The English seaside
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
"salt air, seagulls and unpredictable weather" Georgina Hayden
Somewhat ironically this picture which headed up a piece by Georgina Hayden on a trip around some of Britain's beaches, in The Guardian newsletter, may not be England at all. And Georgina Hayden mostly talks about Greek food, but the picture and the words that followed, about British seaside foodie treats, induced such a feeling of nostalgia, that I started thinking about how I could use the photo for a blog.
Initially I thought of a whole series - a somewhat narcissistic one - about my life in food - or somewhat less narcissistically how the food that I have eaten - and therefore more or less 'ordinary' people in the British western world have changed their eating habits.
However, I'm not up to that today - I might come back to it some time - and am just going to concentrate on either specifically Southend-on-sea centred, or a broad view of English beaches - particularly the food.
I've used this photograph before - myself on the left with worryingly skeletal lower legs but a big smile, my brother in the middle and my sister looking somewhat less happy. We are sitting on a beach somewhere and it is obviously cold and windy - I mean we are all wearing coats and just look at my terribly wispy and disarrayed hair. And yet we have made little sandcastle kind of things. Damp sand, upturned bucket. And the beach is sandy - which is somewhat odd for us as all the beaches that we regularly visited were either non-existent (Southend) - or pebbly (Eastbourne). Well Southend does have a beach but I suspect the sand is artificial because in spite of it's -on-sea addition to its name it's really the estuary of the Thames and so I think the 'beach' may actually be mud. Indeed I do not remember there being much of a beach at all back in my childhood.
Of course there are many, truly beautiful beaches in England - and in Devon and Cornwall and further north facing the North and Irish seas they are sandy, but down where I lived in the south they are often pebbly. Uncomfortable to lie on but with that glorious sound of the incoming waves washing over the pebbles, whilst the seagulls screech in the air above.
And many of them have piers and none more famous than the beach closest to us - Southend - the longest pier in the world - 2.14 kilometres I am told - and I have walked it a few times - one way. There is a train that you can take as well and generally it was a walk one way and a train ride the other. Eastbourne above - and a whole host of others, have rather shorter and also rather classier piers that date back to Regency and Victorian times.
No Brit is further than a couple of hours by train from the sea - it's a long, thin series of islands after all - one big one and some smaller ones hanging off the edge - like the Isle of Wight which we used to visit via ferry from Portsmouth where my grandmother lived, and which we frequently visited.
But enough of me - what about the seaside food that is so uniquely British - maybe even just English. First the fish and chips, which of course are not just a seaside thing. We often ate fish and chips at home - either cooked by my mother or from the fish and chip shop. But yes they are indeed a seaside thing. Back then they were sprinkled with salt and vinegar - malt vinegar because it was the only vinegar we knew, and eaten from the newspaper in which they were wrapped with our fingers. Today if ever I am eating in some beachside pub or more upmarket restaurant I will almost always go for the fish and chips - but without the vinegar and more likely something like a sauce tartare, or just a squeeze of lemon. One of the most perfect foods in the world and quintessentially British. Yes I know it's really Jewish.
The French don't really do the same thing. Their equivalent is Moules et frites which you will find at every beach from the fashionable to the working man's beach, but even at their most basic they look so much more exotic than fish and chips. Is it the accompanying glass of wine or - more likely - the sun will be shining, and everyone is speaking in another language? Or is it even that it's just la belle France? And are they more tasty? I suspect that may be all to do with where you grew up.
And I'm guessing because I don't really know that every coastal country in the world has their own favourite way of serving up fish and seafood on their beaches, with something that equates to chips.
The nearest equivalent in England to the moules et frites - and definitely a feature of working men's beach dreams - is cockles and whelks. As a child and young teenager I loved these humble shellfish, even the whelks which you had to winkle out of the shells with a toothpick. Indeed back then cockles and whelks were served from a street stall into cups - whether paper cones or plastic containers - with toothpicks. Today it's plastic forks by the looks of things. Cockles - so common sounding - vongole sounds so much classier - but fundamentally the same thing. But the other thing to note here is that cockles were mostly sort of pickled - in the same malt vinegar and salt as the fish and chips. Maybe it was the taste of the salt and vinegar that I loved.
Jellied eels? Uugh. I just can't go there, because of the live eels that we would see for sale in a tank in the street in East Ham. The stuff of nightmares for me, but yes indeed jellied eels were a big thing in English seaside food - usually sold on the same stalls as the cockles and whelks. But they were not for my parents either.
Smoked eel I am told is a luxury, and I think I did try it once. I was not repelled. Just not entranced.
As to sweet things well there is rock - long pink sticks of some kind of processed sugar syrup - white inside, pink outside, with the name of the resort - Southend-on-sea in our case - curved around the edge all the way through the stick. I could not find a picture of Southend rock, so had to make do with London. And these days the sticks also seem to be multi coloured and wrapped in glossy cellophane. Which I don't remember.
But it still exists. And how do they get those words all the way through the stick? Well the basic answer is that they make the individual letters large and then combine them with the other sugar stuff roll it up and stretch it out. I watched two or three videos on this, but fundamentally the process has not changed from way back then - shown in my earliest video of 1948 Lettering rock and a later one from 1975 which was slightly more sophisticated but not much. They're short and blasts from the past. Have a look. Below some stills from the 1975 version:
But let's not forget ice-cream whether it be a Wall's ice-cream wafer from way back then or a cassis (blackcurrant) sorbet in Cassis in southern France both considered by me at least to be magical almost divine in their time. What is the seaside without icecream, even if it's not sunny and warm?
Georgina Hayden remembered doughnuts and indeed these are actual Southend doughnuts, but truth to tell I do not remember them. Whether with a hole, or filled with jam and sometimes cream. I do remember doughnuts though - but I think bought from our local baker. Did they have them at the seaside back then? Or are they a more recent phenomenon.
The British love the seaside. Well everyone does don't they? For me the emphasis is on the 'side' part of the word these days. Australia has too much sand which gets into everything and too much sun which is hard to get away from out in the open without a lot of equipment. But I do love to be by the sea. There's a sense of freedom somehow - and fun. Which of course is a major feature of Southend-on-sea in spite of its somewhat tacky nature. The fun fair with its frightening dodgems and roller coaster but magical carousel, the annual lights - for which the entire length of the estuary's side was lined with illuminated tableaux like the one below, the lift that made its way up the short cliff at the posher end of Southend in Leigh-on-sea and that walk along the pier. Simple pleasures available for the cost of a bus or train ride for Londoners.
And yes, all prompted by food, reminding you of so much more. The wind in your hair perhaps; or thoughts of far away places across the sea or your next guilty meal of fish and chips.
YEARS GONE BY
August 28 - Happy birthday Zoe
2024 - Nothing
2023 - Deliciously English
2022 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Nothing
2017 - Nothing
2016 - Buy when it's cheap
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