Pocket Penguin 23 George Orwell In Defence of English Cooking...celebrating 70 years of Penguin books, 70 titles. c1984 ( )

This George Orwell collection of essays and articles was published by Penguin books, as were some of his major works. As a celebration of Penguins achievements in creating literature that could be afforded by all, and to commemorate the special 70’s Editions this book was reissued.
In opening his work Orwell states; “It is commonly said, even by the English themselves, that English cooking is the worst in the world. It is supposed to be not merely incompetent, but also imitative, and I even read quite recently, in a book by a French writer, the remark: ‘The best English cooking is, of course, simply French cooking.’ Now that is simply not true, as anyone who has lived long abroad will know, there is a whole host of delicacies which it is quite impossible to obtain outside the English-speaking countries.”

Orwell went on – in his brave but surely futile attempt to defend the “English Cuisine” of the 1940’s and 1950 years – to list such stalwarts of the British diet as kippers, haggis, suet puddings, marrow jam and, he bewailed that abroad ”one can not find sausages of quite the same kind as ours”. After breathing a collective sigh of relief of no longer having to ‘enjoy’ Orwell’s list, many of us survivors of those years and the boiled cabbages will read on in delight at his spirited articles in this charming collection of nostalgia.

Long live the suet pud called “Spotted Dick”!