If one looks back to older recipes such as those presented in The English Huswife by G. Markham through to The Scots Kitchen, by F. McNeill we see a breadth of ingredients and cuisines available in our history. Additionally, British baking history is brimming with historical recipes. Plum cakes spring to mind, but a great many of our most celebrated bakes are quite old indeed.

So, what happened? The short answer is rationing. The system introduced in WWII by Lord Woolton did away with a large amount of spices, sugar, and other non-essential "luxuries." As biographied in Eggs or Anarchy by W. Sitwell, Lord Woolton had a delicate digestion that reacted poorly to rich or spiced foods. In addition to his own views, the wider strategic view that anything not strictly essential to sustenance was an unnecessary waste of shipping capacity meant that these spices disappeared quite suddenly.

Of course, the British people had to adapt to this new system. The government attempted to aid this by providing example recipes within the Rationing system. The Ministry of Food released many leaflets over the years of the war, which you can read in a collected format in Food Facts for the Kitchen Front. This, sadly, is where it all goes downhill. The famous examples of "Mock Duck" and other less favoured British foods are present. The instructions often told cooks to overboil food, and seasoning was limited in the directions. Spices were almost non-existent.

Now, I feel I have to note some successes here. Carrot Cake was born from these leaflets, as an attempt to make sweet cake with little or no sugar, using an easily grown native vegetable. Apple Crumble also made its debut in this era, as a simple dish that required less resources than a full Apple Cake. Since foraging and growing your own fruit was permissible, it was an option for many to collect apples for this dish, making it quite inexpensive.

Despite these few successes, a diet of unspiced, overboiled, minimally seasoned food using a limited selection of ingredients had been forced, unilaterally, upon a populace. Even fine dining establishments and upper class households were beholden to it. Lord Woolton intended for the system to appear truly equal and fair to all. Even the King and Queen famously greeted Eleanor Roosevelt with slices of National Loaf for afternoon tea. The West End Front by M. Sweet is quite a good book for looking at attempts by high end hotels and restaurants to continue to offer exciting meals to their clientele.

Since the Rationing was so all encompassing, and lasted from 1939 until 1955, it left a culinary mark on a generation. That persisted through the late 20th Century as ingredients, techniques and recipes gradually returned or were introduced.

While lack of access to spices and flavorings due to shortages and rationing in the late 19th and 20th century as described by u/GrunkleCoffee served as a kind of "killing blow," British cuisine had been known to be bland and terrible long before then. Up until the 18th century we see in British cookbooks a great love of heavily spiced and sugared food. However this school of cooking dropped off throughout the 18th century and had been replaced in the Victorian era with a love of bland, overcooked foods, incorporating as few fresh foods as possible. How did this happen?

• Moral philosophies in the Victorian Era denigrated heavily spiced, flavorful foods as indulgent, irrational, and inflammatory to the senses, while holding up foods that were heavily processed and bland as healthier for the digestion and morally uplifting. Flavorless and mushy food became a moral virtue. You might already know about people like John Kellogg who explicitly linked the consumption of flavorful food to moral decay, specifically masturbation.

• As the British Empire expanded and spices became cheaper and more widely available they lost their power as status symbols. Instead people glorified the French style of high-class cooking which focused on elaborately designed meals with an emphasis on highly refined items requiring intensive manual labor such as decorative jellies and pates. These foods were more attainable now because of industrial technology as well as the expanding ability of the middle class to hire kitchen staff. However they retained their high status because they were now produced with science! Meanwhile fresh ingredients like vegetables and dairy were often adulterated in industrial cities, leading to the following point -

• Fresh food could be rotten or tainted with disease and additives. While in French cuisine fresh ingredients were key to making food taste good, in industrialized Britain they were getting harder and harder to obtain so they substituted them with processed preserved foods. Canned and frozen food had the stamp of approval of modern science and the sheen of new technology, and were embraced in new middle class homes without regard for lost flavor and texture.

• Many of these newly urbanized, middle class families were not able to rely on the peasant foodways which had sustained most of the British population up until then. Housewives had the role as the protectors of the home and morality and took on the load of all the factors I just listed, and were tasked with creating contrived and complex meals to assert their dedication to their family and the kitchen. It was seen as a way for women to be creative as well as scientific in a way that had never really been extended to women before. The emphasis was heavily on appearance and morality, not flavor.

These converging and related factors all led up to the situation described by u/GrunkleCoffee. By the time these rations and shortages happened there was already a culture that idealized bland, refined food and heavily relied on a dedicated kitchen staff. Then war came, further limiting the range of ingredients available and subtracting from the labor force. These rationing systems made the bourgeois palate into rule of law. The traditional bland British food we see today only goes as far back as these ideologies and economic/social changes.

Also, to include a positive note, Victorian people absolutely loved ice cream and it became much more popular during that time. And ice cream is delicious :)

Reading:

• Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson
• British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History by Colin Spencer