Hard Graft and Gilded Plates: The Aftertaste of Class in Contemporary Cuisine
How the tastes of scarcity became markers of cultural capital.
"What the rich give to the poor is often less valuable than what they take from them without notice." - William Cobbett
It is one of the great perversions of the British palate - and one suspects, a greater international neurosis - that the food of the poor has so often been requisitioned by the affluent not with shame, nor even irony, but with a kind of moist-eyed reverence, lacquered in euphemism and gloss. The dish once born of insufficiency is now served beneath the gloved hand of a maître d', its price inflated to the point of travesty, and its backstory rewritten as some rustic idyll: hearty, honest, and to borrow a loathsome word, earthy. That adjective alone - so beloved of menu copywriters and print-page palates - ought to set the teeth on edge. Earthy, as though the soil were a flavouring, as though the bitter necessity of subsistence agriculture were just another umami note to swirl about the palate like wine.
It is not only foodstuffs that undergo this peculiar sanctification, but the cultures that conceived them, often under the lash of penury. No cuisine has suffered this genteel misappropriation more than Italy’s cucina povera - a phrase now suavely inscribed on the menus of metropolitan bistros and urban dining rooms, denoting the sort of austere cookery born of clever hands and bare cupboards. Bread soaked in water, bean stews, wild greens fried in sour oil: these were never intended as an aesthetic gesture. They were the edible expression of systemic poverty, of Mezzogiorno tenacity beneath Bourbon neglect and post-unification disdain. And yet in a Fitzrovia trattoria, a Brooklyn osteria, or a Parisian neo-bistro, one may now dine on ribollita for a princely sum, as though Florentine field hands ever paid such sums for their thrice-boiled cabbage.
The truth is, of course, that the rich have always eaten the poor. Not just literally - though the English fondness for game pies and other medieval obscenities suggests so - but symbolically and ceremonially. The food of the labouring classes is assimilated, refined, and repurposed, until its origin is no longer visible beneath the aspic.
Take the lobster - now the edible sigil of indulgence - which in the 17th century was considered so contemptibly lowly in colonial New England that laws were proposed to prevent its overuse in servant meals. By the early 18th century, a surfeit of the creatures washed up along the coasts of Nova Scotia and Maine, leading to a glut so profound that they were used as fertiliser and fish bait. “A cockroach of the sea,” as it was then unkindly known. It was not until the late Victorian period, when railway lines enabled fresh crustacea to reach London’s Piccadilly and Paris’s Les Halles, that lobster was reinvented in Europe - re-described in Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire as a vehicle for sauce Américaine, and thereafter as an object of culinary conquest. What had once been prised from rock pools by ragged hands became instead the red-shelled centrepiece of Edwardian splendour.
Oysters, too, those silvery molluscs which now glisten upon silver trays beside flutes of expensive champagne, were once so abundant in British waters that they were deemed scarcely worth counting. By the 1720s, the beds of Whitstable and Colchester were dredged to the point of exhaustion to meet the demands of the London poor, for whom oysters were protein in its cheapest form. Jonathan Swift remarked acidly on their ubiquity, noting in 1711 that “he was sickened by their slimy plenitude,” while in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, characters consume them by the dozen as matter-of-factly as we might butter toast. The Victorian cookery writer Eliza Acton considered them “staple provisions for clerks and errand boys,” and yet by the end of the 19th century, thanks in part to overfishing and the rise of bacterial epidemics, the oyster became scarce enough to acquire prestige. Its cultural migration was complete: from tavern table to club luncheon, from newspaper wrapping to silver salver.
Even drink has not escaped this peculiar reversal. Pimm’s, that saccharine apéritif of cucumber slices and half-melted strawberries, was first concocted in 1823 by James Pimm, a farmer’s son from Kent who made his name running an oyster house near Bank. His eponymous “No. 1 Cup” was a gin-based tonic served in pewter mugs to aid digestion among City clerks and itinerant traders - hardly the stuff of Glyndebourne. But in the 20th century, Pimm’s was rebranded as a summer libation of the tennis set, consumed in canvas marquees on the lawns of Henley and Cowes. It was marketing, not refinement, that carried it up the social ladder: a kind of liquefied aspiration, the draught of a certain kind of English self-image.
Gin, too, is an object lesson in reputational laundering. In the 1730s, London consumed over ten million gallons of the stuff annually - much of it raw, unrectified spirit sold through pawnbrokers and chemists. The so-called “Gin Craze” - immortalised in Hogarth’s Gin Lane - was not just a moral panic but a genuine urban crisis, with infant mortality soaring and whole districts submerged in drunken dereliction. The government’s attempts to legislate consumption - notably the 1736 Gin Act - failed miserably, inciting riots and driving trade underground. And yet by the 1850s, gin had begun its transformation into a spirit of distinction, aided by the invention of the column still and the production of a cleaner, more palatable liquor. British officers stationed in India mixed it with quinine tonic to combat malaria, giving rise to the gin and tonic - a colonial drink par excellence. By the interwar years, gin was the elixir of drawing rooms and cocktail bars, its reputation so thoroughly rehabilitated that it became the basis for Dry Martinis and Negronis, the chosen spirit of the Bloomsbury set and Bright Young Things. Today, with its artisan variants and botanical infusions, it is the drink of upscale dinner parties and artisan distilleries alike - its rougher origins smoothed out by the patina of design.
Sometimes the transformation is not merely social but metaphysical. In France, bouillabaisse, now a totem of Provençal chic, was born not of reverie but necessity. As Prosper Mérimée wrote in a 1834 letter from Marseille, “the fishermen eat what the merchants won’t touch,” referring to the medley of gurnard, bream, and scorpionfish that made up the original dish. The name itself - a corruption of bouillir et baisser, “boil and reduce” - is a culinary command rather than an evocation. In the Marseille of the 19th century, it was a dish of the portside poor, cooked on makeshift stoves, redolent with the scent of anise and necessity. Yet by the early 20th century, bouillabaisse had crossed into the realm of haute cuisine, appearing on the menus of Parisian restaurants as a regional delicacy worthy of celebration and, naturally, inflation. Today it is recited as an ode to terroir, served in deconstructed components, with its humble origins rendered invisible beneath glass and garnish. For those who grew up watching stews made from clearance fish and ends of fennel, its elevation can feel like a kind of culinary mirage.
More generally, meat has not been spared an unfathomable aesthetic resurrection. The cuts once regarded as butcher’s dregs are now fashionable beyond reason. Pork belly, that banded slab of fat and flesh once cooked long to wring out every ounce of flavour, now features on tasting menus across the country, lacquered in miso or maple as though its costliness were proportional to its crispness. Oxtail - which once turned up in the enamel pots of northern households as a thrifty stew, thickened with barley or simply bread - is now marketed as “nose-to-tail” dining, as though eating the animal whole were an act of refined rebellion rather than simple prudence. Lamb ribs, chicken hearts, cheeks, trotters - each of them sold back to us, the descendants of those who once cooked them from need, as delicacies to be savoured slowly and shared in low lighting. One cannot help but feel the dissonance: that these foods, once eaten without romance, are now consumed under the illusion of authenticity. It is not that the food is bad, or the cooking cynical, but there is something uncanny about it all; to sit at a counter in Soho and pay thirty pounds for what your grandmother would have cooked on a Tuesday out of habit, not reverence.
But then, one must ask: is all this simply the churn of history, the natural metamorphosis of foodways as economies shift and tastes migrate? The British table, after all, has always been in flux. What was once venison for kings became Sunday roast for clerks; spices plundered for naval trade are now scattered on late-night chips. Perhaps the gentrification of once-humble foods is less a theft than a kind of homage, however imperfect. When we speak of celebrating working-class food, as chefs so often claim to do, what do we mean? Are we preserving its soul or staging its silhouette? There is a difficult slippage here. For what begins as honest remembrance can so easily become artifice: the stew thickened not with history but demi-glace, the pie reinvented with duck fat and truffle, the "nod" to simplicity twisted into a wink. And yet, can one really begrudge evolution? Should a dish remain forever tethered to the conditions of its origin, or is it allowed, like language and landscape, to change, to wander, and to be reimagined? The tension lies in not knowing when transformation tips into erasure. When reverence becomes affectation. And when, in trying to honour the past, we polish it to such a gloss that the fingerprints are wiped clean.
And perhaps that is the deeper unease. The transformation of working-class food into middle class theatre is not merely a matter of taste, but of memory. When you grow up in a house where food was made to last the week, not adorn a plate, it becomes harder to square the reverent murmurs over “humble” ingredients with what they once meant. The foods of childhood reappear, not as comfort, but as performance - familiar yet oddly distant. We are told it is a kind of honouring, a return to roots, but sometimes it feels more like translation without fluency, or worse, ventriloquy.
What we see in this great culinary migration from the scullery to the chandelier is not theft, exactly. It is more elusive, more ambient. A disconnect. A wistfulness dressed up as connoisseurship. A hunger, not for food, but for a kind of authenticity no longer accessible. And so the ritual continues. Each time a chef describes a dish as “elevated,” one must ask: from where, and for whom? Each time “honest” food is placed before us with elaborate ceremony, there is the shadow of a question left unasked: what are we really remembering, and what have we chosen to forget?
FOODIE QUOTE OF THE DAY:
‘‘I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.’’
- Salvador Dali
Wonderfully written Jack, as always. You really have a way with words. And it is so true that so many of the foods we now consider fancy (and which demand high prices these days) were once the food of the poor.