The home in 50 objects #41: ‘The Physician’s Friend’, etching by Charles Williams (October 1815)

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This hand-coloured etching depicts a kitchen in a posh Georgian house. A portly guest has come below stairs to thank the household’s French chef for a meal that the chef and the kitchen staff have prepared.

The guest, a doctor, congratulates the chef on his skill in preparing “kickshaws”, fancy, insubstantial and usually foreign cooked dishes. These, the doctor adds, ingeniously poison those who eat them, whereupon they seek the services of “us medical men”, who as a result become rich.

Charles Williams was a leading caricaturist of the day. The publisher of the work, Thomas Tegg, was a prolific supplier of books and other publications, with a shop on the City of London’s Cheapside.

The date of the work is about four months after British, Prussian and other forces had defeated Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo. It was published at about the time the ex-French emperor was arriving at the remote Atlantic island of St Helena for his final years of exile and, indeed, life.

Britain’s rulers remained fearful of the spread of French revolutionary thinking. This was exemplified in the “Peterloo massacre” of 1819 at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, when cavalry attacked a large gathering of protesters calling for political reform.

The etching hints at treachery, however, since, among the rich, having a French chef was a matter of culinary refinement. In the kitchen, meanwhile, there had been nationalist reaction going on for quite some time.

In 1747, the popular cook of the day Hannah Glasse wrote of the “blind Folly” of those who would hire a “French Booby” to run their kitchens rather than “give Encouragement to a good English cook”.

Before Glasse, English cooking had a reputation for being entirely bland. The first cook to put the term “Yorkshire pudding” on the menu, she also takes credit for publishing the first curry recipe in English.

More recently, her admirers included such 1950s and 1960s pioneers of popular cooking as Fanny Cradock and Elizabeth David. But she was no fan of the French penchant for using, in her view, too much butter.

Such a dislike of rich sauces — not to mention the national shunning of assumed continental evils like garlic — would long outlive any memory of Waterloo, and remain even into the quite late stages of the 20th century.

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