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New Statesman
2 days ago
- Health
- New Statesman
True 'Yorkshire tea' is the ultimate in processed food
Photo by Lauri Patterson / Getty Images Dorothy Hartley opens her monumental Food in England by recalling the kitchens of her Yorkshire childhood – and the oatcakes, hot buttered toast, beef sandwiches and Yorkshire puddings made within. One particularly outstanding spread inspires this exquisitely Proustian sentence: 'The Craven Heifer Inn served a massive Yorkshire tea with ham, game pies, apple pies, parkin and cheese, hot teacakes, jam and honey and black treacle, and tea.' It conjures not just the craft of an inn kitchen, but the old magic of processing food to help it keep: pickling or salting, fermenting, preserving with sugar, baking with black treacle (which kept gingerbreads and parkins moist for days). Processes that change the taste and texture of food, or those that keep it, are often ancient and regionally specific. Adding the name of a place changes the way we think about smoked, salted or acid-pickled fish, territorial cheese, fermented dairy foods, something sweet and baked. Even if you've never tasted a butcher-made York ham, Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire cheese or Grasmere gingerbread, it obviously won't taste anything like those packets of re-formed slices of meat, a plastic-wrapped cheese, or a snappy little ginger biscuit. Carlos Monteiro, the Brazilian professor of nutrition and public health, first recognised and named the problem of ultra-processing in food by setting out to discover why obesity rates in Brazil were rising even as sugar sales were falling. He came to think that a bag of sugar in a kitchen was a sign of good health, as it meant people were cooking for themselves. His four 'Nova' categories distinguish food not according to the customary levels of fat, salt and sugar, but by levels of processing. The first two encompass unprocessed or minimally processed foods; the third acknowledges that factories can also use mechanised versions of long-established techniques, such as drying, canning, freezing. These are not the same as the industrial contortions, extrusions and additions of the fourth category, UPF. The food industry wants us to think that Nova is problematic: too simple, too negative. Having spent time in an ordinary kitchen, these categories feel quite intuitive to me, as they would to anybody who has worked on a farm, in a smokery, a brewery, a dairy or a bakery. Processing food takes effort. 'Making a Meal of It', an exhibition at the Ryedale Folk Museum in North Yorkshire, shows just how much skill and graft went into turning rye, oats and, in later centuries, wheat, into bread – as well as barley into beer, pigs into hams, combs into honey and fruit into jams and marmalades. The dairy was where women, cool and clean without the disruption of men, made cream, butter and cheese from milk. York ham, traditionally dry cured over months, was so renowned that, like cheddar, it was copied (to a lower standard) all over the world. From the 17th century, gingerbread moulding, cake-baking and, eventually, tea-drinking joined the list of Yorkshire's famed skills. It is no coincidence that these foods sound like just the thing for Dorothy Hartley's magnificent Yorkshire tea. 'Tea' in the north (and other parts of the country) is still the name for an early-evening meal that others call dinner. For farm and factory workers, who might only have a fire and kettle, the brew transformed a cold meal of bread, cheese or bacon into a hot one. Add in gingerbread, cakes and pies, and it is easy to see why it was talent-spotted by the aristocratic culinary writers of the 1930s, who distinguished 'high tea' eaten sitting up at a table from the armchair 'tea' taken mid afternoon. Lady Troubridge's Etiquette and Entertaining decides that high tea could be made acceptable in one's weekend cottage, so long as it was done with a knowing embrace of 'farmhouse fashion': butter in an earthenware crock, a pot of jam, a big brown teapot and no genteel china. Whatever 'Yorkshire tea' suggests today, it's worth seeking it out in its full historical glory: a hearty, hard-won gastronomic pleasure. Pen Vogler is talking about 'The Politics of Pudding: The Past, Present and Future of Yorkshire Food' at Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole at 2pm on 12 July Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: 'Picnic at Hanging Rock''s vision of girlhood] Related This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap
Daily Mail
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
With WH Smith's name set to disappear from the high street, LAURA CRAIK writes a love letter to the stores that are no more
All bosses are intimidating, and never more so than your first boss in your very first job. When said boss is tall, stunning, flame-haired and in a rock band, your teenage self quakes in their very presence. When I applied to be a Saturday girl in the Edinburgh branch of Miss Selfridge, I knew the staff would be cool. I just didn't think one of them would be Shirley Manson. Before the alt-rock band Garbage penned a James Bond theme ('The World Is Not Enough', 1999) and sold-out stadiums, Manson, its lead singer, was my manager at Miss Selfridge. Of course she was: in the 80s it was the city's hottest store. Everyone shopped there, from the club kids to my history teacher. Sure, Topshop was great, but Miss Selfridge was its cooler little sister; the Miu Miu to its Prada. It had the best chainmail dresses, the best make-up and the best uniforms. My 20 per cent staff discount more than made up for the pong of the changing room at closing time. Miss Selfridge is no more, like a slew of fashion meccas that live on only in the memory – Chelsea Girl, Clockhouse, Tammy Girl, Kookaï. Every woman has her favourite. Remembering the shops from our youth evokes a particular wave of sentimentality. Like much of the UK, I felt an unexpected pang when Woolworths went into administration in 2008, an event that prompted an outpouring of Proustian memories among midlife British shoppers. When I was a little girl, as my mother browsed the aisles of household goods, I was given 10p to spend at the Pic'n'Mix counter. I remember stuffing a paper bag with chocolate tools, foam bananas, cola cubes, milk bottles and strawberry bonbons. Ten pence went a long way. All the way to the dentist. Each vanishing shop closes another portal to a bygone time. As the planned closure of WH Smith proved, nostalgia can be sparked however prosaic and/or objectionable the retailer. Gen Z might struggle to romanticise the strip-lit, haphazardly laid out, shabby interiors of Britain's 233-year-old purveyor of stationery (they don't need it), greeting cards (they don't send them) and meal deals ('a rip-off compared to Tesco', according to my 14-year-old) but, for a certain generation, 'Smiths', as it was fondly known, was an electric blue-carpeted place of wonder. 'It had the best selection of scented rubbers,' remembers one friend, who still possesses the cake-scented Swiss-roll eraser she bought in the Reading branch circa 1986. 'We'd go to Smiths on the August bank holiday to stock up on stationery for the new school year. My dad would get his wallet out, huffing and puffing about the cost of a fluffy pencil case. The plastic bag always split, which would make him apoplectic. Smiths always had the weakest bags, with the flimsiest handles.' None of which prevented WH Smith from becoming one of the first chains to introduce a plastic bag fee. It was also an early adopter of the self-service checkout, and the dreaded TPC – till point conversation – which involved harried customers being asked whether they wanted a giant bar of Dairy Milk for £2. I derive the same mawkish sentimentality from the retail landscape others might draw from the land. Just as my husband, a farmer's son, might lament the loss of a yew tree, I feel sad about the loss of Edinburgh retailers such as the second-hand store Flip or the cheap-as-chips womenswear retailer What Every Woman Wants. My mother, meanwhile, misses BHS. 'Feel the quality of that,' she'll say, proffering a beige BHS jumper bought some time in the early 90s. 'Better than M&S, I'll tell you.' According to Professor Sophie Scott, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, it's not uncommon to attach huge emotional significance to shops. 'The connection they make to our past is heightened by the emotional context,' she explains. 'People feel nostalgia more intensely when they are with family and friends, or when eating, because these situations are rich in retrieval cues that trigger memories. Shops seem to fulfil a similar function.' This might explain why so many midlife and millennial women still miss Topshop, despite its narrow range of sizes and associations with disgraced former owner Sir Philip Green. Were Topshop's jeans any better than H&M's? Were the heels in Freeman Hardy Willis or Ravel any different from those sold currently in Office or Kurt Geiger? In an era when you can buy anything from anywhere (Trump's tariffs notwithstanding), what is it that we're nostalgic for – a frock or a feeling? Maybe it's a connection to who we were. Online shopping may have sounded the death knell for any number of retailers, but it has also been deleterious in other ways. While a trip to the shops is clearly not as healthy as a bracing country walk, it's exponentially healthier than shopping online, an activity that requires precisely zero steps. Given some shopping malls have estimated that people walk up to seven miles on any given visit, the argument to frequent bricks and mortar stores is clear. In-real-life shopping is also good for your mental health. For older customers, particularly those who live alone, a chat with a sales assistant can be the only social interaction of the day. It's why those who prioritise old-fashioned 'service with a smile' are so valued. 'Whether it's simply acting as a friendly face, our people make a real difference,' says James Breckenridge, John Lewis retail director. The store's 'school of service' initiative, which focuses on training employees, is said to have freed up over 500,000 hours for its sales assistants to spend helping customers. Whatever our circumstances, however we like to spend Saturday afternoons, we all grieve the loss of our favourite shops. Accustomed to downloading any film on demand, our kids will never understand the white-knuckle ride of visiting the local Blockbuster Video with our parents, praying that Home Alone was in stock. Whether you miss Blockbuster or Biba, House of Fraser or Virgin Megastore, their closures likely marked the loss of something more nebulous and far more precious than the opportunity to rent the latest film or buy a new lipstick.
Telegraph
06-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Gristly beef and watery cabbage: the school dinners I'll never miss
If you find yourself near Stowmarket, Suffolk, this Spring, you could consider visiting the Food Museum, where a Proustian experience awaits. The museum's new exhibition is devoted to the history of school dinners from the 1940s to the present. The show explores menus old and new, the role of dinner ladies and (alarmingly) offers visitors the opportunity to sample school food from different eras. The provision of school meals began in 1906, when the nursery school pioneer Margaret McMillan argued that if the State intended to make education compulsory, it must also ensure that pupils were adequately nourished. An enlightened understanding of the role of food in maintaining morale led to the universal provision of school dinners from 1944. But over the decades it is striking to observe how some things about school dinners remain constant, while others have profoundly altered. The sharpest divergence is in menus, which have changed dramatically over the decades, driven by the tension between evolving ideas of adequate nutrition and economies of scale. I was at school in the Sixties and Seventies, and apart from the obligatory milk (frozen in winter, curdled in summer) I remember most vividly the dinners at my village primary school. We ate in the gravy-smelling village hall, to which the food was delivered in metal vats and dispensed by dinner ladies who kept a beady eye on my attempts to scrape away my uneaten meals. I was a weedy child with a negligible appetite, and I struggled with gristly beef and watery cabbage, the brown slop with pink sauce ('Medway mud and shaving cream') that passed for pudding and the horror of Gypsy Tart – a dire Kentish delicacy of congealed evaporated milk and tough pastry. Of my grammar school lunches I recall only the Spam fritters, served in a cacophonous space that doubled as the school theatre and gym, pungent with the pong of deep-frying and teenaged angst. Younger pupils arguably had an even less appetising experience after the opening of provision to private tender in the 1980s. On Radio 4 a dinner lady recalled Pork Hippos and Cheesy Feet – not to mention the Turkey Twizzlers that reduced Jamie Oliver almost to tears during his gallant attempt to reform school food in the 2005 television series, Jamie's School Dinners. Studying the school menus of that era, you can see the future obesity crisis inexorably forming. Over the years menus have evolved but the memories of former schoolchildren seem strangely consistent: a kind of rueful affection for the comic nastiness of school food. Bridget Phillipson, the current education secretary, recalled her school dinners as 'absolutely awful', featuring 'custard with a thick skin and orange fish fingers'. Phillipson was born in 1983, but evidently catering standards had not noticeably improved in the decades since Nigel Molesworth's devastating analysis of 'Skool Food, or The Piece of Cod Which Passeth All Understanding'. Meanwhile the role of dinner ladies can be traced in a direct line from Dickens's fearsome Mrs Squeers ('I can't find the school spoon anywhere') to the Beano's unforgettable dinner lady, Olive Sprat, with her concrete-reinforced ladle. These days, current government standards for school meals virtuously minimise salt, processed foods and sugar. But other nations still seem better than we are at persuading children that food is one of life's civilised pleasures. In France, meals still tend to reflect the cultural as well as nutritional aspects of food, with several courses and proper plates and cutlery (back in 2008 the then schools secretary, Ed Balls, called for school meals to be served on china plates, rather than 'prison-style food trays'). A recent episode of Radio 4's Food Programme explored public catering in Copenhagen, where 90 per cent of school meals are prepared from scratch with organic produce. The budget is strict, the ingredients mainly plant based – and the secret of popular uptake? Sprinkle a bit of bacon over the top, apparently. Education budgets, like everything else, are sharply squeezed, but some aspects of the European approach could be worth considering, if we don't want our children and grandchildren to look back on their own school meals with the blend of nostalgia and comic dismay so vividly captured by the Food Museum's exhibition.
Chicago Tribune
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
New film ‘How Lucky Can One Man Get' captures the magic of John Prine in concert
A late March edition of Howard Stern's radio show on SiriusXM featured the host and his guest, Bill Murray, talking about John Prine. Murray had known Prine in the good old days, and talked of sometimes walking from The Second City across Wells Street to listen to Prine on the small stage at the Earl of Old Town. Stern obviously knew Prine's music and expressed his affection for it, but admitted that he had only recently discovered it. He seemed amazed that Murray had actually known Prine and respectfully listened to his memories and his vocal accompaniment to such songs as 'Hello in There' and 'Angel from Montgomery.' (As a singer, Murray should stick to acting.) Emotions and sorrow were palpable even though Prine has been dead for nearly five years. It was obvious from this short audio segment that people who knew Prine and his music remain tightly tied and that people new to both can be easily grabbed. Whatever your relationship, you should consider seeing the screening of a new film, 'How Lucky Can One Man Get.' It is a joyful film, capturing Prine during a 2010 concert at Proviso East High School in Maywood, Prine's alma mater (class of 1964) and, between songs, hearing conversation peppered with stories of family, young love, working as a mailman and memories of vanished neighborhood hangouts of his deeply influential youthful years. That concert, just like one in 1999 and this event, was a fundraiser for the Maywood Fine Arts Association, headed by Lois Baumann, a classmate of Prine's. The association provides arts instruction to the children of Maywood and surrounding communities. The audience will surely contain some gray-haired former classmates of Prine's. His widow, Fiona, and his musical director and guitarist Jason Wilber will be there too, in conversation with journalist Mark Guarino. Mark Dvorak, the great teacher, writer and performer much in the Prine mold, will begin the evening by performing some of Prine's music. The movie features Prine's three brothers, David (who died in 2023), Billy and Doug, and offers a short glimpse of the late Minnette Goodman, the delightful, diminutive mother of Prine's great friend Steve Goodman, who died of leukemia in 1984 when he was only 36. At its heart, of course, is the music that has long cast its spell, with Stern merely the latest to be bewitched and bedazzled. Among the first was the late film critic Roger Ebert, who walked one night into a club on Armitage Avenue called the Fifth Peg and saw Prine's first public performance. He would write about it for the Sun-Times, 'Prine's lyrics work with poetic economy to sketch a character in just a few words.' In short order, Prine and Goodman were 'discovered' by Kris Kristofferson, who helped them get record deals, and they were on their way. Bob Dylan, never one loose with praise, said, 'Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about 'Sam Stone' the soldier junkie daddy and 'Donald and Lydia,' where people make love from 10 miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. If I had to pick one song of his, it might be 'Lake Marie.' I don't remember what album that's on.' It's on 'Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings,' Bob, one of Prine's many albums. His first, 1971's 'John Prine,' remains my favorite, most of it written in an apartment on 19th Street in Melrose Park. It includes the songs 'Sam Stone,' 'Paradise,' 'Hello in There' and 'Angel From Montgomery,' which seemed to be impossible for a man as young as Prine was then to have written, so filled with emotional wisdom. He did much of his later writing in Nashville, where he eventually moved for keeps in the 1980s. The city did such an energetic job of promoting its connection to him that many still think of Prine as a native son, knowing little of those formative years in Maywood. Another person deeply affected by Prine has been Mike Leonard, the North Shore native and former longtime reporter for NBC's 'Today' show. He told me, 'I can remember first hearing him, playing his records late at night and thinking that he was writing about everyday life, people like us.' Leonard made a wonderful 30-minute documentary about Prine in 2016. 'I have been talking to a lot of kids, young people who seem to be afraid of being creative,' Leonard said then. 'They think that being creative involves some kind of wild thinking, thinking outside the box. But I think Prine is a great example of the power of thinking inside the box.' Or as Prine said, 'For me it's more like writing about what you know.' Prine died in March 2020 due to complications from COVID-19. A river of praiseful words flowed. Dave Hoekstra, former Sun-Times writer, had his touching say on his blog. So did Guarino, then in the midst of finishing his remarkable book in which Prine played a large part, 'Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival' (University of Chicago Press). He wrote that Prine used 'plain-spoken language to peel back the mysteries of ordinariness. The key is understatement — minimal details and those generous spaces in the music and between the verses.' That's smart and I will file it away with all the other descriptions I have heard trying to explain what John Prine created, while continuing to think of it all as some kind of magic.
Telegraph
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A Question of Sport is back live... and proves why BBC was wrong to cull it
When Sue Barker, Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell began work on their A Question of Sport theatre tour, they were told they could not use the show's original name, music or even round titles. Never mind. For the opening night at the Brighton Arena, a capacity crowd welcomed Barker on stage with their own a cappella version of the old electronic theme tune, conjuring up Proustian images of Bill Beaumont, Emlyn Hughes and Princess Anne. As with the trains to Twickenham on a Six Nations Saturday, these fans fulfilled a precise demographic. Mostly in midlife and beyond, they entered the auditorium two by two: couples who used to watch from the living-room sofa with a cup of tea. One suspected that a fair few probably read this newspaper. A quiz with sporting legends reunite for a special live tour in 2025. Book your tickets for The Reunion Tour now via 🎟️ #TheReunionTour #SueBarker #MattDawson #PhilTufnell — Sue, Matt & Phil Live! (@ReunionTourLive) October 24, 2024 These were the people the BBC abandoned four years ago, when it jazzed up the world's longest-running TV sports quiz via the recruitment of comedian Paddy McGuinness and team captains Ugo Monye and Sam Quek. Well, the BBC thought it was jazzing it up. In fact, it was betraying the very principle of a show that had always put the sport first. Hence this nostalgic reprise – an unconventional sort of tribute act, in which the original performers play the old tunes but call them different things. Instead of 'Home and Away' and 'Sprint Finish', copyright rules meant that we had 'Hall of Fame' and 'Quickfire Quizzing'. Still, the familiar chemistry remained intact. Tufnell invested every line with his characteristic cockney charm, and often left his seat to prowl around the stage in the manner of his old dressing-room nickname: 'The Cat'. James Haskell – the hulking rugby player who was one of the four guest panellists – soon took to imitating Tufnell's gait, which he invested with an extra campness. Haskell's impersonation would not have got past a TV producer on political-correctness grounds, but it went down a storm in this hall. 'We're not on the BBC now!' In a live setting, there was no one to bleep out the odd swear word, and the performers seemed to be enjoying the extra latitude. Even the clean-cut Dawson came up with a mildly blue joke when he suggested that Jonny Wilkinson could probably have landed the World Cup-winning drop goal 'with his k---'. Looking around cheekily, he continued 'We're not on the BBC now!' The budget did not run to retreads of 'What Happened Next?' (those sports rights do not come cheap) or 'Mystery Guest', but any absences were more than compensated by all the varied ingredients that made up this show. As well as the quiz rounds – in which former prop-forward Joe Marler proved a handy asset – the captains had a chance to tell a few anecdotes and narrate a couple of clips from their sporting heyday. Unsurprisingly, Dawson's highlights were rather more flattering than Tufnell's. And then there was the audience participation element, in which each half of the Brighton Centre crowd was assigned to one of the teams. When a question was delivered, it was not just the panellists who started chewing it over. A low rumbling resonated around the whole auditorium as everyone racked their brains: which year was it when Brian Lara broke the world record? A deep bond remains After a couple of hours of lively entertainment, the opening instalment of an 11-match series went to Dawson's team, by 31 points to 29. Again, this was not a huge surprise. No matter which panellists are recruited through the tour, Dawson usually beats Tufnell to the buzzer. But the outcome was beside the point. At the end, a standing ovation spoke of a deep bond between performers and audience, and of the folly of culling this much-loved show too soon. Sue, Matt and Phil: The Reunion Tour plays its second night at London's Apollo Theatre on March 2, then continues to Bath, Leicester and Bournemouth next week.
