The British love of game continued to wane, and Austin's family often ate pigeon pie (the roasted kind, of course), and game such as hares and wild boars were often on the squire's table.

Rules Restaurant, the oldest surviving restaurant in London, has preserved the tradition of cooking game since its founding in 1798. They have an estate in Yorkshire where deer, roe deer, grouse, partridges and so on. The four walls of the restaurant are decorated with skulls of various deer, and the small label at the bottom also records the year of the hunt and the name of the hunter.

The game on the menu changes seasonally, and here we had braised venison with shiitake mushrooms and pickled cucumbers, roast pigeon with sweet and sour blackberries:

For some, this is the last glory of British cuisine. Soon after, a sea change from agriculture to industry brought it a succession of critical hits.

At the end of the 18th century, the revolution in the textile industry ushered in the era of the Industrial Revolution, but it also led to a rapid increase in unemployment. At the same time, the bad weather of 1794-1795 caused widespread famine, and the government hastened to issue a series of guidelines detailing "the cultivation and consumption of potatoes" in order to fill the gap in wheat, after all, one acre of potatoes could feed almost three acres of wheat.

The people did not accept potatoes at first, but the reality was cruel: the price of white bread had skyrocketed, and the price of meat and cheese had doubled. The Committee of Agriculture vowed to help: "Boiled potatoes with salt can provide enough nutrients for people." ”

In this way, potatoes became a staple food in the British, and they remained a staple for hundreds of years afterward.

At the beginning of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, peasants left their land behind and flocked to the new industrial cities to become workers.

Chef Eliza Acton noticed that the traditional art of stewing seemed to disappear altogether: "Those that are healthy, delicious and inexpensive.

Workers living in cramped apartments, having to buy sandwiches on their way to work, have no energy to study cooking? Not to mention, canned meat imported from the Americas is half cheaper than fresh meat of the same weight, canned vegetables and fruits, bagged soup packets, margarine, condensed milk, and bread mixes have since invaded the kitchen, and housewives have abandoned complicated family recipes to make a decent dinner with product manuals alone.

And when ordinary people are beginning to embrace the standard taste of assembly line production, who will remember the freshness of wild vegetables, peas and bacon stewed together?

As an island nation, the UK has always relied heavily on imported ingredients. The colonial expansion that began in the 16th century turned the world into the breadbasket of Britain. Before the war, five-quarters of Britain's wheat had to be shipped from Canada. However, when war broke out, the food supply was devastated.

German U-boats roaming the Atlantic sank thousands of merchant ships, and Britain's food supply was suddenly tightened. In 1918, butter, margarine, lard, sugar, and meat were rationed, and even potatoes (potatoes!) were in short supply.

The British had not yet completely emerged from the shadow of World War I, and the artillery of World War II came again. Nutritionist John Boyd Orr told the British government that there would be no danger of famine as long as bread, fat (butter or margarine), potatoes and oats were supplied to the people, plus enough vitamins A and C.

This phrase, along with the corresponding food rationing system, dominated the British cuisine for decades.

The government began to educate the public that vegetables should be simply cooked or even eaten raw so as not to destroy valuable vitamins. Carrots, which were used as livestock feed before the war, were advertised as a healthy food that "contributes to night vision". The fragile and hard-to-transport eggs have all but disappeared and have been replaced by dried "egg powder", which the food department has been told: "You can make a hot omelet with it, and you can buy jars of delicious jam to eat with the money you save!"

It has been said that in the history of mankind, war is probably the most powerful weapon for changing eating habits. British cuisine has long ceased to be glorious before, and after this battle, it has been hit hard.

In the winter of 1947, Britain was hit by heavy snow and then floods, destroying 80,000 tons of potatoes and 70,000 acres of wheat. Food rationing continued until the 1950s, but many of the recipes passed down by word of mouth have disappeared altogether.

In 1952, Bi Nelson's "The Penguin Cookery Book" (???) still taught people to cook with canned fish, and all recipes that used butter should also be supplemented with the phrase "margarine can also be used instead". Recipes have become manuals, cooking ingredients in the most economical way, but those flowery spices, the combination of pride and wisdom, and the imagination that is ready to blow up have long since died heroically in the ravages of the Industrial Revolution, famine and war.

A few decades later, we can see the scenery of cattle and sheep everywhere, lush pastures, and fruit trees in this land. Ingredients from all over the world have also crossed the ocean, where they meet and merge. Take a stroll through the wet market and you'll find Devon cream, Yorkshire cheese, Kent apples, Cumberland sausages in the Lake District, oysters from Whistbull, French tomatoes in different colours, Iberian ham in bright red, and Alaskan king crab with teeth and claws.

The richness of the restaurant is even more impressive, with Italian pizza, Spanish paella, Indian curry, Turkish barbecue meatballs, Chinese goo pork...... You think it's the British who are open to new flavours, but you don't know that the love of spices has long been engraved into the DNA of their ancestors.

And traditional British cooking is gradually regaining its glory. There are old-school restaurants like Rules, which tenaciously perpetuate traditional tastes for 200 years, and new-school chefs like Heston Blumenthal, who borrow modern technology to bring medieval recipes back to life.

Local rabbit meat eaten in York with lovely carrots

Of course, you can also visit the traditional English taverns scattered around the country, and come across dishes like roast rabbit, lamb tongue stew, wild boar pie, and guess how people from 100 or even 1,000 years ago appreciated these flavours – presumably, it can be counted as a chic surprise.