This regal dish has become so much a part of the national identity that it has led to the French referring to us as les rosbifs. British beef was at the centre of one of the most contentious rulings of the European Union, when exports of British beef to the rest of Europe were banned after infection with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) led to incidences of the fatal condition, new-variant CJD (damningly known as “mad cow disease”). It was all so different once.

The association between Englishmen and beef goes back at least to Elizabethan times. Shakespeare has two of his French characters in Henry V, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, anticipating victory over the English forces because they have heard that the English have very little in the way of provisions left to sustain their fighting men. The capacious appetites of the Englishmen are legendary, as the Constable of France notes to the Duke of Orléans: “[G]ive them great meals of beef… they will eat like wolves and fight like devils”.

In the 15th century, when the royal bodyguard – the Yeomen of the Guard – was formed under Henry VII, they became known, and are still to this day, as the Beefeaters, mainly for the prodigious quantities of meat the soldiers were allowed by way of ration. Even into the early 19th century, the men ate around a pound of meat per head at each meal. The heroic consumption of great amounts of red meat became a defining characteristic of the national appetite, and usefully marked us out from the pernickety French, where aristocratic taste favoured small game birds and large quantities of bread. Read more about Beefeaters here.

By the late 1600s, the beef-loving reputation of the English was even more firmly established. London was full of butchers’ shops and cookshops (where cooked food was sold to those on the move), the heart of the whole trade being the Smithfield meat market. Henri Misson’s Memoirs And Observations Of Travels Over England (1719) has the author noting, while staying in London in 1698, that “it is common practice, even among People of Good Substance, to have a huge Piece of Roast-Beef on Sundays, of which they stuff until they can swallow no more, and eat the rest cold, without any other Victuals, the other six Days of the Week”.

Ben Rogers, in his cultural history of British beef, Beef And Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull And The English Nation (2003), points out that beef became known as the meat of the industrious middle classes, the artisans and traders. While the poor ate bacon (or no meat at all) and the well-to-do fed on game, beef was the food of yeomen, farmers and small entrepreneurs – the backbone of England, in the popular estimation.

English v French cooking

A good part of the reason the English became the rosbifs of foreign parody is that it was widely felt that this was pretty much the only type of cooking English housewives and English chefs were good at. For all its aura of sumptuous indulgence, roasting is a basic and fairly plain method of cooking. It relies not on complicated seasoning, but mainly on the fat of the meat itself to bestow flavour, while in place of the time-consuming sauces of French gastronomy, it offers only the roasting juices of the meat mixed with simple stock and thickened up with flour – otherwise known as gravy. This prompted the French writer Voltaire’s famous sneer that the English had a hundred religions, but only one sauce.

To the English, by contrast, the French were a nation starved of meat. They got it when they could amid conditions of general scarcity, so unlike the bountiful atmosphere of our own dear Albion, where the figure of John Bull seated at the groaning table, his waistcoat bulging, was the permanent image of a people constitutionally assured of being able to eat their fill.

In 1734, the first performance was staged of a song written by the novelist and playwright Henry Fielding, as part of an entertainment entitled Don Quixote In England. The song was “The Roast Beef Of Old England”. Sung to the pre-existing tune of another popular ballad, it became an immense hit, and was known and sung fondly until well into the 19th century. The song is in part a lament for the affectations in dress, manner and diet the English have misguidedly picked up from their continental neighbours to the south, but is also a call to arms. If our race will simply remember its red-blooded gastronomic heritage, order and dominion over foreign pretenders will be restored as of old.

When mighty roast beef was the Englishman’s food,
It ennobled our hearts, and enriched our blood,
Our soldiers were brave, our courtiers were good,
Oh the roast beef of old England,
And old England’s roast beef!

But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,
We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance,
Oh the roast beef of old England,
And old England’s roast beef!

Then, Britons, from all nice dainties refrain,
Which effeminate Italy, France and Spain
And mighty roast beef shall command on the main
Oh the roast beef of old England,
And old England’s roast beef!

The song was adapted and expanded shortly afterwards by the composer Richard Leveridge, who added extra verses that made the connection between the carnivorous manly diet and military success all the more explicit. It wasn’t ragouts (ragouts! they didn’t even sound like food, whatever they were) that helped us smash the Spanish Armada. Nor was it “coffee, or tea, or such slip-slops”,  as Leveridge’s lyric had it. It was good, honest, hearty roast beef – and plenty of it.

In 1748, William Hogarth painted The Gate Of Calais, better known since as The Roast Beef Of Old England, after his friend Fielding’s song. The picture shows a huge rib of raw beef (so not roast, in fact) being delivered to Madam Grandsire’s, an English hotel in the French channel port of Calais. Surrounding the porter as he staggers towards the door with it is a cast of unappetising French characters: a trio of cackling fishwives clutching a skate, a pair of miserable soldiers strutting with their pikes, a portly friar who takes a faintly disgusting interest in the English meat, a couple of emaciated cooks with their bowl of nameless slop, an undernourished wretch in the tattered uniform of the failed Jacobite rebellion, who has nothing to eat but an onion… All are in contrast with the anticipated plenty represented by the weighty hunk of meat at the centre of the scene.

www.peterwestern.f9.co.uk/hogarth/hogarth36.html

The beef theme was already predominant in Hogarth’s life. In 1736, he had been one of the founder members, with actor-director John Rich, artist George Lambert and the unconventional peer Lord Peterborough (the first member of the nobility to marry an actress), of the Sublime Society of Steaks. This was a company of like-minded souls who met weekly amid the milieu of the Covent Garden theatre to consume grilled sirloins, and lament the decline in national moral fibre. They referred to themselves as “the Steaks”, their symbol being the gridiron on which the steaks were traditionally grilled. A descendant of the club, the Beefsteak, exists to this day.

Healthy eating?

By the time of the first world war, the Englishman’s beef had been reduced to the infamous bully beef, a canned processed meat somewhat like corned beef. It could be stewed up with vegetables, or else in extremities just eaten out of the tin. Nobody mistook it for anything like the roast beef of home, but it had at least some distant affinity with meat.

Healthy eating and detox diets (not to mention BSE), coupled with the decline in the kind of family eating best represented by the Sunday roast, have rather pushed the former national dish to the margins of culinary favour. Beef is now eaten most widely in the form of burgers from the big, American-owned chains. The massive growth in single-person households has played a role in this. Nobody living alone would cook a roast dinner for themselves, even if the leftovers could sustain them through a week’s worth of sandwiches.

Sunday ritual

There are restaurants that specialise in traditional English roasts, such as Rules in Covent Garden (the oldest restaurant in London) and Simpsons-in-the-Strand. To most, though, the point of a roast beef dinner is a celebration of home: the slowly developing aromas of caramelising meat that fill the house on the laziest day of the week, the ceremonial carving, the half-guilty acceptance of seconds. It is our last glimpse of a version of domestic cooking as a grand production that takes time to execute, fills the preceding hours with hungry anticipation, and leaves us in a state of wholly satiated, slumberous contentment.