You Are What You Eat 16

I hate the assumption that working-class people only eat English food, and cheap staples from other cuisines are dismissed as ‘pretentious and posh’ by others. (@STEMlorde) Except that spag bol and lasagne is “caff” food, not café food.

The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind. (Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding, 1948)

M&S Food's Best Ever Mac & Cheese! With cave-aged Cheddar, Pecorino, Emmenthal and mozzarella, topped with roasted garlic oil and onion ciabatta breadcrumb. Need we say more? (@CostaCoffee) There's an upmarket version of everything.

I made home-made pesto and the ingredients cost about £800 and it’s not even that great so my life hack today is go to Lidl and just buy a jar for a quid and don’t be a twat like me. (@JaneSlavin)

The antiquated snobs will tell you you're wrong to say dessert rather than pudding, yet they will not hesitate to ask for a dessert spoon. (@AodhBC)

Latest Upward/Weybridge fad is sneering at anything imported, especially flowers – one must get behind Brexit/save food miles/save the planet.

Teales and Definitelies domesticate foreign tastes by adding sugar: Balsamic vinegar and sweet chilli sauce (that isn’t very hot). They domesticate “artisanal” bread by making a soft version.

Sam Upward would offer you “mashed potatoes”, because “mashed potato” sounds like something you’d read on a menu.

Who was refusing to go to a funeral because the choice of venue for the wake was “Beefeater or Harvester”? (At least you'd get enough to eat instead of a handful of polite nibbles.)

Most layers of the middle class love turning any subject into a rant about obesity (burden on the NHS, wasting our tax dollars). Starve the chavs! (Obesity can be a result of poverty.)

Upwards can never eat anything “creamed”: creamed corn, creamed potatoes. Especially when the word means “smothered in white sauce”. 

Dark brown meat in dark brown gravy is very downmarket. It’s hard to find except frozen in Iceland.

"Good food": consists of fresh ingredients, freshly cooked – but not deep fried. It is probably dished up in a style borrowed from a country where you can afford to go on holiday. If you want real British food you’ll have to sign up to meals on wheels from Wiltshire Farm Foods. 

Fizzy water comes in different strengths of fizz because everything comes in a “range” and there has to be a version we drink or eat and a version we look down on people for drinking or eating. Sodastreams are back, but Upwards are not allowed to add too many bubbles. Upward withholding again!

Whatever happened to those little paper chef’s hats for the ends of lamb joints or mutton chops? They were utterly beyond the pale in the 70s – but who eats mutton any more? (Damned by John Betjeman: "The frills round the cutlets can wait...")

Until the 50s, jam and pickles were decanted into cut-glass dishes. Only the lower classes put a jar of jam or pickles on the table, whether or not in a saucer or with a special silver jam spoon that hooked over the side. Of course silver jam spoons with a latched hook were utterly naff, as were asparagus tongs. Asparagus, melted butter and all, was eaten in the fingers. Those silver jam spoons come in handy for jars of instant coffee. (The Upwards faint.)

A 30s book of “cookery and household management” describes making, with a lot of time and trouble, a savoury custard which you cut into slices. You then punched shapes out of the slices, washed them in several changes of cold water, and added them to clear soup. The shapes were replaced by small pasta shapes like stelline before disappearing from our lives.

Why are the chairs in trendy upmarket cafés too low, and the tables too high? Makes eating difficult, makes reading difficult. Makes typing on a laptop harder, not easier. Typing chairs need to be high – you need to imitate a piano player, not a begging dog.

Upwards are allowed to like motorway services if they have a gloss of artisanal rusticity – a farm shop, some distressed wood, an absence of videogames and fruit machines, proper coffee. Someone on Twitter describes having a coffee at a services “in the middle of nowhere” as the ultimate in alienation. Very Bohemian Rowena Upward drives to motorway services on purpose to soak up the alienation. Local residents would be outraged to hear that they live “nowhere”. Would paintings of motorway services, or those “strange, sterile” Amazon supermarkets, have a Hopperish feel, asks an architectural journalist? 

There’s a tendency for institutions to replace an affordable canteen or café with a very upmarket restaurant which will get reviewed in the broadsheets and attract an impressive clientèle. Meanwhile ordinary visitors have nowhere to eat, avoid the museum/concert hall as a result, and the restaurant goes bust. When firms were no longer obliged by law to provide canteens the concept vanished from our minds. Was the wonderful BHS canteen in Oxford Street the last man standing? Ordinary grub, formica tables, and not a single pepper in anything. The National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery, the V&A – they all had canteens and I remember them fondly.

Why do Upwards despise pickles? Because they need to show that they can afford fresh vegetables, and always have been able to. They also needed to show that they could afford a fridge. This taboo extends to despising anything vinegary apart from French dressing.

Ethelind Fearon in The Reluctant Hostess (50s) describes the dilemma of a woman when a friend unexpectedly drops in to lunch and all you have in the larder is six eggs. Solution: omelette, followed by zabaglione (a trendy 50s dessert of whipped up egg whites, sugar and sherry). Why didn’t she say “there’s nothing in the house, shall we go out?” Because there was nowhere they could go. Somewhere acceptable for two ladies is either too expensive or too far away, and her husband has taken the car. Upwards used to avoid cafés, even dainty tea shoppes, because “bang might go sixpence”. They were right – I’ve saved so much money not sitting in Costa’s for hours. Caffs and Macdonalds are cheaper, but this is /fast food/, and Upwards can’t be seen there. The tea shoppes were too lower middle class and the crustless sandwiches came with a sprinkle of mustard and cress and a handful of crisps.

When computers arrived in offices about 30 years ago, many Upwards recoiled from them. They all came in beige plastic. There wasn’t an organic, artisanal version. We got used to them, and now they come in sleek, stylish metal. But some Upwards still feel the same way about microwaves, now being recommended as they use less fuel. 

I fear I am not the only insufferable microwave snob. A woman I know admits she views microwaves as ‘anti-aspirational’. She reluctantly bought one years ago for £30, still doesn’t know how to use it properly, and only ever heats up porridge inside it. It is hidden from view in a cupboard. Another super-successful woman I work for won’t have one in her house. Her word for them is ‘common’. (Times, Candida Crewe, Aug 2022) And a friend didn’t like to use a microwave because “you have to use plastic dishes”.

Lady Behave by Drusilla Beyfus (1956) reveals a lost world of menu French and salad plates. It's like looking into Tutankhamun's tomb. Salad accompanied a main dish, but on a separate plate. The most naff were glass and crescent-shaped. When laying a table, don’t forget the ashtrays and cigarettes. Beyfus boldly suggests putting dishes of vegetables on the table so that guests can serve themselves. She describes the “cooking hostess” who has to provide a dinner on a grand scale – she no longer has servants, so she just does it all herself. Another thing she doesn’t have is a job. Beyfus frowns on finger bowls, though you are supposed to eat gulls’ eggs in your fingers, shell your own prawns and debone your own sole. The ladies would need to withdraw after that lot – to wash their hands. 

Beyfus uses the word “delicacy” frequently. Another striking aspect – the food is all European, meaning French or Italian. German and Swiss food have never been “gourmet” in the UK, apart from Scandinavian smorgasbord, and fondue in the 70s, which we will pass over in silence. There’s a complete absence of anything from the Far East or Indian subcontinent. Delicacies are snails and frogs’ legs, which are either Roman-style decadence or famine food. There’s a lot of garlic, but not a single pepper.

More here, and links to the rest.

You Are What You Eat 14

Some kind of supper with cold meat and pink or white shape and stewed prunes. (Crewe Train, Rose Macaulay, written in the 20s. “Shape” was cornflour blancmange.)

Letters to the Editor (Times)
Sir, the correspondence on baked beans reminds me of an incident one morning at the Royal Marines officers’ mess in Poole years ago. I had barely taken my seat when. White-coated and white-gloved member of mess staff arrived silently at my side to take my order. “Good morning,” I said. “May I please have baked beans on fried bread.” I turned to read my newspaper when I realized that he had not moved. Believing that he had not heard, I repeated my order. “yes, Sir, I heard you the first time,” he said. When I asked if there was a problem he replied, very much Jeeves-like: The thing is, Sir, that baked beans are not really an officer’s vegetable.” (Simon De’Ath, Upper Basildon, Berkshire)

My background is working class but I would never try to pretend I’m not middle class now... But I heartily agree with a friend from similar stock who complains that the middle-class lifestyle creates much more washing-up. At dinner parties and even family meals food is put on the table in various serving bowls with spoons from which you help yourself, not all ready-portioned on the one plate as it was in my childhood. Crockery use is doubled. And... you don’t want to look greedy so you always take less than you really want. (Carol Midgley, Times)

Mum told Greggs vegan sausage rolls are “too posh for Kirby” (Liverpool Echo headline 2019)

Food is a pretty important and significant social activity, and dating is often centered around food. (Daniel Mallory Ortberg)

Per Mary Killen (pictured above by Hugo Bernand), common food includes:
Anything on an oval plate
Stacked towers of ingredients
Anything that’s too easy to eat
Anything microwaved
Quartered tomatoes
Potato croquettes
Lemon quarters are fine, but not if you call them “lemon wedges”.
Cheesecake and apple strudel are out because they’re “mucked-about food”.
Shaped portions of fish and chicken (fingers and nuggets)
She condemns “thick” marmalade – surely some mistake?
Taboo words are “cereal”, “meal” and “nibbles”. Be specific – cornflakes, lunch and nuts.

Mary would have a fit over tomatoes carved into flower shapes, wouldn’t she? Samantha doesn't like to admit that these days she microwaves side veg like mushrooms and carrots with a knob of butter in a container with a lid. She agrees about food that’s too easy – rice-like orzi pasta instead of spaghetti that you can just spoon into the cake’ole.

Mary's list of posh food includes:
Anything difficult to come by, difficult to cook, or repulsive: sweetbreads, oxtail. (I’d add brains, steak tartare and cold soup.)
Game in season
Hare
Gulls’ eggs
Turnips, swedes, parsnips, beetroot – but boiled, not pickled
Baked pears, home-made custard
Bread-and-butter pudding
The "cheese and biscuits" circuit? (March 2019) Whatever happened to cheese and biscuits – they used to end every middle-class dinner.

A vegan pie has sparked outrage after winning a top food award, with a leading chef branding the butternut squash creation “a disgrace”. (Daily Telegraph, March 2019) “The millennials have taken over,” opines chef Richard Corrigan. There’s an outbreak of really quite nasty “vegan jokes” among conservatives – vegan food, which has existed happily for years out of sight in health food shops, has now hit the supermarkets. And manufacturers are trying to cash in by producing special bars, nut mixes, protein balls with too much artificial flavouring and a ridiculously high price. Conservatives are furious to find these cranks given their own section – next to the Poles'.

In April 2018, the inhabitants of Giffnock in Scotland were furious that their Wholefoods was being replaced by a Lidl. It will “bring down the tone of the whole area”. “Stores like this... attract the degenerates of society. I understand that they need to shop somewhere, however you didn’t see benefit cheats and single mothers and their feral brood flock to Whole Foods. Discount stores allegedly save you pounds on your shopping but you could lose a lot more at the front door when your purse is stolen... It’s only going to attract vermin that do not belong in this prestigious area. Giffnock isn’t pretentious at all, it’s a middle-class area and that is the way it should remain.”

Others suggested that the “pretentious” could always shop in Newton Means, and one riposted: “Honestly what has happened to people. I grew up in Giffnock when that space was Presto and up the road was Gateway then Kwicksave and not an eye was batted.” (And I remember when the middle classes agonised over whether it was possible for them to shop in supermarkets at all.)


Britain is discovering the hot dog! Translation: Firms are making serious money selling upmarket, gentrified hot dogs to affluent gourmets. French President Emmanuel Macron told farmers to concentrate on upmarket products – and now they’re struggling. An area is “regenerated” and all the cafés and shops are too expensive for the people who live there. Where do the gentrifiers think the poor people are going to go? Perhaps they don’t care. In the US, it’s been suggested that cheap food shops should be closed – to encourage purveyors of “proper” food to move in. Because working class people eat unhealthy, processed fast food, don’t they?

Cheap food doesn’t need to be unhealthy: potatoes, cabbages, lentils, carrots are all cheap. And so are quinoa and avocado – so why are they middle-class signifiers? As a friend says, the hippies have basically won. We all eat brown rice and want to save the planet now.

Rowena has crowd-funded to turn her caff into a chain. Samantha suggested calling it “Scoff”, but Rowena went for “Lou’s Café”, in hand-painted red lettering on white, and had the fascias carefully distressed. The menu now includes: chops, greens, roast potatoes, steak pie, stew, mashed swedes, corned-beef hash, beetroot in white sauce, bubble and squeak, Spam fritters, cottage pie, pork pie, Scotch egg, jam roly poly, and local dishes like Manchester pie, gypsy tart, Bedfordshire clangers and barm cakes. She'll overboil your cabbage for you if you really like it like that. Sam disparages the menu by calling it "comfort food".

Rowena ripostes that her goals for 2019 include eating a burrito washed down with crème de menthe, and working her way through all those chocolate bars that people like us don’t buy.

Sam is rather tired of the “street food” fad. Former open spaces are cluttered up with smelly stalls selling food that all seems to be fried. And there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it. Really, what happened to farmers’ markets?

Howard Weybridge agrees. “Isn’t there any British street food? Er, fish and chips…?”

Sam checks with Henry Mayhew. “Men sold freshly baked muffins, and there were pudding shops – and isn’t there a bit in Little Dorrit where Flora and Amy chat over steak and kidney pies? Here’s more: shell-fish, pea-soup, baked potatoes, ham sandwiches, meat puddings, pigs’ and sheep’s trotters, hot eels, hot green peas, penny pies, plum duff, crumpets, Chelsea buns.”

Howard  says: “Haven’t had a good old steak and kidney pud for years. Used to come in pudding-shaped tins. Well, now we’re leaving the EU…”


“I dared to mention a superfood after it had gone out of fashion, and was put in my place by a friend who’d been all over it a couple of years before”, says Sam.

“All my friends are on some ridiculous exclusion diet – and meanwhile people are queueing up at food banks!” sighs Eileen Weybridge.

"As food becomes plentiful, not eating becomes virtuous," says Sam. "Except it has always been virtuous – look at Early Christian ascetics. Or even 60s crash diets."

“The trouble with vegan food,” says Harry Stow Crat, “Is that it takes such a darned long time to eat! And it’s all in little bits so it falls off your fork. Plus it tastes of nothing and after you've eaten it you're still hungry. Give me a bacon sandwich any day.”

But Harry earns enough to restore the orangery by selling over-priced vegan and gluten-free snacks made from oats and spinach grown on his estates. Caro gets the recipes out of Vegetables for Victory by Ambrose Heath.

"Shops at stately homes sell such ghastly wares," she explains. “Tea towels, novelty pencils and pot pourri, oven gloves in the shape of fish, and everything covered with weedy water-colours of flowers."

When I was at university in Norwich, I took a friend to a caff I often went to. It was always full of art students. She boggled slightly when I ate a cake with pink icing and shreds of desiccated coconut. Few of my fellow-students went to cafés in town (though they went to wine bars and ate a lot of ratatouille). But it was OK to go to a tearoom in a converted Tudor cloth hall.


We like to poke fun at the “mid-century menu” – everything suspended in gelatine, on a bed of lettuce. This cuisine wasn’t sold as “slimming”, but it can’t have contained many calories. The gelatine bulked out the ingredients, so you got a slice of something that only looked like food. Jellied chicken soup, anyone? From the 30s (and probably earlier) to the 70s, there was a trend for food that was mainly air or gelatine. Sorbets (water ices), soufflés, apple snow (apple puree and whipped egg white), strawberry mousse, savoury terrines. They were a debased version of Mrs Beeton-style posh food. Those Victorian banquets with endless courses probably needed dishes that didn’t have much food value. (You didn’t eat all the food, there was a menu and you could choose, and portions were small. It was more of a tasting menu, and if Giles Coren is to be believed, this idea lives on. I mean the idea that you eat food for its taste, or rarity, or exoticism, or unusual ingredients, or to admire its presentation – not because you are hungry.)


Theresa May scrapes mould off jam and eats it – this is very Stow-Crat. They may even say “It’s penicillin – it’s good for you”, or “Waste not, want not”.

Gingerbread Easter Bunnies are on sale at Costas just after Christmas. This means they have three months to sell the things. Creme Eggs on sale in the Coop, ditto. It happens every year and no amount of middle-class whingeing is going to change it. Do the Upwards really think they can persuade big firms like Costa and the Coop not to use strategies that make them money?


Some restaurants deliberately increase the noise! Microphones collect customer and kitchen noise and pipe it back into the dining area ("dial in the buzz"). (Via Twitter. It’s called “acoustic reflection”. Really great for anyone with hearing problems.)


More here, and links to the rest.

You Are What You Eat 10

Coffee shops, ranked by poshness:
Percy Ingle 
Greggs
Costa
Starbucks
Nero
Pret 
"Oh we've got this little independent place we go to."
(@JonnElledge)

Although, oddly, Upwards don't go to independent bakers...

Well, my 8am has been all about kicking a deflated football around a playground & trying to fight off a herring gull from my brioches. (@_katherine_may_ She can even name the species of gull.)

I'm not saying this campsite is middle class but some girls cycled by extolling the virtues of the 'duck vegan wrap' they had for lunch, the man in the next tent has a coffee grinder and one of the children, when asked during the Bushcraft session what food they are allergic to, replied 'Sushi'! (ABS)

The surgeon told me that there were three types of knife/finger accidents: the oyster-opening one, the avocado one, and the separating-two-frozen-burgers one. A paradigm of the British class system perhaps? (Letter to Guardian, April 2017)

Middle-class problems. You are at a friend’s and they grill some halloumi and offer you some. Do you accept politely and spoil your dinner? Are they going to produce more food later? Do they think a few pieces of grilled halloumi is an adequate dinner?

Middle-class problems. A friend invites you round, and says she’ll cook. (This is not “being invited to dinner”.) There are several other people there, and you drink wine and chat for hours, and then she cooks some noodles mixed with ONE cut-up fried courgette for the six of you. You get home at midnight and make cheese on toast.

Middle-class problems. You go to some evening “do”, like a talk or the opening of a picture show. There is wine, and trays of very superior nibbles, tasty but tiny and you only get a handful. Do you suggest to a friend that you go and get a pizza somewhere, or is this supposed to be dinner? If it is, can you grab a whole plate of chicken goujons?

Middle-class problems. The same thing happens at weddings: how do you make an adequate lunch out of tiny sandwiches and mini-quiches? Plus, you lose count of how many you’ve eaten. Is there or isn’t there going to be a sit-down meal at 3pm? On the way home, you eat walnut cake at a garden centre because you are starving.

Middle class problems. You go to a café with a lovely menu full of fashionable food and vegetarian options. But the shredded red cabbage comes in tiny chips, in a ramekin, without dressing, so there is nothing to stick it together. You try to eat it out of the ramekin, but it falls off the fork and you only get a few tiny fragments at a time. Do you tip out the ramekin onto your plate and ask for a spoon, or give up? There is some baby spinach and rocket as well – a few leaves to make the plate look covered, splashed with a very hot mustard dressing that you want to avoid. The pastry on the vegetarian dumplings is so hard you can’t cut it with the very blunt knife provided. It slips and the rocket goes everywhere. You try to eat a rocket leaf but it is too big and sticks out of your mouth, making you look like a manatee browsing on seaweed. You yearn for the days of risotto or chicken supreme, where you got a bowlful of small bits of stuff in mush. You didn’t have to cut anything up, it all stuck together, and every mouthful was the same. And it was pale beige. And FILLING.

Middle class problems. You go out to a posh restaurant where every course is “plated” – a tiny stack of stuff amid smears and blobs of sauce. As soon as you try to eat any of it, it falls apart. It amounts to about three mouthfuls and there’s no way of scooping up any of the sauce. The other diners don’t mind because they eat biscuits and cake all day and are never hungry. Dining at expensive restaurants is just a performance.

When I went to university I was surprised to find that the canteen served “tea”, ie supper, from 5, and shut at 7. I went a few times on my own (I like stodge followed by trifle), but girls didn’t go – it was all groups of boys. When – and what – did the girls eat? We had kitchens, but I never saw anybody cooking in one. I moved in the second term to some converted US airforce barracks and had the communal kitchen to myself. The canteen was working class (though I met friends for lunch there), and there were a couple of middle-class coffee shops – literally on a higher level. I think people sold sandwiches in the student union, and there was a supermarket. And when the very classy Sainsbury Centre opened we Art History students ate lunch there in the lovely restaurant nearly every day. You could get a cheap cheese roll at the Chaplaincy, and there was a burger bar on an even lower level than the canteen. We got a free (fried) breakfast at our converted airfield but again – girls didn’t go, and eventually I got the message. There was a bar at the airfield too, but I never went there either.

From Facebook: Whenever I use the automatic checkout machines and walk away I feel guilty as if I haven't actually paid... (Combines Upward love of needless guilt with Upward obsession about purchasing behaviour. See the Upward who feels guilty saying “Nothing to declare” when he has nothing to declare.)

More here, and links to the rest.

Choose Your Words Carefully 1

Does your vocabulary give away your class background?

When posh people can’t think of a word, or want to refer to something that’s beneath their notice, they call it a doofer or doobry. Middle-class Eileen Weybridge calls it a thingie, pronouncing the G. Upper-class Harry Stow-Crat refers to “the doings.”

Upper-middle Samantha Upward says “damn” or “bugger”. Her mother said “Oh, dash!” Caroline Stow-Crat says “sugar!”

Stow-Crat and Upward couples call each other “darling”, which makes all the other classes sick.

Sam calls the shop Marks and Sparks, Jen Teale and Eileen call it Marks, Caro never goes there.

Sam uses a lot of French phrases because it doesn’t occur to her that people might not understand them (joie de vivre, raison d'etre, de rigueur). The Stow-Crats obsess about their children learning French from the age of two because they’ll need it for skiing. Jen overcorrects foreign words and calls bruschetta “brooshetta”.

The Upwards and Stow-crats call all shades of blue-plus-red “purple” because lilac, violet, burgundy etc sound like colour names on a shade card. They’d say “primrose yellow” not “primrose”. They used to say “hairwash” for “shampoo” and “washing up machine” for “dishwasher” and “drying up cloth” for “teatowel” because shampoo sounds like a brand name, dishwasher sounds American and teatowel is inaccurate (and very Teale). Upwards still throw their rubbish into a “waste paper basket” and not a bin.

Sam tries to avoid neologisms and Americanisms. She would never use the word pants in the singular or call trousers anything but trousers. Her husband Gideon might say undercrackers for a laugh. Jen says knickers - her daughter Christine refers to undies, underwear or underpants.

Sam avoids Teale words like crispy, curvy, silky, herby, clicky because they sound like baby talk. And either something is made of silk or it isn’t. She thinks that Jen is mostly likely to talk like this, referring to tummies and botties, but there’s a certain kind of Stow Crat who says “We’ll meet soonsies”, and talks of Chrissy pressies and getting wetty in the rain.

More here, and links to the rest.

How to Talk Posh is now an ebook available here.