Eat for Britain
Last updated 09:16, Saturday, 17 May 2008
Not many men would be brave enough to tell their wife that their puddings are, ‘like cream strained through a tramp’s hair’.
But luckily, touring stand up comedian Sue Perkins, is one of the least likely people in Britain to care about what her husband thinks of her cooking.
Partly because she’s an unmarried lesbian, but mostly because her endeavours are for new BBC Two TV show, The Supersizers Go... and the comments are from her ‘spouse’ for the series, restaurant critic and newspaper columnist Giles Coren.
Based on the one-off programme Edwardian Supersize Me which aired last year, she and Coren will be eating their way through six episodes of British history.
Like gastronomic Timelords, The two will be expected to consume the diets of wartime Britain, the Elizabethan, Restoration, Regency and Victorian periods and the 1970s.
In the first episode, Coren and Perkins grab their ration books and work out how to eat their way to victory. Luckily this involved consuming unlimited vegetables, which was apparently fine with Sue.
“I live with a vegetarian and don’t eat meat at home at all,” she explains. “If I don’t need something I don’t see why I should kill to get it.
“But I do eat a lot of cake. I’m the sort of person who won’t have a main course, and then will head straight to the creme brulee, followed by a couple of biscuits, a really sweet, hot chocolate and then another cake.”
Unfortunately, during wartime, sugar was rationed. But throughout their 12 weeks of filming – one week of comprehensive eating, followed by another to recover – the two presenters were forced to completely change their diets.
Sue confesses: “I’ve eaten pig’s nostrils, eyes and tail, raw hare’s gall bladder, fish eyes, cockerel’s testicles, chick’s heads and every gland known to man.
“The Elizabethans had the most repulsive food. They’d take something normal like fish pie and then they’d add all the stuff they’d got from the New World, even if they didn’t know what it was. Suddenly raisins, prunes, figs, sugar, saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg were all in a fish pie.”
A slim figure with a moral conscience, Sue proved more than a match for the wit of dedicated meat guzzler and journalist Giles Coren.
“It’s called rationing,” she fires at him as they tuck into their first wartime breakfast. “You cannot just say, ‘Wench get me some more pork and I’ll have a sheep’s head.”’
She admits afterwards: “On the face of it Giles and I are completely different. I’m more of a ‘grow your own veg’ type and he’s more a tea and cake person. But while there was a lot of bickering, it really was a case of opposites drawing together. And the good thing was that we could enter into a hearty debate without anyone getting hurt.”
Perhaps she has now forgotten that moment when he likened her wartime outfit to that of ‘a satanic Womble’. Or maybe there were simply other things to worry about.
“Eating the sheep’s head for the Victorian era was just appalling. It had been boiled for three or four days and you’d prod it with your fork, and the whole of the side of the face would slough off in a grey jelly.”
When you’re not watching Giles and Sue looking horror-stricken at the thought of fried calf’s eyes, this new series is wonderfully informative. Via the medium of food, we get a practical look into the comings and goings of everyday life throughout history.
“Food says everything about us,” says Sue. “It says a lot about our political and religious past, our affiliation to current trends, our personal morality, our class and our wage packet.”
During the first episode we discover that Giles and Sue both lose weight and gain fitness while surviving on wartime rations and unlimited vegetables. Which is more than can be said for their time in Restoration England.
“During that time they didn’t have any clean drinking water so you drank small beers from the moment you got up. Even the children drank it,” explains Sue. “I was drunk and crying (with laugher), by 8.30pm.”
“One night it got to 9pm and I was slurring and and red faced. I passed out and Giles urinated in a bucket in front of four academics dining with us. All of which was captured on camera. I woke up to the sound of him urinating next to my head. In Restoration times food was a way to show off. We had to eat something which had 40 different types of dead animal in it and afterwards I went home and cried.”
Expected to try everything that was put in front of her, Sue’s relationship with food and her body was put on under pressure.
“While filming the Victorian episode I put on nearly a stone in a week because I was eating dauphinoise potatoes from 7am in the morning until midnight, and I thought ‘I don’t like my body’. I was up to nine stone, and while rationally I knew that I wasn’t fat, I realised how easy it would be to get a skewed self image.”
She found her changed diet also affected her mood. “During the Elizabeth era, I wasn’t drinking any caffeine, because they didn’t have any, and I was drinking a lot of alcohol, because they didn’t have any clean water. I had huge highs and lows. One moment I would be skittish, mad and frivolous and then really dark and wouldn’t say anything.”
n The Supersizers Go... starts Tuesday May 20 on BBC Two. (with pictures)
property
motors
jobs
date