England's food renaissance Caroline Stacey St George's Day gives us an annual injection of national pride and a chance to celebrate the rediscovery of our national food heritage. But there's more to be done if England's to stay the food lover's favourite.

In this article

Chefs champion Britain Cooking the British books

Vocal for local Losing our heritage?

Recognising home-grown Truly English?

As well as being the patron saint of England, St George is the patron saint of farmers, and we're hearing his name used as a badge of pride ever more frequently in gastronomic circles. But how far does our rediscovery of a national food heritage really go?

The produce of England's green and pleasant land is featuring on a growing number of restaurant menus as chefs and diners rediscover traditional delicacies and relish the quality of local produce. 

Chefs such as Fergus Henderson (of London's St John restaurant) and Mark Hix (of London's Hix Oyster and Chop House restaurant) have put British and, as often-as-not, English, food on the world map. With a menu of duck hearts, ox tongue with beetroot, treacle tart and Eccles cakes, Henderson's St John restaurant is influencing menus the length and breadth of the country, as more chefs opt for updated traditional recipes that were once shunned. Hix's recipes for Rabbit and crayfish stargazy pie and Perry jelly with elderflower ice cream, redolent of this native West Country, were winning dishes in the 2007 series of BBC Two's Great British Menu.

Even the classically French-schooled Gordon Ramsay has joined the fray. His three pubs have turned their back on the Channel to offer the likes of Pork pie with piccalilli or Morecambe Bay potted shrimps followed by Lemon posset, matched with British beers and English wines such as Chapel Down Bacchus.

And with institutions such as the National Gallery Restaurant in London offering a thoroughly English menu, and the rise of the British cuisine-focused gastro-pub, it's getting easier for visitors from all over the world, as well as locals, to enjoy England's culinary offerings.

Rural and urban gastro-pubs have cemented their role in the community. The good ones have helped us rediscover neglected dishes and ingredients by delving into British culinary history, buying from local producers and coming up with locally inspired treats that chime with the hoppy ales that every self-respecting pub should have.

The past year or so has seen a bumper crop of cookery books about British food. As well as the second collection of recipes from Great British Menu, James Martin's 'The Great British Village Show Cookbook' celebrates a countryside tradition where magnificent leeks jostle with light-as-a-feather Victoria sponges for rosettes. Phil Vickery's 'Britain: The Cookbook' takes key ingredients from different regions as a starting point for inventive recipes. Two-thousand nine sees the publication of Gordon Ramsay's 'Great British Pub Food' book and chef Ed Baines' 'The Best of British'.

There's nothing nostalgic about this heartening interest in British food. As Nigel Slater rhapsodises in his book 'Eating for England', "We have a greater wealth of good food in this country than ever before."

Farmers' markets, food fairs, farm shops and vegetable box schemes are the wholesome proof that good local food is out there and that people want to buy it. According to Defra the number of producers making regional English food is on the increase.

The 'Food Lovers Britain' website exists because "there is such a huge demand to find local produce," says the long-standing British food champion, Henrietta Green, who runs this nationwide database of local and specialist producers recommended by her and her team.

Research carried out in 2007 by the IGD, an independent organisation representing grocery distributors, found that local produce is more popular with shoppers than any other 'ethical' type of food. At a time when many people are conscious of carbon footprints, it makes sense to look close to home for ingredients.

Six out of ten shoppers actively try to buy local products

Six out of ten shoppers actively try to buy local products and they're a growing band. The numbers looking for local went up by almost 20 per cent in the first half of 2007 and during British Food Fortnight in September sales of home-grown food in supermarkets increased by 34 per cent. When 47 per cent of those questioned say they would switch to a shop that sells more locally produced items, you know the supermarkets will be paying attention.

The 2,000-odd varieties of English apple have terrific names like Peasgood's Nonsuch and Colonel Vaughan, but for all the reverence attached to historic fruit, it's seldom grown commercially. The pressure to meet increased demand for British fruit and vegetables can mean tradition and variety are sacrificed. 

It may be that English apples and pears are seeing a revival, though. Encouraged by the growing demand for their fruit, farmers are planting more orchards. Recently planted trees, however, are more likely to be heavier croppers such as Braeburn and Gala. If this pattern continues it's predicted that Gala will overtake the iconic English apple, Cox's Orange Pippin, as the most widely grown variety of apple.

Other traditional fruit and vegetables need cherishing too. Great-tasting, distinctive English cherries - they don't thrive north of Nottingham - with their romantic names like Elton Hearts are becoming rare. While once cherry orchards were part and parcel of the English landscape there are only 750 acres left, less than five years ago. The Cherry Aid campaign aims to help save native fruit and fruit trees. "People are missing out," says organiser Henrietta Green. "And as the old orchards disappear, so does the biodiversity of the flowers and insects. Our aim is to raise awareness about these heritage cherries."

An underappreciated vegetable that traditionally goes hand in hand with a tangy British cheese is the cauliflower. Farmers earn so little for growing it that some are giving up on the not so jolly cauli.

British consumers might prefer to buy British, but it's not always clear where our food comes from; often we buy imports without realising it. Almost all of the 16 million fresh chickens we buy from supermarkets each week are British.

It's perfectly legal for a chicken curry ready meal to say it's produced in the UK if it's made in a British factory with chicken from Thailand

But many ready meals are made with imported chicken, mostly from the EU, as well as Brazil and Thailand, which accounts for half the chicken we eat. It's perfectly legal for a chicken curry ready meal to say it's produced in the UK if it's made in a British factory with chicken from Thailand. More producers and supermarkets are trying to source British chicken for their meals, however.

Ten years ago 84 per cent of the pork we ate was home-produced. Now more than half our pork is imported, mainly from Denmark and Holland. A mere 22 per cent of the rashers we buy to fry are British, a figure that's gone down from 45 per cent since 2000. Pig farming simply isn't profitable enough for our farmers and those remaining prefer to produce fresh meat.

Even so you might be hard pressed to realise you're not buying British. Imported ham, bacon and even 'Scotch' eggs or 'Lincolnshire' sausages are often coy about their origin. Again, a product can say it's made in the UK if it's processed here with imported meat.

And then there are all those supposedly 'British' jars and bottles that actually belong to overseas companies. Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce is owned by American giant Heinz, as is HP Sauce, which it bought from the French in 2005. In March 2007 Heinz stopped bottling HP Sauce in Birmingham after a century and moved production to the Netherlands.

So before we congratulate ourselves on our appreciation of British food, let's be sure that's really what we are buying, and that we are making the most of the freshest, highest quality produce we're so lucky to have all around us.

Updated February 2009.