12 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the times
treats, such as gingerbread, Eccles cakes,
custards and dried fruit puddings, are
laced with cinnamon, cloves, mace and
nutmeg — the bounty of imperial trade.
For a nation mocked for our bland palate
we have always adored spice.
Scoff is a superb book for snacking on,
with its short chapters devoted to gin, avo-
cados, or “bread and butter”, which Vogler
notes was an afternoon tea dish in itself
served ready-spread (a staple of my own
childhood). She serves a buffet of obscure
facts from historical cookery books, alongwith keen culinary readings of Austen,
Dickens and the Brontës, who I’d never
noticed wrote so much about food.
Vogler’s style is warm, amused and
personal, although she expresses a contro-
versial loathing of fish and chips, “indigest-
ible and oily batter”, while revealing that
first chippies were Jewish-run, then Irish,
since mass-frying fell to immigrants as an
arduous, dirty task. There are recipes too,
both ancient and modern versions of
dishes such as parkin, pease porridge or
nettle soup.
Most gratifying is discovering that ourFor a nation mocked
for our bland palate
we have always
adored spice
kitchen kitsch
British cuisine was
not renowned for its
sophistication in the 1970sbooks
It’s class war
over dinner
(or should that
be lunch?)
Food and class go
together like fish and
chips. Janice Turner
feasts on a fascinating
book about Britain’s
culinary history
A
s he sent me off to buy bread for
a family party, my Yorkshire
father issued a stern order.
“And we don’t want those
French sticks,” he said. “People
here eat baps.” That was 20 years ago, but I
always think of his words when entering
the Doncaster branch of Morrisons, piled
with baguettes, sourdough and rosemary
focaccia. My affected London ways went
mainstream: people here don’t just eat baps.
Taste in food, as Pen Vogler shows in this
erudite yet lively compendium, is not just
about preferred flavour, but what items in
your shopping basket say about who you
are or, more precisely, who you aspire to
be. Scoff, of course, means both to fill your
face and to sneer. But this book shows the
foodstuffs regarded as elite can tumble out
of fashion once enjoyed by hoi polloi.
Take the centuries-long competition
between coffee and tea to be the elite
British beverage. In Pepys’s time the
coffeehouse was the gathering place for
high-end gossip, until writers including
Pope, Coleridge and Sydney Smith eulo-
gised tea as a drink for the thinking classes.
Then, as the price of tea fell and its
popularity rendered it a basic foodstuff, so
its status tumbled.
The upper classes then tried to differen-
tiate themselves from socially inferior tea
drinkers by means of etiquette. “He’s very
MIF” (milk in first, as served by proles) was
a 1930s putdown, while drinking a cuppa
with meals (like my parents in the 1970s)
was appallingly common. Thus the reprise
of coffee, in its fancy, modern double-decaf
macchiato form, was almost inevitable.
The term “builders’ tea” to denote basic PG
Tips is used by middle-class people affect-
ing to be unaffected, as Vogler notes wrily,
but never by builders themselves.
Similarly, fashions in bread have veered
from white to brown and back again
several times. Brown was for centuries fed
to the lowest servants and farmhands,
while the upper classes nibbled white rolls.
Yet not only — as we know now — was
white less nutritious, but white flour was
also easier to adulterate with chalk or even
powdered bone. Yet white bread remained
the luxury product until poor people could
enjoy it too, with mass-produced aerated
loaves. Cue the middle classes rediscover-
ing wholemeal, until that too was eclipsed
by the “artisan” fusspottery of sourdough.
This new raising agent, bubbling away in
many springtime lockdown kitchens, was
popularised by US settlers who didn’t pack
yeast when their wagons headed west.
The Christmas turkey follows a similar
arc. Initially it was deemed superior to the
humbler, less meaty goose that poor city
workers saved up for all year in “goose
clubs” to be cooked in communal ovens.
Vogler reminds us that Scrooge was
shocked by visiting spirits into generosity,
bought the Cratchits the biggest turkey in
the shop and effectively elevated them to
the middle class. But soon bourgeois ubiq-
uity set in, along with freakish farming
methods; some turkey breeds must be
artificially inseminated because they are
too obese to mate. Now there is cachet, and
a God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen retro vibe,
in serving goose.
Scoff is full of such fascinating, intelli-
gent dissections of familiar foods and culi-
nary practices. Ever wondered why we
speak of “school dinners”, even in the
south where the midday meal is known as
lunch? The answer, Vogler tells us, is
northern philanthropists in Bradford and
Manchester — Victorian Marcus Rash-
fords — were the first to ignore the 1834
Poor Law Act (that made it illegal to pro-
vide charity outside the workhouse) and
serve “dinners” to hungry schoolkids. Al-
though, as Vogler notes, smarter private
schools have lately started calling servers
“lunch ladies”.
Our native cooking may still be (unfair-
ly) an international joke, but Vogler allows
that our history means “Brits are surpris-
ingly open minded about other national
cuisines”: we flocked into Italian immi-
grant cafés after the Second World War
and made chicken tikka a national dish.
Moreover, French patisserie may be richer
and more refined, but ours can claim to be
more flavoursome: our most ancient localScoff
A History of Food
and Class in Britain
by Pen VoglerAtlantic, 470pp; £S
A
a
bABook of the week
modern food faddishness is far from new.
Indeed, Scoff introduces us to Dame Alice
de Bryene, a 15th-century noblewoman
who made her own almond milk, or rather
“mylk”, a popular dairy substitute during
Lent, the period when cows needed to nur-
ture their own calves rather than humans.
Both then and now, Vogler writes, it was “a
symbol of whiteness and purity, of a
cleansed body and mind”.
She also has an acute eye for how the
ways a food is served or preserved have
their own class signifiers. Tinned goods are
much disdained and ridiculed, as in Monty
Python’s Spam song. Yet, as George Orwell
remarked, the Great War couldn’t have
been fought without bully beef, nor could
food banks function today without long-
lasting canned donations.
I recall a weird phase in my childhood
when my parents, who grew their own veg-
etables, started serving tinned peas, car-
rots and potatoes. Although far inferior to
fresh ones, my mother had been persuaded
that they were “modern”. The irony, as Vo-
gler points out, is middle-class gourmets
love to fill their larders with preserved veg-
etables, as long as they are in jars.
If, like me, you cannot stand in a super-
market queue without trying to deduce a
person’s life history from whether they’re
buying Golden Shred marmalade or
Bonne Maman jam, oxtail soup or quinoa,
you will find much useful intelligence
in Scoff.3-6-1-6-6-7-5-1-