The British love for game has not diminished. Austin often eats pigeon pie (of course, the roasted one), and prey such as rabbits and boars often appear on the squire's dining table.

Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, has preserved the tradition of cooking game since its establishment in 1798. They have a manor in Yorkshire, stocking deer, roe deer, grouse, partridge, etc. The walls of the restaurant are decorated with various deer skulls, and the small labels underneath also record the year of the hunting and the name of the hunter.

The game on the menu is constantly changing as time goes by, and here we have venison with mushrooms and sour cucumbers, and grilled pigeons with sweet and sour blackberries:

In the eyes of some, this is the last glory of British cuisine. Soon after, the huge changes from agriculture to industry brought it a continuous critical hit.

At the end of the 18th century, the innovation of the textile industry opened the era of the industrial revolution, but also led to a rapid increase in the unemployment rate. At the same time, the bad weather from 1794 to 1795 caused widespread famine. The government quickly issued a series of guidelines to carefully explain "potato cultivation and consumption" to fill the gap in wheat - after all, acre of potatoes can feed almost as much as three acres of wheat.

People did not accept potatoes at first, but the reality was cruel: the price of white bread soared, and the price of meat and cheese doubled. The Agricultural Commission vowed to add fuel to the fire: "Boil potatoes with salt in water can provide people with enough nutrients."

In this way, potatoes turned into the British staple food, and their ghosts remained unchanged for hundreds of years.

In the early 19th century, it was the era when the industrial revolution was in full swing, and farmers threw down their land and flocked to emerging industrial cities and turned to workers.

The chef of the time, eliza acton, noticed that the traditional soup stew seemed to disappear completely: “Those are healthy, delicious and low-cost.

Workers squeezed into a small apartment and could only buy some sandwiches on the way off work. How could they have the energy to study cooking? What's more, canned meat imported from America is half cheaper than fresh meat of the same weight. Canned vegetables and fruits, bagged soup buns, margarine, condensed milk, and bread ready-mixed powder have since invaded the kitchen. Housewives gave up complex home-born recipes and could make a decent dinner with just the product manual.

And when ordinary people begin to embrace the standard flavor of assembly line production, who else will remember the freshness of wild vegetables, peas and bacon stewed together?

As an island country, Britain has always had a strong dependence on imported ingredients. The colonial expansion that began in the 16th century turned the world into a British granary. Before the war, five-quarters of the British wheat had to be transported from Canada. However, once war broke out, the food supply was devastating.

German U-type submarines wandering the Atlantic sank thousands of merchant ships, and the food supply in Britain suddenly tightened. In 1918, butter, margarine, lard, sugar and meat were subject to a quantitative rationing system, and even potatoes (potatoes!) were short of them at one point.

Before the British could completely emerge from the shadow of World War I, the sound of gunfire from World War II came again. Nutritionist John Boyd Orr told the British government that as long as the people were supplied with bread, fat (butter or margarine), potatoes and oats, plus enough vitamins A and C, there would be no danger of famine.

This sentence, and the corresponding food rationing system, ruled the British recipes for decades.

The government began to educate the public that vegetables should be cooked simply or even eaten raw so as not to destroy precious vitamins. Carrots used as livestock feed before the war were promoted as healthy foods that "help night vision". Fragile and difficult to transport eggs almost disappeared, and were replaced by dry extracted "egg powder". The Ministry of Food is tempted: "You can use it to make a hot egg cake, and you can also buy a can of delicious jam to eat with it!"

Some people say that in human history, war is probably the most powerful weapon to change dietary habits. British cuisine has long been no longer glorious, and after this battle, it has suffered a heavy blow.

After the war, labor force dropped sharply and supplies continued to be scarce. In the winter of 1947, Britain suffered heavy snow first and then flooded. Eighty thousand tons of potatoes and 70,000 acres of wheat were destroyed by floods. The food rationing system continued until the 1950s but many word-of-mouth recipes had completely disappeared.

In 1952, in the "Penguin Cookery Book" written by Bi Nielsen (Huh???), people are still teaching people to cook with canned fish. All recipes that use butter should also be added with the sentence "mart butter can also be replaced by the operating manual. The recipes become operation manuals, cooking ingredients in the most economical way, but those spices with flowers, the combination of wise and wise combinations, and the imagination that is about to emerge has long been heroically sacrificed in the continuous ravages of the industrial revolution, famine and war.

Decades later, we can see cattle and sheep everywhere, grasslands and fruit trees on this land. Food ingredients from all over the world are also roaming across the ocean, where they meet and blend. Go to the vegetable market for a walk, and you can buy Devon cream, Yorkshire cheese, Kent apples, Cumberland sausages in the lake, oysters from Whistpur town, as well as French tomatoes of different colors, bright red Iberian ham, and Alaska king crabs with fangs and claws.

The richness of the restaurant is even more impressive, including Italian pizza, Spanish paella, Indian curry, Turkish barbecue balls, Chinese guaro... You think the British are willing to accept new flavors, but you can't imagine that their love for spices has long been engraved with the genes of their ancestors.

Traditional British cooking is gradually regaining its glory. There are old-school restaurants like Rules that have tenaciously continued the traditional taste for two hundred years, and new-style chefs like Heston   blumenthal, who borrow modern technology to bring medieval recipes back to the light of day.

Local rabbit meat eaten in York with cute carrots
Chapter completed!