by Jilly Cooper
On Monday, aping the upper classes, Eileen Weybridge feels it her duty to pick up the litter dropped by trippers in the nearby beechwoods before she goes out to bridge or a Conservative coffee morning.
Believing that upper-class women spend their leisure hours doing the flowers, the Weybridges are heavily into flower arrangement by numbers, ramming salmon-pink ‘glads’ into green foam blocks, so that they stand up in the plastic ‘dole-phin’ vase and pick up the apricot décor in the lounge.
Yellow ‘chrysanths’ and button dahlias have always been a talking point too, when arranged in the white basket held by a naked cupid on the dining-room table when Howard’s business associates come to dinner. While the orchids Howard raised in the ‘conserve-a-tory’ (the Stow-Crats say ‘c’nserv’tri’) look so well in driftwood in the vestibule. The expression ‘fresh flowers’, to distinguish them from dried or plastic flowers, is also very Weybridge.
Although Jen Teale lives in a house with a number, she has re-named it ‘JenBry’ which combines both her and Bryan’s names; she puts it in inverted commas on her notepaper. This drives the postman crackers. Her wrought-iron gate also incorporates the name. On either side Bryan has built a bright yellow wall, shaped like a doily. A plastic flowerpot container, filled with purple and shocking pink petunias, hangs by the mauve front door. Jen remembers to remove the dead heads night and morning. There are no creepers up the house. Jen doesn’t want earwigs in the bath. Most of the back and front gardens have been crazy-paved by Bryan because it looks so much neater, but there are a few crescent-shaped flower beds which might have been dug out by a pastry cutter. Here in neat rows in the spring stand military lines of blue grape hyacinths, yellow ‘daffs’ and scarlet tulips. In the summer these are replaced by white alyssum, French marigolds, Oxford blue lobelia and scarlet geraniums, or, by way of a change, calceolarias and salvias. Jen loves bedding plants because, once they’ve finished flowering, they can be thrown away. There is not a weed in sight. The garden is oblong, regular and compact like a park garden. When Bryan is not in his toolshed, he tends his ‘chrysanths’ and his ‘toms’ in the greenhouse. It’s better than being hoovered under. Occasionally on summer afternoons Jen and the family sit out on tubular steel picnic chairs that can fold away neatly afterwards. There was a nasty moment once when an ‘elderly relative come to visit’ got stuck in the couch hammock with aluminium frames. Harry Stow-Crat ties hammocks to trees.
‘For God’s sake pull the plug out!’
As a first-generation gardener, Mr Nouveau-Richards pulls out all the stops. Apart from lighting up his tarmac drive and technicolour lawn with toadstools, he has all his flowerbeds floodlit and coolie-hat lamps stationed like street lights round the garden.
Weeding, watering and edging is all done by electricity, which also keeps the earth warm under the cloches. In the propagating frames all-night fluorescent lighting forces tulips into bloom in November, and vast strawberries to ripen in time for Christmas. Plastic grass lines the outdoor swimming pool which is constantly kept at 80° like the indoor one.
Mr. N-R reclines on the underfloor-heated ‘pate-io’ and plays with a computerized mowing machine, a new toy just imported from Texas. He has just mixed a mint julep from his portable drinks trolley which glides over tiles and shag-pile and was described in the catalogue as ‘the ultimate way to enjoy a cocktail on the patio, an aperitif by the pool, or those after-dinner drinks in the lounge’.
Mr Definitely-Disgusting hasn’t got a garden, but he grows tomatoes and geraniums on his balcony, and he also has an allotment, which means a lot to him. It is illegal to sell ‘produce’ (a very Jen Teale word) from one’s allotment, but at least he can grow vegetables for all the family. Here stand neat furrows of potatoes, curtains of runner beans, rows of lettuces and ‘collys’ and, at the end, a blaze of annuals and bedding plants in primary colours to rival Samantha Upward’s playroom. When Mr D-D pulls up a lettuce he calls it ‘picking a salad’.
12 FOOD
LET THEM EAT GTEAU
‘When a woman asks for back, I call her “madam”,’ said a grocer. ‘When she asks for streaky I call her “dear”. You can always tell the gentry,’ he went on, ‘by their knowledge of cheese. They don’t have trouble saying the foreign names.’
The food you eat often indicates what class you are. The way you eat it, namely your table manners, does so almost more. The upper classes, for example, don’t have any middle-class inhibitions about waiting until everyone else is served: they start eating the moment food is put in front of them. This stems from the days when they all dined at long refectory tables and if you waited for fifty other people to be served, your wild boar would be stone cold. Nor would Harry Stow-Crat comment on the food at a dinner party, because one doesn’t congratulate one’s hostess on something one expects to be done perfectly in any case.
The ritual of table napkins is interesting. The working-class man tucked a handkerchief under his chin to protect his shirt and waistcoat (he would never eat in a coat.) The lower-middles, daintily thinking ‘napkin’ sounded too much like babies’ nappies and wanting to show off their knowledge of French, called it a serviette. The middle classes, wanting to go one up, talked about napkins, but, being frugal, also wanted them to last a few days, so they introduced napkin rings. The upper classes, who had plenty of people to do the laundry (Harry Stow-Crat’s mother calls it ‘larndry’), had clean napkins at every meal and regarded napkin rings as the height of vulgarity. One peer, when presented with a pair in a velvet box, had to ask the mayor what they were for before embarking on his speech of thanks. Even today Caroline Stow-Crat would rather use paper napkins than napkin rings. Mrs Nouveau-Richards, having read in some etiquette book that the word ‘serviette’ is common, calls them “s-napkins’. In the same way, she only just remembers in time that dinner in the middle of the day is called lunch, and talks about ‘d’lunch’, which sounds faintly West Indian. Harry Stow-Crat’s mother still calls it luncheon.
Both Harry and Gideon Upward would lunch from one o’clock onwards, have tea around four and dinner at eight to eight-thirty in the evening. The Teales would breakfast very early because they don’t like to be rushed, so would the Definitely-Disgustings because Mr D-D has to get to work early. Both Bryan and Mr D-D probably have a cheese roll or a bar of chocolate at nine-thirty, followed by ‘dinner’ at twelve and ‘tea’ the moment they get home from work about six to six-thirty.
The worst thing about the lower classes, complains Caroline Stow-Crat, is that they never know when to leave. If she asks them round for a quick pre-dinner drink, they’ve always had their tea first and are all set to carry on drinking until midnight. Samantha Upward gets round the problem by asking Mrs Nouveau-Richards at seven, then lies and says she’s frightfully sorry but she and Gideon have got to go out to dinner at eight-thirty. Unfortunately Mrs N-R spoils everything by asking if she can see the kitchen and discovers three large baked potatoes and a casserole cooking in the oven. Samantha stands on one leg and says:
‘The au pair has the most enormous appetite.’
Then there’s a whole new ball game about what to call the courses. Caroline Stow-Crat never uses expressions like ‘starter’, except in quotes, or ‘the soup’. She would talk about the ‘meat’ or ‘main’ course or ‘cold cuts’, but never ‘the entrée’ or ‘the roast’. (The middle classes say ‘joint’.) Nor would she refer to chicken or grouse as ‘the bird’ or ‘poultry’, although if Harry were farming he might use the word in that sense. Howard Weybridge says ‘polltry’ and ‘casseroll’ with a short ‘o’. Everything from lemon water ice to jam roly-poly Caroline would call ‘pudding’: she would never say ‘sweet’ or ‘dessert’. Cheese would be served after pudding, never before. Then, to muddle everyone, this might be followed by dessert, which is fruit, even bananas, eaten with fruit knives and forks.
A few months ago I went to the annual general meeting of the ’Istoric Houses Association, a gathering bristling with member
s of the aristocracy and the henchmen who organize the people who see over their houses. Having been gossiping in the bar, I arrived late for lunch and found a fat henchwoman sitting by herself, the rest of the table having gone off to help themselves to pudding.
‘It would never ’ave bloody well ’appened, Ricardo, if you’d ’eld yer knife proper.’
‘Who else is sitting here?’ I asked, ‘anyone exciting?’
‘Well ay don’t think they were ducal folk,’ she said, ‘Because they were holdin’ their knives like pencils.’ Indeed she was right.
One of the great class divides, along with living in a ‘bought house’ and saying pardon, is the way you hold your knife. The lower echelons hold them like pencils, the upper and upper-middles to a man putting their first finger (the one Mr D-D uses to read with) on the knife where the handle joins the blade. Harry would also turn his fork over to eat his peas if he felt like it, and pick a bone—behaviour that would horrify Jen Teale.
Michael Nelson, in Nobs and Snobs, tells a story to illustrate what a gentleman his grandfather was. When sitting next to his hostess, he saw a slug on his lettuce. Rather than embarrass her, he shut his eyes and ate it. ‘And my grandfather,’ the story ends, ‘managed not to be sick until after dinner.’
While it is a touching story, I think this was the act of a gentleman, but not necessarily of an aristocrat—the two are not synonymous. Harry Stow-Crat wouldn’t swallow a slug, nor eat anything he didn’t like. Nor would he ever resort to the lengths of a Jen Teale who dropped in on my brother and his wife and was asked to stay for lunch. To eke out the sausages and mash my sister-in-law fried three kidneys, which this Jen Teale was too polite to say she couldn’t eat. In silent glee my brother watched her whip it off her plate, when she thought no one was looking, and hold it in her hand all through lunch. Afterwards she sidled inch by inch towards the fire and, choosing a moment when she thought my sister-in-law was pouring out coffee, flicked the kidney discreetly with a brisk backhand into the flames, whereupon it let out a prolonged and noisy hiss.
If someone else was paying for lunch in a restaurant and the food wasn’t up to scratch, Mr Nouveau-Richards would complain noisily to the waiter; Harry, however, would keep his trap shut. If, on the other hand, he was paying, he would never be too embarrassed to complain, like Gerald Lascelles lunching at the Ritz, who sent a trout back because it was too small. Or the crusty old baronet who peered into the communion cup at early service and, because it was only a quarter full, bellowed, ‘That’s not enough’.
If you stayed with the Stow-Crats you would go in to dinner at eight on the dot because it’s inconsiderate to keep the servants waiting, and you wouldn’t sit around the table swilling brandy until midnight, because the servants want to clear away. But the men would stay behind with the port and grumble about estate duty, while the women would go into the drawing-room and probably grumble about constipation.
Things are changing, however. You now find far more upper-class people telling the hostess her food was lovely, because she’s probably cooked it herself—and if you’ve spent two days slaving over a dinner party you want a bit of praise. In London fewer and fewer men wear dinner jackets, although the upper classes and upper-middles tend to in the country, while many of the women still stick to their horse-blanket long skirts and frilly shirts. With the inroads of women’s lib, however, upper-middle women are less and less often shunted off to drink coffee by themselves after dinner, the merrytocracy in particular believing in a port in every girl, and as the husband often cooks the dinner he’s the one who needs to go upstairs and tone down his flushed face.
The other great change in the upper-middle-class life-style is the swing back to traditional English food. In the ’fifties and ’sixties, on those three-week holidays to various costas, the wives picked up tips for five-course dinners. If you put garlic and green peppers in everything it showed you’d travelled. Samantha Upward even used the same plate for all courses, so you could still taste the squid vinaigrette and the boeuf-provençale when you were eating your Poire Belle Helène.
As a reaction to all this, the trend now is for simple cooking designed to bring out the flavour of good food instead of concealing it in a cordon blur of cream and wine sauce with grated cheese and breadcrumbs on top. At dinner parties Samantha now serves fish pie, pink beef and, particularly, English lamb. And for puddings it’s treacle tart, jam roly-poly and bread and butter pudding, which in a time of insecurity remind Samantha of nanny, childhood and security.
Meanwhile other trends move downwards. The patrician habit of not commenting on the food, for example, is reaching the suburban spiralist belt.
‘Dinner gets more elaborate,’ said a wife on a neoGeorgian estate, ‘but people pretend not to notice. It’s all passed over to prove we’re used to avocado pears and brandy in everything.’
Although the Surrey commuters are still wafting out garlic like dragon’s breath—a sort of last gaspachio—the return to traditional food is just reaching the Weybridge set. Determined not to let the Chancellor ruin their ‘wholl new fun lifestyle’, they are into communal dinner parties with one wife cooking each course, and all keeping a stern watch on anyone getting too elaborate and putting in too much cream.
The foreign food bug has just filtered down to Jen Teale; Colman’s Cook ‘n Sauce is the best thing that has ever happened to her. She has also started tarting up the Oxo stew with package Hungarian goulash, and finds that Chicken Marengo Mix gingered up with garlic salt makes a nice change from an ‘assorted platter of cold meats’, and all these mixes do save bothering with messy ingredients. Packaged Boeuf Trogignon was a smash hit, too, the time Bryan’s boss came to dinner. Bryan’s boss’s wife also admired Jen’s table. Pink paper napkins in the glasses, matching pink doily in the basket under the slices of ‘crusty bread’, pink flowers in the centre of the table, and pink needle-dick candles casting a lovely light. Jen, who believes that things that look good taste good, has decorated everything with radish flowerets and cucumber hearts. And her new tupperware Jel ’n’ Serve bowl set the orange mousse in a rose shape, and Jen garnished it so prettily with piped cream and mandarin segments. The one bottle of table wane looked so attractive in its basket too. In the old days Bryan used to decant it, so people wouldn’t see the V.P. label. And Jen made sure no one got tiddly by serving little glass bowls of crisps and nuts with the Bristol Cream before dinner.
Jen’s knives have stainless steel handles and resemble fish knives. The forks look like tridents and have long thin handles to keep you further away from messy food. Jen never ‘cooks’: she calls it ‘preparing a meal’. After she’s been to a ‘resteront’, she expects the waiter to ask, ‘Enjoyed your meal?’. The word ‘meal’ is a convenient cop-out when you don’t know whether to call it lunch, dinner or tea. Bryan’s Rotarian father says ‘repast’.
The Nouveau-Richards still over-do their dinner parties—smoked salmon and caviar soufflé to start with, sole flamed in brandy with a Pernod cream sauce, boeuf en kraut and a moated sugar castle for pudding, followed by After Ape mints. ‘Chá-o bŏ-elled’ wine flows throughout. Afterwards all the guests are sick.
The Definitely-Disgustings don’t give dinner parties. Everything is geared towards Sunday dinner. In the old days you were paid on Saturday night, rushed off to the pawn shop, got out your Sunday suit and then hurried down to the late-night market to buy food for ‘dinner’ the following day. The warmth and friendliness of the pub often proved too seductive for the wage earner, and his wife would try to drag him out before he blued all his earnings. When there wasn’t enough money to pay for dinner, Charlie Chaplin remembers his brother and he being told to sit down at a bare table and clash their knives and forks together so that the neighbours wouldn’t realize they were going short.
Today the tradition continues. Mr D-D starts Sunday with a good breakfast—fried egg, bacon, beef sausages, because they’re cheaper than pork, and fried bread. At twelve he goes to the pub and
is dragged home at two-thirty for the ‘roast and two veg’, followed by apple pie and custard, or, as a treat in the summer, tinned peaches and cream. Having slept off the excesses, he would then have whelks and two slices of ‘ovis for tea, this being the only roughage he has during the whole week.
GROWING, SHOPPING AND COOKING
Like Mr Definitely-Disgusting, Harry Stow-Crat has always liked plain unmessed-about food, the Costa Brava/Elizabeth David revolution having hardly touched him. Harking back to the old days, when mediaeval barons had to take care of themselves, the upper-class estate has always been self-sufficient. The Stow-Crats kept their own cows and sheep, shot their own game, caught their own salmon and trout, picked their own fruit and vegetables, and stalked their own deer (which Harry calls ‘ven’son’).
Harry also likes food that is tricky to eat and holds pitfalls for the socially uninitiated, such as oysters, asparagus and artichokes. The first week a London girlfriend went to live in the country, someone asked her if she could ‘draw a mallard’. No one flickered when she said she’d always been frightful at art.
The upper classes tend to be unimaginative in their tastes. Lord Lucan used to lunch at his gambling club every day off cutlets in winter and cutlets en gelée in summer. I have a friend whose father always has Stilton and rice pudding for lunch. Lord Ampthill, who is in charge of the food at the House of Lords, has tried and failed to get tapioca taken off the menu.
As has been pointed out, lack of servants has only recently prompted the upper classes to take an interest in cooking. Lord Montagu may get up early and cook woodcock or snipe for his guests’ breakfast on Sunday, but more characteristic is a story told by Nancy Mitford about the evening her maid went out and left her some macaroni cheese to put in the oven for three-quarters of an hour. After the alloted time she took it out and was surprised to find it stone cold. It had not occurred to her to turn on the oven.