Pamela cleared the plates, then brought in a large tray that held warmed plates,

a carafe of red wine, two covered vegetable dishes and a steaming hot pie with

golden pastry.

‘Here you are, Bruno. The great classic of English cuisine: steak and kidney

pie. The young peas and the carrots are from the garden, and the red wine is

from the Camel Valley in Cornwall. They used to say you could never make good

red wine in an English climate but this proves them wrong. And now, prepare for

the most heavenly cooking smell I know. Come on, lean forward, and get ready for

when I cut the pie.’

Bruno dutifully obeyed, and as Pamela lifted the first slice of pastry he took a

deep breath, savouring the rich and meaty aroma. ‘Magnifique,’ he said, peering

into the pie. ‘Why so dark?’

‘Black stout,’ said Pamela. ‘I would normally use Guinness, but that’s Irish, so

I used an English version. And beefsteak and rognons, some onions and a little

garlic.’ She piled Bruno’s plate high, then Christine served the peas and

carrots. Pamela poured the wine and sat back to observe his reaction.

He took a small cube of meat from the rich sauce and then tried a piece of

kidney. Excellent. The pastry was light and crumbly and infused with the taste

of the meat. The young peas in their pods were cooked to perfection and the

carrots were equally right. It was splendid food, solid and tasty and

traditional, like something a French grandmother might have prepared. Now for

the wine. He sniffed, enjoying the fruity bouquet, and twirled the glass in the

candlelight, watching the crown where the wine fell away from the sides of the

glass as it levelled. He took a sip. It was heavier than the kind of red Gamay

from the Loire that he had expected, his only experience of red wine grown that

far to the north, and it had a pleasantly solid aftertaste. A good wine,

reminding him slightly of a Burgundy, and with the body to balance the meat on

his plate. He laid down his knife and fork, took up his glass, sipped again, and

then looked at the two women.

‘I take back everything I’ve said about English food. So long as you prepare it,

Pamela, I’ll eat any English food you put before me. And this pie, you must tell

me how to make it. It’s not a kind of dish we know in French cuisine. You must

come to my house next time and let me cook for you.’

‘Yes!’ exclaimed Christine, and to his surprise, the Englishwomen raised their

right hands, palms forward, and slapped them together in celebration. A curious

English custom, he presumed, smiling at them and addressing himself once more to

his Cornwall wine. Cornwall, he reminded himself, was known in French as

Cornouailles, and he knew from school that the traditional language was very

like the Breton spoken on France’s Brittany peninsula, so they were therefore

really French in origin. That explained the wine. Even the name for Pamela’s

country, Grande Bretagne, simply meant larger Brittany.

The salad, the ingredients again from Pamela’s garden, was excellent and fresh,

although crisp lettuce mixed with roquette did not seem particularly English to

Bruno. But the cheese, a fat cylinder of Stilton brought from England by

Christine, was rich and splendid. Finally, Pamela served a home-made ice cream

made with her own strawberries, and Bruno confessed himself full, and wholly

converted to English food.

‘So why do you keep this a secret?’ he asked. ‘Why do you serve such bad food

most of the time in England, and why is its reputation so terrible?’

The women each spoke at once. ‘The industrial revolution,’ said Christine. ‘The

war and rationing,’ said Pamela, and they both laughed.

‘You explain your theory, Christine, while I get the final treat.’

‘It’s pretty obvious, really,’ explained Christine. ‘Britain was the first

country to experience both the agricultural and the industrial revolutions of

the eighteenth century, and they very nearly destroyed the peasantry. Small

farming was replaced by sheep farming because the sheep needed less care, just

as better ploughs and farming techniques needed less labour and more investment.

So small farmers and farm labourers were pushed off the land, while the new

factories needed workers. Britain became an urban, industrial country very fast,

and the mass urban markets needed foods that could be easily transported and

stored and quickly prepared because so many women were working in the mills and

factories. Then the new farm lands of North America and Argentina were opened,

and with its doctrine of free trade Britain found its own farmers beaten on

price and became a massive importer of cheap foreign food. It came in the form

of tinned meat and mass-produced breads. And this happened just as the old

traditions of peasant cooking that were handed down through the generations were

disappearing, because families dispersed into the new industrial housing.’

‘Some would say that similar forces are at work now in France,’ Bruno observed.

He turned to Pamela, who brought to the table a small tray with a large dark

bottle, a jug of water and three small glasses. ‘What of your theory about the

war being responsible, Pamela?’

‘Hold on a minute, Bruno,’ said Christine. ‘It was you French who invented

tinned food back in the Napoleonic wars, and wars were what spread the system.

The Crimean War of the 1850s, the American Civil War of the 1860s and the

Franco-Prussian War of 1870 were all run on tinned food, because that was the

only way to feed mass armies. Just the other day in your local supermarket here

I saw cans of Fray Bentos – do you know how that got its name?’

Bruno shook his head, but leaned forward, suddenly fascinated by this

conversation. Of course the huge conscript armies would need tinned food. The

First World War in the trenches could probably not have been fought without it.

‘Fray Bentos is a town in Argentina that began exporting meat extract to Europe

in the 1860s, to use up the surplus meat from all the animals that were killed

for the Argentine leather trade. And pretty soon the meat trade was far bigger

than the leather.’

‘Amazing,’ said Bruno. ‘I knew you were a historian of France, but not of food.’

‘It’s how I teach my students about globalisation,’ said Christine. ‘You have to

show them that history means something to their lives, and there’s no easier way

than to talk about the history of food.’

‘I wish I’d had teachers like you. Our history lessons were all kings and queens

and popes and Napoleon’s battles,’ said Bruno. ‘I’d never thought of it like

this.’

‘I agree with all that Christine says about the history,’ Pamela said. ‘But

World War Two and rationing, which continued for nearly ten years after the war,

made everything worse. After depending so long on cheap imported food, Britain

was nearly starved by the German submarine campaign. People were limited to one

egg a week, and hardly any meat or bacon or imported fruits. Even the tradition

of better cooking in restaurants nearly died because there was a very low limit

on how much they could charge for a meal. It took a generation to recover and to

get people travelling again and enjoying foreign food, and to have the money to

go to restaurants and buy cookbooks.’ She lifted the dark bottle off the tray.

‘And now I want you to try this as your digestif instead of cognac. It’s a

Scotch malt whisky, which is to ordinary whisky what a great chateau wine is to