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?
A Potted History
In 'Distinction' Pierre Bourdieu similarly writes of the opposing taste of necessity and taste of liberty, a distinction between the foods of the poor, which are most economical and filling and those of the rich, which use stylised forms to deny function. This binary recurs time and time again when we talk of the food of the poor, but though eating and the consideration of economy were both necessary this does not tell the whole story of working class food. It was certainly essential to prepare food and do it cheaply but ideally it was prepared in the most appetising way possible within these constraints. The concept of what is appetising is a cultural one and the tongue is a product of history. This was a working class food culture which grew as it passed down the generations but was not purely prescribed by tradition. Recipes would be adapted and updated and the use of ingredients would differ wildly from region to region. Food was symbolic as well as nourishing and culinary colloquialisms were the source of solidarity and pride. In short, in a life of essential drudgery food could often provide the only creative, cultural output for the poor. Bourdieu, it seems, would deny this aesthetic aspect altogether.
In the middle-ages foreign visitors remarked on both the quantity and quality of English food and at this point the English poor would have eaten far better in times of good harvest than their counterparts in Europe. The quality of produce, along with the later asceticism of the Reformation and Puritanism is undoubtedly a factor in the perceived English preference for 'plain fare'. However whilst cooking methods may not have always been elaborate this perception is countered by the huge variety of food consumed up until the 20th Century, which cannot be simply explained as a reaction to issues of scarcity and distribution. Bourdieu's opposition pits the cuisine of the poor against that of the rich along the same lines as the labour of the workman versus that of the artist. In this dichotomy the artist elevates form over function, yet even in the 'highest' cuisines food cannot completely escape its functional role. Likewise the meals of the poor were a cultural object for consumption whose creators were unconstrained in their full use of the incidental material which surrounded them, rather than technicians of a purely functional food.
Even before the arrival of new fruit and vegetables from the continent and 'New World' a great variety of hedgerow herbs and leaves were eaten and everything from cockles to sparrow were fair game. If it was edible it was probably eaten and though partially borne of necessity the preparation itself presents a startling creativity in its execution. Many flowers, roots, berries and buds have fallen out of our diet which were once eaten but importantly these were not merely replacements for unaffordable alternatives but essential parts of meals: Ingredients in their own right, a culinary arte povera, in which there was an equality of ingredients based not purely on availability but on taste and texture.
This same attitude is evident in the preparation of the meat that occasionally found it's way to the tables of the poor. Unable to afford expensive cuts of meat they settled for organs, extremities and the tougher cuts but the dishes produced were far from second rate. Pies and pasties made portable the cheapest scraps of meat and other offal became daily fare: Pickled tripe, for example, was popular after a day at the factory to wash the dust from the cotton workers throat. Yet once again this food was not purely functional, the often robust flavours and varied textures of these meats were taken as strengths and were subjected to cooking methods and flavourings which made them preferable even to more expensive options. The stewed fillings of puddings and hot pots elevated these meals far beyond the sum of their parts and there are few foods more beautiful than the pink and white marble of a slice of brawn.
Added to this was the tradition, perhaps parodying those above them, of the poor creating 'mock' foods: An approximation of expensive meats concocted from 'lesser' ones which became a representational cookery far more interesting than the simple use of the choicest ingredients. Here delicacies were wrought from the combination and interplay of ingredients which were cheap and accessible, there was no reliance on the psychological effects of premium and scarcity on the palate. Mock Goose was made from skinned and spiced pork, Mock Turtle Soup was sheep's head, brains and vegetables and Welsh Rabbit (a cultural dig at the Welsh, too poor to afford even the cheapest meat, but also a wry awareness of their own culinary aspirations) was simply cheese on toast. Within the accepted opposition between the food of the rich and poor this tradition can be read as one of many forms of social imitation, a class looking upwards for cultural direction. However as the 'mock' was always present in the name we must assume an acknowledgement rather than a pretence. With this in mind these dishes instead assert an intelligent recognition of the quality of the ingredients available to the poor and the skill of the cook who can create a similar sensory effect with hugely different means.
It is important to note that the food of the poor did not always simply try to replicate that of the rich or that the ingredients they used remained static. As foreign trade boomed their cuisine incorporated newly affordable imported vegetables, herbs and spices. A feature of English upper class food since the Norman invasion, it is a testament to the adaptability of working class tastes that they embraced theses flavours so readily once they were widely available. In the North of England the industrial revolution brought larger and larger quantities of exotic spices to trading ports: In Cumberland the availability of spices from the West Indies shaped the distinctive flavouring of local sausages and the increased trade in sugar and ginger led to cakes such as Yorkshire Parkin..
Entire books could be (and have been) written about the creativity inherent in traditional British cookery: The bawdy eroticism of a spotted dick or a toad in the hole; the representational humour of a Sussex pond or Kentish puddle pudding (perhaps a precursor to the now fashionable, molecular-gastronomic representational dishes). However now that British cuisine is no longer an object of derision the question must be why is it no longer accessible to the class who developed it. If the food of the poor represented such a rich and diverse cultural output how is it that today we are left with less than a shadow of its legacy, buried under a mountain of ready-meal trays and takeaway boxes?
Continental Gastronomy
Until the beginning of the 20th Century, when the numbers of domestic staff dwindled and cooking became fashionable amongst more well-off women, the most extravagant meals cooked by the poor were for the rich. Whether in country estates or town houses those who didn't employ a chef would have had a cook drawn from the working class. Though these households would have had vastly greater means and afforded a much wider variety of ingredients the cooking for a long time, at least stylistically, was not vastly different from that of the poor.
Regional dishes were found on the tables of the rich as often as those of the poor (and often developed further in their kitchens): The worker's pork pie, who's hot water pastry was raised by hand was instead worked up inside elaborate moulds and filled with more expensive meats to become a 'noble pie'. Whilst the poor cooked the common Sparrow the rich dined on Pheasant and after the commons were enclosed the poacher willing to risk his life for a little game could restore some parity with his Lord's table. So similar were the diets of rich and poor in terms of their nutritional benefits that conditions such as rickets were far from uncommon amongst the children of the aristocracy, but this similarity of diet was to begin to change in the 19th Century.
The main influence for this shift came from France, where haute cuisine had developed as a codification of the food of the bourgeois who in turn had refined the regional food of the peasants (encompassed in the notion 'terroir' in which the characteristics of a foods' geographical origin are integral to its nature). Such a refining was not to happen in England as the movement towards the industrial towns, and away from the kitchen garden or even a kitchen, began before the influx of new foods from Europe and the Americas. Whilst the working class were inventing their own new food culture in rapidly expanding cities the only 'high' food was the butter. In response the rich were to look across the channel for a refined gastronomy and a succession of Chefs, born or trained in France, brought high cuisine to the upper classes.
The most notable of these was Antonin Carêmé, considered one of the most important early figures in haute cuisine, who worked as chef to the prince regent, later to be king George IV. He was followed by Alexis Soyer and Carêmé's student Charles Francatelli who both served Queen Victoria. Next, Auguste Escoffier, the legendary chef who ran the kitchens at the Savoy and Ritz hotels. It is important to note that this shift from cook to chef marks the true professionalism of cooking, at least in England, the shift in cooking from a concern with medicine and the balancing of the four humours to artistry: As this shift was to culturally disenfranchise those at the very bottom of society it is perhaps no coincidence that it also encompassed the move from the female cook to the male chef, a change which is still clear from restaurant kitchen's to TV screens today.
Not only did this new cooking focus on far more expensive ingredients and elaborate presentation but the influx of French gastronomy increased the perception of English food as inferior. Recipes were almost over-associative in their luxury, perhaps in an effort to disassociate with those of the lower classes. Ortolans, not so far removed from the songbirds limed by the poor were force fed before being drowned in Armagnac, a method of execution usually reserved for regicide. Beef Wellington, despite being named for the field marshal who defeated the French army, is clearly influenced by French cooking: An extraordinarily expensive cut of beef, covered in foi-gras and mushrooms then enclosed in a rich, fine pastry is almost absurd in its comparison to a traditional meat pudding.
Lumpen Custard
Aside from the cultural denigration of their daily food this shift in the direction of the 'national' cuisine did little to affect what was actually eaten by the poor. Instead, a rising population and high density in the burgeoning cities brought new issues for the provision and preparation of food. The food culture of the poor was creatively adapted to the ingredients made available by international trade and urban living but this gastronomy was not being 'refined' or 'elevated' by the middle or upper classes. As a result the difference between the food of the rich and the poor grew ever wider: One of the most notable results being that English food, now solely the food of the working class, was not considered a cultural object with attendant history, language and skill but was relegated to something like Bourdieu's taste of necessity. Nevertheless as the 20th Century began it was not this cultural shift alone that was to spell the end of a properly working class cooking, totally uninterested as it was with any kind of working class culture. It was only when this cultural hierarchy influenced the chain of events stemming from a reliance on imported food, rationing and war that the food of and for the poor was to be decisively erased.
Though rationing did not have a huge impact during the 'Great War' by the 1930's Britain was importing close to 70% of its food. As a result the impact on international trade of the second world war meant almost all food was either rationed or subject to shortages. This was certainly not without its benefits as the technocratic implementation of rationing took the health of the nation as one of its primary concerns and so the meals of the poor became nutritionally far better. However whilst government intervention to improve the ingredients of bread or to add vitamins to processed foods such as margarine was to actually improve the health of the poor during war years, these gains in nutrition paralleled losses in culinary identity.
Kitchen gardens were encouraged by the 'dig for victory' campaign in order to supplement rations which resulted in a beneficial increase in the consumption of vegetables (often in place of meat). However the cultural identity of working class food was also overwritten by centralised policy as meals such as “carottes de gaulle” were prescribed as an alternative to traditional meat dishes. Despite being a 'patriotic' version of “carottes a la vichy” it merely dropped the name of the collaborationist government, rather than the Francophile obsession with the style and nomenclature of French Gastronomy. Similarly other traditional recipes were negated by the required economical considerations of the Ministry of Food. Imported meats were often boneless and canned, leading to a rise in products such as corned beef and spam whilst vegetables and fruits were caned or dehydrated using new technology to avoid wastage. These economies of scale were also apparent in the 'national restaurants' set up to provide hot meals for large numbers of the working class and the result of both changes was to be a better but far more homogeneous diet for the poor.
The change in culture also had other unintended consequences. For example the focus on nutrition and hygiene encouraged the poor, no strangers to boiling and roasting, to cook food for far longer than was necessary, to the detriment of both nutrition and taste. As other forms of prescribed cultural activity increased in popularity there was a marked decline in English food. Cooking became a chore, subsumed rather than enhanced by the nutritional and economical food policies, it was an exercise in making do, an imposed taste of necessity in which preparation was a necessary evil. Put simply a working class food culture which had managed to thrive under economic constraints was inhibited and displaced by rationing, a process which continued and even worsened for almost a decade after the end of war.
Mange Tout, Mange Tout
Beyond this point we see the beginnings of the position we find ourselves in today. A revolution was to start in the 50's and 60's in which an enormous variety of ingredients were to become available in the aisles of proliferating 'super' markets. A cornucopia of produce inconceivable in the years of rationing developed to the point where we can now take our pick of food from every continent at even the most modest supermarket. Yet there was no longer an existent working class food culture to embrace it. Newly available domestic technologies; refrigerators, toasters, microwaves, promised a life of leisure away from the drudgery of work, with cooking firmly relegated to the latter. As with new ingredients these appliances were not used to enhance a food culture which belonged to the poor but were to be used to inhabit a formal gastronomy imposed from above.
In the lineage of 'refined' cooking and eating Haute Cuisine was followed in the 1960's by Nouvelle Cuisine. With a focus on smaller, elaborately presented dishes it couldn't be more in contrast to the traditional food of the working class, similarly intelligent in its use of flavour and texture but hearty and informal. However, with this tradition erased the trickle down of Nouvelle Cuisine enabled by the new abundance of produce is clear to see in popular food of the 70's and 80's: Recipes such as prawn cocktail or duck a l'orange, currently considered in very bad taste (though rapidly being re-appropriated by the nostalgia industry), are testament to the cultural imitation inspired by Novelle cuisine. This was a food culture that didn't simply reflect the ingredients and techniques of those more 'cultured' but adopted their utilisation of food as a signifier of wealth and cultural aspiration. Consequently food became a tool for social showboating rather than the shared culture of a community: Outside of this exhibition meals were often simple or processed - bland, frozen, microwaved or all three.
Cooking as part of the commons, a shared knowledge of ingredients and processes, is difficult to commodify in its totality however the imposition of a 'refined' food culture allowed exactly this by removing it's commonality. As per the accepted process of gastronomic refinement ingredients were indeed elevated for their formal properties over their function. Yet these formal properties were not the sensory ones employed by a working class cooking but those valorised by capital: Scarcity, authenticity, obscurity. By replacing the formal content of working class food culture and shearing it of its social function it also paved the way for the current state of food and cooking. With a decisive break in the development of the food of the poor its history was ripe, in the 1990's, for 'rediscovery' and the ever-attendant marketisation.
Today food fads such as the slow food movement ossify a nostalgic snapshot of a food culture which was previously in constant evolution. This stasis of forms and methods demands only the correct, authentic ingredients and implements, easily recognised by their price tag. Creativity becomes a product of the consumer's shopping habits rather than the social function of their cooking. The cook buys creativity through their purchase of organic, ‘home made’ or artisan products and are told so by the over-familiar, infantile marketing which adorns the packaging. This creativity however rarely extends to the production of new recipes, or even general culinary experimentation, a task best left to the professionals: The TV chefs and their bulbous hardbacks, who will teach you 'peasant' cooking from France, Italy, Spain and of course Britain.
Out of the frying pan, into the Microwave
What, however, of the eponymous 'peasants'? Some might be lucky enough to participate in in this 'refinement' of their lost culture yet most are excluded by the constraints of time, money and the repeated mantra that food for the poor can be nothing but a necessity. In television and newspaper reports from the sporadic hand-wringing over the nation's diet and health we see the same story ad-infinitum. Working class parents pointing to the fact that, exhausted after work, they will choose the cheapest and quickest food available. Inevitably processed or preprepared, high calorie and low effort, these choices are met with cries of 'don't they know what's good for them?' by many with vastly greater means, both material and temporal, but there are psychological factors at play. Advertising plays it's part, for example with the all-natural, 'real' ingredients of processed foods lauded over their salt content. Vegetables on the other hand are depicted, if at all, for a supermarket few can afford, falling moistly and in high definition to the sound of middle-class favourite Santana.
Moreover the purchase of ready meals and take-aways give access to the product of a servitude that previously the working class were bound by. The option to have food cooked, or at least prepared for you is not a new one for the working class, the cook shop, pie shop and all sorts of street vendors served the urban poor who often had no kitchen or couldn't afford the fuel to cook. This 'street food' was developed the world over to provide cheap, hot meals to workers and their families and it is just another facet of working class food to have been ruthlessly marketised, now unrecognisable as an expensive, if 'authentic', lunch option or a 'fresh twist' on the upmarket restaurant menu. The 'street food' left to the poor tends to come from national or multinational corporations and has little going for it beyond the time it saves, having possibly less nutritional value than the fare served in the 18th century cookshop. It is a testament, however, to the status of these foods that a Conservative Prime Minister felt obliged to invent the consumption of a pasty at a train station to highlight his solidarity with those for whom 'street food' is a snatched meal from a national chain between a days work and a long commute.
However whilst 'street food' is either refined beyond the means of the poor, or available as a hugely varied, if uniformly dubious, pairing of meat and carbohydrate from a fast-food outlet, it was domestic technology which was to provide the promise of some culinary social-mobility: The fridge-freezer and the microwave were the promised robot servants of a science-fiction utopia, carrying out the domestic work for their masters. Previously the legions of domestic servants were necessarily dehumanised and so the invisible hands packing food into boxes and trays or the non-human kitchen machines opened up access to this dehumanised labour. They were to also offer the chance to taste the food of the rich in a more formal way, as the frozen pizza or the microwaved lasagne not only took the work out of cooking but represents the pinacle of form over function, the hallmark of a refined cuisine. These preprepared meals contain all the sensory pleasures of their home-made equivalents, perhaps even more so with enhanced flavours and colours, but considerably less nutritional value. Their function, that of sustenance, is not merely disguised by form but impaired by it in the short term and fatally undermined by it, literally, in the long term.
When the Cook isn’t Working
The understanding of cooking as work also fed in to the wages for housework campaigns of the 70's and 80's. The argument ran that cooking as a domestic chore carried out, unpaid, by women deserved a wage as it provided others with food, leisure time and reproduced the workforce. This logic has various problems however, the first being the fact raised by feminists that any payment would merely reinforce the idea that domestic work was a woman's work, not to mention the enforced role of capital as the sole valorising force behind any activity. The proposed answer was to share the burden of domestic work between the sexes, yet in addition if we were to stop treating cooking as work we are able to think about new ways of valuing food. This is not to say that the effects and emotions which stem from the view of cooking as work are invalid but that with working class families now having both parents in employment there needs to be a different approach. Perhaps the only way to alleviate this shared burden without recourse to dehumanised labour is to treat it as an opportunity for a shared creative/cultural act.
One set of working class groups which still retains an active food culture are immigrant communities. Whilst this is often a product of hierarchical family structures it is also true that food here provides a bond within a distinct community. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that traditional sites of British working class food and drink have been closed, marketised and subject to suppression along moral lines and that the consumption of food is largely confined to the nuclear family. That a more open idea of food preparation and consumption outside of 'commercial' kitchens might provide the opportunity for an everyday creative output and a chance to feed into a shared cultural community is surely part of the reason for its conspicuous absence. However this opportunity is also overlooked by almost all left discourses which focus solely on (all too easily monetised) ecological and ethical issues which simply lead to a different form of the food of necessity; a necessary asceticism, a joyless self control. Whilst many of these issues are clearly important in avoiding a reliance on dehumanised labour and increasing the nutritional and economic value of foods, a blinkered focus purely on personal choice in consumption misses the chance to re-value cooking. A working class food culture which allowed for ecological and ethical choices but focused on cooking as a literally fulfilling creative act would allow for formal play and a communal solidarity. However most importantly, alongside and enabled by a redefined distribution of wealth and idea of work, it might provide a bit of dignity.
