Fine Words Butter No Baby Food Parsnips

I flew to England last week. It was a last minute trip, totally unplanned and funded with the many frequent flier miles that I accrued over the past 12 months. I told everyone I was going to visit relatives, which was sort of true—but really I just wanted to hang out in the supermarkets, convenient stores and gas stations and basically see all the food that they have and we don’t. It’s one thing to read about it in the trends section of foreign trade journals but so much more fun to browse the aisles and see for myself!

The UK has better candy than we do. They have several types of chocolate confections like Whisper and Aero that uses molecular techniques (probably picked up from Heston Blumenthal) to create an airy, bubbly texture inside the chocolate. We don’t get that here. They also have candy bars that have been converted and infused into other dessert items like Rolo and Whisper ice cream bars and puddings. Big tins of “Quality Street” toffees, Digestive cookies and unusual Nestle creations like “walnut whips” (hollow chocolate cone filled with low water activity marshmallow fluff and topped with walnuts) are some of the other creative items that we just don’t get back home. I have asked around about why the UK has more interesting candy than we do and so far the responses have been: The English take their candy way more seriously than we do, they have a bigger sweet tooth and, lastly, most candy companies started out there anyway so they naturally have more line extensions.

Babies in the UK are much more adventurous than American babies—or at least the mums that buy the food think their babies are. UK babies eat puréed parsnips, shepherd’s pie, Thai curry and salmon. Official University of Illinois Food Science Department studies by Dr. Brewer have confirmed that retorted salmon holds up well and retains the nutrients that are good for babies (omega-3s) but the whole fish purée concept hasn’t quite made it mainstream on our side of the pond!

In the frozen and shelf stable retail section they have way more Indian food (but we knew that) and they have a HUGE section of Quorn, the UK’s fake meat contribution to the vegetarian world—a filamentous mycoprotein from Fusarium veneratum. I got the scoop on Quorn from my good friend and food science consultant Professor J. Ralph Blanchfield, MBE, who gave me the whole story:

“Quorn is a range of made-up food products based on ‘Quorn,’ a filamentous mycoprotein from Fusarium veneratum. Quorn started life in the 1960s as an R&D project under the name of ‘protein A3/5,’ in the Lord Rank Research Centre in the UK (the research center for the then very large Rank-Hovis-McDougall food company … so the story goes, the Fusarium veneratum was found in the soil in Lord Rank’s garden!). At the time, there were many who viewed world hunger as purely a protein shortage rather than, as seen later, that many people simply did not have enough food. Many developments of ‘novel protein’ were going on, which required extrusion or spinning to texturize them. Where protein A3/5 scored was that it did not need texturizing, it texturized itself! A variety of fermentation substrates were tried over the years, but I understand that current practice involves continuous fermentation with a continuous feed of oxygen, nitrogen, glucose, minerals and vitamins. One of the early problems encountered was the high ribonucleic acid content, and it is treated to reduce the level to below WHO limits, centrifuged to remove water, and then compounded with other ingredients. I have no connection with the succession of companies involved over the years, but I watched its progress throughout those years with interest. A great deal of good science and technology went into satisfying the regulatory authorities and bringing it to the market in the UK in 1985.”

Ralph told me all about Quorn during our lunch of fish, chips and ‘mushy peas’ which are the traditional accompaniment to fish and chips, particularly in northern England (where they are pronounced ‘mooshy’). The chefy version of mushy peas, Ralph informed me, is made by the lengthy process of soaking dried marrowfat peas in water and sodium bicarbonate for about 12 hours, draining, adding cold water with salt, sugar and coloring, and cooking for about 30 minutes. Ralph then let me in on a bit of old English history in which he had been involved—how mushy peas became a convenience food. Back in the 1950s, a company called Batchelors Foods held 66% of the UK market for canned processed peas. In the canning process, it was found that although all batches of dried peas were treated in the same way, occasional batches of dried marrowfat peas, when soaked and then canned, resulted in canned peas that were a bit mushier than they should be, and they were treated as ‘substandard.’ Then a clever marketing chap at Batchelors asked, “Why can't we make processed peas deliberately mushy so they could be sold as a brand new convenience product, aka, ‘canned mushy peas.’ It was then just a matter of experimenting to determine the right amount of sodium bicarbonate in the soaking water so that the peas were of just the right level of mushiness after the cans were retorted. To this day, canned mushy peas are a premier product in the UK market.

I left England with a suitcase full of candy (but no mushy peas—I prefer mine fresh thank you!) and hopeful thoughts that perhaps our mainstream manufacturers will become more adventurous and we too will get more candy, Quorn, salmon baby food and Indian “ready-meals” in the United States soon! Who said English food is no good? But as they say, fine words butter no parsnips!