Memories of English Farmhouse Cuisine: Beyond England

Over many years in the kitchen, I have found three, and only three cookbooks that gave me a shock of recognition, only three that have evoked the cooking I knew growing up in the 1950s. This was the cooking of the English farmhouse, that I ate at home, at my grandparents, in the farm houses of uncles and aunts and friends and acquaintances of my parents.

Hereford Cattle. Illustration by J.S. Goodall for Joan Parry Dutton’s Good Fare and Cheer of Old England

In the order in which I encountered them, these three books are Joan Parry Dutton’s The Good Fare and Cheer of Old England (New York: Reynal, 1960), Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1976), and Darina Allen’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking (London: Kyle, 2010).

Interestingly, two of the cookbooks were published outside the British Isles and only one was written by an Englishwoman.

Joan Parry Dutton, The Good Fare and Cheer of Old England (1960).

I picked this book up in a second hand store in Pittsburgh some time in the 1970s. It’s a gem, describing the food of the inter-war period with intelligent commentary, good recipes, and evocative illustrations by the illustrator J.S.Goodall (who also illustrated the books by the fictitious English village school teacher, Miss Read).

It turns out, on googling, that Joan Parry led quite a life, moving from a farm on the Welsh borders to Texas, and then, I believe, at some point to Virginia.  Apart from this book she wrote The Flower World of Williamsburg (1962), published by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Enjoying America’s Gardens (1958) among a number of other books.

Breakfast and tea lead the chapters, fish, beef, pork, game and poultry follow, then the kitchen and fruit gardens, bread and biscuits (that is, crackers), cheese, ale and cider (alcoholic) finish up the book. The parade of recipes–including apple pie and beef and kidney pudding, caper sauce and christmas pudding, coconut cakes, custard sauce, Dundee cake, kedgeree, sponge cake, gooseberry fool, herrings, Jerusalem artichokes, jugged hare, marmalade, mint sauce, pancakes, porridge, rissoles, rock cakes, sage and onion dressing, seed cake, scones, suet pudding, Welsh rarebit,and Yorkshire pudding–were things that my mother turned out without needing to look at a cookbook.

The kitchen garden sounds familiar.

“We had several varieties of French beans; broad and runner beans; early, maincrop, and late peas. There were early and long-keeping carrots, leeks and celery, beetroot and spinach, potatoes and parsnips and turnips. . .globe and Jerusalem artichokes, an asparagus bed, . . . seakale . . .onions . . .shallots . . .lettuces . . . marrow . . .spring cabbage, savoys, sprouting broccoli, and curly leafed kale . . .cauliflowers and red cabbage . . . Brussels sprouts.”

Edna Lewis, The Taste of Country Cooking (1976).

This I found in a remainders sale in Honolulu in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Like Joan Parry Dutton, Lewis reminisces about farm life in the 1930s but this time it is in Freetown, Virginia.  Edna Lewis was one of eight children, their grandfather an emancipated slave who had been granted land, all well educated in the first accredited school in the area, built with funds from a graduate of Oberlin College who had moved south.

Her custard sauce, the pies, the trio of pound, sponge, and fruit cakes, the puddings in a near-English sense, the roast meats and boiled vegetables, the parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes, the apples and plums (including damsons), the preserves, could all have come from my family kitchen.

Certainly some aspects were unthinkable in England, particularly the use of corn breads and the fruits and vegetables, from watermelon to aubergine, that would have had not a prayer of ripening in the cool wet English summer. Some of it, too, seemed wildly extravagant, such as a Christmas dinner with three meats (roast meat, roast chicken, baked rabbit), and four desserts (mince pie, persimmon pudding, fruit cake, and coconut layer cake), slightly puzzling because this was the Depression she was writing about. Then, again, that was the image of American cooking in England, extravagant, particularly with meat and sugar.

The seasonality, not in the sense of “oh it’s hot, let’s have lemonade” but in the sense of the march of the agricultural calendar, the tension at harvest time, the inclusion of wild and near wild game and fruits, the absolute necessity of meals on schedule, and management of garden and kitchen work (preserving) to maintain that schedule, echoed what I knew too.  How strange in Honolulu to be reading passages like the following:

The damson tree was one of the most popular in the orchard . . . It was a prolific bearer of hundreds of small plums, the shape of bird’s eggs, of intense navy blue with a purple tinge.  Damson preserves . . . have a tangy and distinctive flavor, especially when preserved with their pits intact, and are particularly good with all kinds of meat.

Pheasant is pretty special game, whether caught in the wild or raised in captivity; the flavor remains the same when properly aged, As great as pheasant tastes, it has less flavor than chicken if it dress and cooked without aging . . . it is best to let the pheasant hang in a cold place in the feather.

Darina Allen, Forgotten Skills of Cooking (2010).

Darina Allen is the second in line in the Ballymaloe dynasty in Ireland, where her mother-in-law Myrtle Allen set up one of the first country house dining rooms open to the public, where the tradition continues to the next generations.

Darina Allen’s book, by its very weight (4 1/2 pounds), number of recipes (700), and lavish illustrations, proclaims that here we are in a whole new generation of cookbooks.

Much of the increase comes from describing techniques (how to use suet, how to render beef fat) that would have been standard household procedure to the families of Joan Parry Dutton or Edna Lewis or from giving recipes for everyday usages.  Beef dripping on toast (I prefer bread) for example, which is simply the congealed fat and juices from a roast spread on bread warrants a recipe.  Well, cheers. If that’s what it takes to bring beef dripping back, I’m with Darina Allen.  As she says, it is “divine.”

Yet the recipes remain in the same tradition and the kitchen, garden, and meals fit the same pattern.

“We [had] a kitchen garden, a house cow, a flock of hens, and regularly fattened chickens for the table. There was always cooking going on in the house. With nine children, by the time we had finished clearing up after one meal, it was almost time to start preparing for the next. Mummy baked brown soda bread every day, there was always something bubbling on the stove, and in summer and autumn I remember regular jam and chutney-making sessions. The table was nicely laid for every meal.”

What Makes This Cooking English?

Or originally from the British Isles, if you prefer that.

First, at least for exposition because in my view beliefs and tradition are actually first, are the techniques, ingredients and dishes. The culinary tradition of the British Isles relies heavily on baking, both of meats and of sweet dishes, and boiling (or if that word makes you shudder) simmering. Preferred meats are beef, pork, mutton, game, the preferred staple, bread.  Fats are animal fats, suet, lard, and butter. Sugar is the sweetener. To make the sauces and sweets typical of a high to middling cuisines, the combination wheat flour, fat, and liquid (which may be meat juices, milk, eggs) crops up time and again in thickened gravy and white sauce, cakes, pies and puddings, which if sweet, of course, also contain sugar. Preserving depends on sugar, vinegar, salt, and smoke.

Second, is the historical continuity. This culinary tradition that stretched across the British Isles, albeit with regional variants.  The recent Dublin Gastronomy Symposium made the links between English and Irish cuisine abundantly clear.  The tradition stretched further to the thirteen colonies, where English settlers brought their techniques, such plants and ingredients as they could, and their cookbooks with them. Joan Parry Dutton, in her introduction, points out that “Most early Virginia households relied on English cook books, or . . . on collections of English recipes printed in Virginia.”

In short, the Southern cooking with which Edna Lewis was familiar owed much, not everything to the English tradition. I would place Edna Lewis as a skilled exponent of this tradition, bringing to it skills developed by both white and black cooks over a couple of centuries as they adapted it to the circumstances of Virginia.  In this I concur with Cynthia Bertelson, who has been writing about the English roots of Southern cooking for some months now and who has just come out with a long, thoughtful piece on Edna Lewis herself.  I see it neither as uniquely American nor specifically black. Contemporary convention demands that I now editorialize on this conclusion, but for now I will just let it stand.

What Makes This Cooking Farm House?

There are lots of books on English cooking. Why do these three stand out as farm house cooking.

First, is the sense that food comes from a widening circle of kitchen and pantry, garden and orchard, field and hedgerow, and that shopping is not a major part of the housewife’s job compared to gardening and preserving.

Second, that the housewife’s tasks are driven by the calendar, that preserves must be made in summer, that there is a glut of eggs in spring, that vegetables are in short supply by the end of the winter.

Third, that unlike many cookbooks these are absolutely not written with a view to the dinner party or entertaining.  This is cooking for the family and a large family at that, often with more than one generation, often with visiting friends and family.

Fourth, that meals were arranged around farm work. All authors talk about big, two course breakfasts. All assume that the main meal is at midday.

Afterword on Mary Nowak

Before discussing the three, just a word about a fourth author, Mary Norwak, the first food writer I ever read. Every week a fat yellow copy of the Farmer’s Weekly arrived at our house. The list of prices, discussions of different kinds of flooring for wintering dairy cattle, and advertisements for farm machinery did little to hold my interest. But the back page was given over to a column by Mary Norwak on some aspect of country food. I was amazed that it was even possible to write about food.

Mary Norwak was a prolific writer and I still regularly consult one of her books, English Puddings, Sweet and Savory (1981). Grateful as I am to her, though, she always wrote as an outsider describing country cooking.

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