Scoff E-Book

Pen Vogler

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The brand new book by Pen Vogler, Stuffed, is available now ***THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*** A Book of the Year in the Daily Mail, Independent, The Times & Sunday Times Finalist for the Guild of Food Writers Food Book Award 2021 'Sharp, rich and superbly readable... Fascinating' Sunday Times 'Utterly delicious' Observer 'Superb' 'Book of the Week', The Times 'Terrific' 'Book of the Week', Guardian 'I loved it.' Monty Don 'A brilliant romp of a book.' Jay Rayner Avocado or beans on toast? Gin or claret? Nut roast or game pie? Milk in first or milk in last? And do you have tea, dinner or supper in the evening? In this fascinating social history of food in Britain, Pen Vogler examines the origins of our eating habits and reveals how they are loaded with centuries of class prejudice. Covering such topics as fish and chips, roast beef, avocados, tripe, fish knives and the surprising origins of breakfast, Scoff reveals how in Britain we have become experts at using eating habits to make judgements about social background. Bringing together evidence from cookbooks, literature, artworks and social records from 1066 to the present, Vogler traces the changing fortunes of the food we encounter today, and unpicks the aspirations and prejudices of the people who have shaped our cuisine for better or worse. 'With commendable appetite and immense attention to detail Pen Vogler skewers the enduring relationship between class and food in Britain. A brilliant romp of a book that gets to the very heart of who we think we are, one delicious dish at a time.' Jay Rayner

Leseprobe

Also by Pen Vogler

Dinner with Mr DarcyDinner with Dickens

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Pen Vogler, 2020

The moral right of Pen Vogler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-647-8

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-648-5

All illustrations copyright © Dan Mogford, 2020

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Simone, Miranda and JustinWith love

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Tea and Confusion

Breakfast: or the Two Nations

Recipe: Kedgeree

The Sandwich: the working lunch

Etiquette: the civilizing or discriminating process

Tea: a now universal magic

Afternoon Tea: the Duchess of Bedford’s sinking feeling

High Tea: a bourgeois affair

Recipe: Parkin for the many

The Dinner Party: the middle classes’ revenge

Supper: a subtle rebuke to the aspirational classes

Part Two: Brit…ish

Carving: the whole hog

The Roast Beef of Old England

Recipe: Spiced Beef for Christmas

Roast Chicken: murder most fowl

Mashed Potato: disguising humble roots

The Cornish Pasty: trying to square the circle

Recipe: Cornish Herby Pasty

Peas: the fresh and the dried

The Gravy Wars

Jelly: slithering down the social ladder

Christmas Pudding: charity and family

Part Three: Foreign Introductions

Turkey: its journey to greatness

Old Spice

Curry: an Anglo-Indian relationship

French Food: male chefs and female cooks

Stews: a hotch-potch of names

Parmentier Potatoes: food for the republic

Macaroni: and other Olde English pastas

Recipe: Macaroni

Ice cream: the big business flavour theft

Recipe: Brown Bread Ice Cream

Gingerbread: feast and famine

Part Four: Rooms, Plates and Cutlery

Where We Sit: and why we care

The Restaurant: the rise, fall and rise of British food

Small Plates: a return to Georgian dining in miniature

Fish Knives: and other ways of being cutting

Forks: making a stab

Recipe: Eighteenth-century Duck and Green Peas

Doilies, Napkins and Tablecloths

Food in Tins

Recipe: Potted Shrimps

Part Five: Disappearances and reappearances

The Venison Pasty: too posh to last

Tripe: a social outcast

Oysters: from national treasure to rarity value

Fruit: the raw and the cooked

Recipe: Quince Pye

Saloop: comfort for outsiders

Metheglin and Mead: champagne or alcopop?

Gin: how it drove everyone crazy

Bread and Butter: tea-time essential to pre-dinner bagatelle

Recipe: Wiggs

Part Six: Fads, Fasts and Health

Almond Milk: why fasting fell out of favour

Recipe: Quaking Pudding

Vegetables and Vegetarians: unpopular cranks, revolutionaries and proselytizers

Recipe: A Poor Man’s Pease Porridge

Rationing: making the class war obsolete

Bread: white or brown?

Brussels Sprouts and Brassica Cousins

The Avocado: the middle-class signifier

The Tomato: whose heritage?

Chocolate: my health drink, your drug

Part Seven: Country and Town

The Pork Pie: class-free but not unclassy

Cheddar and Stilton: a tale of two cheeses

Rabbit: a poacher’s tale

Fish and Chips: a mixed-race marriage

Picnics: wandering lonely as a cloud… or being sociable?

Foraging: the knowledge economy

Recipe: Nettle Soup

Cake: a regional lexicon

Recipe: Mrs MacNab’s Scones

Conclusion

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Index

Note: All recipes serve four unless indicated otherwise.

Introduction

Scoff1verb to jeer at

Scoff2noun food; a meal

The Chambers Dictionary

TWO YEARS AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was teaching English in a small town in what was then Czechoslovakia. The people of Liberec, twenty miles north of Prague, were blinking in the light of new problems and freedoms, such as the right to learn English and travel. None of my kind and respectful adult students had had the chance to discover Britain or any part of the West for themselves and they were courteously eager to learn everything my twenty-two-year-old self could impart. When I came to the lesson on British food in my TEFL book, I was a little apprehensive. Would all the book’s talk of roast beef and fresh vegetables make it look as if I was crowing, I wondered, to people who’d been stuck behind the fried cheese and pickled cabbage curtain; and where I had seen no fresh fruit and vegetables in the whole of the winter months I had been there? I needn’t have worried; they all already knew for a fact that British cooking was the laughing stock of Europe. No matter what I said about home cooking, local ingredients, international cuisines, I could see that they were having none of it. In spite of my inability to grasp the Czech language, I could tell a room full of scoffing students when I saw one.

Admittedly our international standing in the kitchen has, historically, never been good; no British chefs have given their names to the great dishes of cream, truffle and potato; the fame of British cakes tends to be domestic, unlike the Continental Torte families of Sacher, Linzer… It has been, right up to our current culinary obsessiveness, a centuries-old belief of our Continental friends – and many Brits themselves – that the British are insufficiently obsessed with food and that a bit more European-style passion would bring us more enjoyable meals, a more functional family life, better health and fewer laughable cafés and restaurants.

However, one classic British obsession has given us a huge stake in the business of food, and that is social class. In a country where even letters have a choice of first or second class in the postal system, how much more ideal is eating, with its innate social function and attendant rituals, as a way of firing up rivalry, envy and social unease and conveying the niceties of where we all sit on the social ladder.

How we serve food and how we eat it, our table manners, what we call our meals and what time we have them, all this has been a source of immense fascination to Brits for longer than our European friends have been taking sideswipes at grey mincemeat and lumpy custard. Everything we believe we choose to eat actually comes to us with years – often centuries – of valueladen social history. Our decisions about what we ‘like’ and how we regard food are influenced by our parents, their parents, our peers, but also by a long history and a wide network of social and political pressures. Foods have slid up and down the social scale, been invented or disappeared completely.

Most Brits could read a shopping basket as though it were a character sketch: Golden Shred or Oxford Marmalade; Typhoo or Earl Grey; Custard Creams or Florentines; Kingsmill or sourdough; stir-fry veg or Pot Noodle; battery or free-range; doughnuts or Chelsea buns. By the same token, how we behave at home isn’t simply a matter of personal choice, but a series of clues about our background and upbringing. Whether you sit round the table as a family; how you push your peas onto your fork; whether you serve food, such as wild garlic or grouse, that hasn’t come from a shop; all these are clues to who you are, as much as what socio-linguists would call the ‘social markers’ in your speech. A friend’s mother once said that, when she was growing up, you were middle class if your father had heard of Saul Bellow and your mother knew what an avocado was. It’s a distinction people still see; one journalist at the Metro newspaper described what A&E departments have started to call ‘avocado hand’ (an injury sustained by over-enthusiastic cutting of an unexpectedly soft fruit) as ‘the most middle class injury ever’.1 English novelists use food to tell us something about the status of their characters: Austen mocks vulgar Mrs Bennet for obsessing about her well-cooked partridges, whereas David Copperfield’s obsession with batter pudding is pitiable not laughable, because he is hungry for food, for family and for security.

We take it for granted that more choice and refinement in food comes with money and social prestige, but it is determined by where – and when – you happen to be eating. Archaeologists believe they have pinpointed the emergence of what the sociologists call a ‘differentiated cuisine’ to Ancient Egypt, where a ‘high and low cuisine’ grew up alongside more sophisticated cultivation, food surpluses, wealth and power. There are no shortage of theories about why on earth early humans abandoned the fun and protein of a hunter-gatherer society for the back-breaking life of agriculture, but caste came early into the mix. Either a powerful, male elite organised matters so that they alone had access to the land and animals required for hunting, forcing the weaker members of the community to grow their own food; or – and the difference is subtle but significant – the men who chose or were chosen to hunt for food for the tribe gathered around themselves an aura of power. The association of hunting with aristocracy is ancient but not universal; the Indian caste system focuses on purity of food, with meat being less pure and therefore lower caste, so to move upwards meant becoming more vegetarian. Many parts of Africa still have a single cuisine, in which a whole community will eat porridge, meat soup, served with a relish made from okra, ground-nuts, tomatoes or vegetable leaves; wealth simply enables you to have more food, rather than more choice. The anthropologist Jack Goody explains, ‘What is different in Africa is the virtual absence of alternative or differentiated recipes, either for feasts or for class.’2

In our northern climate, the great differentiation was initially simply meat versus non-meat. The Norman overlords had the choice of several different types of meat (or fish on a fast day), but there was not much complexity at a feast; and perhaps because there was a limit to how much roast boar, venison, pheasant, hare, crane, heron, seal or porpoise one Lord of the Manor could put away, he came to demand more show and sophistication from his kitchens. This, of course, caused its own problems and the Tudor feast was marked by a series of distinctions: the higher up the table you were, the more variety you were permitted. It was a hard boundary to police, though. Ecclesiastical abstinence constantly tipped over into enjoyment and appetite, so in 1541 Archbishop Cranmer decreed the number of dishes which each rank in the clergy could eat from; unsurprisingly, after two or three months, ‘by the disusing of certain wilful persons, it came again to the old excess’, he reported glumly.3

The frequency with which medieval and Tudor kings and parliaments attempted to impose restrictions on diners seated towards the bottom of the table through ‘sumptuary’ laws is an indication of how toothless such laws were. In pushy, irreverent Britain, neighbours jostled to outshine one another and the fear of falling behind socially – as well as not getting enough pie – held more terrors than falling foul of petty decrees. This attitude contrasts with, say, medieval Germany where social conservatism made sumptuary laws far more effective.4

One plotline of this book mirrors Cranmer’s story of attempted – and usually failed – control: one self-elected arbitrator or another decides that the members of a different (usually – but not always – less powerful) social class should stop eating what they want and how they want to, and start eating what is seemly, socially appropriate, good for them, or benefits society as a whole. Over the centuries the social clout of the arbiter changed; initially kings and archbishops attempted to use laws to keep those below them in their places. The emerging medical, ecclesiastical and educated class deliberately reversed the flow of traffic using the subtler instruments of education, argument and propaganda: in the dedication to his 1530 handbook of, among other things, table manners for aristocratic children, De civilitate morum puerilium (On Civilized Behaviour in Children), Erasmus is surprisingly boastful about his status: ‘More true nobility is possessed by those who can inscribe on their shields all that they have achieved through the cultivation of the arts and sciences.’5 As this educated group grew and stratified further, its members increasingly looked below, rather than above, to assert what was appropriate, economic or healthy for the servants, workers or artisans who made up the next social class down. It was often a message that relied on its recipients being well educated enough to read it. When the eighteenth-century cookery writer Hannah Glasse famously addressed herself to servants and cooks, whom she called ‘the lower sort’ – in order to ‘save the ladies a great deal of trouble’ – she assumed that her ‘lower sort’ was able to read the cookbook she had written and expected ‘ladies’ to buy. Over the subsequent centuries, laws, taxes, education, arguments, advocacy and propaganda have been mustered as weapons in the food fight, increasingly unsuccessfully, unless the country is on a war footing. Every government skirmish involving taxes on sugar or hot pasties is fought back by complaints about ‘lifestyle’ taxes. Mostly, the food fight is waged between sections of the population, rather than through policy.

There is a food campaigning brigade in every generation that wants to educate, shame or cajole a different set of people out of their Turkey Twizzlers and burgers, takeaway fried chicken and TV dinners. In the twenty-first century, governments have preferred the social pressure of the village green to shame or nudge individuals into making the ‘right’ choices, rather than imposing top-down decisions. We saw this in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, when there were sudden, unexpected shortages and stockpiling. Social media commentators shouted from the sidelines, attempting to shame individuals into suddenly exercising a collective restraint, a muscle that had turned flabby from lack of use.6 Calm, of a kind, returned when the supermarkets decided to impose their own rationing, and some of the fears – of hunger and of unfairness – subsided.

We worry about social status on all sorts of levels. Are we popular at school or at work; do we fit in? Or rather, who do we fit in with? Our parents and their generation? Our peers? Or people whom we would like to call our peers, but who may be a bit more fashionable, or elegant, or cooler, or classier than we secretly know we are? One recurring theme in our food choices is how we reject food from previous generations because of our worry about its social status. While our geographical palate is now impressively wide, we have lost the taste for some interesting flavours, and the types of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables available to us have narrowed. We are happy to get a meaty fix from ‘roast chicken’ or ‘smoky bacon’ flavoured crisps, although the science increasingly warns us of the consequences of the fats and additives involved, but we shudder at the Roman appetite for parts of the real animals, cockscombs or sows’ udders.

If we are going to kill an animal for food, why not eat everything? Lamprey pie was a commonplace on Tudor tables (and it was made for Elizabeth II’s coronation feast), but where would we buy lampreys (now a pest in the American Great Lakes), except as frozen bait in fishing shops? Why, in an island with 36 million sheep, is it impossible to buy mutton from your local butcher or supermarket? And why has the Cornish pasty survived – thrived, in fact – whereas the venison pasties and pigeon pies of two centuries ago are hardly known?

The industrialization and supermarketing of food are often blamed for the changes in our diet (such as the disappearance of ‘heritage’ varieties of fruit and vegetables), and with good reason; they have manipulated our tastes to fit with their supply chains and profit. But one purveyor of food, the French chef Auguste Escoffier, believed that it was the clamour for novelty from his wealthy diners, with their blasé palates or anxiety to impress their guests, that lay behind incessant change: ‘I have ceased counting the nights spent in the attempt to discover new combinations, when, completely broken with the fatigue of a heavy day, my body ought to have been at rest.’7

Escoffier shared the fruits of his witching-hour laboratory in his monumental 1903 culinary textbook Le Guide culinaire, knowing that his haute cuisine for haute clientele would be seized upon and exploited by lesser chefs for less glamorous diners. (Unlike artists and writers, chefs had no legal copyright in their work, he complained.) This eternal cycle of innovation-copy-innovation is a neat summary of how the wealthiest social layer pay for novelty which then makes its way down the food chain. Soon, pêche Melba, created by Escoffier in honour of the Melbourneborn soprano Nellie Melba, found its way onto more modest tables, although without the original ice swan; by the 1950s it had become a dinner-party staple in suburban detached houses, until the occupants went on foreign holidays and discovered Black Forest gâteau. The peach melba, now made with shop-bought ice cream, tinned peaches and raspberry jam, continued its journey downwards to the glass dishes and doilies of the three-bed semis. By the time I encountered it in the 1970s, it was a pudding for children; no grander than a banana split.

The hours that we dine are hounded by the same social pressure. From the age of Samuel Pepys to today, our ‘dinner’ has been pushed back by about eight hours, as the upper classes ate later and later to distance themselves from the annoying middles; and the middles moved later and later to emulate them. Entire meals – luncheons and afternoon teas – evolved to plug the gap and offer a whole new area of social differentiation: how to serve tea (milk in first? milk in last?); how to distinguish your sandwich from something an agricultural worker eats; whether to eat ‘luncheon meat’. Any British antennae will pick up something about your background if you have ‘dinner’ at midday or in the evening; or invite a guest to ‘tea’, meaning a mid-afternoon snack or an early-evening meal in its own right. Food is a marker – and sometimes a weapon – in the struggle of different socio-economic groups towards identity. Or, as the nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin taught us, rather more pithily, you are what you eat.8

Only now, of course, it is more likely that you are what you don’t eat, as any number of allergies and intolerances define those with the leisure and education to identify them. Now that the choice of foods on offer to us is staggering (in 2015 Tesco had a baffling 90,000 products in its range), we have to say something about our level of refinement not in terms of the breadth of our palate, but the opposite. ‘Gluten-free’ is, for sufferers of coeliac disease, an essential remedy; for others, it is more of a marker of sensitivity for which a food industry is only too ready to cater.

Sooner or later, when chewing over the ideas of food and social class, it is inevitable that we get tangled up in the twin values of good taste and tasting good. The General’s caviar might not suit the hungry labourers in KFC. Many tastes – as anyone who watches a child encountering coffee, tea or Brussels sprouts for the first time – are learnt, rather than inherent. Cultural contexts quickly take effect; we enjoy the caffeinated lift of coffee, in spite of its bitterness; we learn to love the Christmassiness of sprouts; and get excited by the sensual slitheriness of a raw oyster. We might now be repulsed by the oily, rooty drink saloop, perplexed by the oysterish taste of salsify, or shudder at the rubberiness of tripe; but these are all tastes and textures our forebears have prized and which we could again, if the social conditions were right. By contrast, some wild plants which our ancestors used, not as calories but as ‘physic’, are valued by us as free food, because of the way our predominantly urban lives change our thoughts and feelings about the land and about what we have learnt to call foraging.

For younger people, drawing on a range of cultural influences in music, art, film and TV is a sign of social ease and sophistication; few people under fifty would only be interested in ‘high’ culture. The same is true of our shopping baskets. If there’s a packet of sliced white nestling among the kale and almond milk, or PG Tips next to the pesto and quail’s eggs, it suggests you are confident enough about your own tastes to pick and choose food from a wide range of different culinary cultures and world cuisines. A few younger people, from reasonably well-off families, have confidently told me that class is no longer ‘a thing’ as it was for their parents, because their generation happily switch between fast food and instant dinners one day, vegan or veggie another. It creeps into our vocabulary with terms such as ‘builder’s tea’, more likely to be used by their clients than by builders, as a way of suggesting an admirably unpretentious and proletarian solidarity. Sociologists today see this as a part of ‘cultural capital’, which suggests that part of your middle-class identity is your broad and eclectic tastes.9

This idea of ‘cultural capital’ originated with the French Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The son of a postal worker, who became one of France’s foremost intellectuals from the 1960s onwards, his own experience fed into his assertion that cultural capital was the product of education, wealth and confident self-belief that your cultural choices are somehow ‘higher’. He argued fiercely, though, that ideas of good taste are a product of our upbringing, surroundings and economic necessity. Loving ‘binary oppositions’, as all good French thinkers of the time did, he portrayed a working-class vs bourgeois preference for quantity over quality, belly over palate, matter over manners, substance over form. ‘Good taste’ for a working-class family meant conviviality, warmth, sharing. The plate for a portion of gâteau could be card torn from the cake box, rather than the clatter and fuss of cutlery and crockery. Eating out focused on being together at a counter, rather than the bourgeois restaurant where each table is ‘a separate, appropriated territory’.10

Bourdieu undertook to explain why the poor and undernourished might choose hedonism over sobriety and nutrition. It is, he said, ‘the only philosophy conceivable to those who “have no future” and, in any case, little to expect from the future’.11 It is an issue which has perplexed and outraged food writers and social commentators for centuries. Hogarth, for example, explores the effects and hints at foreign culpability in his companion prints from 1751, Gin Lane and Beer Street. The 2019 Nobel Prizewinning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee called it ‘Poor Economics’, as they sought to occupy the precarious shoes of the poor in order to understand the choices that they made. They showed that immediate concerns such as overcoming boredom or seeking an instant lift with a cup of sugary tea might make more sense to someone in poverty than planning cheap and nutritious, but dull, meals. ‘The poor often resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work.’12 It was understood implicitly by sympathetic observers of London street life, in the early and middle nineteenth century, such as Charles Lamb or Henry Mayhew, but it took George Orwell to bang the drum to readers of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works… White bread-and-marg. and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water.13

We are always looking for ways to lift our harassed, bored and miserable spirits and the food industry today is happy to make it as simple as possible. All the salt, sweet, carbs and fat of Orwell’s chips and ice creams are there in a Pot Noodle and a Mars Bar, cheap as chips (or cheaper) and you don’t even need to run out for them, or eat at a meal time, or share with anybody else (indeed, they are designed to be eaten solo).

Some of the most interesting writers about food are Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb and George Orwell; not cooks or professional foodies but writers fascinated by the way that food and drink are social magnets (and, sometimes, dividers) and whose passion for good food runs in tandem with their fervent commitment to the right for people to eat well.

There is a Hogarth, showing how badly the working classes choose to ingest their calories, and an Orwell, showing why they do, for every generation. Wars are one of the few situations which will induce the rich to accept a redistribution of wealth – via taxation – and nutrition – via rationing. Rationing in the Second World War brought up the level of nutrition for the bottom 50 per cent of society which suffered some degree of malnutrition, but brought down cholesterol and fat levels in the rest.14

While we commonly believe that those in poverty eat better now than in a hungry and murky past, there are too many exceptions and reversals to this rule for it to be a simple truth. The shocking reality is that the diet of those in poverty has worsened, acutely since 2008, and more generally in the last thirty or so years. There is a lot of irresistibly cheap food available in Britain; the lure of six sugary cakes or a deep pan pizza for a pound is leading to obesity, bad health, pasty skin, blood-sugar swings. Even cheap food hasn’t solved the problem of reliance on food banks, food insecurity in children, and the kind of locally determined charity that the post-war Welfare State was supposed to eliminate.

This brings us to a significant underlying question: how much of what you eat is determined by income and how much by social class? The answer might have been relatively simple in the early modern period when income and social status mapped onto each other almost completely – but what is ‘social class’ now? Figuring out how many ‘classes’ there are is a rich seam for sociologists to mine. Three? Seven? A gradation? Several socio-economic groupings, some with new names such as the precariat and the technocracy? Not everybody agrees with what defines a class: income, wealth, education, social connections, cultural consumption?

We have learnt to be more cautious about making contemporaneous class pronouncements, aware that there isn’t a direct overlap between the ‘socio’ and ‘economic’ bit of any attempt at a grouping, although we all seem to agree it has got something to do with avocado consumption. Generalizations are both friend and foe. The trilogy that we are all familiar with – working, middle and upper classes – is a legacy of the Victorian taxonomy: the first lived by manual labour, the second by non-manual labour, and the upper classes lived on their capital. It seems relatively easy to categorize a Victorian family as ‘middle class’ if the father gained his income from employment, rather than capital, the mother did not work, and they employed servants. Is using these terms for the pre-Victorian era anachronistic? And are they outdated in the twenty-first century? Even at the time, the boundaries were fuzzy and increasingly hotly contested, and words such as ‘respectable’ were deployed to patrol the grey areas between the status of, say, a tailor or a hosier or a glovemaker, and a property-owning shopkeeper. However, for all the problems of its sledgehammer subtlety, this familiar taxonomy is a useful background against which to spot changes in our food and our attitude to it. We all understand that for every trend there are outliers: the impoverished aristocrat eating roast grouse in an unheated country house dining room, or the millionaire entrepreneur who still loves the childhood taste of chip butties or Angel Delight. For the sake of your boredom threshold, and mine, I haven’t attempted to caveat every example with an itemization of possible counterexamples from different ages, genders, geographical locations or ethnicities.

The infrastructure for the stories that follow is not contemporary or academic definitions of social class, but what people thought at the time, and the vocabulary they used to say it. How people wrote about privation is a good example. Commentators who used income as a measure were not only being analytical, as we’d expect, but their focus on words relating to income – ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ – also indicated sympathy. Criticisms of the same income groups – usually for being overattached to bread or tea and not eating sufficient vegetables – tended to use a language of social status rather than income: ‘the lower orders’, ‘the common people’, ‘the lower classes’, ‘the plebeian order’.

The voices of the poorest, the uneducated and the disenfranchised are, inevitably, missing from the earliest parts of these histories. We know very little about what the poor ‘at the gate’ thought about being given the lord’s gravy-soaked trenchers, or whether they complained about the windiness of cabbage (although actions speak pretty loudly; the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 gives us a fair idea of what they thought about their lot on the whole). As social hierarchies became more complex over the centuries, and growing literacy led to a greater number of people leaving their own accounts, the input of voices becomes more complex and more contradictory. There are tensions between, say, a skilled factory worker whose focus is on providing his family with bread, meat and cheese, and the social campaigner who wonders, on his behalf, why he – or more likely his wife – doesn’t provide the family with more porridge or soup. It’s a tension we wrestle with today, between, for example, the mother (usually) of a family, who sees her role as keeping the family together and happy with food they like to eat, and the educators who want them to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day for the sake of their health.

Food isn’t always just a way into social history; a symbol of socio-cultural values; a stand-in for love. When you are very hungry, it might just be food. Sometimes, as I’ve been writing this book, I’ve been hungry. I’ve skipped into the kitchen to see what these things I’m writing about taste like or, more accurately, whether I can figure out a recipe to make them taste good. Not always, is the answer. In the seven sections that follow, I have included recipes that do taste good and do adapt to the modern kitchen. Some are well loved and some semi-forgotten; all have made the cut both because I think they show something particularly notable about how our ideas of taste have been formed or have changed. The original recipes are gems of social history; they lure us into store cupboards and kitchens from the past, and invite us to look at the preoccupations of the recipe writers, cooks and eaters and consider where each sat in the social structure of the day. Every recipe has been modernized and tested by some willing cooks and I hope they offer a taste of past lives in a way that is also a pleasure for modern palates.

As my Czech students taught me, it is easy and entertaining to scoff at other people’s food choices. Their image of British food was based on national identity. The Brits are surprisingly openminded about other national cuisines, but within our own we have found it easy and entertaining to scoff at each other based on ideas of social class. One of the underlying questions in the stories that follow is whether our reputation for bad food was because of our class obsession. Have we put more time and energy into judging each other on what we eat and the way we eat it, or worrying about what people think of us, than trying to make sure everybody has the same access to good food? As the wonderful George Mikes said, from his perspective as a Hungarian-born adopted ‘Brit’: ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England they have good table manners.’15 One thorny question that kept scratching at me was this. If we have spent the last few centuries looking in the wrong direction, what has been happening in the space where we should have been looking? Have we allowed some really bad food – health-destroying, adulterated or overprocessed – into our lives, and into the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable, simply because we were concerned with the wrong issues?

This book looks at all the different ways that you can scoff at other people’s scoff and, through stories of knives, gin, pasties, supper, avocados (and over fifty other ways of thinking about food), teases out why that matters.

PART ONE

Tea and Confusion

Breakfast: or the Two Nations

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

Somerset Maugham

ONE OF MY life pleasures is my food group. Five of us each bring a dish to make a dinner, usually constructed around a loose theme, such as a country or a season or, once and most memorably, something from our childhoods. Claire, a natural storyteller and gifted cook, charmed us with her stories from her childhood holidays in Donegal when her father would go scallop-dredging with a friend all night and they would welcome him and his catch home by knocking up yesterday’s mash into farls. Even more charming was her re-creation of that breakfast of tangy, sweet scallops, set off by salty bacon and a moist pillow of potato bread.

This was breakfast? Without a slice of toast in sight. We ate it as a supper dish with a glass of something white and cold. But this is the point of the perfect breakfast food – at least for the leisured classes. It was never entirely necessary when dinner was a morning meal, held at 10, 11 or noon. But when dinner was held in the evening and supper became obsolete, rather than lose altogether the unbuttoned occasion and its cosy, savoury and uncomplicated dishes, it was simply shunted overnight into the next morning (see Supper, page 74). We think that the ‘Full English Breakfast’ is an enlightened coming together of the English country house and the labourers’ cottage kitchen. In fact, the English country house learnt to do breakfast from the Celtic fringe.

The medieval Catholic Church forbad its monastic population from breaking their fast before the first Mass of the day. An early meal was something that marked out the corporeal worker from those dedicated to a higher, spiritual life; particularly since he or she had been working since sun-up or before and needed sustenance. The earliest courtly records are largely silent about breakfast, apart from an allocation or two of ale and bread for those who rose early. A physician in 1572 still thought that 10 or 11 a.m. was the best hour for meat ‘if you can fast so long’.1 Later dinners and the Reformation kicking of Catholic habits made an early meal of porridge, ale and bread more acceptable.

By the time the Essex poet Nicholas Breton sang the praises of summer in 1626 in Fantasticks, his hymn to the months of the year and hours of the day, dinner was around midday and breakfast had become universal. There was a pot of porridge over the fire at 3 in the morning when the milk maids were astir; the household servants would be digging in at 4 a.m.; the farm labourer put in a few hours of sweat and got breakfast at 8, along with the scholar, the shopkeeper, the ostler and, if he was lucky, the beggar.2

Some households decided to make breakfast a meat meal (or fish for fast days; herrings again). The housekeeping rules for the Tudor court at Eltham Palace, known as the Household Ordinances, offer us an engaging picture of the maids of Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Katherine Parr, tucking into a daily breakfast of a hefty chine of beef.3 The Restoration breakfast has no specific menu; Pepys breakfasts on the roast beef, chine of pork or collar of brawn from last night’s supper eaten cold, or ‘hashed’ (refried)4 or, once and slightly randomly, just radishes.5 Tea and coffee, however, began to draw family and friends together over a table to form a sociable first meal. For Jane Austen’s mother, staying with her cousins in Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, ‘Chocolate, Coffee and Tea, Plumb Cake, Pound Cake, Hot Rolls, Cold Rolls, Bread and Butter, and dry toast for me’ is a country house breakfast worth writing home about.6 This was the era of the enriched dough and the toasting fork; Bath buns flavoured with caraway seeds, the brioche-like ‘French bread’ (see Bread, page 330) and Sally Lunns (still made in Bath to a secret recipe); and muffins, pulled apart around the middle and toasted. These displays of white flour, butter and the baker’s art were the breakfast of the leisured classes around the fashionable centres of Bath, London and Brighton. The one time that well-shod Georgians indulged in a meaty but unsophisticated breakfast was while travelling. Jane Austen gives William Price an early breakfast of pork and mustard and Henry Crawford hard-boiled eggs before the two leave Mansfield Park for London.7

Labourers in the North usually got a better breakfast than their southern counterparts from the end of the eighteenth century. Food was cheaper than in the South and wages were higher as landowners increasingly competed with industry for labour. After an hour or two of work, men might have breakfast at about 8 a.m.: bacon with their bread, and perhaps coffee would be on offer as well as tea. Families in Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire had higher standards of nutrition with milk and more oats. A labourer at Clitheroe in Lancashire calls his annual Easter Sunday breakfast of ham and eggs ‘a good Cumberland breakfast’, adding that he couldn’t afford it ‘above once in a year’.8

Wives and children, in the poorest households, lost out. In the West Country they often resorted to ‘Tea Kettle Broth’ – bread softened in hot milk and water.9 Porridge wasn’t a popular breakfast dish with more southerly workers. Charitable ladies, whose role was to visit the poor and sick with nutritious soup, imbibed the nineteenth-century self-help ethic and became reforming ladies who visited the needy to urge them to make nutritious porridge for their families for breakfast. Porridge and cheap saucepans are not happy partners, and many families rejected porridge burnt on the bottom of thin tin pans in favour of cheap bread.10 The impetus is alive and well; the Tory peer Baroness Jenkin said in 2014 that one of the sources of food poverty was that the poor didn’t know how to cook nutritious meals: ‘I had a large bowl of porridge today. It cost 4p. A large bowl of sugary cereal will cost 25p.’11

Poor old porridge, its propensity to burn gives it a bad image in literature. Charlotte Brontë uses it as a weapon in the hands of the inhuman Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre (1847), desperate to subdue the spirits of the wretched girls of Lowood school. ‘Oh, madam,’ he says to the head teacher, ‘when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!’12

The North/South divide extended up the social hierarchy. Educated visitors to Scotland, Wales and the North wrote rapturously about the excellence of the breakfasts they found there. Even the hard-to-impress Dr Johnson acknowledged that the Scots ‘must be confessed to excel us’ in the matter. He found not only butter, but honey, conserves and marmalade (then uncommon on the English breakfast table) and concluded, ‘If an epicure could remove by a wish in quest of sensual gratification, wherever he had supped, he would breakfast in Scotland.’13 Tobias Smollett’s Highland Breakfast in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) was a marvel of local produce: honey, butter and cream, boiled eggs, goat’s cheese, venison pasty. There was ‘a bushel of oatmeal, made into thin cakes and bannocks’ and, showing a particular delicacy of hospitality to the southern visitors, ‘a small wheaten loaf in the middle, for the strangers’ (see Bread, page 330). There is no hot tea and coffee, the job of warming the body being allocated, instead, to whisky, brandy and ale.14

The travel writer George Borrow is propelled around Wild Wales (1862) by a series of hearty breakfasts of Glamorgan sausages or mutton chops, but it is one at the White Lion Inn in Bala (still there) which inspires him to a pitch of excitement: ‘What a breakfast! Pot of hare; ditto of trout; pot of prepared shrimps; dish of plain shrimps; tin of sardines, beautiful beef-steak; eggs, muffin; large loaf, and butter, not forgetting capital tea. There’s a breakfast for you!’15 It’s a challenge to read it without rushing into the kitchen and rustling up eggs and toasted muffins as a stand-in for its savoury glories.

In Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) the principal commercial inn of the novel’s northern mill town serves up ‘pies of spiced meat and trout fresh from the stream, hams that Westphalia never equalled, pyramids of bread of every form and flavour adapted to the surrounding fruits, some conserved with curious art, and some just gathered from the bed or from the tree’.16 (Germany with its prized Black Forest and Westphalia hams was a thorn in the side of the competitive and proud ham-producers of Britain – particularly Yorkshire.) Inevitably, one of the inn’s metropolitan guests complains (inaccurately) that you can never get coffee in these places.

In a book alternatively titled The Two Nations – that is the Rich and the Poor – this isn’t just a breakfast; it is a political breakfast. Disraeli has already, humorously, established breakfast as a political meal, via two formidable aristocratic ladies who fret that men who socialize over breakfast are restless revolutionaries, dangerously chasing after ideas and gossip from the moment they are awake.17 The other end of the breakfast spectrum is represented by a pale child, queuing for a loaf of bread, who says timidly that he is too dizzy to go home because he hasn’t yet broken his fast.18 The starving child is a standard Victorian literary device both realistic (they were not hard to find) and iconic: an unthreatening object of pity. Hungry men, by contrast, are sinister, like Dickens’ Magwitch, or dangerous, like Sybil’s machine breakers and rioters, or the hungry men and women behind the French Revolution.

Trollope, on the other hand, doesn’t find these northern breakfasts appropriate for his southern county of Barsetshire (Salisbury, Winchester and Exeter), and certainly not for ecclesiastical life. In the rectory of Plumstead Episcopi he lays out disagreeably heavy forks and a formidably heavy basket, to contain a dozen types of bread, as well as dishes, napkins, boxes and containers for eggs, bacon, fish and kidneys, for the reader’s disapproval, to show that clerical respectability has drowned out the proper considerations of religion and made the archdeacon forget that man does not live by bread alone.19 His censure is close to that of the medieval Catholic Church; breakfast ballast was for manual workers, not men of the cloth. The sin is compounded by the choice of expensive but hefty and dull furnishings in the breakfast room.

It was a relatively new idea that you should devote an entire room to breakfast. The breakfast parlour began to appear in fashionable houses in the mid-eighteenth century. The first were elegant rooms with a round breakfast table; the breads, cakes, tea and coffee were laid out on a side table for two or three hours in the morning for family and guests to choose whatever hour and dish suited them best. They might rise at 8, spend a couple of hours writing letters, shopping or walking and eat at a modish 10 a.m. or so. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet has time to breakfast with her family at Longbourn, receive a letter brought by a servant and written that morning by her sister at Netherfield, walk three miles there and still find the fashionable Netherfield party assembled in the breakfast parlour. When ladies started to lunch (see The Sandwich, page 28) and then to share afternoon tea, breakfast became thought of as a masculine meal. Trollope’s midcentury breakfast parlour with ‘thick, dark, costly carpets’, ‘heavy curtains’ and ‘embossed but sombre papers’20 was the pattern of the room which, with the meal, hit heights of impressiveness in the late Victorian country house and the sporting weekend.

The Victorian host and hostess had to deploy the finest, most fashionable French food for dinner (see The Dinner Party, page 66) but breakfast enabled them to make a different display of British food from their own lands. The great breakfasts from the North and from Scotland and Wales which had so delighted travellers were gathered in (and somewhat tamed) so that the sideboard of the perfect country house breakfast served as a map of power, ownership and Englishness. The home farm delivered whole hams or a Christmas round of spiced beef, as well as fried bacon and oozing sausages, eggs (poached, boiled, fried) from their hens, all kept hot in silver dishes with little spirit lamps underneath. In the shooting season there should be game pie or cold pheasant from the park or moorland. Kedgeree and devilled kidneys nodded to the Empire; smoked fish to our seas; marmalade to our history (vegetables were absent). Queen Victoria’s love of Balmoral brought porridge in from the cold, so long as it was served with thick cream from a known herd of cows. Another Scottish inspiration, later in the century, when raising agents made this minor miracle possible, was to have scones alongside a range of breads and rolls. In the summer, your guests might finish by snipping onto their plate a small bunch of grapes, fetched from your hothouse, or spearing with a fork some strawberries or raspberries from your kitchen garden. In the winter, their existence would be testified to by home-made jams.

Mrs Beeton hadn’t quite caught on to the social cachet of breakfast in her 1861 cookbook, and it wasn’t until some better-connected breakfasters published cookbooks specifically devoted to the meal that her editors updated her Book of Household Management, to introduce new dishes to cooks and mistresses of the house who had never been offered kedgeree or devilled kidneys in a country house, or who didn’t have a still room to make their own ‘preserves’. This word was adopted from the idea of ‘preserved fruit’ to dignify shop-bought jam, earning itself a place in the non-U (see Doilies, Napkins and Tablecloths, page 243) lexicon of John Betjeman’s poem ‘How to Get On in Society’ (see Etiquette, page 38). Marmalade came to replace jam for breakfast, but as it refused to change its name, its consistency provided the class-watchers with some subtle, but crucial, distinctions. Jilly Cooper’s late twentieth-century upper classes have proper ‘Oxford’ marmalade on their toast as does her nouveau riche and aspirational character Samantha; ‘she doesn’t like it very much but she read somewhere that Golden Shred was common.’21 Newspaper articles in the early twenty-first century noted that runny marmalade was the thing to serve as it showed that it had been home-made by somebody in the leisured classes and wasn’t shop-bought.

Bacon and eggs made an early debut together thanks to seventeenth-century courtier and recipe magpie Sir Kenelm Digby. As an afterthought to his recipe for Roman Pan Cotto he wrote, ‘Two Poched Eggs with a few fine dry-fryed collops of pure Bacon, are not bad for break-fast.’22 Who could disagree? But until eggs and chickens began to be farmed on entirely different systems in the US in the early twentieth century (see Roast Chicken, page 102), eggs were as much of a luxury as chicken and, in accounts of workers’ breakfasts right up to the twentieth century, are conspicuous by their absence. Eggs would be found amid the chafing-dishes of the Victorian breakfast. (Gabriel Tschumi, Master Chef to Victoria, Edward VII and George VI, noted disapprovingly that, even after a five-course breakfast, servants would slip a couple of hard-boiled eggs into their pockets lest they felt a bit peckish before the morning tea break, which he took as proof of his belief that plentiful meals made servants greedy.) Bacon and eggs were, in some ways, first an attempt to imitate the country house idyll in a more modest urban home; and then, when the well-staffed idyll fell victim to the servant shortage after the First World War, an attempt to keep it alive. Food writers up to the Second World War complained about the monotony of bacon and eggs, while having to acknowledge that they had reached a status bordering on the iconic.23

The roster of staff responsible for the Great British Breakfast gave way to one housekeeper or maid and then, after the Second World War, shrank to one member of the family who kept the breakfast going with bacon and eggs, catering almost solely for the men of the house, according to Mass Observation* (and my own memory of my mother making B&E for my father and brother before work), while we girls had toast (or, thanks to the occasional diet, grapefruit). At weekends or holidays, bacon and eggs were supplemented with the limited number of characters familiar from every greasy spoon, bed and breakfast, and hotel today. Bacon, eggs and sausage. Toast and marmalade. Tea and coffee. Fried potatoes were a nod to the habit of country families to find a use for yesterday’s cold potatoes. Fried tomato and mushroom edged their way onto the plate in the 1960s and 1970s, as did baked beans, if you were particularly unlucky, or black and white pudding for a nod to the meal’s northern and demotic roots. Fried bread and hash browns were added for an extra-manly touch. The traditional restaurant Simpson’s in the Strand called this plateful of death-threats to the heart ‘The Ten Deadly Sins’. My friend James calls it ‘The Godzilla’.

Just as the cooked breakfast ideal was taking off in middleclass households, it faced an existential threat from the Seventh Day Adventist W.K. Kellogg, who started his cereal business in America in 1906, convinced that a healthy diet would direct children away from deviancy (particularly masturbation that so horrified Victorians). His commercial genius was to recognize that, around the turn of the century, children of nearly all backgrounds, except the very poorest, were becoming a lucrative market. Most children have a sweet tooth and Kellogg’s sweetened cereals, with free gifts inside the boxes and – later – cartoon characters on the packaging, appealed to them more than bacon, eggs, marmalade, or plain bread or porridge.

From the first, the marketers of breakfast cereals trod a careful line through the images that marked traditional class boundaries, with some surprising success. The patrician food writer for The Times Agnes Jekyll thought that our breakfasts were ‘conservative and often monotonous’ and that we would do well to eat ‘American Cereals’ (her italics) such as ‘post-toasties, honey-grains, puffed wheat, or puffed rice’.24 My mother who, like many of her generation, would not allow anything as vulgar as a milk bottle on the breakfast table, didn’t demur at packets of cereal. A miniature box of Frosties or Coco Pops, chosen from a variety pack, was a huge holiday treat for us as children (the bigger box of plain cornflakes always going to an uncomplaining father). Like the quote (variously attributed to Aristotle and St Ignatius Loyola) that if you ‘give me a child before he is seven he is mine for life’, Kellogg’s aimed to establish its brand loyalty early.

When Cereal Killer, a café in Tower Hamlets in London’s East End, started selling cereals to hipsters, the owners discovered that they were falling foul of a century of cereal marketing which had turned cereals into the right of every child, irrespective of income. When a Channel 4 News interviewer asked the owners whether local kids could afford £3.20 for a bowl of cereal, it attracted the attention of Class War, a protest group whose name speaks for itself. Dispirited by the lack of press interest in their protests at luxury developments and estate agent chains, they arranged a ‘Fuck Parade’; activists with pigs’ heads and flaming torches daubed paint and threw cereal at the café, and were delighted when the coverage went global.

Old and social media coverage had a field day with the ironies: a group of highly educated protesters were terrifying people at a small business owned by two brothers from a deprived area of Belfast, who’d been too poor to go to university. Much was made of the problems of gentrification side by side with poverty; most of the area’s schools run breakfast clubs to make sure all children have something to eat at the beginning of the school day. But, as one of the brothers put it in an open letter to Channel 4, they could simply have charged £3 for a coffee like many other local businesses and no reporter would have been at all interested. The same could be said for the Full English, available nearby for a fiver, or for £50 if you are choosy about your surroundings. But breakfast cereal belongs to children and is obviously another matter. As the Cereal Killer owners discovered to their cost, we are still Victorian enough to tolerate the image of the hungry adult, while we are roused by the image of the hungry child.

The Full English (or Scottish, Irish or Welsh) is probably the only British meal to have found favour with non-Brits and we, as a nation, are proud and protective of it. In spite of claims that the fry-up was slowly dying, killed off by its own high cholesterol, it is now more popular than ever before. The Full Victorian has been revived in high-end restaurants and hotels, serving omelettes and eggs benedict, smoked kippers, salmon and kedgeree to business people and tourists. And, if you are lucky, in a reversal of the end of the eighteenth century, some of the dishes get shunted over into supper.

To do breakfast justice at the weekend, we elide it with the midday meal to create the invented meal brunch, which is where some of the dishes of the Victorian and Edwardian country house breakfast, such as this kedgeree, really come into their own.

KEDGEREE

Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert, who served with the Madras Cavalry in India and wrote recipes and household books under the name ‘Wyvern’, was a big fan of breakfast. His books, including Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878), saved many a memsahib from a fit of the vapours, as he explained how to get ‘native’ servants to cook fashionable French food and Anglo-Indian dishes such as ‘kitchri’. Back home in England, he also published Fifty Breakfasts. This kedgeree recipe is inspired by both works.

MODERN RECIPE: THE COLONEL’S KEDGEREE

About 400g fish – smoked haddock fillets, or any white or oily fish – or even seafood – you like (or need to use up)

2 bay leaves

240g basmati rice

Pinch of salt

4 eggs

50g butter

1 large onion, diced

1 dessertspoon turmeric

1 dessertspoon curry powder or mixed cumin and coriander – optional

Handful of chopped fresh herbs – flat leaf or curly parsley, marjoram, coriander, chives – or mustard and cress

1.   Cook the smoked fish by gently poaching it for 8–10 minutes in water with the bay leaves. Remove the fish with a slotted spoon, put it aside and cover it with foil to keep warm. Keep the cooking liquor.

2.   Cook the rice with the retained cooking liquor and a pinch of salt (use less of it or add water, according to the instructions on your packet).

3.   Get the eggs on to boil – about 10 minutes for hard-boiled; 6–7 minutes for soft-boiled – and then put them into cold water. Peel them under running water.

4.   Melt the butter in a thick-bottomed pan and fry the onion until it is fully soft. Add the turmeric and other spices, if you are using, and fry for a couple of minutes.

5.   Add the rice and stir well.

6.   Pile into a dish, flake over the warm fish.

7.   If hard-boiled, you can chop the eggs, in the Victorian way, or leave them as halves, in the twenty-first-century way.

8.   Sprinkle with the herbs.

ORIGINAL RECIPE: KHITCHRI* (INDIAN)

From Fifty Breakfasts by Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert (1894)

This dish, from which the so-called ‘kedgeree’ of English cookery books was doubtless taken, was originally a dish of rice cooked with butter and an Indian pea called dál, but now it may either be composed of cold cooked fresh fish, or of salt fish that has been soaked and either boiled or fried. Choose which you prefer – about one pound will be enough – and with a fork divide it into small pieces. Boil six ounces of rice, as explained for No. 20. These preparations can be made overnight. Boil three eggs hard, and with a fork crush them, whites and yolks together, to a coarse mince. Melt over a low fire three ounces of butter, and fry a very finely minced shallot therein till it is a yellow colour; now stir in the rice, using a wooden spoon, and the pieces of fish, season with pepper and salt and sufficient turmeric (about a teaspoonful) to tint the rice a nice light yellow colour; lastly shake into the mixture the crushed hardboiled eggs, and empty the whole into a very hot dish.

*Elsewhere in a recipe for ‘kegeree (kitchri) of the English type’ the Colonel omits the turmeric but includes garden herbs such as cress, parsley or marjoram.25

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* Mass Observation was a social research organization that collected details of everyday life from 1937 to the 1950s.

The Sandwich: the working lunch

Lunch is for wimps.

The fictional banker Gordon Gecko, Wall Street (1987)

IN MY FIRST office job in London in the early 1990s I was introduced to two types of working lunch. Our Chief Executive was overfond of the boozy lunch to celebrate something – anything – the signing of a document would do. We learnt not to expect anything too rational from afternoon meetings. Words must have been said, as it was suddenly all sandwiches in the board room. The office assistant was despatched to Marks & Spencer or the sandwich shop, for cheese and pickle, prawn cocktail, egg mayonnaise and, a particular favourite – in the 1990s at least – sweet and spicy, unctuous coronation chicken. For one client lunch the accounts assistant, a tiny young woman from a Kenyan Asian background, was sent in his place, returning with a brown bag full of McDonald’s hamburgers. The CE made a ‘what shall we do?’ face, but we cut them into quarters, and put them on plates for everybody to help themselves in the usual way. We all ate a token quarter each, perhaps to demonstrate something about our social unpretentiousness, but not so much that we were tainted by fast food.