Is toast the defining dish of British cuisine? Nigel Slater, who has now achieved the status of national treasure, certainly seems to think so. “I’ve eaten toast everywhere, from Laos to Luton, and I can say without a shadow of hesitation that no one, but no one, makes toast like the British,” he writes in his new book, which is the sort of ragbag of choice culinary morsels that would pass the time nicely on a train journey. As someone whose most famous book is called Toast, Slater might be said to have a vested interest in promoting it, but he still makes a convincing case that it is one of the wonders of these isles. He is a connoisseur of hotel toast (“curiously moreish”), fancy sourdough toast, thick toast (cut from a bloomer) and, best of all, Aga toast. Toast, Slater goes so far as to argue, is “our offering to world gastronomy”.

This thought isn’t new. When Carl-Philip Moritz, a German pastor, came to London in 1782, he was much taken with the “incomparable” British way of “roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire”. He liked the way that slice was laid upon slice “so that the butter soaks through the whole pile of slices. This is called ‘toast’,” he wrote.

Kate Colquhoun uses this quotation about toast to begin her history of British food through the ages. Similar charming details appear on every page of this fluently written survey. We learn of Tudor standing pies made in the shape of hare’s ears, of possets adorned with grated nutmeg, of spicy Regency mulligatawny and wartime “austerity pudding”. With ease and relish, Colquhoun takes us from the sugar banquets of the Elizabethans to Pepys’s breakfast of goose, from medieval macaroni cheese to Cromwellian mutton with oysters.

However delightful these individual details may be, though – and they are accompanied by lovely, generous colour plates – they are too often not explained or analysed properly. Let’s return for a moment to toast. Clearly, the delicious substance that Moritz ate in 1782 is not, in fact, what we would think of as toast at all, since the slices were buttered before they were “roasted”. This would have made it much richer, rather like fried bread and altogether different from the crisp rectangles produced by the modern cook in a two-slot Dualit. This raises many questions: Was the toast eaten by Moritz typical? If so, when did dry toast replace this earlier, buttery thing? Why should the British have been so much keener on toast than other nations? Colquhoun doesn’t ask any of these questions, never mind answer them.

For an explanation of our national addiction to toast, we must go to Alan Davidson, whose Oxford Companion to Food suggests that English wheat bread “lends itself more to toasting than the close-textured rye breads” of northern Europe; and that because it was kept for several days, something had to be done with it when it got stale. Or to Elizabeth David, who wondered if the open fires of a typical British household might explain toast’s ubiquity among all classes.

Compared to Colin Spencer’s admirable British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, which appeared in 2002, Colquhoun’s history does too little to explain what makes British food unique, offering little or no comparison with the cooking of other nations. Spencer’s argument was that British food, once bountiful and proud, declined with the enclosure acts of the 18th century, which forced small farmers off the land. In France, agriculture continued to be dominated by small-holders, which partly explains why French food was better. Our food got even worse after the Industrial Revolution and only really began its current rebirth from the 1980s onwards. Spencer’s is above all a story of agriculture and economics. By contrast, Colquhoun attempts to tell the same story in a rather insular way, through the gastronomy of cookbooks, and as a result always seems to be skirting on the surface, missing the real point.

She is good on various fashions (telling us that potatoes were “something of an obsession” in the 1820s and that omelettes were likewise “something of an obsession” in the 1910s), but deals less well with the ordinary food of ordinary people. Ultimately, the book is like a culinary theme-park ride through British history – enjoyable while it lasts, but leaving you none the wiser as you disembark. We never do learn why Slater – along with the rest of us – is so very fond of his toast.

EATING FOR ENGLAND: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table by Nigel Slater
Fourth Estate £16.99 pp280

TASTE: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking by Kate Colquhoun
Bloomsbury £20 pp460

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