Word: pullar
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When the Romans introduced their rich ways to England, the Britons scorned these foreigners "who bathe in warm water, eat artificial dainties." This establishes a motif that runs through Miss Pullar's history: puritans v. orgiasts. But gradually the natives came round. By the time those other invaders, the Vikings, had introduced their rollicking ways, canons had to be published forbidding drinking in church...
What would have happened, Miss Pullar speculates, if the Puritans had not forbidden spices as exciters of passion, and generally brought to a crisis the English gourmet's problem, which she defines as "the neurosis between the soul and the body"? The English tradition, she thinks, "might have blossomed as richly as that of the French." After Cromwell, mourns Miss Pullar, "nothing was ever quite the same again." "Mighty Roast Beef" became the national dish...
...Miss Pullar, her history, and history in general, goes downhill after the Industrial Revolution. "Not since Imperial Rome can there have been so many signposts to gluttony," J.B. Priestley wrote of the Edwardians. (Edward VII's breakfast: haddock, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock.) Yet coexisting with gluttony, comparatively unimaginative gluttony, was malnutrition. Only one of three Englishmen of military age was found fit for World...
...welfare state, Miss Pullar complains, has leveled things out, but only at the price of turning England into a giant supermarket. She writes: "There is no excellence any more, or very little," looking far beyond her cookbooks to a civilization she judges tragically out of tune with nature. "Sterility, not fertility, is the great cry," she protests. " 'Life is one animal,' Samuel Butler said. And slowly we are killing...
Today's Englishman, Miss Pullar concludes, has come full circle and ended up like the Romans, with bread-and-circuses. But what she finally cannot forgive him is the poor quality of the bread...