As we are on the subject of the fire and feeding Londoners, let’s not forget that food was behind the fire in the first place. It was caused by a spark from the ovens of Thomas Farriner, a baker on Pudding Lane, at the site now marked by the Monument and not far from old Billingsgate market. Warehouses were crowded around the baker’s shop and stored oil, coal and timber, so the whole area went up like a bomb. Before an inquiry into the cause of the fire was completed, a Frenchman, Robert Hubert, confessed to starting the fire as part of a Gallic plot against the capital, though it later transpired that he wasn’t even in London until two days after the fire started. He ended up being hanged for arson, convicted on the basis of his own confession, even though the judge doubted his evidence. The inquiry, reporting three months after the fire, concluded that Hubert was ‘a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life’ and had confessed to a crime he never committed, and that the fire in the Pudding Lane baker’s was most likely an accident.
At the top of the Monument is a gold, burning orb. Originally the designer wanted to put a bust of Charles II up there, but the King thought better of it. He was worried that he might be associated with the cause of the fire rather than as the man who saved London from the flames, and given what had happened to his dad, Charles I, who had the misfortune of being beheaded, he was a bit wary of a shift in public opinion.
If you head down to Lower Thames Street today in search of eels you’ll be disappointed. The original market is no longer in operation. The Victorian buildings are still there, and are pretty impressive in size and scale, including a huge, grand hall with towering arches and the usual Victorian brickwork and artistry. A cathedral to all things with fins. The old market buildings were refurbished by the architect Richard Rogers when the commercial fish market decamped to West India Docks in Poplar in the 1980s, and they are now elegant, cavernous spaces available for hire for corporate events. The new market is a bit more utilitarian. It has a lot of car park and can’t match the beauty of the old market. The smell remains pretty authentic though, and if you feel like getting up at 5.30 a.m. you will be greeted by the most extraordinary array of fish from all over the world.
So, having rowed out to the Dutch eel boat to stock up on eels, what did the Victorian cooked-eel seller do next? Well, there was a lot of skinning, gutting and boiling before they went out on the street with great kettles of stewing eels. I’m already imagining the pong. On the street, hot eels were sold with liquor, the same green liquor you get with pies and mash now, which is a basic parsley sauce, though each pie shop will tell you they have a special ingredient. The other traditional accompaniment was spiced vinegar, which is again a condiment offered at any self-respecting pie shop.
In my devotion to seek out the story behind the great pie and eel story, I took myself off to Broadway Market in east London to meet Robert Cooke, who runs one of the Cooke family’s pie and mash shops. The Cookes are one of a small number of families, along with the Kellys and Manzes, who have dominated the pie and mash trade for generations in these parts.
Robert’s is not the oldest working pie shop in London. That honour belongs to the Manze shop at 87 Tower Bridge Road, which opened in 1902 and has been trading there ever since. But it’s certainly no new kid on the block. The menu here offers delicacies that haven’t changed much in 150 years. Above the shop doorway, the gold letters announce that not only is Cooke’s a pie shop, but also an importer of live eels, and in the window another sign promises hot and jellied eels.
Out the back, Robert shows me a kind of water tank with drawers. It has connecting pipes at the back that provide a constant water supply. It looks for all the world like a filing cabinet, only the drawers are for eels, presumably of the ‘live, imported’ variety. I am guessing you’d have to file a lot in the bottom drawer under ‘w’ for ‘wriggling’ and some under ‘s’ for ‘slippery’. They can’t all be under ‘e’, surely? This old relic was used to keep live eels on the premises until their moment of destiny came, but now the eels come when their wriggling days are over and there is no need for the eel tank.
If you are in two minds about eels, out in the shop there’s a framed excerpt from a report from the Medical Research Council of 1928 extolling the virtues of the eel: ‘The body oil of eels, which is almost 30% of their whole substance, contains not only vitamin D, but almost as much vitamin A as cod-liver oil.’
The shop had a makeover in the 1930s. Perhaps the MRC endorsement had boosted sales of eels, who knows? The interior is not glamorous exactly, but the cream tiles and pale-blue and icy-green colours have a charm that you won’t find in your local fried chicken shop, which now competes for the closing-time munchies business.
During the day there is a different clientele sitting on the hard wooden benches at the marble tables. Two ladies of a certain age are having lunch when I’m there. One of them, a little twig of a thing, is tucking into a huge plate of pie, mash and liquor while the other is having jellied eels. Mid-afternoon, a couple of large cabbies, whose wives have them on health regimes, come in for a post-salad lunch of double pie and mash. They both admit that it is almost an addiction, and I know quite a few people who suffer from it. My old mate Rob Dickins, the head of Warner Bros records, used to take bemused execs over in London from Burbank, California to Manze’s in Tower Bridge. And Steve Jones, erstwhile guitarist of the Sex Pistols, who now lives in LA, was telling me that his first destination when returning to London is the pie and mash shop in Chapel Street. In fact, he admitted to being caught licking the window once, when he arrived to find it shut, much to the astonishment of his American companion.
At the end of the Second World War there used to be 130 pie and mash shops in London, now the numbers rumble around 20 to 30. Many of those that survive, like Robert’s family shop, have teetered on the brink, as the food, cheap as it is at £2.50 for pie and mash, has gone out of fashion. Robert is hopeful, though, and he’s beginning to get new, younger customers, for whom his brand of takeaway, in contrast with the now familiar flavours of the chicken chow mein or Hawaiian pizza, suddenly seems quaint and exotic. What can’t be denied is that nowhere in London can you buy a dish that, in all its essential elements, is just as it was when it was served to Londoners over 150 years ago.
The gourmet eel pies beloved of Henry VIII may have gone out of fashion, as eel flesh is now more expensive, but jellied eels, a rare dish on its own which is still punted out from seafood stalls around the East End, are often offered as a companion to the meat pie and mash. And with the exception of tripe, jellied eels are possibly the only substance on Earth I have put in my mouth and have yet to force down my gullet. And, believe me, as the well-brung-up Londoner what I am, I’ve tried. Jellied eels may even be a French import, being pretty similar to the French dish of
aspic d’anguille
. There’s also a similar Italian version, served with balsamic vinegar. Both of these dishes sound a bit nicer to my ear, but perhaps I am being unpatriotic. Maybe it’s the cold fish jelly that surrounds the eel chunks and is not much more than the cooled fat released from the eel flesh and bones during cooking that stops me in my tracks.
The diners out front in Robert’s shop are having their eels with chilli vinegar, just as generations of Londoners did before them. I’m all ready to go, satisfied with my research, when Robert pulls me aside and takes me to the engine room of the operation, out at the back. In for a penny pie, in for a pound, I’m thinking, as I put on an apron. I have come to cooking a bit later in life than some, but I know my way around a kitchen, so I’m not fazed by the huge pots of peeled spuds - no surprises there. What catches my eye is the machine for rolling pastry. I wonder if Gordon Ramsay has one of these? It looks like the sort of thing that might have featured in the Great Exhibition, though it’s actually a twentieth-century contraption. It works like this: you put in fist-sized balls of homemade pastry, crank up the machine, which looks like a cross between a lawn mower and a mangle, and out the other end shoot perfectly sized oval pancakes of pastry to line and cover the individual pie cases arranged on the counter beside me.
In this kitchen, this is what passes for mechanisation. The rest is all done by hand. It’s not exactly mass production, but it all runs like clockwork. There I am in my pinny, lining the pie dishes with the pastry, for Robert to start filling them up with beef flank and gravy before it’s back to me to whack on the lids and then trim back the pastry. With a bit of help from Robert, I make about 16 pies and then we carry them to what looks like a safe in the tiled kitchen wall. Now, I knew these were going to be special pies, hand-crafted by yours truly, but I didn’t expect Robert to treat them with such reverence. As it turns out it isn’t a safe but a very old oven. In they go and then out they come, golden-brown. Lucky diners.
That’s a truly traditional London meal out, though Londoners are as likely to plump for a curry on Brick Lane, not much more than a stone’s throw from Broadway Market. I had thought that the curry house was brought to London with a big wave of migration from the subcontinent in the 1950s and 1960s, following Indian independence and then partition, but actually the tradition goes back so much further. The first Indian-run restaurant opened its rather grand doors at 34 George Street, just off Portman Square, about 150 years earlier, in 1809. It was called The Hindostanee Coffee House, and despite its rather odd name, it did serve Indian food. It was set up by a rather remarkable man called Deen Mahomet.
This godfather of the British curry house was a Muslim from Bihar in northern India. Deen joined the Anglo-Indian army after finding himself an orphan at the age of 11. He travelled widely with his regiment and, when he left the army, ended up in Cork in Ireland with an Irish wife. Having lived a rich and varied life already, you’d think Deen would have been content to slow down a bit, but no, aged 50 he decided to try his hand at the restaurant trade, and moved to London. His idea was to serve an Anglicised version of authentic Indian food. What Deen offered was not cheap and it was quite different from the chop houses and taverns which were his competition. Since all the gentry had their own chefs - who could, if their masters so desired, rustle up a curry and replicate exotic favourites - the great and the good didn’t come in numbers, and nor did anyone else. It looked like Deen didn’t quite get his market right.
Unfortunately, he went bust within three years. But in addition to a very interesting life, which included a travel memoir published in 1794, Deen’s venture into the restaurant business has not quite disappeared from London’s culinary map. On the site of the Hindostanee Coffee House stands a building called Carlton House, which bears a plaque to his memory. From that false start springs the mighty chicken tikka masala, part of our authentic London cuisine (and officially Britain’s favourite dish) along, of course, with sweet and sour king prawn balls.
While we are on food of the exotic East, you might be familiar with Gerrard Street in Soho as the hub of Chinatown in London, festooned with lanterns to celebrate the arrival of the Chinese New Year when I last walked past. This is the place to get your pak choi and five-spice, ginger spice, sporty spice, scary spice and, if you are flush, posh spice. But Gerrard Street is not the original hub of the Chinese community in London, or the home of its first Chinese restaurants and grocers. Again, you have to go further east, to the docks in Limehouse. Chinese sailors were employed by outfits like the Blue Funnel shipping company, and many of them stayed in London for one reason or another - maybe they fell in love with jellied eels and pies, mash and liquor? Unsurprisingly, shops and cook-houses grew up around the docks to cater for them, at places like Mandarin Street near the Westferry Docklands Light Railway station and Ming and Canton Streets. The presence of this small Chinese community, which was not much more than 100 people, is now memorialised in these street names. The slum clearances in the 1930s and the Blitz pretty much wiped everything of substance away, but it is fair to say that Limehouse is the original homeland of London’s Chinese takeaway. But while we might be able to trace the origins, a bigger mystery remains. Who first asked that controversial question: ‘Are we all sharing or each ordering our own?’
Having a takeaway these days might seem to us as something of an extravagance because it is assumed that most homes have an oven, even if they aren’t used. A hundred or so years back, many fewer households, particularly those in the slums of the city, had an oven of any sort, and then there were the people who lived most of their lives on the streets. Buying hot food from street vendors or cook shops was not unusual. For some it was a way of keeping body and soul together.
Staying with the Victorian takeaway keeps us in the east of the city, among the urban poor and the immigrant communities settling in the East End. And now I want to move on to a dish which is closer to the hardened arteries of my own heart and a meal synonymous with everything that is great about Britain: fish and chips.
Just mentioning those two humble items together whets the appetite. Before I go in search of what claims to be the site of the first fish and chip shop in Britain, I want to dig about a bit and trace the origins of these two culinary companions. Let’s start with the fried fish. It is generally accepted that fried fish was brought over to London by Sephardic Jews, possibly from Portugal and possibly as early as the seventeenth century. The Jewish community, like many immigrants entering the capital, did not stray too far from the port and settled in east London. The Bevis Marks synagogue in Nelson Street, EC3 was founded in 1701 by the Sephardic community and is one of the oldest and most beautiful synagogues in Britain. It’s a testimony to the long and rich cultural heritage of the Jewish East End. There is a brilliant organisation called the Jewish East End Celebration Society which has a website crammed with amazing information about this part of London’s cultural life, including suggested walks which take you through landmarks of that community. So when did fried fish stop being a Jewish delicacy and move out of its originating culture to become a street food of the poor?