GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF: BRITISH FOOD AND IDENTIY THROUGH MEDIA by Xandria Lashea Outing A Thesis submitted to the History Department, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Public History Chair of Committee: Dr. Sarah Fishman Committee Member: Dr. Karl Ittmann Committee Member: Dr. Mark Goldberg University of Houston AUGUST 2020 Copyright 2020, Xandria Lashea Outing i DEDICATION To my mom, family, and friends for their continued patience and tenacity as I entered this journey of graduate school and remaining dedicated to my dream with me! ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you, Dr. Fishman, for your honesty, patience, and phenomenal editing skills. I am honored to have you as my advisor. Thank you for going out on a limb and venturing into a subject unfamiliar to you and being supportive of my work. Thank you to CLASS, and everyone involved, for the Dean’s Supplemental Grant. And to my committee, thank you for being flexible with me as my life plans changed and we had to adjust how we interacted during 2020. iii ABSTRACT This thesis examines British food and identity through media as well as the reflection of that identity in the US through the lens of the Great British Bake Off (GBBO). It explores how British food and identity developed over time and by class. It then analyzes how a baking competition show came to define a British identity linked to baking. The thesis links the conceptualizations of British modernity to the evolution of media technology from mass-market cookbooks and newspaper recipes, to cooking shows broadcast over the radio and television and finally to the newest developments in digital/streaming media. Examining media evolution the global impact of British food and identity in the twenty-first century. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION.......................................................................................................................... i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ iii LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................1 I. Eating Like A Brit: Is There a British Cuisine? ................................................................6 Twentieth Century Class Structure and Food ........................................................................7 The Twentieth Century: Rise of Dining Out .................................................................................. 9 The Changed Diet of the Working Class ...................................................................................... 10 Breakfast of Champions ............................................................................................................... 13 The Modern British Lunch ........................................................................................................... 16 “Oh, Bring Us Some Figgy Pudding” .......................................................................................... 19 II. British Food: The Cook, Celebrity Chef and Media .....................................................24 Women, Cookery and Publication .......................................................................................25 Radio, Broadcasting, and the BBC ............................................................................................... 31 Food and Radio Broadcasting ...................................................................................................... 34 Food and Television ..................................................................................................................... 39 III. Baking Competitions, Reality Television and The Great British Baking Show .......46 The U.S. Food Network .......................................................................................................48 The Great British Bake Off .......................................................................................................... 50 The Uniquely British Identity within GBBO ............................................................................... 57 The Spinoffs and Future of the GBBO ......................................................................................... 65 IV. The Digital Age: The Future of Food Content ..............................................................69 Netflix and Baking Content ..................................................................................................70 YouTube and Food Content ......................................................................................................... 76 Apps & Food Content Future ....................................................................................................... 78 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................83 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................85 v Figure 1: Full English Breakfast ............................................................................................. 15 Figure 2: Christmas Pudding Scene ........................................................................................ 21 Figure 3: Cold Souchet of Salmon à la Mozart....................................................................... 29 Figure 4: Agnes B. Marshall ................................................................................................... 31 Figure 5: Julia Childs at KUHT Station .................................................................................. 42 Figure 6: Great British Bake Off Series 6 Cast....................................................................... 55 Figure 7: Winner of Series 10 - David Atherton..................................................................... 58 Figure 8: Animation Drawing by Tom Hovey ........................................................................ 61 Figure 9: Nadiya Hussain’s Final Bake Animation by Tom Hovey ....................................... 64 Figure 10: Title card of The Great American Baking Show ................................................... 66 Figure 11: Nailed It Promotion Image .................................................................................... 72 Figure 12: Zumbo’s Just Dessert Factory ............................................................................... 75 Figure 13: SORTEDfood Members ........................................................................................ 78 1 Introduction While all humans consume food to survive, only humans adapt food from its natural state. Earliest written texts provide examples of specific foods, and eventually, food has been transformed into cuisine. Although we consume food to survive, cuisine is a style of cooking characterized by distinctive ingredients, techniques and dishes associated with a specific culture or geographic region. Throughout history and worldwide, numerous cuisines have developed to match the palate, local and regional ingredients of various places. Cuisine itself has never been static, carried with humans as they migrated and discovered new ingredients and preparations. Eventually, as Collins Dictionary defines it, “the cuisine of a country or district is the style of cooking that is characteristic of that place.”1 As I broached this topic, I was challenged to define British “cuisine,” and even to justify that name. In contrast to French cuisine, considered the top of haute cuisine that developed along with refined eating rituals, I was asked to truly think about what British cuisine was. How do people prepare food, why do they prepare certain foods, and who benefits from that preparation? That raised the biggest question: who decided that their cooking skills merited being written down and shared? I then began to think of food as always being connected to media that made food transparent and exposed it to a wider audience in simpler and easier means. Although focusing primarily on the Great British Bake Off, my research engages at numerous points with the broader history of British food and cuisine. Suzanne Daly and Ross G. Forman in their article on food and drink in the nineteenth century point out that until 1 “Cuisine Definition and Meaning: Collins English Dictionary,” Cuisine definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd), accessed June 29, 2020, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/cuisine. 2 recently, “[i]n many university courses in the humanities, ‘food studies’ was barely a recognized term, and one with an uncertain status, particularly within English studies.”2 However the literature on British food that has emerged since 2000 addresses a number of key areas that link to my research. In addition to Daly and Forman’s 2008 article, “Cooking Culture: Situating Food and Drink in the Nineteenth Century,” in 2012 April Bullock published “Class, Taste, and Foreign Foods in Victorian Cookery Books” and Chris Otter published “The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories.” Together with John Lawrence’s