English

by Ben Fogle

  Please do not consume food, sweets or chew gum whilst the screening is in progress.

  For each colourless liquid I was given four options: acid, bitter, salt and sweet. Once I had identified the flavour I had to rate them in order of intensity, from weakest to strongest. I was surprisingly nervous, all sweaty palms and racing heart.

  I regressed to my childhood loathing of exams. I hated them because I was so bad at them, hopelessly unacademic. I failed them all. I have tried to avoid exams as much as possible in recent years but now, here I was surrounded by Marmite royalty and about to put my love of one of our most iconic brands to the ultimate test. I picked up the first glass cup and sniffed the colourless liquid to discover it was also odourless.

  ‘Make sure there is no distraction in your mouth,’ advised St John, offering me a glass of water. ‘Rinse your mouth regularly.’

  I sipped a small mouthful. Salty, I was sure. I picked up another beaker and this one was stronger, but was it salty or sugary? How could I mix up sweet and savoury? This was ridiculous. Under pressure my mind started playing tricks on me.

  I took another sip of the first cup, which now tasted sweet. But was it the dregs of the previous cup that I’d failed to ‘cleanse’ with fresh drinking water? Arrrrggh. How was I going to make it as a professional Marmite taster if I couldn’t even distinguish between salt and sugar?

  ‘It’s definitely sugar,’ I whispered to myself, before reaching for the other beakers.

  I swished the fluid around my mouth. This cup was rank. It wasn’t a salty flavour after all and it certainly wasn’t bitter. I quite like bitter; this was acidic and disgusting – and strong, very strong. I raced to the sink to spit out the noxious substance. St John smiled a little as I wiped the spit from my mouth and returned to the concoctions.

  ‘Think rationally,’ I reminded myself as I sipped each cup methodically and allowed the sweetness to caress the front of my tongue. I divided them into their two groups and then returned to have another taste before placing them in ascending order. First flavour screening complete, I was presented with the second batch of flavours.

  What if I had got the first set wrong? By my reckoning the remaining ones had to be ‘bitter’ and ‘salt’, but if I had been wrong the first time then I would fail the whole exam.

  I began to doubt my ability to distinguish between acidic and bitter. We rarely try many of these flavours on their own in their raw, visceral nakedness, but now in a laboratory in northern England I was forcing my taste buds to work to Olympic standards.

  Once again I gingerly sipped one of the cups. This one was definitely salty. I have drunk enough salt rehydration sachets over the year to know what it tastes like when mixed with water. Interestingly, the more dehydrated you are, the less you taste the salt; the more hydrated, the more you can taste it.

  The other substance was unfamiliar. Was it bitter? Once again I trusted to instinct and carefully marked them all off the list before handing in my paperwork and walking to the small meeting room.

  I waited nervously before St John returned. ‘I want to be fair,’ he smiled, ‘you failed to mark one of the categories. Have a good look at the paper,’ he said, ‘and think carefully about what you’ve done. And make sure you are still happy with your decision.’

  Suddenly his words sounded like an ominous warning. Had I messed up that badly? I returned to the lab for reassurance, sipping the liquid again. Now I was sure it was salty, but why had St John questioned my judgement? Was he playing with my mind?

  I handed over the now complete but unchanged papers and returned to the waiting room.

  St John returned looking serious before placing the papers in front of me. ‘You scored twenty-four out of twenty-four. Full marks!’

  ‘One hundred per cent!’ I marvelled. I had never got full marks for anything in my life, and now here with Mr Marmite I had finally obtained academic excellence in … Marmite. It seems a rather fitting tribute to living Englishly.

  The press seem to agree. Marmite has provided our newspapers with manna from heaven. A quick look online revealed hundreds of Marmite-related stories.

  After a spate of Marmite thefts from a Spar store in Northamptonshire, the manager was forced to keep the Marmite behind the counter. There have been dozens of stories of Marmite being banned from British prisons because prisoners were using it to make home brew or hooch. Apparently, at Dartmoor prison the prisoners were making a drink called the ‘Marmite Mule’. In 2011, Marmite was banned in Denmark because it fell foul of the country’s law restricting products fortified with added vitamins.

  But my personal favourite came from the Daily Mail under the headline, FACE OF JESUS FOUND IN JAR OF MARMITE. According to the story,

  A family breakfast turned into a religious experience when they spotted what appears to be the face of Jesus in the lid of a Marmite jar. Claire Allen, 36, was the first to notice the image, on the underside of the lid, as she was putting the yeast spread on her son’s toast.

  And husband Gareth, 37, said he could not believe his eyes when she showed him.

  Mr Allen, of Ystrad, Rhondda, south Wales, said: ‘Claire saw it first and called her dad to come and take a photo of it.

  ‘When I first looked at it I wasn’t sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought Christ, yeah, she’s right – that’s the image of Jesus.

  ‘The kids are still eating it, but we kept the lid.’

  Mrs Allen said her 14-year-old son Jamie had also remarked on the likeness. She told the South Wales Echo: ‘Straight away Jamie said, “That looks like God”, and my other boys Robbie, four, and Tomas, 11, even said they could see a face.

  ‘People might think I’m nuts, but I like to think it’s Jesus looking out for us.

  ‘We’ve had a tough couple of months; my mum’s been really ill and it’s comforting to think that if he is there, he’s watching over us.’

  According to another story, one Marmite superfan has revealed an immense collection of Marmite memorabilia which included more than 200 jars of Marmite:

  Shelly McClellan, a self-confessed lover of the iconic Burton-made product, only began collecting items four years ago. And in that time the 45-year-old, whose obsession with the black spread began when she was a child, has amassed more than 200 different jars, and memorabilia ranging from jewellery and clothing to lamps.

  Shelly McClellan went to a pop-up Marmite shop in London dressed as a jar. She said: ‘I’ve also done several Marmite projects which have included me knitting a hat and painting a gnome.

  ‘My most treasured item is a gold Marmite jar celebrating 100 years. It also came with a knife and was only given to employees. I managed to get my hands on one as someone was selling one on eBay. My dad went and picked it up for me.’

  Yet another story was about a man from Etwall who ‘hates’ food, and says that he only eats to stop himself from starving to death and believes a daily dose of Marmite has been keeping him alive.

  In 2016, a post-Brexit Marmite row, or ‘Marmageddon’ as it was dubbed, caused panic buying. A very public spat between Tesco and Unilever saw the supermarket giant refuse to accept price rises on hundreds of Unilever products caused by the falling pound, which resulted in Marmite disappearing from Tesco’s shelves. No one meddles with our Marmite! Smaller supermarket chain Morrisons, however, quietly hiked the price of the iconic British toast-topper by 12.5 per cent, setting off new fears about food price rises in the wake of the Brexit vote. Tesco struck a deal to keep price rises to about 5 per cent. I even got caught up in the Marmite crisis myself, As jars went online for more than £1,000, I bought a jar for £50 just in case.

  If every country in the world were asked to assemble a capsule of iconic national food staples, there is no doubt that the box labelled ‘England’ would contain a distinctly shaped pot of Marmite, a caddy of Twinings teabags, a small slim bottle of Worcestershire sauce, and a tall jar of Branston pickle. Interestingly, if you break down the
assortment of flavours they all have things in common. They all have an emphasis on strong, piquant flavours, and arguably they are all best with something else … e.g. Marmite and toast, Branston and cheese, Worcestershire sauce with Welsh rarebit or a Bloody Mary, tea with biscuits. They all now have iconic branding, which suggests people love the homely familiarity of the product as well as its taste.

  Marmite to me is the epitome of English food. Widely derided and sneered at abroad and by half the people at home, it stoically and quietly grinds on in the face of opposition and unpromising odds. As a result it makes a lot of people very happy. For the naysayers, we can just repeat the classic phrase ‘You can’t please all the people all the time …’

  Can there be a dish any more English than fish and chips?

  If there is a spiritual home of fish and chips it must be Whitby. The home of Dracula and the annual Goth Festival, the Yorkshire seaside town has also become a Mecca for fish and chip aficionados.

  I love Whitby. It has a faded, gothic glamour with its ruined abbey and its grand Victorian façades. While the most famous fish and chip shop is arguably Magpies, which boasts a year-round queue for a table, I paid the town a visit in order to work in the newly crowned hero of fish and chips, the Quayside restaurant.

  Long before the sun had risen on a hot summer’s morning, I joined a small trawler, the Providor, as we motored out of Whitby harbour into the North Atlantic ready to catch the fish of the day. The trawler swayed gently on the benign water. It isn’t always like this. Fishing remains one of England’s most dangerous professions.

  We laid the long nets and trawled up and down the coast. Several hours later we hauled the brimming nets onto the deck before returning to harbour with our bountiful catch.

  It was still early but already Whitby was alive with visitors sitting on the quay wall watching the returning trawlers unload their catch while munching on fish and chips. Seagulls wheeled overhead, threatening to steal the contents of their white paper wrappers.

  Our shining cargo was unloaded and ferried to the local fish merchant, Dennis Crooks, where I helped clean and fillet the haul before finally delivering it to Quayside, the winner of the 2014 annual Fish and Chip awards – the Oscars of the chippie. Quite an accolade. More than 2,000 of Britain’s 10,500 chippies enter the competition.

  As I walked into the bustling, proud establishment, the owner, Stuart Fusco, to whom I was apprenticed for the day, handed me a long white apron and a chef’s hat.

  The secret to the perfect fish and chips, of course, is in the batter, and Stuart was certainly not giving away his award-winning secret recipe. The preferred fish divides between our nations within the United Kingdom: haddock, favoured by the Scots, must be sweet, flaky and soft in the mouth while cod, England’s favourite, should be subtle, firm and flaky.

  Using a pair of tongs, I gently dipped the freshly filleted fish into the creamy batter mix, allowing it to steep for several minutes before dropping it with a fizz into the bubbling cauldron of fatty oil. The queue was already snaking around the corner as visitors, many of whom had travelled for hours, waited patiently for the national dish.

  Fish and chips are synonymous with the seaside. Eaten in newspaper, drowned in vinegar and smothered in salt, they have become a staple for a generation. Winston Churchill described them as ‘the good companion’.

  No good Englishman or -woman can avoid the temptation of a chip. We consider it the bedrock of our culinary experience, but of course the chip is not a chip at all; it began life as the French fry. The story of the chip dates to seventeenth century France where it is reputed to have been created as a substitute for fish.

  In times past, rivers in France froze just as readily as our English ones. The fish couldn’t be caught and the French, in a pique of resourcefulness, resorted to carving potatoes into the shape of fish which they then fried as an alternative.

  This coincided with the introduction of fried fish to England from Jewish refugees coming from the Mediterranean. One of the earliest references in literature was in Oliver Twist, in which Charles Dickens referred to a ‘fried fish warehouse’.

  No one knows for sure who married the fish and the chip to create our culinary triumph. While some credit John Lees, an entrepreneur from Lancashire who sold fish and chips from a wooden hut at Mossley market, most still attribute the Jewish immigrant Joseph Malin, who opened a fish and chip shop in East London in 1860. In the nineteenth century, working-class diets were pretty bleak and unvaried, so when fish and chips arrived, it provided a new taste sensation and shops sprang up across the country. Italian migrants passing through English towns and cities saw the growing queues outside the chippies and sensed a business opportunity. Within years, fish and chip shops were a fixture on the High Street, with over 25,000 operating by 1910. The dish became so popular that during the First World War the government prioritised its protection, worrying that if the enemy cut off supplies, the effect would hamper public morale. According to Professor John Walton, author of Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, ‘The cabinet knew it was vital to keep families on the home front in good heart. Unlike the German regime that failed to keep its people well fed and that was one reason why Germany was defeated […] fish and chips played a big part in bringing contentment and staving off disaffection.’

  By the late 1930s and the advent of the Second World War, the government ensured fish and chips were never included in the nation’s rationing, once again fearing the effect on morale, and George Orwell agreed. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he suggested that fish and chips helped to quell uprising and avert revolution.

  Today, fish and chips has lost a little of its culinary hero status, diluted by the nation’s love affair with the North American burger and the Italian pizza. Burgers, fried chicken, pizza, Indian and Chinese dishes all now outsell fried fish. Cost is part of the problem. Strains on stocks of cod and haddock have pushed prices up, while health concerns about deep-fried food have turned many consumers away. According to statistics, our annual takeaway consumption breaks down as follows: 748 million burgers, 569 million Chinese and Indian meals, 333 million fried chicken dinners, 249 million pizzas and 229 million portions of fried fish. The fall in popularity is reflected in the number of chippies: 25,000 in 2010 and fewer than 10,000 by 2017.

  You are what you eat. You can tell a lot about a nation from their diet. As well as the land of Marmite and fish and chips, we are also the land of Worcestershire Sauce, HP sauce and Twiglets. We get through an estimated six billion packets of crisps and 4.4 billion bags of savoury snacks a year – around 150 packets per person – and you do wonder what our love affair with crisps is doing to us. Looked at by tonnage, we consume more crisps, crackers and nuts than any other European country. And this is where our own touch of eccentricity shines through.

  In the UK in 1981, Hedgehog Foods decided, as a joke, to produce hedgehog-flavoured crisps (potato chips). To everyone’s surprise, the crisps were a huge success. I have vivid memories of the phenomenon. We, as kids and as a country, were intrigued and outraged in equal measure, and I can remember the mad scramble to get hold of a packet of the most coveted crisps in the country. Hedgehog-flavoured crisps were actually flavoured with pork fat – no hedgehogs were used in the manufacturing process. Consequently, it wasn’t long before Hedgehog Foods Ltd ended up in court (1982) up against the Office of Fair Trading, on a charge of false advertising. Bizarrely, a settlement was finally reached when Mr Lewis of Hedgehog Foods interviewed gypsies who actually ate baked hedgehogs, to ascertain the flavour of hedgehogs. Mr Lewis then commissioned a flavouring firm to duplicate the flavour as closely as possible and changed the labels from ‘hedgehog-flavoured’ to ‘hedgehog flavour’.

  Our national taste buds can be as eccentric as our customs, clothing, humour and habits.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ENGLAND’S GREEN AND PLEASANT LANDS

  If there is a landscape that sums up our nation it must surely be the lawn
. From the English garden lawn to the bowling green, grass tennis court and cricket field, the green strips of finely cut grass are unequivocally English. When I think either of my father or my father-in-law, the most vivid image that comes to mind is that of them mowing the lawn.

  There are 15 million lawns in Britain. Last year we spent £54 million on lawn fertilizers. We then forked out another £127 million on lawnmowers. There is even an English lawn awards and a lawnmower museum. Except perhaps a dog, there is nothing an Englishman loves more than a lawn.

  The earliest lawns were probably found in medieval monasteries, where contemplation was helped by their greenness. But the first mention of the English lawn was in a 1625 essay on gardens by Francis Bacon. Bacon referred to lawns as ‘the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’, and he was quite firm about what made a proper garden. It should be square, surrounded by a ‘stately, arched hedge’, a distant patch of wilderness (thickets of sweet briar and honeysuckle) and, in the foreground, a lawn. ‘Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn,’ he wrote.

  The earliest domestic lawn is at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, where Capability Brown designed Salisbury Lawns in 1760 – so named because they seemed as big as Salisbury Plain, the vast rolling green plains of Wiltshire. Enormous lawns at houses such as Chatsworth demonstrated your wealth, for the lawns were expensive to keep. Many large estates used sheep and goats to keep the grass short; indeed, visit almost any stately home today and you will be sure to find vast flocks of sheep, ‘organically mowing’ the huge lawns that surround the old piles. If you didn’t want animals littering your idyll, you needed gangs of men with scythes.

  It wasn’t until 1830 that lawns really took off when Edwin Budding, an engineer from Stroud, Gloucestershire, patented an invention which would transform our country – not just socially, but also in the way it looked and sounded. It was the first mechanical lawnmower. The Budding marked the end of the skilled men with scythes, and meant everyone could now cut their grass into a short green oasis.