Since the early modern period, writers have framed food choices as connected to forms of identity. This grew, in part, from explorations of selfhood that emerged in philosophical and literary texts of the Renaissance. The sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne thought deeply about why eating was important to experiential knowledge, particularly of the self, but also of society. By the seventeenth century, cultural myths of ‘national’ identification began to develop around food and drink in England and France that reflected the emergence of collective self-identification, before the advent of the nation as a political idea. While prolonged conflict between the two kingdoms influenced the creation of culturally determined icons of national sentiment, so too did cross-cultural exchanges that were entangled with a burgeoning consumer culture, divergent economic policies, and the rapid expansion of foreign trade. A comparative analysis of this transnational food history yields the greatest insights into how eating and drinking habits and preferences became associated with ideas of what it meant to be French or English, as the notions of what it meant to eat like an Englishman and a Frenchman grew together out of the myths that established the foundations of food choices that are now perceived as both nationally and culturally determined. These choices, in turn, resulted in distinctive foodways that were linked to collective identity and shared cultural virtues that have endured.

The myths and icons that were first cultivated in England and France in the seventeenth century became firmly embedded as cultural tropes by the nineteenth century. The well-known, if overused, aphorism of nineteenthcentury French writer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin—‘tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are’—is often cited as evidence of how the connection between food choices and collective identity was popularised. While memorable, the maxim is reductive, obscuring the manifold influences that contribute to how choices are made and how they are linked to specific elements that represent a shared identity. An analysis of transnational exchange, and the relationship between foodways and the development of national icons and myths, allows a consideration of contingency, how these ideas succeeded, and the factors that led to their emergence.