Did you know the Cornish pasty isn’t really Cornish? Shocking
but true... The food world, it turns out, is full of culinary tall tales- and for the romantics out there, the truth about many of the
popular stories and origin myths may be hard to swallow. Food
historian Annie Gray separates the folklore from the fakelore
PORTRAIT: KRISTY NOBLE PHOTOGRAPHY.ILLUSTRATIONS: ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGESF
ood is full of mythology,
often deeply held and almost
impossible to contradict.
Some of it is even true. Much of it,
however, is not, especially when
it comes to the origins of dishes.
Yet even when a myth crumbles
in the face of logic, we tend to cling
to the ideas behind it.
The stories we weave
about food may seem
innocuous, but they’re
deeply revealing of who we
are, and they can support
erroneous ideas about
culture, society and politics
that go well beyond the question
of what we’re having for dinner.OF PLOUGHMAN’S AND PASTIES
Take the ploughman’s lunch, that
mainstay of 1970s pubs. Bread,
cheese, pickle, maybe some ham or
a token salad on the side... What
could be closer to the probably-medieval-maybe-Victorian-but-old-
anyway rural midday meal, taken,
presumably, in the shadow of a
haystack and accompanied by
a good English ale? Rural workers
certainly did have a diet made up
predominantly of bread or bread-
like goods – wheaten in the south,
more likely oat-based in the north.Hard cheese, likewise, was a staple.
But workers had a hard life, which
got even harder as the Industrial
Revolution put pressure on wages
and rural poverty reached shocking
proportions. A snatched meal
of adulterated bread, bad cheese
and perhaps an onion is hardly
romantic (albeit not far from somemodern ploughman’s lunches).
A revised version of the rural
repast took off in the 1920s and
1930s, as it was easy to prepare and
cheap – with wide appeal to the
new breed of car-driving tourists.
But the ploughman’s didn’t get its
name until the 1950s, when it was
reborn out of post-World War II
romanticising of a long-gone
rural past. The ploughman’s
was pushed heavily by the
Milk Marketing Board as a
way of encouraging people to
consume cheese – ironically
at exactly the moment when
British cheese production was trying- and failing – to recover from the
damage wrought by the wartime
ban on all but a tiny selection of
government-approved cheeses.
Another romanticised food
item is the Cornish pasty, now
protected by the EU award of PGI
(Protected Geographical Indication)
A snatched meal of
adulterated bread, bad cheese
and an onion isn’t romantic78 deliciousmagazine.co.uk