In the summer of 1748 the painter William Hogarth, on a visit to France, paused to make some sketches of the old city gate of Calais. Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder and was marched off on suspicion of being a spy. He did not enjoy his interrogation and, once safely back in England, took his revenge - by painting.
The Gate of Calais, part of Roast Beef and Liberty, a new exhibition at the relaunched Tate Britain, shows a magnificent piece of British beef. The meat is destined for an English inn, and it is being slavered over by the French, whose monks alone are fat. In the right foreground a Jacobite refugee makes do with an onion. In the background on the left Hogarth has depicted himself just at the moment when he feels a hand on his shoulder, his sketching about to be unpleasantly interrupted.
A print of the painting was made for mass consumption, subtitled O the Roast Beef of Old England, a reference to a jingoistic song written by Hogarth's friend Henry Fielding. There was even a cantata composed as a commentary on the picture, telling of the beef's short journey through the streets of Calais and the envious responses to it of our deluded enemies, the French, and Irish and Scottish rebels, as they watch it go by.
The Tate Britain exhibition is about xenophobia and national identity in art, and The Gate of Calais indeed seems the most blatant and obnoxious propaganda, about as subtle as a German picture in Germany of Germans parading their BMWs through the ruins of Longbridge.
It gets worse. Hogarth was a member of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, who gathered to eat a ritual meal of the rarest beef while singing anti-French songs. In fact, not only is the picture obvious; obviousness is its very message. Poor starving foreigners, forget what your heads tell you and what your hearts believe; know the simple truth revealed by your saliva-glands - British is best.
It wouldn't be so bad if beef was merely symbolic, but our worst enemies seemed to agree we were indeed fortunate in our access to meat. The French honour us twice by calling us Rosbifs - firstly because the thing itself, roast beef, is such a splendid thing, and then because they have to borrow from our language even to speak of it, acknowledging how thoroughly English it is and how unFrench.
It derives from a compliment, grudging but not back-handed, that the English may not know how to cook but they certainly know how to roast a joint. Our cattle were much better fed, better looked after and slaughtered younger than their continental cousins. Countless travellers observed the superiority of our meat as well as its amazing quantity. Even after the occupation of Paris in 1815 when the French were reconciled to things English and introduced for the first time to bifteck à l'anglaise , you still had to go to England to taste it at its finest, according to Dumas père , who often made the journey.
We return the favour by calling the French Frogs, consumers of watery amphibious creatures born out of slime, a food for scavengers, a substitute not for beef even but for chicken, a food of such meagre nourishment that it produces the characteristic French form, caricatured by Hogarth and in many of the cartoons in the Tate's exhibition: drippy and thin and froggish, the opposite of hearty John Bull.
Clearly the French are not nearly so happy being frogs as the English are being beef. French doctors, like their English counterparts, considered frogs unwholesome and tried to discourage their consumption; France's own renaissance intellectual Bernard Palissy considered frogs among the lowest forms of life and observed that, naturally, very few people actually liked to eat them. Long after frogs had fought their way to the table, the great chef Escoffier preferred to disguise them with the name nymphes , considering grenouilles too vulgar a term for haute cuisine.
Roast beef, on the other hand was a prize worth having long before the British seized it. Right at the beginnings of European literature, we find that Homer feeds Achilles and all his hunky heroes on nothing else, as Fielding, for one, was fully aware. In contrast, non-Europeans, such as the Egyptians, worshipped cows - preposterously - and the head of the animal was cursed when killed. If there were Greeks in town it was sold to them; if not, it was thrown into the Nile and allowed to float off downstream.
Roasting on a spit, the simplest method of cooking, was as important, ideologically, as the beef; pots and pans were deeply suspicious objects for Plato, reeking of cuisine and unnatural complexity. What serious army would be bothered to carry them around? And if Europeans have long been distinguished as carnivores in general and have often shocked those they colonised by the sheer quantity of animals they killed, the beefeating English must be the most European of Europeans. For beef is the meatmost meat, at the pinnacle of carnivorousness. Next in the hierarchy is lamb (as in that unusual dish rosbif d'agneau ). Frogs, the closest you can get to fish without swimming, are to be found on the very bottom rung.
A Greek comic poet, 2,000 years before Hogarth, reflected his distaste for the playwright Euripides, all sauces and lechery, by comparing him unfavourably to a real piece of meat. And if beef is manly and warlike it has also long indicated substance itself - which helps to explain its small but important role in the history of art.
For Hogarth beef represents a basic truth, the heart of British values, "the beef". He may, in fact, have been alluding to Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, where a side of beef fills the entire frame. And in the 20s the Jewish artist Chaim Soutine did his own version, enormous and lurid, pure paint. He contemplated the carcass for so long that the neighbours complained about the smell. (Apparently the police were called, and they advised Soutine on how to preserve the animal in formaldehyde.) Finally, one needs no reminding of the bovine output of Hogarth's modern descendant, Damien Hirst. It is as if each artist in turn was asking himself the same question - "Where's the beef?" - and coming up with ever more painfully obvious answers - "Here it is", "Here it is", "Here it is" - stuffing dead cows in the viewer's face.
"To cry roast meat," however, was a proverb in Hogarth's time that meant to draw attention, obnoxiously and foolishly, to a piece of good fortune. Underneath all this self-confidence lies a deep insecurity. You don't have to be a vegetarian to see there is something a little excessive in the Georgian cult of beef. If meat is murder, rare beef is the bloodiest kind, and among those many travellers who complimented us on our meat were several who believed we ate it raw. If the French are frogs because of the "fr-" sound, blood, sang , is the missing link between Rosbifs and LeS ANGglais. British beefeaters ran the risk of being also meatheads, crude, unsophisticated and uncultured, bloody carnivores, savages, fat, red-faced, red-coated, bull-headed; in short, b tes .
All this red-toothed savagery is clearly overcompensating for something. Indeed, the lyrics to O the Roast Beef of Old England are full of anxiety about the influence of French ragots , dangerously à la mode , usurping the beef of Elizabethan times that had helped to sink the Armada. Other cartoons in the exhibition satirise the import of Parisian fashions. The French would first corrupt then conquer us. Indeed, the Calais Gate, emblazoned with the English coat of arms, was a monument to defeat and decline, our last possession on the mainland, lost for us by Bloody Catholic Mary. Hogarth and the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks thought they were fighting a rearguard action.
The beef is the Gate of Calais, a better "bulwark" than mere stones. But behind all this is an even deeper anxiety, revealed by the Scottish theologian John Weemse in 1632. The Jewish doctrine that to eat more than a pound of flesh at a sitting was gluttony did not apply, he argued, "in these cold countries".
There's the rub. For all their bloody beef the English were never a sanguine nation, but the exact opposite: cold, inert, phlegmatic and depressed. They tried their very hardest not to be, very possibly, despite the health risks, we are still trying today. But of all nations we remain the most amphibious, the sea-faring frogs of Europe, ever since we usurped the Dutch from that position. And we all know what Frenchmen do with those cold-blooded, clammy creatures - let's not balk at the obvious now - they bloody eat them.
• Re-Presenting Britain: Roast Beef and Liberty is at Tate Britain, London SW1 (0171-887 8000), till September.
