You Are What You Eat 15 (In Quotes)

“Imaginative food, beautifully presented” is a compliment. But what’s wrong with classic food, plainly presented? The American phrase “gussied up” is useful. Or “gourmet up the pot roast”, as Carrie Snodgress was urged to do in Diary of a Mad Housewife. (She probably added sherry, cream and a sprinkling of chives.)

Consider yourself too good for normal meals because you read the recipes in The Guardian? Then you’ll love these needlessly complicated versions of basic food. (Daily Mash)

The term “elevated” is bandied about a lot. It's used repeatedly on cooking reality shows. On those series, a contestant prepares a popular, common dish, and is told that it needs to be “elevated.” The term means that a hamburger or a taco might be “elevated” by using a more expensive and tricky to prepare cut of meat, or a rarer cheese, a specially made sauce, and perhaps the design and look of the meal may be different and fancier than all of the standard versions of the foodstuff. Chris Chan

My husband and I are planning a lovely weeklong staycation with his relatives—eight adults in total. My mother-in-law loves having meals together and usually makes the food, but she’s a terrible cook, bless her. She tries, and we get by with basic staples like tacos and prepackaged lasagna. But I really love good food, so it’s a real shame to do that for a week. ... To add to the issue, if I offer even light advice like, “I bet that some fresh basil would be amazing in this delicious tomato soup,” even when my mother-in-law welcomes the change, the rest of the dinner guests make comments like, “Oh, there Wendy goes again, wanting to make things fancy! She can’t just leave it alone,” which really dampens the mood. My husband loves my food and is very supportive of me, but if I let him, he would unleash. Am I destined to eat boring basics in exciting food cities? (Writer-in to Dear Prudie, slate.com)

My daughter Bella has a great playgroup that meets once a week after school. We were really lucky to get into this group. The girls come from some of the wealthiest families at the school, and since our family is more working class, we love that Bella is able to see how the other side lives and maybe even look for something to aspire to one day. So far Bella has had so much fun with all the girls. But last week I got a nasty email from one of the mothers. I sent some homemade cookies and store-bought veggies and dip for the snack last week, and apparently this was not up to snuff! The mothers said that my vegetables were clearly not homegrown and organic and that they could taste the pesticides and preservatives on them. They asked if I knew that ranch dip is high in cholesterol and saturated fat which leads to heart disease. I was in tears reading this email. Their assumption that I had no idea how to feed my daughter was so insulting. I emailed them back saying that I was unsure what particular brands of veggies, dip and baking items to buy, and received another email suggesting I start a garden. Prudie, we live in an apartment complex. I am unsure how to respond. I really, really want my daughter to be happy and have friends with the right values and aspirations. But I have no idea how to make these women happy. I went to the farmers’ market an hour away last weekend to look for some appropriate items to send for next week, but the market was so expensive. I don’t want my daughter to get kicked out of this playgroup, especially now that she’s so happy. How can I handle these clean-food moms? (Writer-in to Dear Prudie at slate.com)

When I was studying quinoa in early 2000s rural Ecuador, it was often considered a peasant food. 'Inferior', 'backward', even 'unhealthy'. Today in the West the exact same food is considered aspirational, fancy and thus innately healthy. (James Wong @Botanygeek)

David Brent’s spiritual home is a Harvester restaurant west of the M25. (Will Hodgkinson)

In the most deprived parts of London the kids rush to the local takeaway shop (normally chicken shop due to price) after school to get their dinner. They’ve been given £1-2 a day to get something as they know they are not getting anything at home. Their parents both work two jobs and don’t have time to shop or cook. (@cjbearcpfc)

More here, and links to the rest.

What to Wear 8

Caro Stow-Crat says: “Please, no fancy dress after 40. Though Harry did once go to a fancy dress ball as a bishop...”

A welcome erosion of class structures has seen top hats relegated first to the top shelves of cupboards and wardrobes, and then donated to become a staple of Amateur Dramatic Club costume collections. (Lucy Adlington, Stitches in Time) Thomas the Tank Engine’s Fat Controller (Sir Topham Hatt) was originally the “Fat Director” – a 20s caricature capitalist in a morning coat and top hat, grown fat on the profits of a private railway company. When the railways were reprivatised, why didn’t he revert to being a director? He's still an outdated stereotype.

Caro wonders when a bowtie became a “dicky bow”? A dicky is a fake blouse consisting of a Mao collar and enough material to show under a V-necked jumper. It's a useful way of using up remnants, and will delude your friends that you own more blouses than you actually do. A “dicky bird” is what vulgar people call a bird.

Samantha says “I refuse to buy my grandchildren clothes covered in writing and logos”. She buys them clothes at Muji and Uniqlo. Sharon Definitely buys her daughter (Madison) pink T shirts that read “Little Lady” but also “Girls Can Do Anything”. Her son Jayden dresses in scaled-down army uniform.

Lower middle-class Jen Teale uses shoe deodorisers, Caro chucks smelly trainers, but Samantha insists on wearing them out. She may Google for an old-fashioned (cheap) home remedy (baking soda) that doesn’t work. 

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” This advice made sense in the days (80s and earlier) when a secretary wore a blouse and skirt, while the lady boss wore a suit.

I’m old enough to remember when we called face veils “yashmaks” and made jokes about them. Perhaps those old white men who moan about “political correctness” could cast their minds back. Nobody forced us to stop joking about yashmaks, we just stopped. We don’t give small children replica guns any more, either. Or sweet cigarettes.

Young people holiday in the far East and come back with batik sarongs. (In my day they went to India and came back with kurtas and kaftans – but not saris.) But no Upward goes to Whitechapel or Ridley Road market to buy a long flowery dress as worn by Muslim ladies, or a glittery shalwar kameez – or even a cotton shalwar kameez. They’re very cool in hot weather and are perfect for the office. Likewise, Boris is appalled by niqabs but not by a Carmelite nun’s outfit. The Times (August 2018) shows “manxi” dresses that are very like a Muslim woman’s dress, but no connection is made. Is this crossover? Cultural appropriation? Caro wears a genuine pashmina to the opera, over an oxblood taffeta evening dress with a wide skirt. Her great-grandmother wore a genuine Indian paisley shawl.

When I arrived at university in the 70s my sunglasses with pale pink frames puzzled other students. I seemed to be middle class – didn’t I know that the colour pink was common? And pink plastic! I also wore a pink mohair jumper – I was going through a 50s phase. I was ahead of the trend – lurid mohair jumpers were a punk fashion in the later 70s. And this was in a decade when we were supposed to be breaking down barriers of all kinds and creating an egalitarian society, free of all prejudice. They dressed entirely in blue denim or brown corduroy. (Can you still get brown denim? They never seemed to grasp what “prejudice” meant, either.)

In 2018 Teales wear 7/8 jeans, white T shirts and cardigans or jackets in a subdued, plain colour. Usually blue, navy, and grey. They look almost Boden. They achieve this look by buying cheap clothes and discarding them as soon as the material goes sad and shabby. They ruthlessly “edit” their wardrobes, and wash everything after one wearing. They iron their T shirts. Upwards, on the other hand, have “favourite” pieces they are sentimentally attached to and persist in wearing them however grey, bobbly and sagging. They fail to notice that modern fabrics don’t last like the old-fashioned kind. Teale clothes, being featureless, have no associations and are just replaced by more of the same.

More here, and links to the rest.

Canny Upwards in the 70s used Catherine Milinaire's Cheap Chic as a style bible.

The Stow-Crats: Update

The Stow-Crats, Harry and Caroline, are very self-deprecating — they can afford to be.

Poor Lady Lucan! The TV audience found her “cold”, and thought it incomprehensible that she’d had no contact with her children for 35 years. She said: “I bumped into George once in a park. We didn’t say much.” George is her son. Her abusive husband provoked her into emotional outbursts and filmed them as evidence that she was “unstable”, so that he could get a divorce and custody of the chidren. She made it clear that people of her class weren’t allowed to experience or show emotion of any kind. It was redefined as madness. (This was clearly a shock to people who are used to reality TV, and interviewees breaking down in tears on cue.)

From a Times obituary, 2014: After a rackety youth on the continent gambling and having affairs, she settled down. Her husband had to teach her how to make a cup of tea. When she moved into a flat, she wondered why it was so cold – she didn’t realise you have to turn radiators on.

It used to be the thing for Stow-Crats and Weybridges to despise all foreigners, while Bohemian Upwards fawned on them.

More here.

And more on the aristocratic lifestyle in David Cannadine's The Country House.

Quotes about Boarding Schools

Still wish you could give your children "all the advantages"?

Mount adds a brief exegesis on Spartan schooling (boys were flogged at random to keep them on their toes. Needless to say it appealed enormously to the sociopaths who constructed the British boarding system.) (Catherine Nixey on Harry Mount’s Odyssey, July 2015)

While presenting the Hampton Court flower show, Monty Don said that he’d been sent to boarding school at seven “from chalk to ericaceous soil”. He was so miserable that for a long time he couldn’t bear to look at rhododendrons and azaleas. (Arthur Marshall, once a prep-school master, wrote a book about them called Whimpering in the Rhododendrons.)

After boarding school in Sussex – where she began a Resistance Movement which saw her put unhappy girls on trains home, but later redeemed herself by becoming Head Girl... (Obituary of Jill Hyem, writer of Tenko)

As long as you’re awake, you’re being watched. The first year was miserable. (Stephen Mangan)

Children in the Britain of [the 20s and 30s] did not always enjoy a happy family life. The upper classes shunted them off to boarding schools and the lower classes forced them into jobs at a young age. (ruemorguepress.com)

The novelist William Boyd, who started boarding there aged nine, described his nine-and-a-half years at Gordonstoun’s junior and senior schools as “a type of penal servitude”. Smaller children were at the mercy of older ones... In the 1970s there was no central heating. Windows were left open at night: in the winter, the children could wake up with snow on their blankets. (Guardian)

Boarding school is utterly brutal and hideous. It’s a secretive empire where you’re brought up without love... I find it difficult to talk about my feelings, even to identify them sometimes. (Katharine Hamnett March 2015)

Being married to an Old Etonian is a bit like living with a war veteran. Most of the time, they remain stoically silent about the things they’ve seen and done. (Jemima Lewis)

Sending kids away to boarding schools at 7: “privileged abandonment”.

Prep schools have proliferated, but private secondary schools have not. The head of a girls’ prep school in West London says some parents “almost explode” from stress. “The pressure is beyond boiling point now. Children ... will be sitting six or seven separate schools’ exams... There are so many prep-school children and so many more prep schools and no new senior schools to speak of. There aren’t enough places... We’re having to try to prepare 10-year-olds to have sophisticated exam technique as well as knowing how to answer the questions, such as writing legibly, looking at the clock and dividing up the questions, not spending too long on a question that is worth only one mark, allowing time to review what you’ve done. It’s not just about aptitude, it’s about those tricks to go with the aptitude.” Another head says: “There is very little innocence and freedom left for children... pressure on places is becoming such that parents are beside themselves with anxiety to get their children into schools.” 

Earl Spencer told the Times he hated boarding and wanted to go to a state school (January 2015). He found his first boarding school cold and unpleasant, with a “terrifying headmaster”, military-style drill and a culture in which boys whose work was not up to standard were caned on their bare buttocks... “I was sleepless for six months before going. But it was the done thing, so off I went... straight into survival mode.” Those who couldn’t do moderately well at exams or sport “had an absolutely miserable time”.

So what's the point of it all?

The Head of Cheltenham Ladies College suggests that homework and prep are Victorian and stressful and should be banned. (June 2015)

The master of Wellington, Anthony Seldon, replies: We shouldn’t be shielding girls or boys from anxiety and stress – we should be helping them to cope with it because they are essential and inevitable in life. That’s the whole point of the wellbeing agenda. A lot of people don’t understand it. It is not about avoidance, it is about learning to cope with the inevitable things that life will throw at us. (There is always some reason why we should be cruel to children.)

Currently Westminster’s all-party parliamentary group on SOCIAL MOBILITY has published several excellent papers on CHARACTER AND RESILIENCE... noncognitive “soft skills – including DEFERRED GRATIFICATION, SELF-DISCIPLINE, APPLICATION, RESILIENCE AND REFLECTIVENESS...  As John M Doris points out, “discourse of character often plays against a background of social stratification and elitism”. (Obs April 2015)

Private schools don't have a monopoly on "character". They have a monopoly on power and privilege. (Sathnam Sanghera)

Tristram Hunt ... invoked Winston Churchill in his call for good character to be instilled at school: “Churchill was bang on when he said failure is not fatal, and it is the courage to continue that counts.” (Times Dec 2014)

Anthony Seldon also mentioned grit, resilience – and morality. “Every Monday at Wellington, two prefects remind pupils about the importance of values they have chosen: this week it was respect, courage, integrity and kindness. Entrusting this role to pupils not only gives them a sense of responsibility but also carries a greater weight with their peers. We set our pupils difficult challenges inside and outside the classroom. Reflection and self-awareness, helped by regular “mindfulness” sessions, are also part of the mix.”

Things that can’t be tested: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, question asking, humour, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, civic-mindedness, self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, leadership, compassion, courage, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, resourcefulness, spontaneity, humility. (This list went the rounds. Is this “character”? Or “moral compass”? Not much use if you can’t read and don’t know anything, or don’t know how to do anything. And they spelled it “enthusiasum”.)

Private schools need a constant intake of pupils (and their fees) to survive. If they can't do better in the league tables, they have to stress intangibles like the above, and pretend they are a unique selling point.


Be honest, what is the point of it all?

As Brooks (2008) notes ‘differences in the social composition of schools and colleges and their norms and practices can have considerable impact on the social capital available to young people and the resources upon which they can draw when making their decisions about higher education’. (Coming to Terms with Being a Working-Class Academic)

It isn’t about money, or class or anything but the style of education. (Telegraph Dec 2014 lies through its teeth.)

More here.

Class is Dead, Long Live Class

Have you seen her curtains?
I think she's wearing them!

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Dad was also an alderman (guessing that's what the get-up is). Profoundly petit bourgeois. (‏@oitimesthree Comment on a picture of Margaret Thatcher with her family in the 40s.)

Quite recently, a group of friends told me that “class has disappeared”. But in the week of the Rochester white van England flags Twitterstorm, Reuters calls England “class-obsessed”.
And the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has produced the “National Statistics Socio-economic Classifications (NS-SEC)... the new occupational scale to replace the Registrar General's scale”.

If you want to say that something has “disappeared”, you can always redefine it very narrowly. You can also redefine “disappeared” so that it means “a bit less common than when I was young”. OK, so class doesn’t exist any more – in the “once a villein, always a villein” sense. There is, as people like to say, more “social mobility” now. I think this translates as “equality of opportunity”. If you get an education and work hard, you can climb up the class ladder. But that assumes there is a ladder for you to climb up.

I’ve always wanted to climb down. Weybridges, Teales and Definitelies have more fun. Nobody has said it out loud – but since the war and the disappearance of servants, the middle classes have learned to live more like the working classes. And they seem quite happy. (Except that they whinge all the time – but they’ll always do that.) What does that mean? They cook and clean for themselves, they eat fast food and takeaways and ready meals, they eat cheap food that’s easy and quick to prepare (often borrowed from European peasants). They live with their children - they’re involved with their children’s lives. They don’t eat meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They no longer change three times a day into outfits that need hooking up at the back by a helper. In the 70s there was a fashion for living in your kitchen – time to bring it back.

I live in an area that has a reputation for being 'upper-class', but - having worked all over the country and with a wide mix of people in many different situations (from minor royalty to refuse operatives!) - I would say that the old ideas of class have more or less gone, but snobbery (and inverted snobbery) most certainly has not. I very rarely encounter anyone these days who gives a fig about what social class others come from, but that won't stop them decrying another's choice of curtains etc (or indeed partner!) as being beneath/above them etc. Personal experience does indeed confirm that the most vociferous supporters of the 'class' system are those who traditionally (like my decidedly 'middle-class', but with working-class roots, wife!) consider themselves 'working-class'. (A friend writes.)

Yes, this phenomenon has gone, it has completely disappeared, there is still this phenomenon that is very very like it, but it is something completely different.

Oh, I do see. The people who say “class doesn’t exist any more” mean that “nobody believes it’s hereditary any more – it’s all about socioeconomic groupings now”. Which it is. Which it always was. And perhaps nobody dares use class labels in public any more.

But there’s a lingering belief in some kind of hereditary principle – how could that possibly work? Unless we’re still pretending that Normans are genetically distinct from Saxons. Perhaps people fear they aren’t in the top layer (and unless you have a hereditary title you aren’t), and dread that anyone “above” them will despise them.

So perhaps when people say that the class system has disappeared, they mean they disapprove of it. Or rather, they want to be seen and heard to disapprove of it. And also, they fear that if they admit it exists, their hearers will assume that they place themselves quite high up the rankings, and look down on those “below”. Some assume that anyone who mentions class or writes about it thinks they are an aristocrat and despises everyone else as a pleb, and goes about wearing a tiara graciously waving at genuflecting serfs. (I never wear a tiara, and out of the list above, I have been to Bond Street and Jermyn Street. Anybody can. But they might move me on if I started busking.)

And if there’s no such thing as a class system any more (and how could such a thing just disappear?), why doesn’t Patsy Palmer get asked to narrate nature documentaries?

Classy Quotes 17

[My mother was] really ashamed of our toaster, so she kept it in the cupboard until we could afford the perfect one that could be put on display. (Fashion designer Emilia Wickstead)

In debunking superficial and unilateral forms of etiquette, we have lost sight of the importance of genuine courtesy in human relationships. And in attacking despotic and abusive adult rule, we have failed to cultivate appropriate respect for just and rightful authority… (David Ausubel, 1961)

Mindfulness classes in 2014 are what interior design classes and knitting Kaffe Fassett jumpers were in the 1980s #middleclasshobby (Colonel Blimp ‏@adamcreen)

His parents lived in reduced circumstances in South Kensington, where they courageously kept up appearances... He knew to the finest shade of nuance the exact levels of English middle-class life. (Obituary of Bentley Bridgewater, Indy 1996)

“The class system [is] laid painfully bare on the plane.” (Guardian on a programme about airports, June 2014)

"Have you had any maids or cooks that were satanical, made your life hell?" Libby Purves, Radio 4, 21st century. (Robert Rotifer)

"Quintessential Cotswolds England. Bastards won't get you here!" (Estate agent outside thatched cottage, Under Offer)

35% of British people admit to being Middle Class, though 60%< have middle class jobs. (The untrustworthy @byzantinepower)

In the US, 99% of us are middle class. No one will admit to being anything else. (Bill Thayer ‏@LacusCurtius)

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Quotes 15

Novelist Nina Bawden was born in 1925 and raised in Ilford, Essex, in "a rather nasty housing estate that [her] mother despised". (Wikipedia)

They preached the lessons of moderation, cleanliness, simplicity, self-denial and humility with an admirable thoroughness, low-church to the core… There was no need for place mats as the meal was to be cold, but place mats were invariably laid. (Jerusalem the Golden, Margaret Drabble)

WASPs took pride in "good posture, genteel manners, personal hygiene, pointless discipline, the ability to sit still for long periods of time" (Wikipedia on WASPs)

My three best girlfriends were daughters of earls… but their upbringings had been even colder and lonelier than mine… I didn’t know how out of touch I was. I thought that I was worldly and sophisticated, but I had no idea what the world was like. I became aware of how oddly sheltered and yet at the same time unprotected I had been. (aristocratic Ivana Lowell, Why Not Say What Happened?)

"Ah," Roland cried delightedly, "I see we have a new class now. There used to be those who had the tele and those who were above it. Now we have those who have the tele and are still above it." (A Bit off the Map and Other Stories, Angus Wilson)

In a really nice hotel or restaurant, things like old fraying stained suitcases and terrible clothes equal terrible rooms, uninterested service, and bad tables. (Stephanie Pierson, Males, Nails, Sample Sales (She also says that good clothes will win you the job, but warns that in Europe you get what you pay for – smart clothes and luggage won’t get you an upgrade to first class, or a better hotel room.)

One Facebook user, Jennifer Huggins, wrote on Waitrose's Facebook page: "Please stop the free coffee at Barry Waitrose, it is putting me off shopping in the store. People are coming with two cards two free coffee no shopping, with their Tesco bags." (Telegraph Dec 2013

It was a strange time in Prague. The city was awash with young Westerners, mostly Americans, and the Americans … were all setting up small businesses. There was great snobbery, with those who'd been there for eighteen months greatly despising those who'd been there for a mere six. (JP)

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
(T.S. Eliot The “area” was a small courtyard at basement level, below the street. Steps led up to a gate in the railings.)

Virginia Woolf found “ordinary people… repulsive in the mass”. In 1915 she  describes train journeys taken with “shabby clerks and dressmakers” and women with string bags. Buying her own food is a “degrading but rather amusing business. I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously.” In one of her novels (Night and Day), an upper-middle-class man meets a lower-middle-class woman and joins her suburban family for “an unpleasant meal under a very bright light”. Leonard Woolf loathed “cheap humanity” in “red villas”. Virginia thought Leonard’s “uneasiness in the presence of the lower classes; always suspects them, is never genial with them” could be explained by the fact that he was not a “gentleman”. Does anybody read her novels any more? (Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants)

A character in a novel by Enid Bagnold dismisses an applicant for the post of cook as “a born lavatory attendant”. (The Duchess of Denver in Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison talks of the victims of a poisoner being “born murderees”.)

Councils aren't against non-chainstore spaces as long as they conform to a Farrow & Ball model of middle-class individuality. (Guardian Nov 2013)

Research suggests the upper classes are less cognizant of others, worse at reading other people's emotions and less altruistic than individuals in lower social classes. "If you occupy these higher echelons, you start to see yourself as more entitled, and develop a heightened self-focus," [researcher Paul] Piff told the Guardian. "Your social environment is likely more buffered against the impact of your actions, and you might not perceive the risks of your behaviour because you are better resourced, you have the money for lawyers and so on." (Feb 27 2012)

Who are you calling an average Joe you two up two down 2.4 children Just for Men mediocre tea and digestive swilling Punto driving middle England Harvester frequenting Mail reading Saturday lawn mowing non-entity you? (Commenter on lions-tour-extra.com, 2007 The riposte: Black poloneck man is having a hormone imbalance. Quick get some sushi or latte or something!!!)

The idea of being stuck in some concrete complex surrounded by sunburnt, overweight, Daily Mail reading, Harvester-frequenting, Chelsea supporters piling their plates high with a full English and “free” cocktail at 9.30am, is not an experience I’d pay for. (Letter to the Guardian, 2013-05-26)

More here, and links to the rest.