Modern take-aways familiarly extend well beyond fish and chips. Kebabs, burgers and the rest may originate outside Britain, yet younger generations are coming to think of pasta and pizza as British food. Similarly, meals their grandparents think of as English, e.g. Christmas turkey, the pudding, with milk chocolates afterwards, reflect earlier migrations of foods – spices from the Far East in the later Medieval period, turkey from the New World, also the potatoes, sprinkled with mint brought by the Romans, and chocolate from Central America transformed from its bitter basic paste by the addition of sugar, milk and fats. Globalisation is not new: conquest, waves of migration, Elizabethan exploration, modern tourism and more, have moved foods and recipes around the world for centuries, available for incorporation into local eating patterns to become accepted as typical dishes of these regions.

Unfamiliar cuisines, imported tropical fruits, fusion recipes – even the very expression ‘fusion food’ – are reminders of the fashionable use of foods whose meaning, over time, shifts from ‘novelty’ or ‘luxury’, to ‘everyday’ or even ‘necessity’. In Britain as elsewhere in Europe, the massive social disparities in wealth of the Medieval period were marked by aristocracies displaying their superiority via gargantuan feasts. In the following centuries, quantity gave way to quality, with social superiority being expressed by refinement and discrimination in taste. Successive waves of what was considered fashionable set in, with those lower down the scale aping those above, who in turn adopted new dishes, new times of day to eat, new styles of serving a meal’s courses by way of maintaining their distance from those below.

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Content last updated: 21/04/2005

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