I have a vivid memory of arriving at university at the back end of the 1980s and telling someone I needed to buy a bread cake, at which point I remembered (too late!) that most people call the round baked item in question a bap or a roll. The term bread cake – no, it has nothing whatsoever to do with cake – is highly regional: a South Yorkshire and, at a push, East Midlands thing. If I’d been wearing a Tracey Emin-style neon sign on my head that said, “I am from elsewhere, possibly another planet”, I couldn’t have announced myself more clearly. Not that I was embarrassed – and in any case, old habits die hard. On Sunday mornings, when I make bacon sandwiches, the floury baps that I like to use, soft as pillows, are still bread cakes to me. They always will be.
The experience I describe was, however, a long time ago and, today, as I think about making pease pudding for dinner (I’m joking; of course we’re having pasta), I find myself wondering about regional differences when it comes to food. Do they belong, now, to the past? Admittedly, it’s still hard to lay your hands on parkin in London: Gail’s Bakery looks to Europe, not Leeds, its nose in the air and a silk scarf tied firmly around its neck. But Eccles cakes and Cornish pasties are ubiquitous now, and I’ve seen haslet with my own eyes at the Islington branch of Tesco (a herby meat loaf, haslet is very good in bread cakes, so long as they’re thickly buttered). Neal’s Yard Dairy, the fine cheesemonger, sells Staffordshire oatcakes. Leave the capital, meanwhile, and you will find that a sourdough-and-rocket-inflected monotony is spreading ever outwards from the M25.
Except … uh oh. Nature does abhor a vacuum, and where once we had Dorothy Hartley’s classic of 1954, Food in England, to guide us from county to county, now we have Deliveroo, whose latest sales data has helpfully provided an alternative and highly 21st-century map of the nation’s tastes. Some of them are entirely predictable – in the north, people are more likely to order chips with curry sauce – and others are downright weird (I cannot think what kind of person panic-orders scones on such an app, but apparently they mostly live in Glasgow). Geographically speaking, York is now the capital of bubble tea, Brighton of oat milk, and Tunbridge Wells of champagne.
The media swallowed Deliveroo’s press release wholesale, no questions asked, and thanks to this I was able to study its findings in a newspaper for several moments while eating (I’ll use an uncontroversial word) a sandwich. How bewildering, and how melancholy. While some of my neighbours adopted delivery apps with alacrity – a liveried bicycle arrives at one house in our street virtually every day – I’ve never used Deliveroo, and don’t plan on doing so any time soon. But even if I did, I wouldn’t think of ordering a latte from Costa Coffee (Blackpool), or a rice bowl from Leon (Bath). What strange cravings! These are businesses whose success, at least in part, is built on convenience: you are there, they are there, the train you plan to get boards in 10 minutes. They strike me as last resorts, not the ne plus ultra of a good night in.
There are many dispiriting phrases in the English language; I have mentioned before how much I hate to hear anyone say, “I’m not having a starter.” But “eight pieces boneless from Wingstop” is right up there with the worst words I’ve ever heard spoken out loud (according to Deliveroo, the trending food of the past year was chicken, and this easy-to-eat octet from Wingstop, an American chain with 55 outlets in Britain, “took the top spot”).
Ordinary as they may sound to some ears, those words seem to me to encapsulate something: an unstoppable blandification; a refusal to recognise both the value of difference and the danger of ignoring it. Even as I cling to cheese, the one food that has improved beyond all imagining on these islands in my lifetime, I worry about what we’re losing. All I can do – all any of us can do – is to go on performing our small acts of resistance. Bread cakes forever, and down with bicycles bearing oat milk.
