TIME’S TABLES
Pen Vogler on dining through the ages
The notion that there is a right and proper food for every rung on the social ladder has always been a potent dynamic in British kitchens. From the Restoration, upwardly mobile metropolitans liked late dining hours and French food (or, at least, a French culinary vocabulary) to show their superiority to their country cousins. Sauces, fricassees and ragouts were produced by highly paid chefs for London’s aristocratic Whig families, whose dinner parties indicated political influence and privilege. The Spectator’s co-founder Joseph Addison complained of being at a supper where he was served ‘French kickshaws’ (a disgusted Anglicisation of quelque chose, meaning ‘something’) and a roast porcupine (actually a larded turkey), while the ‘noble sirloin’ was banished to a sideboard. What you served guests at Christmas was a particularly useful way to distinguish yourself. Eighteenth-century landowners spending the season on their estates might enjoy the results of the shoot: pheasant, partridge and venison to be roasted before a spit or put into towering pies. Wealthy kitchens could produce the sort of Yorkshire Christmas pie Hannah Glasse describes in her 1747 cookbook, in which boned pigeon, partridge, fowl, goose and turkey meat sit within one another ‘so as it will look only like a whole turkey’, buttressed by jointed hare and wild fowls.
At high-society ball suppers, the food had to dazzle: a whole salmon swimming in glistening aspic jelly, glazed raised pies, lobster salads, almond cheesecakes, fruit tarts, decorative baskets of dried fruits and nuts, coloured jellies and ices turned out into elegant shapes. In the centre might be a pyramid of grapes, nectarines and peaches, topped off with a pineapple. Indeed, rumours went around London that the same fruit was hired out at different functions. Having had the ‘advantage of mixing in so many different societies’, mused the celebrated Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, ‘this aristocratic and inaccessible pine’ would surely be a worthy subject for a bestseller, Memoirs of a Pineapple in London… ‘Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain’ by Pen Vogler (£20, Atlantic Books) is out now.