The Roast Beef of England

When Erasmus described, more than four hundred years ago, the things upon which various nations of the world prided themselves – the Scots their nobility and logical sense, the French their breeding – he said of the English that they ‘particularly challenge to themselves Beauty, Music and Feasting’. The excellence of English food had been a byword for centuries before Erasmus wrote, perhaps because the penalties for slapdash cooking were so severe, for Edward I once ordered all the cooks of the inns on the road between London and York to be executed because their dishes were not to his taste.