Pie Fidelity by Pete Brown review – in defence of British Food

Pete Brown, the author of this errant, discursive, unedited exercise in bloke-prose and lad-bant, is a professional northerner. He comes from near Barnsley and, like another son of that town, Michael Parkinson, he doesn’t let his readers forget it. And also like Parkinson he lives almost 200 miles south (in Brown’s case, Stoke Newington, north London), a sufficient distance to allow an accretion of sentimental Hoggartry to have built up over the years and for him to claim that Percy Turner in a village outside Barnsley called Jump produces the best pork pies in the world. How does he know? He believes that Britain “does pies better than anyone else in the world”. Does it? Empanada, samosa, tourte, hachis parmentier, sartu, coulibiac, pastilla … Such gastronomic nationalism is blind.

On the first page of this artless book, the silliness of whose title is all too appropriate, he says of Barnsley: “I remain fiercely proud of having been born and brought up there, and I believe I’m a better person for it.” Identity, place and self-worth are inchoately scrambled together. He succumbs to a vestigial shame at having left. He is troubled that he cannot honour a vague loyalty – to what? To the heavily accented working-class child he once was? To the straitened expectations that he failed to fulfil by getting a degree and becoming a “creative” in advertising? He has scaled a class ladder that might have been transported intact from the glum fictions of John Wain or John Braine 60 years ago. So might much of the food he garrulously celebrates: pork pie with mushy peas, fish and chips, cream tea, full English breakfast and other bad-diet souvenirs of his childhood – food that these days is positively exotic in Stoke Newington.

Brown moved from advertising into “beer writing”, which is not much of a shift. Beer writing purports to be a branch of consumer journalism. Producer journalism would be more apt. He is forever being invited to judge competitions (beer of course, and cider, veg, pies, cakes, anything). He goes to tastings. He opens food festivals. He attends events. He gets to meet the Hairy Bikers! He has lunch with important persons from Foodworld such as Radio 4’s Food Programme presenter Sheila Dillon and Giorgio Locatelli! The proximity of writer/critic to maker or artisan is worrying. Beer or wine or food writing often becomes a sort of dissembled advertising, or advertorial, which doesn’t announce itself save by its gushing enthusiasm and self-congratulation: “Few nations have elevated the appreciation and criticism of food and drink as highly as the British.”

He goes about illustrating this boast by the dubious means of citing the number of food shows on TV, the number of food magazines, the number of restaurants and so on. Turning cooking into low-brow entertainment is hardly proof that Britain has an “amazing food culture”. Indeed it suggests the very opposite. He backs up this vapid claim with statistics and exciting poll results from GreatBritishChefs.com: “66% of Britons … describe themselves as being passionate about food and drink.” He writes without a wince about “the foodie revolution”, failing to realise that the entire “foodie” business was a lark, a self-deprecatory joke in which 20 or so people (myself among them) under the editorship of Paul Levy and the late Anne Barr took the piss out of their own and each other’s gastronomic obsessions and fetishes – and in doing so inadvertently created a type or tribe. The Official Foodie Handbook was published in 1984.

Brown is wrong when he claims that the “revolution” began some time in the late 1990s: every generation thinks that it’s the first to have discovered, say, avocado toast. He is right or rightish, however, when he asserts that the revolution is a “reaction against traditional British food”. Which ought to be qualified by “whatever that means”. Traditions are evidently invented. They don’t just happen. They are not immaculate conceptions. They come and go.

Are fish and chips traditional? In her Food in England published in 1954 the Christian gentlewoman Dorothy Hartley mentions fried-fish shops only to disparage them. In her opinion “chips” (her quotes) were unworthy of consideration. The middle-class prejudice against fish and chips was founded in both social hierarchy and race. This was the food of the working class and many of the street vendors were Jewish, as was the proprietor of the earliest recorded East End shop.

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Brown’s chapter on the history of the dish is good. Its first sentence is enviably disgusting: “My fondest teenage snogs tasted of fried fish and chips.” His account of Chip Alley in Cardiff in the early hours is a portrait of something hellish but not quite hell: his evidently comradely nature impels him to excuse the legless bedlam and play down what must be the potent reek (oil, vinegar, vomit). A trip to Blackpool is kindred and concludes with an adman’s sentimental hyperbole: fish and chips “is a comfort food for when you don’t need comforting, a celebration when there’s no special occasion, a democratic, unpretentious indulgence that helped shape us and save us”. “Shape” in this context does not signify the fubsy folds that strain to exhibit themselves in the majority of coastal resorts.

Brown’s gastronomic tourism would for anyone else be a form of masochism, though he of course doesn’t see it that way. Nor does he seem to realise that a presumably pleasant social mien is not a quality required by a writer. His unrelenting enthusiasm precludes the establishment of a critical distance between him and his subjects. His lack of scepticism may be generous, but it’s a handicap.

In 1974, in one of the earliest Great Bores of Today in Private Eye, Richard Ingrams and Michael Heath guyed the former’s friend, the Guardian’s beer columnist Richard Boston: “The only pub in the Mendips where you can still get a pint of 4X Old Fart bitter straight from the wood … what is more the barrel is mounted on special brass latchets.” Brown and his wife (the bald dedication is “For Liz who eats”) go to a Herefordshire pub for the roast beef of old England. The publican Matt Slocombe – “John Bull was never pictured with such a warm, welcoming grin” – says of Butty Bach: “It’s more ale than bitter. A nice and nutty foaming pint.” Brown adds “cask conditioned, perfectly cellared and drawn from a traditional handpump”.

Brown lets us know that “I’m not just ordering roast beef here. I’m ordering the roast sirloin of Ledbury beef from Vineyard Farm – served pink – with hot horseradish and Rioja gravy.” Listing where ingredients are “sourced” – which means nothing more than “bought” – is a sure sign that the Crown at Woolhope is not a desolate roadhouse with a custard yellow plastic banner announcing All U Can Eat Sunday Carvery £9.99. Is the fashion for listing more Stoke Newington than Barnsley?