through europe

If 'the world is our oyster' why are they so expensive? Shakespeare's formulation, that a poor man denied money may open the world like an oyster instead, takes on a very different meaning when the cheap food of the poor becomes the delicacy of the rich. Perhaps the shifting fortunes of the oyster are simply the most obvious example of a culinary and cultural refinement which has seen the pots of the many emptied on to the plates of the few. The crumbs from the master's table, 'authentic' and 'honest', have been plucked from the mouths of the poor who have been sold instead a pale imitation of the original loaf.

 

Oysters comfortably adorn the plates of the highest haute cusine and the stalls of the saltiest salt-of-the earth artisans, yet it is no secret that they were also once plentiful fare for the English poor. Originally popular with England's Roman invaders who set slaves to work collecting the delicacy from the shores of the English Channel, these native delicacies were transported as far as the empire's capital. After the Romans left oysters fell out of favour but were popular again as early as the 8th Century and by the 1400's were consumed in great numbers by both the rich and poor. For the less well-off they would appear on 'fish days', during which no meat was eaten and which fell as often as Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in order to bolster both the fishing industry and the number of seafaring men available to the royal navy.

 

The need to eat is a great leveller, an inescapable biological necessity, but what is the difference between the food of the rich and that of the poor - Is it just a question of taste? John Burnett in 'Plenty & Want' describes the rich of the 19th century as those who enjoyed “some margin of income over necessary expenditure and were able to make some choice in their selection of food”. This being the case the poor therefore ate a food which was a product of circumstance: Cheap, often monotonous and nutritionally inadequate. Yet out of this necessity came a resourceful invention, a creative use of the ingredients at hand and an open minded adoption of the products of foreign trade and technological innovation supposedly absent from traditional English cookery. The recipes left to us show a cooking which fulfils the apparently contemporary fashion for local produce, economy and creative presentation, not as a fad but as perhaps the richest heritage of working class culture. However, the development of this culture was broken somewhere along the line only to be 'rediscovered' recently by chefs and television personalities catering to the middle and upper classes. How did the working class loose their culinary culture only to have it dangled in front of them, out of reach, by supermarkets who can 'taste the difference' and celebrity chefs who berate them as they eat their TV dinners?

 

Up until the 20th Century bread had long been the staple food of the British Poor in both the city and the country: From the middle-ages black, brown and white bread were ever present through plenty and want and little was to change for centuries, especially for the better. Even as late as the 1890's bread was the only solid food in over 80% of the meals for the majority of children in Bethnal Green.

 

As the primary food of the people, the “staff of life”, bread has proved to be a hugely important not just as cause, but as buffer, to social unrest and revolution: In 1789 French women marched on Versailles driven by the price of bread; in 2011 millions took to the streets across North Africa and the Middle-East under the slogan 'bread, freedom and dignity; yet in 1848 English bread prices and its political structure were stabilised by cheap wheat as a wave of revolutions swept through Europe; and today...