More than 70 years after the event, the British Council has apologised to George Orwell for commissioning and then rejecting an essay about British food.
The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was, the body has revealed, commissioned to write British Cookery in 1946, as part of the organisation’s efforts to promote British culture overseas. But a discovery in the British Council’s archives has revealed that after commissioning the essay, it declined to publish it, telling Orwell that it was problematic to write about food in a time of strict rationing.
“I am so sorry such a seemingly stupid situation has arisen with your manuscript,” runs the letter, raising “doubts on such a treatment of the painful subject of Food in these times”. The publications department representative tells Orwell he has written “a good essay … apart from one or two minor criticisms, I think it is excellent,” but that “it would be unfortunate and unwise to publish it for the continental reader”.
Orwell went on to publish a shorter version of the essay in the Evening Standard. “It seems that the organisation in those days was somewhat po-faced and risk-averse, and was anxious to avoid producing an essay about food (even one that mentions the disastrous effects of wartime rationing) in the aftermath of the hungry winter of 1945,” said editor Alasdair Donaldson. “Over 70 years later, the British Council is delighted to make amends for its slight on perhaps the UK’s greatest political writer of the 20th century, by reproducing the original essay in full.”
Featuring Orwell’s recipes for plum cake, Christmas pudding, and orange marmalade – of which the British Council editor declared: “Bad recipe! – Too much sugar and water” – the essay sees the novelist taking on the “simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet” of the British, which he finds draws “much of its virtue from the excellence of the local materials, and with its main emphasis on sugar and animal fats”.
“It is the diet of a wet northern country where butter is plentiful and vegetable oils are scarce, where hot drinks are acceptable at most hours of the day, and where all the spices and some of the stronger-tasting herbs are exotic products,” he writes. “In general, British people prefer sweet things to spicy things, and they combine sugar with meat in a way that is seldom seen elsewhere.”
Orwell considers breakfast, which is “not a snack but a serious meal” consisting of three courses, as well as hot beverages. Coffee “is almost always nasty … the majority of people, though they drink it fairly freely, are uninterested in it and do not know good coffee from bad”. With tea, “everyone has his favourite brand and his pet theory as to how it should be made”. Moving through roasts, and “the specifically British ways of cooking potatoes”, Orwell admits that “potatoes apart, [vegetables] seldom get the treatment they deserve”, with the British “not great eaters of salads”.
He has more praise for “one of the greatest glories of British cookery – its puddings”, in particular plum pudding and the boiled apple dumpling. But he warns his readers away from the milk puddings that are “unfortunately, characteristic of Britain. They are preparations of rice, semolina, barley, sago or even macaroni, mixed with milk and sugar and baked in the oven. The one made with barley is somewhat less bad than the others: the one made with macaroni is intolerable to any civilised palate,” he says.
After a long digression about high tea, Orwell explains that “the two great shortcomings of British cookery are a failure to treat vegetables with due seriousness, and an excessive use of sugar”, but urges readers to try the best of British food – in his opinion, apples, salt fish, oysters, biscuits, and jams and jellies.
“No one who has not sampled Devonshire cream, stilton cheese, crumpets, potato cakes, saffron buns, Dublin prawns, apple dumplings, pickled walnuts, steak-and-kidney pudding and, of course, roast sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and horseradish sauce, can be said to have given British cookery a fair trial,” he advises.
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