Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (27 page)

Our fondness for ready meals in Britain is symptomatic, like so much else in our gastronomic culture, of our lack of real connection with food. More than any other European nation, we have embraced industrialised food production, warts and all. The health implications of
this are well rehearsed – hydrogenated fat, palm oil and bucketfuls of salt are just some of the horrors we have been unwittingly consuming for years.
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But our convenience-food habit is affecting more than just our health. It is distancing us not just from food, but from everything that goes with it, with implications that extend well beyond the kitchen.

Although few city-dwellers before the twentieth century cooked for themselves, the intricacies of the food supply network meant that people had much closer contact with those who produced their food. Middle- and upper-class mistresses discussed menus with their cooks, often dealing directly with suppliers, or approving the produce they delivered. The urban working classes also had direct access to suppliers, of whom there were a lot more than there are today: food deserts are a modern phenomenon. Even the ‘added value’ in cooked food was real in the nineteenth century: when Victorian workers bought a baked potato from a street hawker, most were paying for something they could not produce themselves. Yet now that we all have kitchens, we are still prepared to pay other people to cook our food – which might make sense for those who can afford to do it occasionally, but for the less well off it makes no sense at all. The great paradox of convenience food is that the ‘added value’ in it is all in the part (the cooking) we could easily do ourselves. The part most of us could
not
provide (the raw ingredients) is the one we seem most reluctant to pay for. Strange, isn’t it?

Cooking is about much more than chopping up a few vegetables and throwing them in a pan, or putting a ready-made pizza in the microwave. Because cooks control not just what goes out of a kitchen, but what comes into it, they are a vital link in the food chain – the guardians of our gastronomic know-how. Only cooks know how to source raw food, tell its quality, make it taste delicious, manage and store it, make use of leftovers. Few skills have a greater collective impact on our quality of life. People who don’t cook don’t use local food shops, invite their friends around for dinner, know where food comes from, realise what they’re putting into their bodies, understand the impact of their diet on the planet – or educate their children in any of the above.

As it happens, both my parents know how to cook. My mother and
father can draw you an approximate anatomical section through a cow or pig (both are medically trained, which probably helps). They can tell you which cuts are tough or tender and why (it depends what the animal used them for), which bits are cheap or expensive; which are good for roasting, frying or stewing. They know when vegetables are in season, what to do with giblets, how to tell whether fruit is ripe, whether meat is safe to eat. This knowledge, as my parents constantly reminded me and my brother when we were growing up, was forged during the Second World War, a time of general deprivation when common awareness of food had never been greater. My generation is lucky never to have known such hardship, but even as postwar babies, we learnt some of the lessons of wartime. Like many people my age, I find my parents’ horror of waste has rubbed off on me. Growing up in the 1960s, I also picked up some basic knowledge of seasonality. I can still remember my childhood pangs of disappointment (motivated by sheer greed) when the summer absence of old King Edwards meant I would have to forgo my mother’s peerless roast potatoes, known among family and friends as ‘crunchies’ in tribute to their crackingly crisp exteriors, achieved, needless to say, through liberal basting with dripping left over from the previous Sunday.
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Today, unless you choose to make a career of it, picking up that sort of culinary knowledge is close to impossible. Go to a supermarket and try to find someone there to ask for advice, and good luck. Try to work out which bit of animal you are about to cook, and ditto. Of course supermarkets deliberately obscure the origins of meat, knowing that if most of us recognise a bit of animal in the packet, we won’t buy it. As for vegetables, trying to pick out local, seasonal varieties amid the profusion of ‘eternal global summertime’ can be hard work – or impossible. So much for gathering food. As for cooking it, there is a big difference between reading a saturated-fat statistic on the back of a ready-meal packet, and cutting off a lump of butter and sticking it into a pan – an act that never fails to afford me pleasure, even though I shudder at what it must be doing to my arteries. There is no better way to learn about food than by cooking it; yet few of us today are shown how.

Back in 1957, the BBC screened one of the most famous April Fools of all time: an episode of
Panorama
in which the highly respected
broadcaster Richard Dimbleby reported, with complete seriousness, on the unusually good spaghetti harvest that year in Switzerland, due to the mild winter. His report included footage of Swiss farm-workers in a mountain orchard picking spaghetti off trees.
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Since few in the audience had ever cooked spaghetti, most believed the report to be true. Fifty years on, not many of us would be taken in by such a programme: spaghetti is one of the few foods that we bother to cook. But 20 years from now, who knows? As Jamie Oliver discovered during his recent TV school-dinners campaign, food knowledge among modern British schoolchildren is shockingly low.
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Most of the kids in Oliver’s class stared in puzzlement at the leeks, onions and potatoes he showed them as if they were creatures from another planet (the vegetables, that is, not the kids; although both could arguably apply). If we continue as we are, the prospect of the next generation being totally ignorant not just of foreign foods, but of basic British staples, is scarily plausible.

Although cooking is a vital human skill, its position in society has always been ambivalent. Considered taboo by many ancient cultures, it was commonly viewed as an unclean act, and of lowly status. No doubt some of this prejudice came from the fact that cooking involves serving others, but a more powerful reason was probably the mess and brutality inherent to it. An essential part of a cook’s work is knowing how to gather and produce food, something which in the past generally meant knowing how to raise and slaughter animals. Domestic cookbooks published before the twentieth century invariably contained advice on the latter, and even today certain foods – notably various kinds of seafood such as lobsters, crayfish and eels – are routinely killed in the kitchen. In addition to killing, cooks through history have been expected to skin, pluck, bone and gut animals – skills that even a generation ago were common among ordinary housewives. One 1965 recipe in
Elle
magazine took for granted that its readers would be capable of skinning a rabbit; a task that would make most
Elle
readers
today run screaming from their kitchens, assuming they were there in the first place.
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Cooking is brutal and dirty work, but its product, the meal, is of immeasurable cultural significance. Cooks kill and nurture, give pleasure or poison. They are servants who hold power over those who employ them. Their knowledge is vital, yet they work in secret. Cooking is full of such contradictions – no wonder we are so confused about it.

Although the traditions of cookery fall into two distinct camps – professional and amateur – the distinction between the two is not synonymous with public and private. Since only wealthy households had separate kitchens until the early nineteenth century, they were invariably run by professional cooks. What we think of today as domestic cookery – that is, amateur – was largely confined to the countryside, where people had access to raw ingredients, and houses often had large open fires or brick ovens. Many early rural dwellings were simply kitchens in which people lived (Finnish smoke saunas being one example), and such buildings remain emblematic of the ancient marriage between hearth and home. Although early town houses also had open fires, as cities grew larger the fires got smaller, and the nearest most city-dwellers came to cooking for themselves was to sling a pot over the living-room grate and make some sort of stew. For the most part, urban populations subsisted on a diet of bread, cheese, salted fish or meat, plus the occasional hot meal bought from a public cookshop; which is why the latter had a vital role to play in cities right from the start.

Public cookshops date back to the city states of the ancient Near East. As well as acting as urban food hubs, Egyptian and Mesopotamian temples often had public bakeries too. When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the great ziggurat at Ur, he found several such bakeries in the temple compound – his comment was that the building was more like a kitchen than a temple.
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Woolley also discovered less exalted cookshops in the city. One on a side street appeared to be an ancestor of the modern kebab shop, with a solid brick range, a charcoal tray with brackets for carrying braziers of meat, and a wide brick counter on to the street for displaying cooked dishes to customers. Similar establishments have been found all over the ancient world. Roman citizens
could choose from a large variety:
thermopolia
sold hot snacks and drinks over the counter,
popinae
specialised in cheap meat left over from temple sacrifices, and
tabernae
served hot meals that one could sit down to eat.
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Another common practice in the past was the taking of raw food to the baker to be cooked. Romans did it with their free grain, and working-class Britons took their Sunday joint to the baker’s to be roasted until well into the twentieth century.

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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.