Wikipedia has a short and clear article on agribusiness, contrasting two ways in which it is used. The first is neutral.

Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as a convenient portmanteau of agriculture and business, referring to the range of activities and disciplines encompassed by modern food production.

The second is not.

Among critics of large-scale, industrialized, vertically integrated food production, the term agribusiness is used negatively, synonymous with corporate farming. As such, it is often contrasted with smaller family-owned farms.

Whether you use the neutral or the negative meaning of agribusiness, the fact is that British farming has been agribusiness for a long time, at least since the enclosures of the eighteenth century and in many cases back beyond that.

1% of the population owned 80% of British land in 1900, according to the fine historian Chris Bayly, I don’t know the current figures but my strong suspicion is that this hasn’t changed much. Maybe you could find out here.

This 1% did not actually farm, of course, nor did they manage their farms.  Their “home farm” of perhaps a thousand acres was run by a salaried manager and used for keeping their horses, developing specialty breeds, and providing nice vistas to be seen from their country house.

The estate agent managed the rest of the estate. His job was to collect rents that maintained the owner’s lifestyle. These estate agents played a key role in the industrial revolution which was largely funded (as it had to be) by the large landowners. Men like Thomas Davis, agent to the Marquess of Bath at Longleat, was up to his neck in schemes to find exploitable mineral resources (coal), build canals, put in hydraulic schemes  (water meadows, land drainage) to improve land productivity, use steam engines for agricultural tasks, etc etc.

The large tenant farmers worked large farms (1000 acres or more) and (until after World War II) employed large numbers of farm workers. I know a bit about this because my father’s family have been tenants on the Pembroke estate for a hundred years (perhaps longer but things get murky around World War I). They negotiated their leases every five, ten or twenty years with the estate agent.  Provided they paid their rent, these farmers chose how they farmed.  And need I say that the farming was a business.

Now I am quite happy to see farming as a business.  I am quite happy to see corporations running farms (though not so happy when these are royal or aristocratic corporations) if it ensures the long term commitment necessary to good land management.

But what of all those who take a dim view of agribusiness, who want to get rid of corporations, who want small farms farmed by the owner, who see this as a way to social justice, who proudly call lots of one acre a farm, who want artisanal foodstuffs?

Surely they cannot contemplate the long tradition of agribusiness in Britain with equanimity? It’s quite at odds with the small family farm tradition (real or not) so cherished in American political thought. And surely they should be wary of one of the largest magnates of all, Prince Charles.

Prince Charles inherited 135,000 acres, much of it excellent land in the south and west of England.   His manager farms the Home Farm, the organic bit, 1000 acres where he in time-honored tradition raises rare breeds.

His tenants are not required to farm organically, without doubt use as much of the latest agricultural technology as they can afford, and accept farm subsidies. His estate agent Smiths Gore I presume collect the rents and handle the accounts.

Like corporate agribusiness, Prince Charles has integrated vertically by producing a line of food products,  Duchy Products. These he sells not in farmers’ markets but through the large grocery chain, Waitrose. (True, they pay some royalties  into his charity, but that is in trouble at the moment, having to bail out some land investments made by the Prince).  He advertises these industrially-produced foodstuffs by appeal to tradition (a technique pioneered by big wine in late nineteenth-century France).

In 2008, rents from tenant farmers (and presumably from sources such as The Oval cricket ground and holiday rentals in the Scilly Isles) provided him and his family with an income of $26.4 million.

So when I read rave reviews of Prince Charles at the Future of Food conference going on in Washington, D.C., I have to wonder.

Is Prince Charles’ decision to farm 1/135th of his land organically really so compelling?  How can his admirers, most of whom I suspect, distrust agribusiness (and by any standards, Charles’ landholdings have more in common with large corporate landholdings than small family farms), overlook the scale of his operation?

Because of a sneaking deference to royalty?  Because he claims as his own, standard British agricultural practice, such as dung spreading?

Whatever the reason, I find the deference amazing. Prince Charles is, in my view, agribusiness personified.

Prince Charles–Not Your Typical Radical – National Geographic Magazine.  Worth reading.

Languages die out.  The world is littered with dead languages, most of which are unknown to us.  Cuisines die out.  We no longer have the cuisine of Shang China, nor of the Celts, nor of the British Raj, nor of the Britain I grew up in.  (Hence my cynicism about the possibility of preserving cuisines).

Why?  All sorts of reasons in the case of language. Sometimes languages or driven underground by conquerors; sometimes, as is happening now and doubtless happened in the past, the speakers of smaller languages decline in numbers until the language is no longer viable; sometimes the social circumstances that supported them change; and sometimes over time they change so much that there is no alternative but to speak of a new language.

The general reckoning among linguists seems to be that in about a thousand years a given language changes so much that its earlier manifestation is incomprehensible to modern speakers, the history of English being an example familiar to most of us here.  Most of us get the general drift of Shakespeare without translation, can make a stab at Chaucer, and are at a complete loss with Beowulf.

Do cuisines change so much as to be unrecognizable in the same way?  It would appear so. The Greek and Roman cuisines of the ancient world had successors but these are so different that they warrant being called different languages.

Some words appear to be more resistant to change than others, such as words for the more striking parts of the body (finger), the lower numerals, close relatives (mother, father), basic natural features (sun, moon), and basic necessities (bread).[i]

Are there elements in cuisine that are similarly resistant?  Does bread in the cuisines of Europe play this role or rice in the cuisines of much of Asia.  Can we go beyond the basic staple?  Is the flavor profile, for example, very stable?

How are new languages created? Sometimes by fission from their parent languages (the Romance languages from Latin, for example).  Sometimes by fusion with different languages (perhaps Hinglish in India today). Rarely do conscious attempts to create a new language succeed (Esperanto).

What are examples of cuisines created by fission?  Perhaps Spanish cuisine of the sixteenth century was created by splitting off from earlier Roman Cuisine (though it’s not quite so simple because there was also fusion with Celtic and Germanic cuisines). Certainly American Cuisine was created by fission from British (again with fusion with German, Dutch, Italian, etc).

What are example of cuisines created by fusion? Perhaps Mexican, though I tend to think of Mexico as having two tiers of cuisine rather than a fusion cuisine.

Can totally new cuisines be created and gain currency?  I think perhaps the new European cuisine of the sixteenth century, particularly as it developed in France, fits this category.  Perhaps also Buddhist Cuisines though I’d put Christian and Islamic more firmly in the fusion category.

__________________

[i] David W. Anthony,  The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 40.

This draws on a paper that I gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 2009 and subsequently published in the Proceedings, Food and Language.  You can find the earlier entries on inventorying cuisines, on mutual unintelligibility,  on families and sub-families of cuisine, on  being bi-cuisinal, and on the geographic expansion and contraction of cuisines.

Rachel, do you know when or where Jane Grigson said her wonderful thing about masterpieces and ordinariness? I’ve searched without success, and would like to verify it.

best,
mm

Mary Margaret Pack

Personal chef, food stylist and food writer

It is a wonderful quote, isn’t it. “We have more than enough masterpieces. What we need is a better standard of ordinariness.”    And if there are any readers of this blog who don’t know Jane Grigson’s work, well, you have a treat in store if you like a meld of intelligence, poetry, scholarship and cooking.

I had it from John Whiting (whose page is well worth knowing even if you not lucky enough to be going to Paris bistros).   If there are

Here John Whiting’s response to your question, Mary Margaret.  Small wonder you could not find it.

My source was Paul Henderson’s “Cornucopia: A Gastronomic Tour of Britain”, London, Little, Brown, 2000, ISBN 0-316-64817-5. Here’s the context, where it appears on p. 277, the next to the last page:

“It is a hard thing to say, but fine food is far from the most important thing in the world. It is not really a question of reaching perfection – that would be too much to ask – nor of lotus-eating, but of finding and maintaining a level of confidence in the food we eat day by day that enables us to get on with the rest of our lives. I forget who said it [he later told me that it was Jane Grigson], but the phrase could apply perfectly well to the food of Britain: ‘We have more than enough masterpieces. What we need is a better standard of ordinariness.’”

Be sure to check his comments about how kumquats and probably potatoes came to Greece thanks to the British. I await posts about some dishes (other than pudding) that came with or without these foodstuffs.  And candied kumquats, I can’t wait.

And be sure to check out his blog Greek Food Recipes and Reflections while you are at it.

Sardines–look at the little dears nestled in their can bathed in olive oil–are one of the more curious of the world’s foods.  They are one of that select group of foods, pineapple and sweet corn being others, that were created by canning.

Before you yelp, yes of course in some sense all of them were around beforehand but only as odd specialties. Pineapple, unless you lived in the central part of the Americas, was nurtured in the hot houses of the rich. Sweet corn was a highly seasonal specialty, being the young ears of corn.  It still is in Mexico.  Now both these specialities are grown to be canned and marketed to millions.

Sardines are a slightly different case.  For thousands of years, people had been eating young clupeids, as the herring family, probably the most important group of  food fish in the world, are called.  There are at least 300 species and people munched away on whatever their local species was without giving a damn about Linnaeus and his efforts to sort the living world out.

The British, along with the Dutch and the Scandinavians, were some of the greatest clupeid eaters in the world, thanks to the riches of the North Sea.  Dutch prosperity in the seventeenth century (and all those gorgeous still lives of food) was founded on herring bones as the Dutch saying went, thanks to their huge export trade in pickled herring.  The British followed, with a suite of preserved herring–red herring, bloaters, kippers, and dozens of dishes of fresh herring.

Fresh clupeids were and are appreciated in Britain in many forms. The real babies, just an inch long, are called whitebait, lightly fishy, crunchy when fried, with lemon and brown bread and butter on the side, have long been a treat as an appetizer or a lunch dish.

The herring youngsters, about three or four inches long, are called sprats, and different but equally delicious prepared the same way. My mouth waters.

The herring teenagers are called pilchards and only recently did the Cornish stop exporting preserved pilchards to the Mediterranean.

And the full grown herrings–pickled or grilled or soused or potted or fried in oatmeal have been a favorite for centuries.

And then there are sardines in a tin or in a can.  There are two stories at least about how this happened and, given the world wide experimentation with canning in the nineteenth century, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to run across many more.

One story says that it was Signor Giulio Trentino of Italy who put pilchards in earthen jars and called them sardines, the ancient Greek and Roman name deriving from Sardinia.   The other story says that it was Monsieur Joseph Colin who began canning sardines at Nantes basing his technique on the older habit of preserving the fish in butter or olive oil in earthenware containers.

Either way, a huge kerfuffle ensued because the Norwegians, the Portuguese, the Canadians and the Americans were also canning whatever species of these little fish swam in their waters.

Enter Harvey Wiley of the United States Department of Agriculture, author of the US Food and Drug Law passed in 1906. Such confusion was intolerable, how could people know what they were eating?  Mis-branding was going on all over the place.

After much huffing and puffing and bureaucratic to-ing and fro-ing, it was decided that a sardine was any small canned clupeoid fish no matter what the species.  What had to to be specified was the country of origin and what liquid the fish was canned in. Check your local grocery store and you will find that this US decision had widepread influence. So the sardine was born.

Now the French in particular were very proud of their canned sardines, giving them vintages, laying down stocks, etc.  I remember on one of my earlier visits to France seeing cans of silvery sardines in a specialty store–except the silver was foil and the sardines were chocolate.  Chocolate imitating sardines.  Well if that’s your thing, so be it.

Enter Marcel Boulestin. French and English cuisines have co-evolved since the Norman Conquest, and so it was with sardines. In the 1930s, one of the most influential interpreters of French cuisine in England was Marcel Boulestin. He’d been part of the Willy-Colette circle,  dabbled in art buying a Modigliani for 12 quid and selling it for ninety,  and had a well-regarded restaurant  in London.

Improbably he wrote for the Evening Standard which, if not a tabloid, certainly did not have the dignity of the Times or the worthiness of the Guardian (though actually he also did write for the Guardian and for Vogue from time to time). He also invented television cheffery, not just in Britain but in the world, appearing on the BBC from 1937.

In his Evening Standard Book of Menus (1935), Boulestin offered a recipe for sardine butter, canned sardines pounded to a paste and mixed with an equal quantity of butter.   I’m sure it wasn’t his invention because it drew on long French and English traditions of pounding and preserving meat or fish in butter. Potted shrimp is a classic English example.  (This is a wonderful technique by the way, quite extraordinarily useful).

Canned sardines soon took an honored place in British cuisine, usually in this form, alongside all the fresh herring dishes and the more traditional preserved herring dishes.  A kind of sardine pate cropped up in appetizers on toast and in sandwiches.  Like milk and cheese, like pork and ham, fresh and preserved herring have different qualities and are used in different ways.

And that’s where we get to what prompted this little dissertation.  Maria Verivaki of Organically Cooked is making a heroic attempt to come to terms with British Cuisine in spite of deep, deep suspicions  (ones she shares with many of her readers whose comments leave me with my jaw dropping).  She wonders why the British ate sandwiches of canned sardines instead of the fresh sardines that she prepares for her family.

Well, fresh sardines (which under the name of sprats) were and are eaten in Britain with gusto for main meals don’t make good sandwiches.  Canned sardines mashed with butter, perhaps a tad of hot sauce and/or lemon make wonderful, tasty and economical sandwiches. When you go on a picnic you want something portable, tasty, and that won’t fall apart.  They joined cheese and tomato and egg as ideal picnic sandwiches with butter between two slices of good bread.

Jolly good too.  Tomorrow I shall make potted sardines with the contents of this can and enjoy them over the next several days.  Try it.

Mea culpa.  I said that the heyday of the upper class English breakfast was from the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth.  That’s not what Kaori said.  She traces its roots back much further.

But actually I’d defend my interpretation.  As an erstwhile historian of technology, I imbibed a distinction made by economists and historians of technology.  A distinction between invention and innovation.  Yes, it is often important and revealing to know when something first appeared (invention).  But it’s also important to know when it gained acceptance (innovation and diffusion).

So we have here two questions.  (1) When did breakfast for the upper classes first appear? and (2) when did it become an icon and an institution? The iconic period, I submit, was the hundred-year period between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries.

Which leads into a second issue.  Why was this so?  I find the way that Kaori links it to other cultural trends in the period very thought-provoking.  We think before we eat.  Why did the English think breakfast was so important.  I find her analysis useful here.  That’s because one of my passions is connecting eating to the rest of culture and history.  And very few histories of food do that.  Well, as always I exagerate.  But food is all too often off on a little track of its own.

So Kaori’s story is over simple? Yes.  It leaves out the Scots? Yes (and the relation between the Scots and the English upper class is a rich, rich vein to explore not just in food).  But informative and thought provoking?  Yes to that too.

Adam? Anyone else?  I’d love more thoughts.

In a house the saize of a small palace, a buffet was laid out: game (in season), fish, fresh breads, made dishes such as devilled kidneys, tea, and coffee. potted shrimp and crab, fish pies, pickled meat dishes from brisket and goose to ox palate and thrush, apple and strawberry fools, a variety of macaroni dishes, and lots of Indian-style dishe, such as pilau, kedgeree and curried lobster.

Only perhaps one English person in a hundred ever tasted such a breakfast, even though a simpler version did filter down the social scale.

(Note that the country house breakfast had little to do with what is now sold as an English breakfast: bacon, sausage, fried egg, baked beans, and toast. This has emerged in its present form since I left England in the 1970s).

In The English Breakfast, Kaori O’Connor, an anthropologist at University College London, offers a “biography of the meal, a culinary detective story and a cookbook all rolled into one”  in her introduction, just over fifty pages in all.  (Most of the book, which is priced so ridiculously I am not even going to give you the bad news, consists of reprints of a couple of small nineteenth-century pieces on the English breakfast, followed by  (1) Georgiana Hill’s The Breakfast Book(1865); (2) Miss M.L. Allen’s Breakfast Dishes for Every Morning of Three Months (1884); and (3) Colonel Kenney Herbert‘s Fifty Breakfasts (1894)).

The breakfast cookbooks, all written for the leisured classes or those who aspired to be part of the leisured classes, are a window into a vanished world.  They are mainly for men (women could stay in bed).    For the British well-to-do male, this buffet-style meal was fortification enough for a day of country pursuits, hunting, shooting, or fishing.

Kaori O’Connor asks: why did the country house breakfast become so important a part of English culture?  For most of their history, the English upper class, like other European aristocrats, did not eat breakfast. The first meal of the day (dinner) was taken at midday, the second in the evening.

Her answer is that the country house breakfast asserted English, Anglo-Saxon identity in the face of expanding French high cuisine. It gained popularity at a time when Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe, the story of an Anglo-Saxon family in an England ruled by Normans (French).  One of its characters was Robin Hood, established him and his band of “merrry men” as an authentic English hero. It was also the when Alfred the Great was reinvented as one of England’s foundering monarchs.

The country house breakfast consisted of “honest” plain food not fancy sauced food, understood as French. The ingredients from the walled garden, home farm, and estate in Scotland were reminiscent of those advocated by Cato and other republicans in Ancient Rome who prided themselves on home-grown food from the estate.  Move the former midday meal back a bit and you have the dishes that were served.

A breakfast of this size at 9 in the morning allowed men to spend the rest of the day on horseback following hounds, shooting game, or fishing for trout or salmon (the famous trio, hunting, shooting, fishing, pastimes of the country gentleman). All they needed was a picnic.  Dinner became an evening meal.

As a result (and here I extending Kaori’s analysis) the English aristocracy and gentry had a Janus-faced cuisine.

In the morning, particularly in the country, they ate English food, asserting their identity with the nation.

At the evening dinner, they (like the upper classes across Europe) they ate French food, prepared by a French or a French-trained cook, asserting their role as part of a cosmopolitan world and as leaders of a world empire.

Best of both worlds.

Second, follow up with scores of comments like these on Charles and GM in the Telegraph (for non Brits, that’s the major conservative paper) which (leaving aside those that venture further into the matter than I agree or I disagree) also (with a few honorable exceptions) consist more of assertions than of evidence and argument sprinkled with a hefty dose of ad hominem remarks.

What a depressing spectacle.

For other takes, here’s the Guardian’s brief report on Charles and GM. Here’s the Times.

For the record, I have never found Prince Charles’ comments on farming and the environment to be particularly insightful. And I believe that GM crops appropriately used are the way to go.

As a child of the Enlightenment, though, and thus convinced that reason, argument, evidence and civil debate are crucial in public life, I find it hard to see how sense will prevail with GM with passions running as high as they do in the comments in the Telegraph. Or, perhaps more optimistically, these comments are not the tip of some huge iceberg but represent a distant outlier to general opinion.

Sheila Levine masterminds the superb food and wine list put out by the University of California Press. The books are of high scholarly quality, beautifully produced, and, cheers, almost never written in a dry academic style. They range from Ted Bestor’s study of Tsukiji, the Japanese fish market, to Marion Nestle’s series of books on food politics (pet food politics being the next offering), to a reprint of Martino’s Art of Cooking, central to understanding the cooking of Renaissance Italy. If you don’t know this series, check it out.

Also look at Gastronomica, that the journals wing of the Press publishes, edited by Darra Goldstein.

Rob Arndt is in charge of Yes Press which has just one book to its credit, Culinary Biographies, edited by his late wife Alice. I was a tad skeptical when Alice told me her plans for this and twisted my arm into doing entries on Accum (see below) and Appert (the Frenchman who demonstrated the possibility of canning in the early nineteenth century). The result, however, makes compulsive reading and it was enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times and other prestigious organs.

Opening it at random, I can go from Marion Harland, celebrity cookbook author in nineteenth-century America, to Dorothy Hartley, collector of English culinary folklore, to Nika Hazelton, German-Italian cookbook author who did much to introduce Americans to European cookery following World War II.

So if you don’t have it, it’s a book worth thinking about. And since in a few years there will be a second edition, think of suggestions for new entries. Rob particularly wants to strengthen non-American, non-European entries.

Ann Dolamore and her husband run Grub Street. It has reprinted some of the very best cookbooks of the last century, with a British emphasis, including ones by Elizabeth David, who had fame in England as great as the fame of Julia Child in the United States, Jane Grigson, who combined style, scholarship, research and great recipes whether for charcuterie, fruit, or vegetables, and Claudia Roden, of middle eastern food fame.

Less well known but just as interesting are Margaret Patten and my favorite Mary Norwak. She wrote the first cookery column I ever read on the back page of the Farmer’s Weekly no less. Her book on English Puddings Sweet and Savoury that Grub Street has reprinted ranges much more widely than the title suggests and opens the eyes to a world that has nearly gone.

Finally, there Phil Zuckerman, president of Applewood Books. He sells all kinds of interesting food books at great discounts. He reprints historic food books, mainly American and ranging much more widely than just cookbooks, and sells them at quite ridiculously low prices.

And if you visit his web site Foodsville, you can join discussion groups, do social networking (as I’ve learned to call it), and–get this–read those hundred plus reprints free. What a service.

I quickly checked out Accum’s Treatise on the Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1822), Bertha Haffner Ginger, California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook (194), Lafcadio Hearn’s Creole Cookery (1885), and Cheese and Cheemaking with special reference to Fancy Continental Cheeses (1896)–basically how Americans could get in on the growing cheese business.