Long ago, I briefly went out with a man who happened to be both a good cook and an Old Etonian. It was never going to last, but the specific occasion for its ending was perhaps unlikely: the fellow in question looked like he might vomit when I used the word “meal” instead of supper or dinner or whatever term he thought was socially acceptable, at which point, even through my youthful embarrassment, I suddenly understood that a) manners are not necessarily well taught in our private schools, and that b) he was… well, let us a draw a veil here. Reader, I made my excuses and headed to the nearest fish and chip shop, where I promptly and relievedly ordered a highly non-U mug of tea to be drunk with my cod and mushy peas.
If, like me, you are attentive to this kind of thing, and often wonder why, as a nation, we are so snobbish, so uptight, and so weirdly confused about food, then Pen Vogler’s new book, Scoff, is your perfect feast. I found it utterly delicious, though admittedly it became even more piquant to me when I reached the chapter in which said Old Etonian can be found railing against the term “country supper”, as used by Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s British operation, in a text message to David Cameron (apparently, there is no such thing as the “country supper” to which she’d invited the PM, and the fact that she had used these words marked her out as terribly common). I can’t remember the last time I read a food book so interesting and so lively, let alone one that makes so many quietly political good points without ever becoming earnest or preachy. Let me add that it also comes with a recipe for parkin. What more could you possibly want?
Vogler covers the vexed histories of everything from napkins to fish knives, gravy to tripe. Why is it, she wants to know, that a foodstuff can signal sophistication in one age, and the polar opposite in another? And how do such fashions connect to social class, to geography, and even to gender? Take bread and butter. She argues that it has almost disappeared from our tables, at least as a dish in its own right; the hungry manual worker takes his carbs in other forms now. If a person admitted, in 2020, to a love of pease pudding, what would it reveal? While it might suggest that their roots are in the north-east, they might just as easily, these days, be a Hoxton-dwelling hipster whose proudest possession is a signed (and splotched) first edition of Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson. What it wouldn’t necessarily trumpet, as it might once have done, is that they are poor (in the nursery rhyme, pease pudding, “nine days old”, is a dish to be eked out).
The range of Vogler’s reading is extraordinary. If she quotes Dorothy Hartley, Florence White and other great food writers, she’s just as apt to steal scenes from Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Scoff is the place to marvel at the fact that, long before anyone had ever uttered the words “lactose intolerant”, the English were keen on almond milk – in the 15th century, Dame Alice de Bryene of Acton Hall, Suffolk, made her own, to be used during Lent when dairy was forbidden (and when the wealthy liked to pass off porpoise and beavers’ tails as “fish”) – and you will perhaps be amazed, too, to discover how jelly, of all things, slithered its way down the social ladder across the centuries. The mind boggles at the very idea of the Solomon’s temple made from blancmange-like stiff flummery by Mrs Raffald, the author of a 1769 cookbook – a construction that apparently set off a “space race” of competitiveness in the field of gelatine design. What brought us from its obelisk and towers, to the “pensive jellies” of aspic described so mournfully by Dickens in Dombey and Son, and finally to Chivers lime, which requires only the addition of boiling water to achieve its vivid green wobble? You will want to gorge yourself on Vogler’s answer to this question, and many others like it. She has cooked up a banquet, and everything on the table is worth tasting at least once.
• Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain by Pen Vogler is published by Atlantic (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
