Scoff

A History of Food and Class in Britain

Pen Vogler

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786496478
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786496485
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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

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 lan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Tea and Confusion
• Part Two: Brit…ish
• Part Three: Foreign Introductions
• Part Four: Rooms, Plates and Cutlery
• Part Five: Disappearances and reappearances
• Part Six: Fads, Fasts and Health
• Part Seven: Country and Town
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• Acknowledgements
• Index