Meat

British meat, and beef in particular, has long been the envy of the world; for flavour and quality there is none so consistently good. An eighteenth-century visitor from the Continent found that our ox, calf, sheep and swine (today’s beef, veal, lamb and pork) were of ‘unsurpassed fatness and delicious taste, either because of their excellent pasture consisting of nourishing sweet-scented hay, or, owing to some way of fattening ... known to their butchers alone’.

In fact, until the mid-eighteenth century our cattle were not specially fat, but small and tough. It was largely due to the work of a single man, Robert Bakewell of Loughborough, that our beef became such a splendid example of fine-boned meatiness. Bakewell’s breeding experiments were followed by more work, this time on the Aberdeen Angus, by a Victorian farmer-drover, McCombie of Tillyfourie. He was responsible for the fame of this great beef breed, and the result was that Britain became the stock-market of the world.