Rost-Bif

This book of English recipes going back over 700 years is most enlightening for all the stuff which is between the actual recipes, even though the dishes themselves are a real reminder of how our cooking had (so the French tell us) gone right down hill ever since William the Conqueror kicked the bucket. (Oh and by the way, the phrase 'kick the bucket' refers to the domestic slaughter of animals, which would - in their death throes - kick the bucket which was placed below them to collect the blood of their cut throats).

The court 'dinners' (taken at around midday, which we would now call 'lunch') of 15th and 16th century renown which comprised of about 20 courses including every conceivable creature which walked the earth, flew in the sky or swam in the sea, were not so exclusively extravagant as Charles Laughton's Henry V111 might have you believe.

If there were 50 or so guests to feed, it probably took about 100 or so people to prepare all the little dishes, plus about another 50 or so of the people who went out the day before to shoot, hunt, trap, net and harvest the ingredients. All of these servants were included in the banquet, albeit after the guests had had their fill, and so nothing went to waste and the guests did not necessarily over-eat, despite existing statistics suggesting otherwise.

Noblesse Oblige meant more than minimum protection - the servants of the large household ate the same food as the nobles.

Having just returned from Germany (again), has made it all the more clear to me that the old perception of 'British Cooking' being the worst in the world is wildly out of date. This accolade was inherited from East Germany before unification, and I can honestly say that the worst meal I have ever eaten in my life was at a railway station (one of the few places which was allowed to sell meals to the communist public). Everything on the plate was grey.

Both Germany and Britain suffered horribly from post-war food shortage, and the situation was only relieved in the late 1950s with the arrival of a few Italian restaurants. France carried on as gastronomically usual, having a social system which placed agriculture and gastronomy very high on the political agenda - even now, the country can be brought to a standstill by a bunch of farmers driving a herd of sheep up the Champs Elysee, or a motorway.

About 20 or 30 years ago, the only food worth eating in Germany was from Greek restaurants. Given the choice between Wurst and Kraut or simple, tomato-based Greek imports, I would choose Dicke Bohnen every time, when on tour with a theatre company. The Greek places seem to have disappeared to be replaced with horribly ersatz 'Cuban' or other exotic-sounding joints which employ Poles whose prime ingredient is sugar.

In England, there has always been one or two pioneering places hidden away (like the now defunct, 'Hole in the Wall' restaurant in Bath), which - so I believed - specialised in typically French cooking, or handling the ingredients in a typically French way.

The reality is - of course - that up until the turn of the 19th century, most good, Northern European traditional cooking was almost identical (with a few regional variations), but the true difference was that the French never stopped their love affair with food, despite wars and shortages.

The derogatory term 'Roast-Beef' for all English citizens came about because we - since the 16th century - would rather use all the sheep we had for the wool which was making us so much money in the clothing trade. When we weren't eating beef, then we were eating mutton from sheep that were past their best in terms of wool production, or the production of lambs for more wool. Chickens were for eggs, and only slaughtered during feast days as a luxury.

How things have changed, with almost universal chicken battery-farms, and the arrival of Colonel Sanders, hand in hand with Mr MacDonald.