The way we ate

Britain has a reputation for terrible food. Of course this is no longer true, many of the worlds top restaurants and chefs are either British or based here. This is not just the preserve of your top chefs, you can nowadays go into many pubs and small hotels and get a very acceptable meal and a decent wine list. As some of my fellow blogers and I discovered at the Northstar Hotel in Flamborough and The Rising Sun at Bamford.

However the myth still survives. Anyone well acquainted with 21st Britain and the pure volume of TV programmes on cooking will wonder where this reputation comes from.

I suppose having parents who lived through the war and the austerity of the fifties helps my perspective. My father will happily regale me with stories of the rubbish he ate whilst in London. Apparently in the countryside it wasn't so bad and my Mum had better access to fresh vegetables. But stories of dried eggs and soups made from bone were common place stories from aunts and uncles at family Christmases.

I mention this because there was an entertaining telly programme on last night - The Bad Food Guide (inevitably it was on BBC 2). It showed the food people ate during and post war and the menus and standards of food people accepted. Food was poor, service worse and of course us uncomplaining Brits we accepted it. We even had something called the British Restaurant which was affectively school dinners for adults. These started during the war and were "popular" becuase you didn't use those precious ration tokens. They continued after the war as people knew no better. Indeed so bad were things that we had to eat Whale and Snoek and tails of some Aussie animal (hope I've got that right)

In to the fray stepped Raymond Postgate (yes his son was Oliver who did such classics as the Clangers and Noggin the Nog) who wrote articles criticising the caterers and set up the Good Food Club where anybody could write in with suggestions of decent places to eat. In 1951 he published the first Good Food Guide with over 500 recommendations marking a new era for British catering.

It seems in Britain it wasn't the professionals who led the cultural revolution but the talented amateur (ever it was thus!) like George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall Bath.

The original Good Food Guide itself was terribly sexist I suspect a number of the bright sassy women who read this blog will be horrified by some of his suggestions. But that doesn't mean Postgate wasn't well intentioned and standards/attitudes today will seem equally outmodish in 50 years time.

Of course everything didn't become alright over night and of course you can still go out and eat rubbish food, but you can do that anywhere. What is important is that I know I can get a good meal virtually anywhere. Today a pub like the Miner's Arms in Eyam can have a bread pudding to die for.

The programme itself was a fascinating piece of social history.

One of the things we don't appreciate was how devastated Britain was after the War. Yes the Marshall Plan helped but I don't think people realise the impact the war left on Britain and long the effects were felt.