For me, one of the reassuring things about the English pub has always been the ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’, the food traditionally served in country pubs.
It’s just what a farmer needed after the thirsty work of driving massive Shire horses up and down, ploughing fields all day.
A thick slab of local cheese on a hunk of fresh bread washed down with a pint of draught ale.
No wonder it’s been a tradition in our country pubs for centuries.
Except it hasn’t. It was invented by a marketing department in the 1960s.
The ploughman’s lunch never existed.
What actually happened was that the Milk Marketing Board wanted to increase sales of cheese.
Britain didn’t have lots of fancy cheeses like the French, Cheddar was the main one.
So the problem was, how to get people to eat more of this ordinary, basic cheese.
At lunchtime in those days, most people simply went to the pub, so the opportunity was obviously to sell cheese in pubs.
But pubs were for drinking, they didn’t have kitchens, there was no way to cook anything and pubs had no reason to cook, they sold beer.
So how to sell Cheddar cheese in a place used for drinking and in a way that didn’t need preparation, and how could they get publicans interested, why should they care?
How could they make a virtue of a necessity, how to turn plain old bread and cheese into something appetising for the consumer and appealing for the publican?
The Milk Marketing Board’s agency was J Walter Thompson.
Between them, they decided they had to make cheese the perfect partner for a pint of beer. That way, if it helped sell beer, the publican would make the effort.
So they reinvented the past.
They repackaged a plain chunk of bread and cheese and a pint of beer as the ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’, the traditional farmer’s meal.
Then it didn’t seem dull, unappetising and boring anymore, as far as anyone knew it was part of English countryside tradition.
And they distributed 5,000 cards to stand on bar tops in pubs, announcing that this pub now served the traditional ploughman’s lunch: bread, cheese and a pint of ale.
And it caught on everywhere: bread and cheese came to be referred to as a ‘ploughman’s lunch’ and it was a respectable thing to eat – because it was from the country, it was wholesome and healthy.
And, over time it moved beyond the pub, the ploughman’s lunch became part of traditional English cuisine, alongside Cornish pasties, Scotch eggs, Yorkshire pudding.
And gradually people began adding things to the basic ingredients: butter, pickles, celery, apples, even grapes.
And celebrity chefs began offering their own take on the ‘traditional’ ploughman’s lunch: Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, all had their own recipes for making the most authentic artisanal bread, how to source the ideal cheese, how to mix the perfect accompanying relish.
The ploughman’s lunch is now part of the national memory.
This is a great lesson for those of us working in mass media: nothing, not even history, is cast in stone, we don’t have to be reverential about it.
In fact we don’t have to be reverential about anything.
The great lesson is: if we can invent history, we can invent anything.