Food Studies in the Romantic Period: (S)mashing History

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam the Hobbits are travelling with their guide, the slimy Gollum. Gollum catches a pair of rabbits and Sam proceeds to cook them. He muses, wishing that he had some nice fried fish and chips to serve his master. The fish and chips here serve as a reminder of the Hobbits’ home, a Romantic organic community nestled – burrowed, in fact – into the rolling hills in the west of Middle Earth. And as such, they become a symptom par excellence of the entire fantasy of The Lord of the Rings. The novel supplies what in Tolkien’s view Britain never had: a national epic, and thus it is a quintessentially Romantic production, simulating a myth and generating a ‘feel’ of national belonging. Fish and chips, in this context, becomes the ideal national dish. Why not roast beef and bread, the actual diet of choice in the period when nationalism was itself emerging as a philosophical discourse and a political ideology – the Romantic period? There are, in fact, good reasons in British food history for the choice of fish and chips. Fish and chips were the meal of the industrial working class in the nineteenth century. But as Nick Groom’s essay on the subject has demonstrated, they led a shadowy prior existence in literature,filched from the French in the poetry of John Henry Ireland. Before Ireland, fish and chips were the fantasy food of anti-French sentiment. Charlotte Smith’s novel Desmond, set during the French Revolutionary period, employs the dish in a conversation between two gentlemen in Brighton that castigates French customs. On the very the coastal edge of Britain, the upper class defines its difference from the enemy. In terms of how to look at food in its relation to larger social forms such as ideological beliefs, the story of how fish and chips was translated from French into English tells us much. Food is the material embodiment of all kinds of social practices, including the formation of ideology. As a material form, it remains inconsistent with the ideas that surround it. Englishness could never be fully encapsulated in a slice of beef, as Roland Barthes, who wrote on the significance of beef to the French, would have known. So what are we to make of Tolkien’s magical, and to say the least anachronistic, displacement of fish and chips into the fantasy world of Middle Earth, a feudal and pre-feudal realm? Sam’s wish for fish and chips seems demotic, if not democratic, evoking the association with the working class and, before that, the French Revolution. If The Lord of the Rings is nationalistic, it is so reflexively, almost lightheartedly. Fish and chips signifies nationalism on the fly, improvised belonging, a cheeky substitution for the grander Roast Beef of Old England. It is the job of food studies to look into Timothy Morton