With the food historian’s centuries-behind-the-curve timing, I’ve recently discovered the tasting menu, just as the vanguard of food writers are tiring of it. A time-travelling tour of cultured butter or mutton ham, with an inquisitive chef at the controls, relieves me from my blunders with dusty cookbooks and the worry that I’ll be ruining a whole leg of pork or destroying an oven (sorry, Mum). The best restaurants’ samples honour ancient, taken-for-granted ingredients, such as the Box Tree in Ilkley’s puffed and spice-dusted single grain of barley, which brought a pop of flavour to a cheese custard.
Barley came to these islands along with a couple of innovative and disruptive ideas – farming and pots – around 4,200 BCE. Fast-growing and hardy, it became the staple grain, only replaced some time after 1066 by wheat in the south and oats in the north. Pots and barley have had intertwined careers, as suggested by the Anglo-Norman word “pottage” (which evolved into porridge) for a grain stew. To Anglo-Saxons it was a “brewis” (the ancestor of Scots “brose”), to which was added “worts” – leaves such as bishopwort, helenium, radish and dock, each with their (supposed) medical use. If we eat barley today, it is usually as pearl barley (more refined and less nutritious than “pot barley”) in Scotch broth. Its combination of creamy starch and nutty heart – an iron fist in a velvet glove – is ideal, too, for risotto.
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