Nostalgia is like honey. It sweetens everything it touches. The modern British foodie now looks back on the 1970s as a golden age, when the repertoire may have been small, but the flavours big, bold and satisfying: think prawn cocktail and steak Diane, coq au vin and Black Forest gateau.
The reality is that the 70s was where ingredients went to die. The prawns in that cocktail? Almost certainly cotton-wool mushy from months in the freezer, then drenched in the sort of fluorescent pink over-sweetened Marie Rose sauce that only a seven-year-old could love. The steak would have been overcooked to the uniform colour of a British winter sky, and the gravy, thickened with wallpaper paste until it resembled frogspawn. As to the restaurants that offered this stuff, it was menus without prices for the laydees and nothing could be served unless it had first been flambéed, tableside, in cheap cognac, including the bread rolls.
We have come a long way. Indeed, some say we have undergone a food revolution; to my mind we are only in the middle of it, perhaps at the Molatov-cocktail chucking stage. There are still many places where you could starve for want of a good meal, and too many restaurants seem to prioritise the design of the plate over what’s on it. That said, we are also in a thrilling period: at the top end young chefs have taken their lead from Heston Blumenthal to push the envelope of gastronomy (some day soon someone will do this literally by serving an edible envelope); gastropubs have democratised dining and even the chains – from Carluccio’s to Wagamama – have woken up to the fact that diners demand value for money.
So how did we get here? By virtue of politics and the media, that’s how. One reason food culture in Britain was so impoverished for so long was that the British resented paying good money for good food. Margaret Thatcher was no gourmand – her greatest contribution to food was putting more air in Mr Whippy ice cream, during her time as a research chemist – but her policies freed people to spend their cash as they saw fit. And one of the things they began spending it on was dinner. The other element was the arrival of new technology in the newspaper business: the explosion of supplements that resulted in acres of space that needed filling.
The appearance of Marco Pierre White on the scene, the chef as rock god who did unimaginable things with oysters and tagliatelle, inspired editors to fill that space with food features. Not only did this encourage people to eat; it also encouraged a whole generation of young men to abandon ambitions to start really awful rock bands, and become chefs instead. As a result we began to eat better in restaurants, which meant we wanted to eat better at home, which meant suppliers raised their game. So that now, when we decide to go a bit retro, we can prepare a prawn cocktail, steak Diane and a Black Forest gateau and they will all be dishes of true beauty. Which is why, when it comes to British food, the past always improves with age.
Jay Rayner is the restaurant critic for The Observer. His new book, The Man Who Ate the World: in Search of the Perfect Dinner, is out now (£16.99, Headline).
Read more about British food in Cream of the crop.
