The British Have No Food Culture
This is the piece that got me into the finals for Fresh Voices in Food Writing at the YBFs. A longer version of this appeared in the New Statesman’s CityMetric in January 2018 and an even longer version can be found on this site.
I actually took this picture in Jerusalem, not Ilford. Because never in the history of civilisation has a good picture been taken of Ilford.
Angela Hartnett went on Desert Island Discs and said that the British don’t have food culture: there are just some people who have money and can afford to pay for good food.
I hate to disagree with Hartnett, a star in the food pantheon and sensible person of such no-nonsense credentials that she laughed in the pock-marked face of Gordon Ramsey and lived to tell the tale.
But what is this beige buffet of Britishness, this porridge of Reddy-Brexit, class-ist, philistine, pale and bland as white bread? It feels a million miles away from the gastronomic paradise, the vibrant and class-fluid food culture of the country where I was born and raised.
I speak of Ilford.
Ilford is a London suburb on the Essex/East End border, which, like a reverse Mecca or a shit Jerusalem, unites travellers from across the world in the fervent desire to get the hell out, go mad, or kill everyone. And, like Jerusalem, it has its Jewish, Muslim, and Christian quarters, with further fractions etched out by Hindu, Sikh and Chinese diasporas, waves and tides of 20th and 21st century immigration ebbing and lapping on the shores of the North Circular. It is an Ithaca: journey’s end, but a bit of a let-down. A rest rather than a new beginning. A bad motherland, to which we are all ambivalently attached.
Say what you like about Ilford, but it is a place where you’ve been able to find tahini, turmeric and jackfruit since before decimalisation. Most of these items, you could buy at any hour of the day or night, and be served by a tiny child who had been left to mind the shop whilst the adults were at second jobs or night school, at the mosque or synagogue, or in prison. Purchase and consumption of these items signified nothing, except the taste of home.
And it really didn't matter whose home. On festivals we would exchange samosas or jalebi or pierogi or hammantashen with our neighbours and drink masala chai three doors down. There is a whole world of dumplings, and a season for each one. We consumed a lot of chicken: fried pieces in boxes, or in a soup lovingly simmered for the precise amount of time to extract the maximum amount of guilt.
On a Sunday mornings you can wander along Barkingside High Street, which is by any metric an utter shithole, and join a queue for Sri Lankan curries or Italian gelato. There’s an egg-free cake shop. British, Halal, Kosher and African butchers. Four Jewish delis ranging from the glatt to the glitzy. There is no shortage of grilled meat, kebabs, chicken shops, noodle bars. Vast banqueting suites and local cooks cater for weddings of some thousand guests.
You could accuse us of having no culture in Ilford – the cinema long ago became a bingo hall which became a mega-mosque which became flats – but you cannot say we have no food culture.
I can go to the house of any of my Indian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Israeli, Nigerian, West Indian, or Scandinavian friends, safe in the knowledge and mutual understanding that I am going to be fed like a foie gras goose or that spaghetti guy in Se7en.
Just as there’s a multicultural London way of speaking, there is a multicultural London way of eating. An immigrant, diasporic soup of gravies and liquors and hot sauce. A sense of the importance and significance of food and meals and flavours. An appreciation of our own and your neighbours’ diverse food heritage. A love of the marketplace and the dinner table. An ear for languages where "foreign" is the same word as "guest" and "friend". Throw the windows of your semi in Ilford open on a spring morning and you’ll get waves of bacon, chai, cholla bread. And the sounds of TVs in a dozen languages, and music in a dozen different keys, and Sikh builders shouting at Polish builders, and the soft shoe shuffle of the Lubovitchers and the revving engines of the rudeboys before we all go home for Sunday lunch.
Food is my culture. I feel a twitch on the end of each strand of my DNA, like the taste of madeleines on a thousand foreign tongues. I feel it in my bones and the bones of my ancestors as they dissolve into distant soil in foreign fields. Come, gather, sit, eat. Leave room for pudding.