Dan Snow's History Hit - Food, Class and Baking

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Pen Vogler joined me on the pod to discuss the origins of our eating habits and reveals how they are loaded with centuries of class prejudice.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm thrilled to say we got Penn Vogler back on. You may remember last year at Christmas we had Penn Vogler talking about Charles Dickens' Christmas. I went to her house, we cooked, we stood more than two metres together, we drank alcohol, we laughed in each other's face. It was wonderful. It was so Covid non-compliant and it was heavenly. This year we've met over the internet, distanced, in our houses, isolated, talk about food, grub, scran, nosebag. Yep, we're talking about the history of scoff. She's just written a fantastic new book and this is all about the words, the practices, the class connotations, everything to do with what we put in our bodies. Fascinating stuff. If you want to go back and watch our cooking demo, how Charles

Dickens did celebrate Christmas, childhood penury meant that his obsession with hospitality became something that marked his middle and late years. As he became a success, he spent huge amounts of money entertaining, throwing parties for his friends, having a lovely time. What a nice man. And so you can go and see how he did that on History Hit TV, along with many other, hundreds of other history documentaries. It's the world's best history channel. It's like Netflix for history. You're going to love it.

Head over there and do that. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get a month for free, and your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. Go and check it out. And then when you're done with that, go to historyhit.com slash shop, where the knitted knight's helmets, or the crocheted knight hats,

the debate rages, are currently selling quicker than we can get them in. So go and get one of those. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Penn Vogler. Penn, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the pod. Thank you very much for having me. Nice to see you. This is ambitious. A thousand years, a thousand years of our eating habits. Well, it's with a particular focus. So what I'm really interested in looking at is how our sort of thousand year obsession with social class and status and hierarchy has influenced the way we eat today. So what is it about the way that people have given sort of

allocated status to particular food so they think it's appropriate for them to eat or often try to kind of manipulate things so some classes manipulate things so they keep the best stuff the white bread or the tea or whatever it is that they want or the venison or the oysters for themselves and say to other people well actually it's more appropriate because you're a labourer or you're, you know, something else. It's more appropriate for you to eat brown bread and onions and cabbages. We'll talk about obviously the history soon, but does this endure to the present day or has the easy availability of cheap food, like a historically completely remarkable departure, has that eroded everything? Well, I actually think that one of the reasons we've allowed for this kind of easy availability of cheap food in this country is because we've been

looking at the wrong place. So if you compare our kind of food culture to France or Italy, or a lot of other cultures, they're much more focused on the idea that good food is what everybody aspires to, and it's available for everybody. Whereas we have this culture where there's a sort of hierarchy of food, you know, there's all the words you'd recognise for desirable food. It's fresh, it's local, it's organic, it's free range, homemade. And then all that stuff about cheap food. And we seem to think that it's inevitable that poorer people or people with less disposable incomes or less education or whatever have to eat cheap food. And I think what I discovered through writing the book is that that has grown out of our obsession with our kind of belief in social classes, a kind of inevitability, whereas it isn't necessarily inevitability. And things do change, as you'd expect over a thousand

years things have changed that doesn't surprise me at all because presumably apart from anything else i mean our ingredients are the list of our foods it's just transformed i mean a thousand years before the revolution in ship building and ship carriage that took place in the early modern period what was the englishritish diet like? And how did it differ from class to class? What we think of as our national diet today, you know, the meat, potatoes, two veg sort of dinner with a pudding, custard or whatever, that was very much laid down in the long 18th century, 1688 to 1812 or so. And that grew out of this idea that the people who were starting to kind of have control over what we ate stopped being kingly chefs who, and this kind of

Tudor idea of spices and all the rest of it, and started to be much more domestic and female. And so cooks like Hannah Glass in the kind of mid-18th century was showing people how to cook a very kind of English palate and there was a big hierarchy really or a big not a hierarchy but a sort of fight a food fight between what was French and what was English so if you're middle class like the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice in, you know, the early 19th century, you would have very good local food. And interestingly, the diet of the labouring classes didn't change very much. They ate bread, they ate bacon and cheese in the winter, they ate cabbages, they ate, you know, vegetables. But also this idea that people would be telling them what

to eat and would just say, if only they would eat more porridge, or if only they would eat more oatmeal, or only they would eat more vegetables, then they would sort themselves out, these poor people. They wouldn't have a problem anymore. We recognise that today, but that happened then as well. Fascinating about the Anglo-french sort of food thing steak frites is seen as the great french meal but i heard a rumor that actually beef and fried potatoes chip potatoes is in fact british or does it defy national stereotypes and in fact it was even both sides of the channel well traditionally we've been so proud and obsessively proud of our roast beef and you know again back to the 18th century no actually even before you know in shakespeare Traditionally, we've been so proud and obsessively proud of our roast beef.

And, you know, again, back to the 18th century. No, actually, even before, you know, and Shakespeare talks about, you know, the beef-eating Brits. And we've used that as our kind of definition. All those kind of Hogarthian cartoons, you know, the Gilray and everything, they would show impoverished French people eating vegetables, whilst big, fat, ruddy-cheeked, perhaps slightly overfed kind of yeoman were eating roast beef. But the chip potatoes is a slightly interesting thing because we got that later and we got that with fried fish a bit later. And so the earliest recipe I can see for chip potatoes is kind of mid-18th century. And it sounds really rather nasty it's just kind of fried potatoes with lemon juice on them which might be a kind of vinegar substitute how they came together was

probably through french cuisine but these things exist in their own senses in the way that you know fish and chips came together independently a bit later on but these things exist themselves and i think we just do them differently. Steak-free, it's interesting, my Australian partner says, from the Australian perspective, nobody understands quite why we see this massive difference between chips and steak and steak-free, because to them, it's just, you know, it's the same ingredients. This is something that I feel I spend a lot of time asking on this podcast What about the names we give our meals in the UK and what that says about us

and also what time we eat those meals It's so complicated The language that we use for food is really key and the pronunciation even scone and scone If you use that word somebody will place you and the language we use is what is the way and what we eat and where and how we eat it is the way we kind of judge each other. And so if you start talking about your tea, but you mean your dinner, somebody will say, okay, that's this kind of person.

They're probably from the North and they're probably working class or lower middle class or whatever, you know, taxonomy you want to use. I mean, everybody in Peeps Day, he had his dinner at midday. And I think what happened was that because there's a sort of chase going on, people who like to define themselves as higher status would eat later and later and later because they'd see that the people in the class just below them were imitating them. And that was one way that you could do it, was just by kind of making your meals go on later. And so that midday dinner for peeps has become an evening dinner.

Within one century, it moved by about eight hours. So Coleridge, I think, notices that it has moved by about eight hours in the last century. But does Coleridge say this is a sign that we're just all working far too hard? Isn't that a critique of that? You know you've had a good day when you can stop work and pile into your main meal of the day at what we now might call lunchtime in the middle of the day and then the rest of the day is a write-off because you're just like lounging around full of wine and food. Well that's interesting isn't it because in actual fact you'd expect that the people who

have dinner in the middle of the day to be tired in the afternoon and lounge around to be the kind of aristocrats who don't have to do stuff but they don't they just introduce this new meal called luncheon at the beginning of it about 1810 ish 1820 or a bit bit earlier than that and so they keep their dinner with the wine and food and all the rest of it but have a new meal and then again dinner gets later and later and later because of this kind of pushing you know mechanism going on for the aristocrats trying to sort of stop them eating at the same time as the upper middle classes ditto who are trying to kind of stop the lower middle classes joining them and then somebody discovers they get a little bit

peckish around four o'clock, say, and has an invention called afternoon tea. And it's ascribed to the Duchess of Bedford in about 1840. Now, of course, she didn't call it afternoon tea. She just calls it tea. And you have it with bread and butter, not cake. The whole cake thing is an invention that comes later. And again, it's the language that's really important because if you're eating educated, you probably just call that tea because you know that you're going to have a dinner later. Whereas if you're working class or middle class or something, you probably call it afternoon tea to distinguish it from the tea that's in the evening or kind of later on the five o'clock or the six o'clock tea. And that meal gets called tea because for working people who didn't have much money,

who wouldn't have had enough money to kind of have hot beef or a hot meal or hot ham or something every day, tea transformed their cold meal into a hot one, the drink tea. And it's kind of slightly kind of magical properties managed to make their kind of cold repast. And it probably might have been, you know, again, bread, ham, cheese, if you're lucky, little apple pie, if you're lucky. But tea makes it hot. And that's one of the reasons that tea gives its name to that afternoon meal, that, I'd say, afternoon, you know, five o'clock, six o'clock meal. And now people in Scotland still call, and Northern, you know, Northern England still call whatever they have of shepherd's pie, they call it their tea.

This is History Hit. You're listening to Penn Vogler. This is History Hit. You're listening to Penn Vogler. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics

and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I would just like to apologise to the thousands and thousands of listeners to this podcast abroad who are not living in the UK. As we try and understand the words that we used to describe the meals we eat. Don't even start us on what this country is actually called. We're not even going to start getting into the sort of overlapping jurisdictions of the UK and Britain here.

So we have a complicated little archipelago we live on, Penn, don't we? So apologies to everyone listening. So at least we can all agree that breakfast is breakfast, right? Breakfast is fine. Breakfast is breakfast, yes. So luncheon is a fairly new meal. Yeah, so luncheon isn't because you used to have your dinner at the middle of the day and then as dinner gets later, you get peckish.

When they had dinner in the middle of the day, what did they eat in the evenings? Anything? They'd have supper and it would probably just be more of the same. And interestingly, it would be something kind of rather delicious, you know, it might be something, you know, a little tasty, savoury and all the rest of it. And as supper, as dinner gets later and later, supper kind of disappears around 1800 as a kind of big meal. And what happens to quite a lot of the nice supper dishes is they get shunted over into breakfast the next day, you know, so we don't lose them. We just kind of keep them and just rename them. What are the kind of foods that you've tracked that have a particular significance? Well, vegetarianism and veganism is a really interesting one. And it shows

us a lot about how important influence is, and who gets to kind of influence what we eat and what it means. And one of the mistakes, I think, that early proponents of vegetarianism made was that they were directing themselves to male labourers and kept on saying, you are the people who need to change your diet to become vegetarian, because it is good for you and it is good for your spirit and your wholesomeness. And actually, to be honest with you, those are not the people in our history who have been terribly influential in terms of what we eat. And so now we've got new ways that people influence, you know, social media and all the rest of it.

But the fact that they are celebrity, they are female, they are given a sort of status by their celebrity, that makes a massive difference to the way that we kind of take on ideas and adopt them. So that's been very important, I think. What about meat? When I read accounts of 19th century or early 20th century, for example, soldiers, you know, being given a portion of meat as important almost as salary, you know, as important as the money in your pocket. Meat has this incredible status and it starts with ownership of land, of course, and, you know, and it goes right back to the Norman England and the enclosures of the forest and the idea that Norman overlords ate, this is the thing that comes up in Walter Scott, isn't it? The Norman

overlords eat the meat. And so it gets given kind of Norman names like pork or beef. And the Saxon peasants keep it, the animals keep their kind of Germanic names. And meat just has this enormous status because it's used as a way, like you're saying with the soldiers, it's used as a way of patronage. So this whole thing we were talking about how roast beef had this massive, you know, we've seen as the kind of the British dish. If you wanted to be very charitable, you would roast an ox, for example, and share the roast beef out with plum pudding.

And so meat indicates status, it indicates patronage, and it indicates obviously calories and all the rest of it. And that hasn't changed completely. Obviously, the vegetarianism, veganism is threatening that a little bit. And that's very, very interesting about whether that will change. But I think it's really interesting. As soon as the clocks went back, I have a fairly flexitarian diet, like, you know, you probably do as well. As soon as the clocks went back, flexitarian diet like you know you probably do as well as soon as the clocks went back my body started saying to me oh alcohol oh meat because three or four hundred years ago there wouldn't have been much else available in the winter months you know and you have your big meaty blowout at Christmas and then you have salted meat and then you have lent when you're not allowed to

eat meat because essentially there isn't any meat around to eat. So I think there are lots of ecclesiastical reasons and status reasons for why meat is still such an important part of our lives. Sugar is such a big one. Again, when I was young, being given sugar was a sign of extraordinary affection and a great privilege. Sugar used to be used as a spice, really. The earliest sort of medieval recipes would have a teaspoon, you know, a tiny little sprinkling of sugar along with, you know, what other spices they have as a way of flavouring. And our very earliest meals didn't distinguish particularly

between sweet and savoury things. You know, with a big sort of grand banquet, you'd have had some sweet dishes on the table at the same time. It starts becoming imported in 1900. There starts to be different ways of kind of finding it from sugar beet and its status falls and falls and falls. And so sugar is interesting, but also how we use it and how we think about it is interesting, because the way that we bake our cakes, I mean, I don't know if people are watching Bake Off at the moment, but the whole kind of Bake Off thing about the French cakes or the British cakes are

quite interesting because it has a sort of trail of history for how pastry and patisserie and eclairs and macarons all those sort of sweet treats are kind of seen as something that kind of you get on the kind of tiered afternoon tea table aren't they they come at the top of your kind of hierarchy whereas the sugar that was used in farmhouses and farmhouse baking along with all the spices and the fruit and all the rest of it has a slightly different much more kind of bucolic and much more kind of stable status. And so, yeah, we do think of sugar itself as something with low status, but really we're more interested, I think, in a way of where it goes

and what it goes into and how you use it. You mentioned the Great British Bake Off, the cultural phenomenon that is. What is it about baking? We have a strange kind of north-south divide historically in this country where the south's obsession was with baking with wheat. And in the north, where wheat was harder to grow because wheat requires a kind of, you know, a drier, warmer growing season, northerners ate oats and in fact were probably had better nutrition because of it and so there was this obsession in the south of baking with wheat having the whitest

bread as possible whereas in the north you might bake oat cakes or parkin. Most people would not have even had their own ovens and right from a medieval period you had to get your grain milled by the local miller and then the local baker had to bake it for you. And he might often take a piece out for himself. And I think it's quite interesting for me, talking about the bake-off, the way that the baker in the tent, you know, Paul Hollywood is kind of treated

with sort of admiration, but also a bit of kind of anxiety because actually that's the way that bakers were treated historically. Every community needed the baker to bake their bread, but they didn't trust them because the bakers might be sort of fiddling them in some way. And there's lots of accounts of medieval or kind of later bakers being pulled around the town on a trestle with mouldy bread around their necks and being pelted with bread rolls because they've been found to shortchange their customers. So baking has this very kind of central role in communities and who controls it and who has the kind of the wherewithal

to decide who gets what, that gets very important. When baking becomes more of a sort of sweet thing a treat thing you get this difference between cake which comes from that german word and it's much more of a kind of farmhouse local treats and you know the baking that is the high end the french chef the patisserie the chef thing thank you very much pen vogler for coming on again you have taught me how to cook in the past we've talked about charlesens, done lots of fun things. What's your new book called? It's called Scoff, A History of Food and Class in Britain. Must just be breathtaking,

the amount of terms we have for food in this country. Food, scoff, scram. We have this rich lexicon, I suppose, from French and German, but also from countries that have been part of our colonies and all the rest of it. And I mean, even the word scoff has three different meanings to it. Every word says something about you, about your usage of it, just in the same way that, you know, our shopping bags or what is on our tea tables says something about us and where we position ourselves in society.

Brilliant. Well, thank you very much, Penn. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Good luck with the book. Great to talk to you. Thanks, Dan. Hi, everybody. Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that.

Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. you