of the crowded hall in Almaty three weeks ago, surrounded by scurrying students clutching clipboards and asking probing questions of the 40 or so UK universities and colleges who were visiting Kazakhstan on an education trade fair. We had been talking about which UK university her son should go to. Her face broke into a smile at the memory of the food. “My landlady cooked it and it was really very good!”
Now, people often say nice things to me about the UK. It’s not often, though, that includes British food. I love my country a great deal. Pretty odd to be doing this job if I didn’t. I even love those things which non-Brits tend not to like – for example rain. Or queues. Or the way in which most Brits will automatically apologise when someone steps on their toe. And I also like British cooking. I was brought up in a very rural part of Southern England (although I was born in the North England heartland of Yorkshire), where old fashioned English recipes that make the most of the local produce are still used by local restaurants. You can still buy regional food which Thomas Hardy* himself would have recognised from the previous century. But I have to admit that British cooking isn’t necessarily the strongest of our cultural exports. That’s not perhaps entirely fair. There are more Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK than there are in the whole of America. Still – non-Brits, if they refer to cooking at all in such surveys, usually say only that they were pleasantly surprised at how many nice, foreign restaurants there are in Britain. And not how pleasantly surprised they are at British cooking itself.
Now, up until the 1970s, the large majority of foreign restaurants in the United Kingdom would have consisted of either Chinese restaurants (invariably staffed by people from Canton province); Indian restaurants (invariably staffed by people from either Gujarat or the Bengal area); or – but far fewer, particularly outside London – French restaurants. Those restaurants apart, everywhere else tended to serve up food cooked relatively simply. At its best, it was called “Plain English cooking” – and it was a description which reflected pride in the freshness of the food and the quality of ingredients. It was not, however, what you might have regarded as sophisticated. You were told sternly as a child to eat up all the food on your plate. Food was serious; food was not to be trifled with. Garlic was for foreigners.
But then the culinary equivalent of an earthquake happened. Marks and Spencer – that most iconic of all British department stores – took the radical step of adding garlic to some of the products in its new French Cuisine range. To their surprise, the products containing the garlic sold best of all. So they took another radical step – and doubled the amount of garlic in the same dishes. They sold even better! Clearly the British public had turned some sort of culinary corner. A generation later, and London is one of the great gastronomic cities in the world; English cooking has undergone a remarkable revival (still based on those superlative raw ingredients, cooked simply); Marks and Spencer’s single most popular sandwich throughout the UK is chicken tikka masala (a hybrid of southern Indian cooking which emerged in the 1970s from Indian restaurants in Birmingham); and the richest celebrity chef in the world – Jamie Oliver – is British.
Which brings me back to my new Kazakh friend, standing in front of me and reminiscing about her landlady’s shepherd pie. This is a meal designed to use up whatever is left in the fridge at the end of the week. If you’re a shepherd, those leftovers will presumably include lamb meat. If you’re a shepherd in Kazakhstan, your leftovers are more likely to include horse meat. Horseherd’s pie, perhaps? I mentally rehearsed how I would cook shepherd’s pie. Search in the fridge for leftovers. Cut it up finely. Add in whatever cooked vegetables might come to hand – carrots, for example. Add some beef stock, perhaps also add that left over red wine on the table, a bit of chilli sauce, whatever is to hand. Top it with mashed potato, season and a quick microwave to ensure the whole thing is hot. Then eat it. Nutritious, and it uses up leftover food that might otherwise need to be thrown out. But not perhaps a thing of beauty or something to evoke happy memories of living in a foreign land. “Are you sure?” I said to my new friend. I didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm for English cooking. There aren’t enough fans of English cooking in the world that we can afford to lose even one.
“Yes!” she said. “My landlady even added peas – my favourite!”
*Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. Novelist and poet. He lived in the Wessex region (South England) and many of his works chronicle the changing fortunes of rural society and the intricacies of Victorian society. My favourites of his novels are Far From The Madding Crowd; The Mayor of Casterbridge; and Tess of the D’Urbevilles. And if reading a novel sounds like too much work, then watch either the 1979 film of Tess of the D’Urbevilles, or the 1967 film of Far From The Madding Crowd. Then read the novels.