BOOK OF THE MONTH
Beef and Liberty
by Ben Rogers
Chatto & Windus (070116980X)
Reviewer: Jeremy Tagg — Bibliographer, Lindsay and Croft.
Few paintings have been as brazenly jingoistic as William Hogarth's The Gate of Calais (1749). In front of the old city gate, on which a shaft of sunlight picks out the English coat-of-arms, to remind us that Calais had once been in English possession, a kitchen porter struggles to convey an enormous side of raw beef to the local English hotel. Meanwhile, a grotesquely envious monk, two undernourished French soldiers and another ragged Frenchman clutching a spoon all look on in wonder. To the right, two local cooks in wooden clogs carry away a large kettle of unappetising, watery soup. Hogarth mockingly juxtaposes suggestions of French poverty and slavery with that imposing hunk of beef, symbolising the prosperity and vigour supposedly enjoyed by Britons under a limited monarchy and a Protestant church.
The historical importance of beef (as well as bulls, bulldogs and butchers) to the English national identity is the subject of Ben Rogers' entertaining Beef and Liberty. He makes clear at the outset that 'this book is a result of mad cow disease', and his account does much to explain why the outbreak of BSE in the early 1990s, and the subsequent ban on Britain's beef exports, seemed at times to represent not just an economic setback but a national humiliation. In his Introduction, Rogers revisits some of the newspaper headlines, letters and cartoons that appeared in the 1990s, to illustrate how it was the continued French rejection of British beef that rankled most and seemed to stir up a centuries-old culinary rivalry between the two countries.
The association of the English with beef seems to have been established as early as the late sixteenth century, but most of Rogers' account is devoted to the eighteenth century. The widening gulf between French and English cookery contributed to the enmity between two nations that opposed each other in no fewer than seven different wars during these years. The English preferred to boil or roast rather than braise or stew their meat, and developed ever more sophisticated roasting-jacks with which to turn it slowly over an open fire. They took their meat with gravy, pickles, horseradish, or boiled vegetables, ideally followed by plum pudding, and washed down with ale or porter. The French, on the other hand, preferred their meat to be baked in an oven, perhaps with a delicate stuffing, or stewed in stock and served with a rich stock-based sauce. It was, above all, the reliance on stock for stews, sauces and soups that distinguished French cuisine from its English counterpart.
However, if English patriots plumed themselves on their taste for plain cooking, it was partly because French cuisine was gaining an increasing number of converts among the English upper classes. Rogers discusses how Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's Tatler broadsides against the snobbish vogue for French dishes, the Scottish doctor George Cheyne's warnings against an over-refined diet, and the wonderfully named Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, whose members met during the theatrical season to enjoy beef, patriotic songs and toasts, all reflected growing disquiet about luxury and corruption among the ruling Whig elite.
One of the pleasures of Beef and Liberty is its range of illustrations. A whole chapter is given over to Hogarth's crowded visual satires, in which beef, beer and butchers often function as patriotic motifs. But Rogers has also tracked down a number of lesser-known graphic satires of the period, to illustrate, for example, popular prejudice against the fop who aped French tastes and manners. Anthony Walker's The Beaux Disaster (c. 1747) shows just such a figure hanging from a meat-hook beside a row of joints outside a shop in Butcher's Row in London, while the local butcher who has placed him there continues to taunt him in front of a passing crowd. Other graphic satires are used to trace the evolution of John Bull, who began as a flexible character, whom anti-government satirists could depict as an ox burdened by high taxes, and anti-Jacobin prints could portray as a subject content with beef and pudding, and unimpressed by talk of equality across the Channel. Rogers is particularly good on how the misanthropic vision of James Gillray transformed the character into a bloated glutton, scarcely superior to the skinny, bloodthirsty sans-culotte of Revolutionary France.
Written for the general reader, Beef and Liberty is an enjoyable contribution to the history of national identity in early modern Britain. Rogers' book leaves the reader thinking about the present as much as the past. While in the eighteenth century the English defined themselves by their home-grown produce and plain cooking, and feared the influence of a more artificial French cuisine, the situation is now curiously reversed. It is the French and Italians who struggle to preserve their traditional cooking against the threat posed by multinational supermarkets and 'fast food' chains that have already established themselves throughout much of Britain.
