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london cooking, london recipes, english recipes, english food
London England Cooking - Image 2
  1. london cooking, london recipes, english recipes, english food
  2. London England Cooking - Image 2

London England Cooking

Original price was: $14.95.Current price is: $9.95.

London Cooking with Betty evans is a collection of the traditional, tasty and favorite recipes of London’s pubs, restaurants, and homes.

Information and suggestions for visiting London, along with London sketches by Gordon Evans, make this book very useful not only as a cookbook but as a travel guide.

 

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When Betty Evans told me she was doing a London cookbook I must confess I had certain misgivings. True, one can eat very well in London—and in many other cities in Britain-but the food is likely to be foreign. It is no secret that continental Europeans tend to regard what goes on in English kitchens as barbarous. De Gaulle, at a press conference in 1967 when England was trying, unsuccessfully, to join the European Common Market, used a play on words when he remarked tht one of the obstacles to England's entry was the manner in which the English supplied themselves, the French verb "to supply" also meaning "to feed”. What right-thinking Frenchman could possibly contemplate admitting to the EEC people who boiled their cabbages to death and ate baked beans on toast? That England does not have a "cuisine" is no doubt a result of the fact that the English eat whatever is put before them. Unlike the French, who have turned complaining into an art, the English have traditionally gone to enormous lengths to avoid a fuss. In the days before package holidays and soccer holliganism, it was the dream of every continental hotelier and restaurateur to fill his establishment with English guests. This is not to say the English do not appreciate good food: far from it. What baffles the continental mind is that so many English people who obviously enjoy a good meal abroad, so cheerfully tolerate the opposite at home. My housemaster at school, who was certainly not insensible to the subtleties of French cuisine, returned from holidays in the Loire to whatever mess the house cook served up, without a murmur. Are the English ill-equipped by nature to produce anything worth eating? Hardly. In Elizabethan times even foreigners had complimentary things to say about the hearty food of the English taverns. That the tradition for robust, but well-cooked, English food failed to carry over into the hotels and boarding houses of a later age can no doubt be blamed-along with Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Albert Hall-on the Victorians. Fortunately, where this tradition has survived—often splendidly-is in the English home and pub. It is this food tht Betty Evans so ably presents here. - Christopher Swann

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