English Food with Neil Buttery

David Crowther (0:22)

Hello everyone, and welcome to a special treat episode of The History of England. I get a little bit annoyed if I can start on a negative front, which is not a good place to start, but there we go. I get a little bit annoyed about the constant theme that, you know, British food is terrible, or that there's no such thing as British food anymore. So to make up for that and make sure I know that's not the case, I listened to a fantastic podcast called The British Food History Podcast. And Neil and I got in touch and thought we should do something together. So my special treat is that Neil Buttery has joined me for today's episode. Welcome, Neil.

Neil Buttery (0:59)

Thank you very much for having me. Very exciting. It's a bit surreal. I've been listening to The History of England since 2016

Right.

David Crowther (1:09)

Oh, yes. That's right. Yes. That's what I...

Neil Buttery (1:11)

I feel like I've known you for a long time. Yes.

David Crowther (1:13)

Thank you.

So Neil, I think one of the great things about eating in Britain these days is the diversity of food you can get hold of so easily. You know, so many heritages and different types of food, all the way through my life, actually, because I come from Loughborough where we had a very big Bangladeshi and Indian communities and you'd get great food. But I am also a little bit worried that we have a risk of losing some delicious foods that I had from, you know, when I was younger and a couple of them are on the list becoming. So, you know, I've really enjoyed your podcast and found it really helpful for mine as well, actually, because, for example, I enjoyed the discussion you had with Peter Ross about eating at George in London, which was...

Neil Buttery (1:56)

Oh, yes, it was really good. That was a good one.

David Crowther (1:59)

So tell me about the podcast you're doing and, you know, what's the idea? Why did you start it and all that sort of thing?

Neil Buttery (2:07)

Well, I started... Well, I've been doing my own food history stuff for almost 20 years now. And really, there's not an undergraduate course in food history or anything like that. You have to discover it your own way. So in my case, it was from the direction of the food. I was very interested in cooking and looking at traditional recipes and try to bring them back in my own little way. And then I got carried away and obsessed by it.

So I thought I would start up the podcast because I can... It's an excuse to speak to other people who are in my situation where they're doing all this work, cooking, research about the history of English or British food and get to meet them one by one.

David Crowther (2:48)

Fantastic, yeah. So Neil, we thought we'd have two parts to our episode.

Neil Buttery (2:54)

Okay.

David Crowther (2:54)

So the first bit, we had a chat and I had a chat with my family actually and involved them. This is a family project about what did we think particularly iconic British foods were. And from that long list, you've created a short list and we're going to talk about those. So that's the first half.

And then the second half is, we also thought we'd ask some general questions of the outside world. So again, about British food. So again, I asked my family, they came up with a list of questions, but then I was on my tour this year and Rip, within 10 minutes, he had a long list. And we're going to talk through some of those. I see.

So the first specific dish we agreed on is apple crumble and crumbles in general. And I see no reason why these should not have existed forever, but I understand not.

Neil Buttery (3:43)

No, this is one that crops up a lot.

It's a very traditional, we think of it as a very traditional British pudding. My food hero, Jane Grigson writes about crumbles, and she says something like, if you've got friends from Europe visiting, and they want to try a delicious traditional pudding, don't give them spotted dick or some kind of dead man's leg, you know, the kind of boiled.

David Crowther (4:12)

Dead man's leg? What's a dead man's leg?

Neil Buttery (4:16)

You don't know a dead man's leg? No, you've never heard of it.

It's a suet pastry, very sort of heavy. This is before people are putting things like bicarb in their mixtures, and you roll them into a shirt sleeve or a trouser leg and boil them.