English Paradox

I have been spending a fair amount of time in the ice cream isle of the supermarket this past summer. I know that studies show a strange propensity for vanilla and I must admit I am partial to it. Premium ice creams are getting silly : what is cookie dough ice cream supposed to be about : fond memories of boulimia? I have a sweet tooth but not that sweet!!

I have been reading a very fascinating book about European attitudes to food and eating, a quite sociologically complex topic. Abundance is the stuff of fantasy in times of want, but needs to be regulated in times of plenty. And table manners become central, certainly in continental Europe - France and Italy - where ways of being and feeling are the object of self-conscious attention for the honest man. The sexual cleavage enters into play : only men become gourmets while women and children are relegated to having a weakness for sweets (along with anglophones): a must read!

Florent Quellier, Gourmandise : histoire d’un péché capital, Armand Colin, 2010.

Comparing the English and the French with respect to the table, sociologist Stephen Mennell recognizes that ‘it is certainly not unfair to say that in England, in the XIXth century, the fair proposed in the home-maker cookbooks seems rather monotonous, and especially deprived of all feeling that eating is a pleasure’. Characterized by the rejection of all expressions of papal authority, of absolutism, and court-led civilization, the English cultural model, very logically, resisted, in modern times, the Franco-Italian art of good eating which made of cooking not only a lifestyle art and subject of conversation, but especially one of the Fine Arts. In opposition to France where the bourgeoisie imitated an aristocracy modelled on the Court, the anglo-saxon world never experienced that social consensus which led to the triumph of the art of good food. But this does not mean a total absence of forbidden pleasure. Are the English not the most sweet-loving people of all of Europe? Already marked at the end of the Middle Ages, the anglo-saxon love of sugar survived the religious reorientations of the modern epoch and is still a noticeable factor.