Today marks the launch of this year's Orwell Prize, an award celebrating books, journalism and blogs that achieve George Orwell's ambition "to make political writing into an art". Orwell's food writing is less well known, but several of his books and essays reveal a keen interest in the subject.



Probably the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Orwell's descriptions of food is his unparalleled ability to capture the disgusting: Mr Brooker's black thumbprint on the bread-and-butter in the squalid tripe shop above which Orwell lodges in The Road to Wigan Pier; the fish-filled frankfurter in Coming up for Air; the cooks and waiters fingering the steak in Down and Out in Paris and London. His attitude to eating was often grimly pragmatic – what is a human being after all, he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, but "primarily a bag for putting food into". His In Defence of English Cooking, however, sees him write passionately about good food.

The essay, published in the Evening Standard in December 1945, dwells lovingly on kippers, yorkshire pudding, bread sauce, stilton, oxford marmalade – all quintessentially English dishes that still have a place in our kitchens and restaurants today. But many of the other dishes Orwell describes so fondly are now difficult or impossible to find: saffron buns, apple dumplings, marrow jam, cottage loaves, hare, "innumerable kinds of biscuit" made to time-honoured regional recipes. Why haven't these enjoyed the resurgence that so many other traditional English recipes (potted shrimps, faggots, smoked eel and so on) have? Are some of Orwell's favourite dishes due a resurgence, or was his enthusiasm for them simply the result of an appetite whetted by wartime austerity?

On restaurant menus today, Orwell's beloved apple dumplings tend to appear only as an accompaniment to soup, and concern over the decline of Britain's wild hare population means the meat is not often available, and comes at an environmental cost when it is. But a passion for traditional British food has led many chefs, notably Mark Hix, Fergus Henderson and Marcus Wareing, to explore our culinary heritage anew.

At the newly Michelin-starred Dinner by Heston, head chef Ashley Palmer-Watts and Heston Blumenthal have worked with food historian Ivan Day and consulted recipes dating back to the 1300s to create a menu inspired by historic British gastronomy but suited to the modern palate. As Palmer-Watts says, "Everyone's going back to their culinary roots – France has been doing it for donkey's years, whereas in Britain we're just starting out." It perhaps says something about the diet of the 1940s, however, that only one item on Dinner's menu dates from that decade: the somewhat prosaic sounding Cod in Cider.

Indeed, when Orwell subsequently expanded on the theme of our national cuisine in British Cookery, his enthusiasm seemed rather watered down. The essay was commissioned by the British Council in 1946 with the aim of attracting continental tourists but was never published because it failed to provide the anticipated ringing endorsement of the nation's culinary traditions.

In it, Orwell dismisses the British diet as "simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous", going on to describe porridge "boiled into a spongy mess" and cabbage rendered "almost uneatable" by overcooking, and deride milk puddings, made with rice, semolina, barley, sago or macaroni mixed with milk and sugar and baked in the oven, as "the kind of thing one would prefer to pass over in silence". Hardly the stuff to bring international gourmets flocking to our shores.

It's no surprise that many of the dishes Orwell endured have fallen from our culinary repertoire – and something of a relief that we no longer have to tuck newspaper cuttings outlining half a dozen uses for sour milk into our diaries, as he did in 1939. But perhaps some of them do deserve revisiting, and we will all soon be making our own marrow jam and asking for "young rooks" at the farmers' market to give Alan Coxon's recipe a try.

My own quest to sample some Orwellian (in a good way) cuisine led me to scour the web for an authentic recipe for saffron buns, which he referred to in In Defence of English Cooking alongside other cakes he tried and failed to find while abroad. It's as hard for modern cake lovers to find a saffron bun outside of Devon and Cornwall as it was for Orwell, and even there they are fast disappearing, eclipsed by the ubiquitous cream tea (unlike scones, saffron buns should be served with clotted cream only, no jam).

Dan Lepard offers a contemporary take on the saffron bun, but when I suggested to a Cornish friend that I might substitute mixed peel for the traditional currants, I was met with a stony, "We don't care for innovation around these parts." What follows, therefore, is a traditional version, apart from the addition of just a few rebellious sultanas.

Saffron buns

Saffron buns. Photograph: Sophie Mackenzie for the Guardian

500g strong white bread flour

Pinch salt

½ tsp nutmeg

1 tsp yeast

90g caster sugar

Pinch saffron threads

120g butter

100g currants

100g sultanas

1 large egg

100ml milk

Place the saffron threads in a bowl with 4 tablespoons of boiling water and leave to infuse for 10 minutes, before adding the yeast and 1 teaspoon of sugar. Mix together the flour, salt and nutmeg, then rub in the butter. Add the currants, sultanas and remaining sugar. Beat the milk and egg together, then add to the flour and fruit, together with the saffron mixture.

Knead the dough by hand or with the dough hook attachment of a food processor, adding a little more flour if it is too sticky. Divide into 12 and shape into buns. Place the buns on a baking sheet lined with non-stick parchment, cover with lightly oiled clingfilm and leave to rise until doubled in size. Bake at 220C for 15 minutes, until they are golden brown and sound hollow when tapped.