Gastropubs?

The name sound slightly obscene, but epicurious.com assures me that Britain is in the throes of a "gastropub revolution." This means that the food being served in British pubs is now not only edible but occasionally even delectable.

To this I say: show me the data. One Michelined starred pub does not a revolution make. Even 289 gastropubs do not a revolution make. They're more the exception that proves the rule, because in the land ten thousands pubs shilling the tuna and sweet corn jacket potato, you need a heck of a big revolution.

While I could get behind a gastropub, and fully intend on making that Pedro Ximenez Sherry Cheesecake at the earliest opportunity, what I really fancy are just the unassuming pubs that do pub standards right. Thus, props...nay rather...Maximum Respect to the sticky toffee pudding (The steamed pudding is Britain's great contribution to the culinary Pantheon, and Britons would do well to remember it.) and the bangers and mash at the Rose and Crown in Oxford and to pretty much anything at the Stein Inn on Skye.

Addendum:

It occured to me that cosmopolitan though Dr. Curmudgeon readers are, perhaps they are wondering as what exactly is a jacket potato. When the fellow blogger Albert was early abroad he sent out a piece to his Stateside correspondent called "Bottom Feeding" in which he mused upon the lower echelons of English cookery and touched lightly upon the jacket potato. I had thought just of extracting the jacket potato portion and posting it by way of explanation, but when I read through the piece trying to find that bit, I realized I was doing Dr. Curmudgeon readers a grave disservice if I didn't post the whole thing:



BOTTOMFEEDING

A horror story is almost obligatory at the beginning of a report
on the darker parts of British cooking. So here it is.

A reliable source informs me that when he was an undergraduate at a college which legal advisors have told me should remain nameless, the food there was exceedingly bad, and not only in the gustatory sense but in terms of actual nutritional content. Indeed, it was so bad, that the following occurred. One of his classmates while home for Christmas break met his family's general practitioner in the street. The GP said, "My, you don't look so well. Why don't you stop in to the office, and I'll have a closer look at you?" When this meeting came about, the GP was a little baffled at first before he eventually was able to make a diagnosis; you see, he had never before seen a case of scurvy. After that, my reliable source informs me, he and his fellow undergraduates took most of their meals in neighboring pubs.

Well, it says something about the nutritional state of affairs at X College that its undergraduates felt obliged to seek well-balanced meals at, of all places, pubs. For I cannot imagine any Director of the FDA walking into an English pub, having a look about and saying, "Right, this is just the place where someone can get a well-balanced and nutritious meal." If, to revert to the nutritional ideas of my youth, we divided pub food into the food groups we would have: the beer group, the fried things group, the green peas/salad group. Salad?, you ask. Well, don't get too excited. Salad is a garnish of lettuce- ambitious and gastronomically advanced pubs liven it up with a slice of cucumber, but it's still a garnish. It's not, you know, a salad.
To be fair, however, one could imagine a pub that had good food.

It would, however, require good ingredients and a pub owner dedicated enough to cooking to want to use them. If you hear of such a place inOxford, do let me know.

The problem with English food is that it's so simple. What is an abomination of God's creation at one restaurant might be, in another restaurant, something they serve on Thursdays in Paradise. English food is more or less completely dependent on the quality of its ingredients. It does not mass-produce. But then, what cuisine does? But mass production is exactly how the food in most pubs is prepared.
I imagine that there are factories Tyneside where, shipbuilding having moved to Japan, steak-and-ale pies are stamped out in vast industrial presses to feed a hungry nation. This supply does of course meet demand. No pub owner wants to cook when they could be serving beer.

Instant mashed potatoes are a further example of this economic drive.
The instant mashed potatoes of the American school cafeteria are, in comparison, light and fluffy, creamed perhaps with a bit of white truffle. Instant mashed potatoes over here are hefty and weighty, they drop down almost instantaneously into the depths of your belly, and cause you to think rude thoughts about the French.

Rather than go on in this vein, I shall provide you with a short non-alphabetical guide to pitfalls, real and apparent, in Oxford eating:


Sweet Corn- what is it with the English and sweet corn? It's everywhere. It's a topping for your pizza. It's a topping for your Jacket Potato (see below). It is always a garnish, never a side dish. Do they crave yellow things? Does it remind them of the departed sun? It seems more or less an exotic item; perhaps because it is a starch of
a color other than white?

Baguettes- Everyone serves baguettes; we call them "rolls", on which you put something civilized like cold-cuts or meatballs. Here they put just about anything on them. Even Kebab Vans (see below) serve baguettes, and when kebab vans serve something you know that it has reached maximum distribution within the proletariat. Is it, perhaps, that they got tired of calling sandwiches "buttys"? (See below) Your correspondent does not know the answer to this; he can only advise you that a place serving baguettes in England is almost certainly not a French restaurant. These baguettes look vaguely like the real thing; I think they are probably extruded from machinery once used to make steel cable, and then reheated in restaurant ovens. I note with some apprehension the increasing trend to also serve "ciabatta's" as a roll option. This custom has not yet reached the kebab vans; it is only a matter of time.

Department Store Restaurants- England still has them, and they wage war in the streets with sidewalk placards advertising the best £1.99 lunch. You get what you pay for, alas.

Sandwiches at the Chemist's- Here is a sentence that should, I hope, make no sense to you. "I think I'll run over to the chemist's for a sandwich." Translated this means, "I'm going to the drugstore to buy a sandwich." What a country, eh? Can you imagine Eckerd's or CVS selling sandwiches? But that's the sort of thing that goes on over here. And they are the best and most economical sandwiches you can buy in a dizzying variety: roast chicken, roast beef, hummus and red pepper, ploughman's, cheddar and coleslaw, etc., etc. That is, as long as you buy them at Boot's, a national chain. SuperDrug, the other national chain, sells sandwiches whose packets don't bear opening. (Mind you, they have the cheapest prices on all the actual drugstore things.)

Jacket potatoes- we call them baked potatoes. Just about every pub and miscellaneous casual eatery proudly advertises the fact they serve jacket potatoes in large bright letters; it seems to be something of a status item, but I may be wrong about that. Certainly you can't seem to run a respectable cafe without jacket potatoes on the menu. Your Correspondent has sampled a variety of local delicacies in the interests of this being a full and factual report. But I could not bring myself to try these. I don't know why. It really is just a baked potato.
Perhaps it's the toppings I've seen on them. One that comes to mind is tuna and sweet corn. I saw someone eating this combo with revolting gusto; the tuna almost but not quite preserving the shape of its can, the sweet corn sort of studding the tuna like raisins in something more appetizing. It's odd, I know, but I have been unable to tolerate the thought of jacket potatoes ever since.

Cornish Pasties- you may not know it, but the food critic of the New
York Times almost created an international incident when he had some very unkind things to say about the pasty (pronounced, you'll be entranced to know, like the word describing what's already happened),the culinary treasure of Devon and Cornwall. Well, Cornwall, really; or so the Cornish Senior Tutor here informs me. But he may be a bit biased.
The NYT food critic said that pasties were bland and unexciting. Far from regarding this as a compliment, the Cornish began burning copies of the New York Times (who knows where they found them) and inundating the fax machines of the Grey Lady with invitations to "come on over and have me mum's, next time." Like all great artistic critics, upholding the freedom of speech, etc., the Critic would not knuckle under to the mob, or shade his opinions in the slightest. At last-you could imagine him exulting-he's as unpopular as an art critic! Food critics usually just anger restaurant owners, but he had made war against an entire English region!
Well, he's wrong about pasties, except when he's right. There's a little place in the Covered Market here in the center of Oxford where pasties are all they make, and they seem to me to do a pretty fine job. I mean, how can you go wrong if you have a good thick stew inside of good pie pastry? You can't. And that's just the "traditional"; they also have "luxury steak", "cheese and mushroom", "chicken tikka" (q.v.), and a lot of others which I can't remember and haven't tried. I've only had the "traditional", to be perfectly honest.
But if you buy a cellophane packet of "Ginster's", a commercially produced pasty (from former steel rolling mills in Sheffield, I believe), then you are getting yourself into a world of hurt. Imagine a world in which Hostess or Tastycake made meat pies. Imagine the meat equivalent (and I use the word forensically) of the Twinkie. Right. Not a pretty thought. Let's leave it at that.

Chicken tikka-the prevalence of Indian cuisine at a popular level in
England is one of the most striking things about looking at a menu.
Take chicken tikka. There does not seem to be a place in business where you cannot get chicken tikka on something or in something: baguettes (q.v.), jacket potatoes (q.v.), ciabattas, regular sandwiches, even in pasties (q.v.). It is truly ubiquitous. What it is precisely, other than spicy chicken, I couldn't tell you. But it is everywhere.

Lardy Cake- sounds awful, doesn't it? I throw it in because it's actually pretty good, but sounds really awful. An Oxfordshire specialty, lardy cake is puff pastry with sugar and raisins, an English peasant baklava. And I think the puff pastry is made from lard, but there are worse things put in people's mouths around here.

Kebab Vans- The Doner Kebab is...well, I'm not sure I know what a Doner
Kebab is. But there are lots of them sold in downtown Oxford after 8:00 pm. They are sold from the kebab vans, little food trucks that pull up at about 7:45, turn on the generator, and fire up the deep fat fryers. This leads to hundreds of undergraduates swarming out of their colleges and clamoring for jacket potatoes (q.v.), baguettes (q.v.), chicken curry on chips (figure it out), and the doner kebab.
The meat for the doner kebab has been very aptly described by one of my students as "Spam on a stick". It is an enormous tube of lamb/mutton product revolving around on a vertical skewer in front of an electric grill, also mounted vertically. From time to time the denizens of the van take strange tools, doubtless designed specially for the task in top-secret Scottish laboratories, to shave off long strips of meat, which they then place in steam tables. It ain't the most appetizingthing to watch, I'll tell you that.
In the interests of truthful reporting, I have had exactly one doner kebab. This was done after some time observing these establishments as I walk around Oxford at night. Should for some reason you find yourself in Oxford craving a doner kebab, my advice to you is to avoid those vans with the word "gourmet" in their name. Stay far away from the van whose overly optimistic owner calls himself the "Elegant Gourmet." The gourmet vans seem to be the dirtiest and foulest smelling. It's the ones called "Fast Food" that seem to put a premium on cleanliness; owned by former McDonald's managers striking out on their own, perhaps.
How does it taste? Well...pretty much as you'd expect; lots of this meat stuff, some "salad", some onions on top of that. The coleslaw they heap onto it is a bit strange, though, especially when combined with the red-hot chili sauce. The two of them make an particularly common modern English combination, the bland and the exotic paired uncomfortably together.

The Chip Butty- last, but not least, the chip butty. Even though I knew what it was, I decided to try it out anyway. You know what it is too, if you break it down: "chip", meaning "french fries", and "butty", meaning "roll", in combination signify...
Yes, it sounded revolting to me as well. But anthropological research is an arduous task, which is why most anthropologists prefer these days to interview suburban housewives or college students on their own campuses, I suppose. And some of my native guides have spoken rather fondly of this combination. It reminded me of stories of my grandfather spending most of his time in the First World War eating potato sandwiches, and for all these reasons I decided to "give it a go, then."

So I went into a local establishment and ordered up a chip butty.

"I'll have the chip butty," I said without even looking at the menu, feeling sort of crazy and dangerous.
The waitress was unmoved. "Right", she said, scribbling it down. Then she looked up, rather expectantly. Ah, I thought, this is the secret part that they didn't tell me about.
"Would you like coleslaw or chips with that?"
"Excuse me?"
"Coleslaw or chips with that?"
"This is a chip butty, right? With chips on it?"
"Yes."
"But I could have even more chips, if I wanted them? On the side?"
"Riiiight."
"Well," I said, feeling a little weak, "no thank you. Neither, please."
Well, it was as you might expect french fries on a soft white roll to be; the ketchup and brown sauce didn't help much either. If there is an archetype of English bottomfeeding, the chip butty is it.