Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Medieval fast-food joints were open all hours, just like their modern counterparts. One of the earliest descriptions of such an establishment is that of a London publica coquina, written by the Canterbury monk William Fitzstephen in 1174:

  There is in London upon the river’s bank, a public space of cookery … There every day ye may call for any dish of meat, roast, fried or boiled; fish both small and great; ordinary flesh for the poorer sort, and more dainty for the rich, as venison or fowl. If friends come upon a sudden, wearied with travel, to a citizen’s house, and they be loth to wait for curious preparations and dressings of fresh meat, let the servants give them water to wash and bread to stay their stomachs; and in the meantime they run to the waterside, where all things that can be desired are at hand.14

  Londoners collecting Christmas dinner from the baker’s in 1848.

  William had nothing but praise for cookshops, which he found ‘very convenient to the city, and a distinguishing mark of civilisation’. But they have often met with a far less rosy press. Juvenal spoke with distaste of the ‘smell of tripe in some hot and crowded cookshop’, and in 1698 Ned Ward described leaving a cookshop at Pie Corner in Smithfield because the cook operating the spit ‘rubbed his ears, breast, neck and arm-pits with the same wet cloth which he applied to his pigs’.15 No doubt many public kitchens in the past were dodgy, as no doubt many still are (stories like Sweeney Todd don’t come from nowhere). Yet however grim they were, the kitchens of the past have gone largely unrecorded, the taboos of cookery have seen to that. One of the earliest descriptions of life in a professional kitchen came as late as 1933, when George Orwell dished the dirt on a Parisian hotel in Down and Out in Paris and London:

  It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining room. There sat the customers in all their splendour – spotless table cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled food.16

  As Orwell’s account suggests, there can be many reasons to hide a kitchen. The first and most obvious is that cooking is dirty, noisy and smelly – especially when carried out on a large scale. On that score, the separation of cooking and eating is simply a matter of decorum. The tradition of haute cuisine extended the principle, insisting that even a well-ordered kitchen should remain invisible, lest its secrets be revealed to diners, so ruining the ‘magic’ of the food. The third, less exalted, yet most common reason for hiding a kitchen is simply that if people could see how their food was being cooked, they would refuse to eat it. In kitchens, the contradictions of cookery find physical form. In many ways, kitchens are as political spaces as markets: the functions they perform and the issues they raise at least give them claim to such status. But unlike markets, kitchens hide their politics behind closed doors.

  Women’s Work

  The division between professional and amateur cookery might have been blurred through history, but in one respect it is clear. Professional cooks predominantly have been male; amateur ones overwhelmingly female.17 When we think of home cooking, we invariably think of food ‘like mother used to make’, which in the USA means ‘Mom’s apple pie’; in Italy ‘pasta di Mamma’, in Britain ‘Mother’s Yorkshire pudding’ and so on. What these dishes all have in common is that they are essentially rural in nature: the sort of wholesome, hearty food that country housewives cooked for their families, long before many city-dwellers even had kitchens. The apple pies and Yorkshire puds of yesteryear may not have tasted quite as good as we like to imagine; but that is not the point. It is the fact that our mothers (and grandmothers) cooked them at all that makes them so special.

  As far as the history of home cooking is concerned, the twentieth century was an aberration. Before then, few urban households had kitchens capable of producing dishes ‘like Mother used to make’, and if they did, those dishes would not have been cooked by Mother, but by servants.18 If the mother of the house had cooked the meal, she was almost certainly working class, in which case she would not have sat down to eat with her family, but would have remained standing in order to serve her husband at table. Except on special occasions, working-class men usually ate alone, watched by their wives and children, who had to wait to see what would be left over for their own supper.19 Family meals as we think of them today (not only cooked by Mother, but shared by her at table) were a purely twentieth-century phenomenon; the product of the servantless nuclear family brought about by two world wars. Fixed in the minds of the postwar generation in Britain by the Bisto adverts, the family meal was in many ways as ephemeral as the ads that celebrated it. Even as it reached its apogee, the phenomenon was in decline, as the social conditions that brought it about disintegrated once more.20

  No matter who did the cooking, the fact that domestic kitchens have always been associated with women has had a profound influence over house design. Through kitchens, the female associations of nurturing, hiddenness and taboo have been carried into the physical fabric of the home.21 Even today, in our neutralised, microwaved cooking culture, domestic gender boundaries are palpable. In the ancient world, kitchens in houses large enough to have them were typically arranged in or around open courtyards. This was the family domain – a world of women, children, cooking and servants, segregated as far as possible from the public parts of the house. Entrances from the street were either fitted with screens or designed with bends in them to prevent passers-by from seeing in – an arrangement that remains common in traditional Arabic households today.

  In ancient Athens, the gender association of public and private parts of the house was explicit.22 The private areas – the courtyard and, in larger houses, the upper floors – were the realm of idion, a hidden world whose associations (mystery, uncleanliness, otherness) mirrored those of the female body.23 The most important space in the house was the andron – literally, the ‘man’s room’ – where male guests were entertained at a symposion, a ritualised dinner followed by entertainments and debate, to which the women of the house were forbidden entry.24 Although such dinners were considered supremely important in Athenian society, the cooking of them was not. Plato, whose philosophical works all took the form of sympotic dialogues, had little time for cooking, declaring it to be ‘not an art at all’. Philosophers at his academy were reported to have smashed a casserole to the floor, complaining that it was ‘too fancy’.25 In Athens, where public life was exclusively male, cooking belonged firmly to the lesser, female realm. Much the same was true of Rome, where dining remained an important networking tool. Although Roman women were allowed to dine with their men, no high-ranking mistress would have dreamt of doing the cooking herself – kitchens in wealthy houses were the domain of slaves. The fact that women and men dined together meant that the Roman dining room (triclinium) was more central to the house than was the Greek one, often placed next to the semi-public atrium, with the family quarters and kitchen arranged around a private courtyard beyond.26

  Domestic cooking arrangements evolved rather differently in northern Europe, largely due to the chillier climate. Rather than trying to expel the warmth of cooking from the home, traditional longhouses, with their great halls and central hearths, embraced it as a convivial centrepiece. Longhouses were an architectural response both to the weather and to the prevailing hunting culture of the north, in which the roasting of the day’s spoils was a celebratory act, very different to the ‘boiling’ cuisines of southern Europe that would eventually lead to the sauces of haute cuisine.27 The arrangement of a central hearth persisted in northern medieval town houses, which were essentially urban versions of their rural counterparts. When such houses began to be built with separate kitchens during the fourteenth century, it was a sign that urbanism was taking hold, and that cities were starting to lose their close
ties with the countryside.

  Haute Cuisine Comes Home

  The rise of the bourgeoisie in medieval France and Italy marked a resurgence of professional domestic cookery in Europe. Increased urbanisation meant there was a growing demand for cooks from the twelfth century onwards, although they were required to display little culinary skill. When the bourgeois entertained, they did their best to imitate courtly feasts, which at that time meant one thing above all else: abundance. In order to impress one’s guests, all one had to do was to offer them more food than they could possibly eat. But even as bourgeois tables heaved with superfluity, courtly cuisine was moving in an altogether different direction. Partly to distinguish their food from lowly imitators, courtly chefs were developing a radical new cuisine, in which quality, rather than quantity, was paramount. The new cookery required supreme skill, and for the first time in history, chefs began to express their individuality in what they did.

  By the mid fifteenth century, courtly cuisine in Italy was a highly complex art form, practised by well-regarded yet still anonymous chefs. The cabalism of the kitchen ensured that the secrets of the new cookery remained inaccessible to all but a few, but demand for culinary knowledge was growing steadily, and with the arrival of printed books, the means of satisfying it finally came within reach. Cookery books were among the world’s first bestsellers, with Maestro Martino’s Libro de Arte Coquinaria top of the list. Published in 1475 by the semi-anonymous papal chef, Martino’s treatise is often cited as the first modern cookbook. It was revolutionary in that it emphasised the flavour of food, rather than just its physical appearance, and although some of the recipes clearly belong to another age (one for ‘Flying Pie’ details how to bake the classic ‘four and twenty blackbirds’ dish, with live birds inside), others anticipate the techniques of haute cuisine, dealing with refined fruit sauces, wine reductions and so on.28 Martino’s recipes were widely copied, not least because they revealed for the first time the secrets of courtly cuisine. Martino became the first celebrity chef; not yet in the full-blown sense (little is known of his personal life), but famous enough to be identified with his own style of cookery.

  By the seventeenth century, the flaming baton of culinary invention had moved from Italy to France. Cookbooks such as La Varenne’s 1651 Le Cuisinier François, in which the author gave the first recipes for classic techniques such as making bouillon and roux, were essential manuals among the French bourgeoisie, and serving one’s guests cuisine à la mode a ruinously expensive necessity. The pressure to entertain in the correct fashion was exacerbated in 1682 when Louis XIV gathered his court at Versailles, creating a focus of custom and manners that the whole of polite society felt obliged to follow. However, the same period in England saw things moving in the opposite direction. The 1688 overthrow of James II by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ brought an end to culinary opulence at court, signalling a more sober approach to cookery reflecting the rural lifestyles of the English gentry. Good plain country cooking (the pies, roasts and puddings we now think of as quintessentially British) took centre stage, even in the houses of the wealthy. The prophets of the ‘low’ cuisine were mostly women, who treated cookery as a branch of household management, proclaiming their preference for an ‘honest’ approach, partly in riposte to the extravagances then being perpetrated across the Channel. ‘If Gentlemen will have French Cooks,’ sniffed Hannah Glasse in her aptly named 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, ‘they must pay for French tricks.’29

  The stage was set for a clash of culinary cultures that rumbles on even today. When the Revolution relieved courtly chefs in France of their posts in 1798, many came to Britain, bringing their ‘French tricks’ with them. A battle of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cuisines ensued in the dining rooms of middle Britain, at the very moment when the habit of giving dinner parties (long established in France) was taking root. A raft of books on the subject of entertaining was published, unanimous in their view that haute cuisine was to be preferred for dinner parties – it had, after all, a 200-year head start on its rival as a vehicle for impressing guests. Out went the no-nonsense approach of Hannah Glasse and her sisters, and in came a new bastardised form of Anglo-French cuisine. Although it was still acceptable – even necessary – to serve one’s guests a roast, it now had to be accompanied by a profusion of other dishes – hors d’oeuvres, entremets, relevés, entrées – either served all at once à la française, or (even more fashionably) brought to table one after the other à la russe.30 Either way, the bourgeois dinner party had arrived in Britain, and it required a small army to deliver it.

  Knowing how to give a good dinner party was not just a question of being hospitable in Victorian society; it was a matter of social survival. ‘Dining is the privilege of civilisation,’ declared Isabella Beeton, high priestess of the new culinary religion and author of its bible, the Book of Household Management, published in 1861.31 But that privilege came at a cost. The pressure to entertain was so great that families who could barely afford it still felt obliged to find a way. A further swathe of manuals aimed at these poor unfortunates was published, such as the evocatively titled From Kitchen to Garret of 1888, which advised families with only one maid how they could save up all year in order to give that one crucial dinner party.32 Even if a hostess could afford to entertain, getting the details wrong could still banish her to social oblivion. As one manners book put it, ‘there is no better or surer passport to good society than having a reputation for giving good dinners’.33 What was left unsaid – but was perfectly understood – was that the obverse was equally true.

  Fear of Food

  The use of food as a means of shaping social identity in Victorian Britain could not have come at a worse time. Attitudes towards food were shifting as fast as society, and not just because the menus were written in French. The irony of a rich nation – the capital of an Empire, no less – in which three quarters of the population could barely afford to eat should have been troubling enough, but that was not the main source of anxiety among those who could. Other aspects of material existence were beginning to trouble the Victorian conscience, raising awkward questions about man’s place in the natural order of things.

  First and foremost was the question of meat. The British had long been notorious for tucking into their beef bloody and raw with a gusto that, as far as the French were concerned, betrayed a want of manners. As the chef Châtillon-Plessis put it, ‘Compare what I would call the bleeding dish nations with the sauce nations, and see whether the character of the latter is not more civilised.’34 But now the cheerful carnivorism of les rosbifs was beginning to melt away. The case for vegetarianism was not new: it had been an enduring theme of the Enlightenment in both Britain and France. Philosophers of the stature of Newton and Rousseau had argued its case on the basis of compassion for animals, but few had gone so far as to say that the killing of any beast in order to eat it was wrong. Now that view began to take hold. An increasingly vocal lobby argued that the eating of any meat was barbarous; a view formalised in Britain in 1847 with the founding of the Vegetarian Society.35 Although take-up of membership was slow (the society only attracted 5,000 members in its first 50 years), the mere existence of such a body helped to fuel a sense of guilt, and corresponding squeamishness, among the vast majority who continued to eat meat.36 A new repugnance at the killing of animals was taking root; one that found expression not, as might have been logical, in the gradual abandonment of meat-eating, but in greater efforts to hide the evidence. Like a bunch of guilty murderers trying to stash the corpse, Victorians repressed their doubts and set about arranging the world so that its less savoury aspects disappeared from view. Faced with the inconvenient divergence of their preferred diet and their sensibilities, they plumped for denial – an approach we have been following ever since.

  Just as slaughterhouses were disappearing from cities, cooks now began to alter the appearance of food in order to disguise its origins. Piglets, rabbits and geese that would once have been pres
ented at table in all their lifelike glory – snout, fur, feathers and all – now either arrived with all their distinguishing features removed, or were served à la russe: carved out of sight of diners and brought to the table on individual plates. The new sensibility echoed the remarks of the humanist William Hazlitt: ‘Animals that are made use of as food should either be so small as to be imperceptible,’ he wrote, ‘or else we should … not leave the form standing to reproach us with our gluttony and cruelty.’37 Ritual carving at table, once a way of celebrating the life of the creature about to be eaten, was now replaced by ruses to obscure the fact that it had ever lived.

  Victorian levels of carnivorous guilt were heightened in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, in which the author raised the awful possibility that, far from being distinct from all other animals, man might actually be related to some of them. Although Darwin’s theory was highly controversial at the time, the possibility that man might be consuming the flesh of his own distant relatives lent a new potency to the meat debate. Food, which had always occupied a place in the human psyche somewhere between desire and fear, now took a decided lurch towards the latter. The materiality of meat became a source of repugnance; the sight of a bloody lump of steak too close to human flesh for comfort. The British, once mocked by the French for eating their beef barbarously underdone, now took to blasting it to oblivion, much as we still have a tendency to do.

  The Divided House

  While Victorians struggled to come to terms with their bodies, the physical space they inhabited was changing too. Until the eighteenth century, people of all classes had mingled together in cities, often living next to one another in the same streets. Georgian estates were the first to break with this tradition: exclusively middle and upper class, they presaged modern gated communities, with private security guards and barriers that were locked at night. Such estates marked the beginnings of social segregation in Britain, but it was the railways that firmly established single-class enclaves – social monocultures – as the dominant residential pattern. From the mid nineteenth century on, those who could afford to do so began to abandon cities for suburban neighbourhoods such as Bedford Park in west London, completed in 1881 by the architect Richard Norman Shaw. With its redbrick gabled houses and winding, leafy lanes, Bedford Park was essentially an idealised rural hamlet; the prototypical British garden suburb.