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  • Chapter 20 - Culinary Longings

  • from Part III - Cultural Transfers
  • Edited by Petra Rau, University of East Anglia, William T. Rossiter, University of East Anglia
  • Book:
    Europe in British Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    06 June 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024, pp 322-336

  • Summary

    The chapter focuses on the influence of French cuisine in Britain. The innovations of French courtly cuisine were frequently mocked in Britain which had its own tradition of sound and economical country house cooking. The Industrial Revolution brought a loss of cooking skills among the urban poor. The affluent benefitted from the flight of French chefs after the French Revolution, leading to the culinary pretensions of the (equally mocked) Regency period. French chefs set up French restaurants and cooking schools, popularising French cuisine, thus influencing the tastes of the middle classes and stimulating a range of gastronomical writings. Examples from Antony Trollope’s Vanity Fair, Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover and Elizabeth David’s postwar books serve to gauge the extent of French infuence and help define what makes British food, British.