Class (33 page)
‘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 members 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.
In Harry Stow-Crat’s house an eternal battle rages between the cook, who keeps asking for tiny young carrots and potatoes because they’re more tender, and the gardener who wants them to grow to horticultural-show size.
Conversely in street markets you can’t sell tiny potatoes, tomatoes or sprouts to Mrs Definitely-Disgusting because they appear to be a bad bargain. Many working-class eating habits are based on eking things out further. Sandwiches are left with the crusts on, lettuce is served with Heinz salad cream, so you need only use as much as you want, rather than wasting the whole thing by drenching it in French dressing. Mrs D-D’s cabbages always seem over-cooked because she uses everything and by the time the stalk and tough outer leaves are tender the inner leaves are overdone. Jen Teale calls them greens. As late as 1973 only 37 per cent of the working classes in Britain had refrigerators, which explains why they ate so much out of tins, and why so many things—beetroot, onions, herrings, cockles and whelks—are stored in vinegar to make them last.
Because Mr Definitely-Disgusting likes frozen and marrow fat peas, Jen Teale would refer even to peas that came out of a field in Norfolk as ‘garden peas’. Mrs D-D in return would take the mickey out of Jen by saying he wouldn’t touch any of ‘them petty poys’. Jen would ask for ‘green’ beans, to distinguish them from the Cockney ‘biked’ beans, while Samantha Upward would say ‘French’ or ‘runner’ beans. Jen would talk about ‘creamed potatoes’ because it was one up on the working-class ‘mash’, not realizing that the upper- middles and uppers talk about mashed potatoes as well. She’d also call baked potatoes ‘jacket’ potatoes, which she’d cut in half horizontally, spread out like two halves of an Easter egg on a separate plate, and fill with sour cream. Jen thinks chips are very common. If she had to eat them she’d say ‘French fries’, but she’d rather have sauté potatoes, which Samantha calls ‘fried potatoes’.