Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The biggest loser, though, was fresh fish, which was close to vanishing as a regular part of the national diet. In effect, it had been ousted by the single biggest winner of the post-war years, battery-farmed chicken. As the Guardian observed in 1978, almost a third of Britain’s fish and chip shops had shut down in just twenty years. Indeed, for fishmongers these were dreadful years. ‘For a while,’ wrote one food writer a few years later, ‘literally not a day passed without someone somewhere abandoning the fish trade.’ He was not exaggerating. In Essex, Jean Carr bought her fish from a supermarket, lamenting that the fishmonger had simply ‘disappeared from the high street’. Years earlier, she remembered, there had been two fish shops in her village, ‘but now with frozen fish on sale, housewives do not or will not know how to fillet or gut a fish’. As a child she had always eaten fresh fish on Fridays. ‘But now it is on the way out,’ she wrote sadly, ‘and most likely will be gone in a few years, to be replaced by frozen packets of fish.’10

  All the time, the great engine of culinary innovation roared on. Mealtimes were less formal, dishes lighter and cooking times shorter. Younger people often shrank from their parents’ beloved sauces, preferring simpler, cleaner flavours instead. Herbs and spices were more popular than ever: it was telling that when Mass Observation asked Susan Gray to list the ‘new foods’ that had transformed her family’s diet, she turned first to her spice cupboard. Her mother had relied on just seven or eight spices. By contrast, Susan’s cupboard contained everything from cumin and turmeric to garam masala, oregano, cardamom and chilli powder – and this not in Islington but in Darlington. ‘Even in the North East tundra’, she added, ‘we can get kiwi fruit, pomeloes, mangoes, uglis, sweet potatoes, okra and so on, which were unheard of, say, ten years ago.’ Not all families in north-eastern England, of course, were regularly stuffing themselves with mangoes and okra. Even so, the typical British family in the early 1980s enjoyed a diet that was more obviously globalized than ever before. In Basildon, reported Peter Hibbitt, Chinese takeaways, lychees and kiwi fruit were all taken for granted. As a child in the Second World War he had grown up with cheese that tasted ‘akin to Sunlight soap’. Now he regularly bought Edam, Brie, Camembert and Danish Blue.11

  One man who would not have been impressed by all this was the late George Orwell. With the return of mass unemployment reawakening memories of the Depression, Orwell’s shadow loomed over the cultural landscape of the early 1980s. Almost no state-of-thenation survey failed to pay homage to The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and few literary travellers failed to spend a day or two in Wigan. But given his belief that fruit juice was an unmistakeable sign of bohemian perversion, Orwell would not have approved of the food and drink of the 1980s. Above all, he would have been deeply displeased by the rise of vegetarianism, about which he was extremely scathing. The mind boggles, for example, at what he would have made of the scene at Heavens Above in Barnstaple, Devon, which won high praise from Lesley Nelson’s guidebook Vegetarian Restaurants in England (1982):

  The cafe is a casual meeting-place for Ecology Party supporters, anti-nuclear demonstrators, busted buskers, and, on Friday night, anyone who wants to play folk music. There’s a regular menu of snacks like turmeric-flavoured pasties filled with black-eye bean mixture, baked potatoes with cheese, scotch eggs, salad-filled rolls, and carob brownies. And special dishes like stuffed marrow, bean chili, vegetable casserole, and baked apples are prepared on weekdays. The cafe seats 40 to 50 people, amiably grouped round communal tables, and when the food runs out the room is hired to ecology groups, mime artists, and writers.

  Mime artists! You could almost believe it a spoof. But in the early 1980s vegetarianism was a serious business, picking up new adherents every week. ‘By AD 2000’, one vegetarian advocate claimed, ‘Britain will be a vegetarian society’.12

  As that Barnstaple review suggests, vegetarianism had not entirely thrown off its reputation as the gastronomic redoubt of pacifists, eccentrics and university lecturers. The country’s most successful vegetarian chain, founded back in 1961, did not call itself Cranks for nothing. Yet vegetarianism was now far more mainstream than in Orwell’s day, driven as much by anxieties about health and fitness as by philosophical or ethical concerns. Health food shops, which appealed at first to people with hippyish, lentil-fancying leanings, had mushroomed during the 1970s, and one estimate suggests that by the time Margaret Thatcher came to power, there were some 1,200 across the country. Often they tried to attract more conservative shoppers by selling coffee beans, wholemeal bread and cream cheese, which you could not get in the supermarkets and did not have to be a mime artist to enjoy. And so, almost by stealth, vegetarianism began to spread. Eating meat was becoming less automatic, and as many people found themselves eating meat-free meals almost without thinking about it, vegetarianism became casual rather than cranky.13

  The biggest divide, though, was not between carnivores and herbivores, but between people who had money and people who did not. For if food was a potent symbol of middle-class ambition, it was an equally powerful symbol of working-class poverty. Even the vast differences in household budgets told a story of division. One family in twenty spent more than £100 a week on food. Yet at the same time, one in twenty spent less than £20. And for writers chronicling the lives of the low-paid, the unemployed, the sick and the old, their empty plates lent a dash of descriptive colour to the statistics. When Beatrix Campbell retraced Orwell’s journey to Wigan, she wrote with scarcely suppressed fury of the gap between the food teenage mothers saw on television and the reality of their daily ‘toast and tea, beans, bread and chips’. In Coventry, an unemployed couple told her that they only had cooked meals at weekends and lived on beans and toast the rest of the time. Another jobless family told her that good days meant spaghetti Bolognese, bad days meant beans on toast or biscuits, and ‘some days we just don’t eat’.14

  To some extent, the gap was narrowing. Most people, if they were in work, lived more comfortably than ever. And with food prices dropping, tastes that had once been reserved for London’s professional middle classes were now within the reach of millions. In Lancaster, Jenny Palmer was ‘amazed to find working-class pensioners buying steak on a weekday’ – and not from their local butcher, but from Marks & Spencer, where prices were famously high. ‘Yes it is expensive’, one pensioner told her, ‘but you know it’s good from here.’ And in The Times, the food writer Christopher Driver suggested that the success of television cooks such as Delia Smith, the idealized middle-class housewife who taught millions of people how to pronounce the word ‘lasagne’, might lead to a culinary renaissance among the urban working classes. Legend had it that many people watched her programmes with a microwaved ready meal on their lap. But Driver remained optimistic. ‘Gastronomy in Gateshead?’ he mused. ‘All things are possible.’15

  Is it really true that people watched Delia Smith while eating microwaved ready meals? It certainly sounds plausible. In a country where six out of ten women went out to work, the days when the suburban housewife spent her afternoon assembling an elaborate three-course meal were a distant memory. What was more, most people spent longer at work than ever before in living memory. For although British productivity was notoriously dreadful, the average worker actually spent more hours at the factory or the office than his – or her – American, French and German counterparts, and took fewer holidays than almost anybody else in Europe.16

  When Britain’s workers got home, then, many had precious little appetite for slaving over the stove. But their rumbling stomachs were somebody else’s opportunity. In the autumn of 1981, Penguin brought out a commuters’ cookbook, billed as a ‘cookery book for victims of the twentieth century’. It was ‘not an I-hate-cooking book,’ explained the author, Beryl Downing. ‘It’s an I-like-it-but-I-haven’t-the-time … a daily recipe service specially created for commuters who – married, single, old, young, men, women – all travel at least half an hour a day to their offices.’ The recipes, she promised, wo
uld take no more than thirty minutes to prepare, a formula that would later be familiar to fans of Jamie Oliver. But as might also be familiar, many of the recipes looked suspiciously complicated for something that might be ready in half an hour. A typical example was ‘fish thermidor’, which boasted an absurdly rich sauce made from butter, milk, mustard, Emmental and brandy, and required the cook to have been simmering ‘homemade fish stock’ with bones from the local fishmonger. That was not much good to the harassed commuter just off the 6.15 from Waterloo.17

  The obvious alternative was the chilled ready meal. People had been eating ‘TV dinners’ since the late 1950s, but the real breakthrough came with Marks & Spencer’s chicken Kiev, which first appeared on the shelves, with satisfyingly perfect timing, in October 1979. They were expensive: £1.99 for a pack of two, the equivalent of about £10 today. But that was part of their appeal, because they were marketed as high-end products for professional women. The point, according to Marks & Spencer’s product developer, was that ‘the British public was entitled to be able to buy restaurant-quality food to enjoy in their own home’. Given the quality of British restaurant food, this was not, perhaps, as enticing as it sounded. But the chicken Kiev proved a tremendous success, and was soon followed by lasagne, chilli con carne and chicken tikka masala. Other retailers followed suit: by 1982 there were a host of firms making upmarket ready meals for special occasions, such as the Gourmet Hostess Foods company, based on a Lancashire farm, which promised that ‘the filling for a freezer, or ready-to-reheat dinner party, can be delivered to your nearest railway station the day after you order it’.18

  There was, of course, a cost to all this, even though few people remarked on it at the time. Cheapness and convenience came with serious caveats: thanks partly to the rise of the ready meal, people now consumed twice as many additives as they had in 1955. In fact, almost all processed food now contained artificial flavourings. ‘Potato crisps no longer taste of potato but of chicken,’ lamented the Observer; ‘chicken tastes of fishmeal; and fish come not with fins but in battered bite-size fingers.’ Some products fell painfully short of the promise on the label. Tinned ham often contained 40 per cent water, and by the mid-1980s supermarkets were selling ‘country-style’ sausages with a meat content of just 10 per cent. The ‘country’ in question, presumably, was North Korea.19

  The trend for convenience foods, however, was irresistible. As spokesmen for the food industry pointed out, ready meals were an inevitable consequence of the trend for women to work outside the home. Indeed, some food companies looked forward to a future in which, as in the Downing Street flat, old-fashioned home cooking had virtually died out completely. ‘A fundamental change in British eating habits has begun,’ exulted a report by Ross Foods, the nation’s third biggest provider of frozen food, in April 1979. ‘The typical household menu of the mid-1980s will be foreign in origin, fast and frozen. The kitchen will be a centre for the unwrapping of ready-made portions from the freezer and the takeaway food shop … less of an everyday cooking workshop and more of a family distribution centre.’20

  At the centre of this revolution was the freezer. Sales were soaring: in 1970, barely 4 per cent of British homes had one, rising to more than 40 per cent in 1978 and almost two-thirds by 1985. ‘Today frozen goods are at the heart of every grocer’s display,’ declared The Times in 1980, in an article celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fish finger. Mocked on their introduction in 1955, fish fingers were now ‘as British as teabags, instant mash and salad cream’, although frozen pizzas were challenging their high standing in the hearts of the nation’s children. Indeed, most people took frozen food for granted. When, in the winter of 1982, Mass Observation asked its volunteers about eating fruit and vegetables in season, the general response was complete bewilderment. Almost all replied that since the advent of the freezer, they no longer thought about it. One typical respondent was the battery-farm worker Mary Richards. Asked how her family’s eating habits had changed, she immediately pointed to their freezer, which was full of ‘fish fingers, beef burgers and frozen peas, chips, oven chips, chicken pieces … pizas [sic] sometimes, ice cream, fish cakes and frozen pies’. ‘I go to work’, she added, ‘and don’t have time to do the home cooking I used to do and my Mother used to do.’21

  The appliance that really came to stand for the social changes of the early 1980s, though, was the microwave. Contrary to popular belief, microwaves had been available in Britain since 1959, but their size and cost, as well as popular fears of radiation poisoning, meant sightings were rare. But by the late 1970s sales were climbing. Indeed, some early adopters were positively evangelical about the delights of microwave cookery. When the Guardian’s Jenny Webb first bought a microwave, she viewed it with ‘apprehension’. But after a few initial experiments – ‘a jacket potato in five minutes, scrambled eggs in two, roast beef in under thirty and peas cooked from frozen in six’ – she was converted.

  Within one and a half hours I could be tucking into my chicken or in eight minutes enjoying a trout cooked to perfection and covered in melted butter and almonds …

  I could hardly believe that in under 12 minutes I could cook any one of so many time consuming dishes such as soups, pates, beef stroganoff, peaches in gammon, suet pudding and others, all of which became part of my fast menu …

  It sounds as if I am besotted with my microwave but it truly is a remarkable appliance … Imagine being able to soften rock hard butter in thirty seconds, to melt cheese on toast in the same time, to melt chocolate in a minute or to heat up a cold cup of coffee in about two. Some manufacturers even suggest that you can dry your rain sodden newspapers or curl your false eye lashes!

  If curling false eyelashes were not enough – we should probably gloss over the ‘peaches in gammon’ – Webb had some other useful tips. To make a cup of tea, for instance, people should simply ‘put the tea bag in a cup of water and microwave’. To improve the taste of their cream crackers, they should heat them ‘for a few minutes’ in the microwave. And to brighten up their vegetables, they should ‘pop a slice of processed cheese on top … and melt in the microwave for a few seconds’.22

  Amazingly enough, readers did not immediately rush to follow her advice. For one thing, microwaves were very expensive, and by the end of 1983, barely 1½ million microwaves had been sold. But at this point public enthusiasm reached a tipping point. In the next twelve months the manufacturers shifted a further million, and by the middle of the decade demand for microwave ovens was higher in Britain than in the rest of Europe put together, reflecting the much higher proportion of women who were going out to work. ‘People are no longer frightened of the technology and are buying them as a main cooking aid,’ thought The Times. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the Prime Minister was not among them. Her memoirs claim that when she was working late during the Falklands campaign, her microwave ‘did sterling service when sudden meals were required’. But this seems to have been pure invention by her ghostwriters. A few years later, when Mrs Thatcher visited the headquarters of Asda, she told them that although she was impressed by the speed of the microwave, she did not own one herself.23

  The real mark of success, of course, was not having to cook at all. Even before the Big Bang transformed the City, high-minded observers shuddered at the excesses of the capital’s financiers. ‘In the City and big companies all over the country,’ wrote a disapproving Polly Toynbee in 1980, ‘good eating is part of the rich fabric of everyday top management life.’ Oddly, bankers’ meals were tax-deductible if they ate in their wood-panelled dining rooms, but not if they went out to a restaurant. So the first years of the decade saw a boom, not just in specially built directors’ dining rooms, but in agencies providing cooks for the City. Menus were unsurprisingly lavish: blinis with caviar, smoked salmon and sour cream, steak and oyster pie, and so on. Not even the boardroom, however, was immune from the winds of fashion. ‘Avocado pears used to be smart,’ Toynbee reported, ‘but now that hoi polloi eat them
in wine bars, king size prawns have taken their place. Quails are popular at the moment, but Chicken Kiev has become vulgar.’ The latest trend in puddings, meanwhile, was ‘exotic fruits, specially flown in … Chinese gooseberries, passion fruit and persimmons’. In this respect, at least, the Square Mile was already a global village.24

  Yet even at this point, with American institutions moving into the City, the wine-fuelled three-course lunch was on its way out. The Americans arrived early and left late; even more disturbingly, they worked so hard that they only had time for lunch at their desks. The obvious solution would have been a sandwich. But not only were British sandwiches about as non-U as it was possible to imagine, they were generally agreed to be absolutely abysmal. During the Attlee years, the Daily Mail had run a celebrated story about a respectable commuter whose briefcase fell open on the train to reveal four jam sandwiches, the ultimate metaphor for what the Mail regarded as the enforced degradation of the middle classes. And thirty years on, the words that many people automatically associated with ‘sandwich’ were ‘British Rail’, conjuring up a terrifying image of a yellowing ham sandwich, its corners curling beneath the glass of a station buffet. Rehabilitating the sandwich, therefore, would be a herculean undertaking.25