In this lively and lucid book, Ben Rogers tells the story of "the roast Beef of England", as Fielding described it in a once popular song: the dish that in the 18th century became an icon of the new "British" identity. The use of beef as a patriotic symbol is more ancient than the imperial jingoism might suggest. For it is connected with the ideal and with the class of the yeoman farmer, who has been a prominent part of the English settlement from late medieval times. The yeoman, who might be a tenant farmer or a small landowner, was defined by his independence, his disdain for courtly titles, his honest dealing with neighbours and his attachment to ancient liberties, which he would defend with the tenacity of a bulldog. Iconised in the 18th century as John Bull (a character introduced in The History of John Bull, published by the Scottish physician John Arbuthnot in 1712, with the intention of satirising the Dutch and the French), the yeoman became an important focus of the imperial project, and of the patriotism engendered by perpetual wars with France. Macaulay made him central to the reforged Whiggish identity expounded in his History of England, and so he remained through two world wars.
But, as Rogers shows, the symbol tells the story not only of our national diet, but also of conflicts far more deeply rooted than the ongoing rivalry with Holland and France. John Bull's diet is an expression of his class identity. By eating beef, and eating it in quantities that today seem staggering, he showed his contempt for the foppish kickshaws that appear on the tables of the aristocracy, and also his sturdy self-sufficiency and emancipation from feudal ties. ("Kickshaw" is a corruption of quelque chose, meaning the dainty dishes using eggs and cream with which French dinners were interspersed.)
Rogers has great fun with this theme, and entertains the reader with some interesting byways of social history, along with glimpses into art and literature, including moving and original descriptions of the art of Hogarth. He shows food as a socialising force, which feeds the soul as well as the body, and shapes the loves and loyalties of those who live where it grows. "Beef and Liberty" became a national rallying cry in the 18th century, not merely because it was already central to the national diet, but because it lent itself to simple, unpretentious forms of cookery. Beef needed no disguises; it had an honest, independent, Protestant character, contrasting vividly with the ragouts, fricassees, pates and jellies of the French charcutier. In those heydays of British patriotism, the Beefeaters of the Tower of London emerged as the living symbols of a mythic history, and people of influence joined beefsteak clubs, the most famous of which, the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, was set up by Hogarth and two friends in 1736. Beef was the sacrificial offering on the altar of the nation, and was consumed by all classes of society as a symbol of their ancient liberties.
But there is a darker side to the story, in Rogers's reading of it. The bull was not merely the stuff from which beef was made; he was the target of cruel sports which were, if not as important to the shaping of our national identity as the love of liberty, nevertheless quintessentially English. Bull-baiting and bear-baiting were popular pastimes up until the end of the 18th century, and bulls were frequently baited in the belief that a bull killed in this way would have more tender flesh than one humanely butchered. It is no accident, according to Rogers, that the bulldog became a symbol of John Bull, the defiant yeoman; for the bulldog was bred as a baiting animal, whose only virtue was to cling to his tormented victim. Rogers hints that there is, underlying the English love of "beef and liberty", another and darker need: for the spectacle of blood and suffering.
I suspect that an anthropologist such as Rene Girard would take off from this point and give us a theory of the blood-offering, and its role in cementing the community against the threat of mimetic violence. Rogers stops short of such speculation, however, and is content merely to point out that the English bull, unlike the English bulldog, had little reason to be grateful for his iconic status. It was in reflecting on this matter that I began to see a weakness in Rogers's account. Admirably written and economically organised though it is, the book is short on genuinely comparative analysis. It is true that the English took pleasure in bull-baiting and bear-baiting. But so did the French, the Italians and the Germans. Moreover the English were the first to ban these sports - under the Puritans, and then in the early 19th century, when baiting was already regarded with intense disapproval and had little following. Rogers affects to see a survival of our national need for this kind of violence in fox-hunting. But the historical record tells another story. Fox-hunting is the close cousin of the French chasse a courre, the interest of which is not death or suffering but pursuit. Those who agitated for a ban on baiting, and who founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, were fox-hunting people, appalled by the cruelties that they witnessed on visiting the city.
Comparative analysis would also throw up interesting results in the matter of "food nationalism". Beef may be our national icon, but Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, identifies "un bifteck-frites" as an icon of Frenchness. Interestingly, he is compelled to use a word of English origin to describe the dish: but the Americans translate frites as French fries. Moreover, anybody in his senses will know that the English hadn't the faintest idea how to butcher beef, how to cook it or how to garnish it, and that the traditional roast beef of old England was not so much a symbol of national grandeur as a by-product of national ignorance. Personally, as national icons go, I prefer le roti de boeuf de la France ancienne.
Rogers's book appears at a time when the subject of food is, or ought to be, high on the intellectual agenda. The global economy has internationalised our diet, destroying local food chains and the landscapes and farming communities that are their most important by-product. Far more important than roast beef to the modern English identity is the pasture landscape of Old England, with its hedges and walls, its fox-coverts and stone shelters. This landscape is the product of cattle farming and fox-hunting, and is destined to disappear with those practices. Rogers, reflecting on the recent tensions over BSE and foot-and-mouth - tensions that set country against town, and both against France - rightly comments on the survival into our time of the beef part of the "Beef and Liberty" icon. But he ought to see, in the current debate over fox-hunting, the survival of the liberty part of the icon, too. If our national identity is tied up with beef and liberty it is partly because they have both been inscribed on our landscape. And they are the true cause of its beauty.
