Do hard times make for better food? The British, we're told, ended the second world war healthier than they started it, not least because the government directed the food industry to provide maximum nourishment from raw materials. Refining flour until it was white was forbidden. But in eastern Europe, cooking has yet to recover from the 1940s—one of communism's terrible flaws was, of course, its lack of a cuisine. There's still only one Michelin star in the former Soviet bloc, in Prague (it's for Allegro, an Italian joint).
So far Britain's new recession has been good for food, if not foodies. Prices are down in the supermarkets. In 2007, nearly a quarter of all the money we spent on food went on eating-out and there's evidence that some of the uglier effects of that boom may be swept away. The mega-chains, responsible for so much bad, over-priced food in the high street, may well be the first to close.
That, at any rate, is Caroline Bennett's view. She is managing director of Moshi-Moshi, a very small chain of Japanese restaurants. She bought me lunch in her newest venture, Soseki, which has just opened in the gloom of the City, under the Gherkin. Food is served in the omakase fashion, where you get what the chef deems worthy that day, depending on how much you want to spend. This is a good strategy for eating in a recession.
Many of the parents of the high street big names are massively over-leveraged (look at Mitchells & Butlers, owner of All Bar One and Harvester) and the loss of cheap labour from eastern Europe will starve profit margins that were already thin. Their failure could benefit the independents. The story in London this autumn is of high quality, name outlets doing well—Rowley Leigh's Café des Anglais in Bayswater is just one example.
And in your own kitchen? It has not been easy to avoid advice on poverty cuisine. All newspapers have handed it out: lauding turnip tops and kale, drooling over grandmother's ways with a piece of scrag-end. You'd be forgiven for thinking that before we became so unaccountably rich, Britons lived in a waste-not, want-not food heaven, just like smallholder peasants in Tuscany before we got there. I do hate fashionable thrift. There are few things as unattractive as the rich talking about the joys of saving money (see India Knight's new book, subtitled Live Well and Spend Less). Especially now, when it is the duty of the wealthy to spend. Particularly in those restaurants I want to survive.
Attitudes to mince sum up most of these conflicts. If you're over 45, the word summons a mound of grey misery, in grease, garnished perhaps with a triangle of damp toast. On a recent Woman's Hour, Jenni Murray announced in tones of mingled horror and fascination: "Everyone's eating mince." She spoke of shepherd's pie and that misbegotten staple of the chest-freezer generation, pre-baked lasagne. That betrayed her age. The young chef who followed introduced recipes like a minced venison "plait," and lamb mince, spinach and feta fritter.
I visited my cousin the following weekend. She proudly produced a thrift lunch: "there's nothing cheaper than nursery food." It was a cottage pie, and we ate every scrap while discussing the battening-down of hatches and the tightening of belts. But the mince was wild boar, and the wine pretty good.
The chic of thrift fits perfectly with the sensibilities of the modern hobby chef. One of our tribal markers is the making of stock. Use instant stock and you're not in my gang, even if you are Delia Smith: make it from a chicken carcass or veal bones and you're one of the elect. And you've saved at least 45p. So it is with offal. Chris Walton, my pig farming friend, told me that trotters and heads, once unmarketable, are now selling so well he's worried that there won't be enough bits left to make sausages.
Waitrose, the poshest supermarket, recently held an event for food journalists where it announced the relaunch of "forgotten cuts." We chewed on these very happily: trotter, shank, feather steak (the bit inside the shoulder blade), brisket and Bath chaps (pig's cheeks). I admire Waitrose because it is the only one of the big retailers that buys entire animals from farmers, and tries to use all the bits. But I was astounded when the PR said that cheeks and trotters were only going to be sold in Waitrose outlets in Oxford Street and Belgravia: that is, to the rich. At butchers' shops in Edinburgh, where I live, it's a fight to get hold of offal, even kidneys. (But there are still some very nasty sausages.)
The first recession of my life brought with it the late 20th century's most significant food revolution. It took a further decade for this earthquake to reach us in rural Sussex, and by then the very phrase nouvelle cuisine was a byword for the fraudulent trickery of poncy chefs. But in 1972, when the critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau coined the term, they were celebrating a '68ers cuisine. It was the gastronomy of young chefs like Bocuse and Chapel, who threw out the fatty excess, the cream sauces and the flambés of old France, for a light cookery, one that celebrated ingredients rather than process. Perhaps that's what we can hope for this time: a new new cuisine, with less waste and more cooking. Less television, more stove. But things will have to get very bad first.
