in excess of £1,000 a year. It is the most public symbol of having made it, a little paper clutch of success.
If eating out is all about public displays of aspiration, then surely within the privacy of one’s own fridge and store cupboard class should be totally absent. But this is not so. Soups: fresh chilled, canned or, heaven forfend, dried. Mustard: Colman’s, Maille, French’s, out of a squeezy yellow bottle, or Pommery moutarde de Meaux out of an earthenware jar. Breakfast cereals, breakfast bars, 99-calorie bars, dried mangoes, unsulphurised dried apricots, Medjool dates, bejewelled dates, star anise, sumac and saffron. Rice: American long-grain, basmati, Arborio – ‘Oh, but carnaroli is essential for risottos.’ Table salt, rock salt, sea salt, natural Halen Môn Anglesey sea salt with organic celery seed or just plain old Maldon; black pepper, white pepper, crushed pepper, never, never powdered pepper. The tyranny of choice. Waitrose has 47 different types of salt and pepper, Asda has 68 different varieties of mayonnaise or – drum roll – salad cream. Christmas 2011 saw Tesco sell 23 different types of Christmas pudding, from a 98p Tesco Value version to a £16 number topped with 24-carat gold leaf.
Coffee, however, tops them all, with the ownership of a cafetière once considered as much proof of membership of the middle classes as a reserved parking space at the golf club. But even with ‘proper’ coffee there are gradations of snobbery. The Portland Privateers have a Nespresso machine – electronic, showy, but neatly packaged, and it turns out a cup of coffee that looks classy. Mainstream Wood Burning Stovers and Rockabillies use a cafetière but the smugger WBS brigade use a Moka pot, one of those Italian metal stove-top devices that are a nightmare to wash up. Everyone else, at least in their own kitchen, uses instant. Curiously, Elizabeth David, the arbiter of so much culinary taste, herself hated real coffee and always preferred granules – a fact my wife trots out when the north London nespressorati arch their eyebrows on being asked for something out of a jar.
There are three main reasons for this staggering array of choice. First, and foremost, it is the result of the relentless mechanisation of food production combined with an unparalleled half-century of growth in disposable income. Farmers and food factories have been able to make food cheaper than ever before at the same time as customers have had the money to spend.
Second, it is the culmination of 60 years of experimentation – of freeing up the taste buds – that the end of food rationing and Elizabeth David and Raymond Postgate helped awaken and which took flight along with the first foreign holidays. David was the first of what would become a long line of cookery writers who not only provided recipes, but – in a strangely prescriptive fashion – laid down what was good food and what was not. A deb, who had been presented at court, she had the confidence to state categorically that the ideal was ‘sober, well-balanced, middle-class French cookery, carried out with care and skill’. Most working-class people from the provinces had just never been exposed to the Mediterranean produce she demanded – garlic, bay leaves, aubergines, courgettes and wine. Wine was something that was never drunk in the great majority of households. My father-in-law was typical of millions of working-class households in the 1950s in never drinking alcohol at home, save a toast on high days and holidays – and certainly never wine. He can remember the first time a bottle of ‘champagne’ came into the house – a present brought in by an uncle, who worked at the docks. A great hush descended as the family gathered around and opened the bottle. As a boy, he was aware of the disappointment from all the adults that there was no pop as the cork came out. They then quietly sipped their strangely dark and pungent liquid. It was, it turned out, Cognac Grande Champagne – a brandy, made from champagne grapes – but no one dared say anything that might suggest they had got it wrong. It seems inconceivable now, in a day when champagne is sold at £10 a bottle at Morrisons, that any family could have so little knowledge of what champagne looked or smelt like. Britain now consumes 35 million bottles of the fizzy stuff a year, enough for every household in the country to have one and a half bottles.
And thirdly, this bewildering choice in our kitchens has been driven by class divisions. Whereas once it was all about keeping up with the Joneses, now it is about differentiating ourselves from the Joneses. And helping us in this mission, indeed driving this project, is the world’s most sophisticated and powerful supermarket industry. Supermarkets not only have pioneered the cheap distribution of food, but they have also been at the cutting edge of social research, endlessly analysing who their customers are, and encouraging them to trade up – or sometimes down.
Now, about 80 per cent of all our food shopping is done in supermarkets. They didn’t even exist in 1954. Well, not in the way we would recognise them. Grocery shops were often fairly formal places, where you would be served by an apron-wearing assistant, who would stand behind a counter. The Co-op, at this stage the country’s largest food chain, had tried out ‘pay as you go out’ sections in its shops in the 1940s, but they had never taken off. It was left to Sainsbury’s to pioneer what was known back then as self-service with ‘Q-less shopping’. The company had converted a shop in Croydon in 1950 and cleverly used tough, unbreakable Perspex left over from wartime bombers as a means of protecting fresh food displays. By 1956 there were 3,000 self-service shops in Britain.
There are now well over 55,000 supermarkets, and with their growth has come the alarming decline of butchers, bakers and fishmongers. This rapid decline of the independents and rise of the supermarkets is often seen as a wholly bad thing. But the rise of large retailers, and their corresponding ability to negotiate hard with suppliers (because they were buying in such volumes), allowed us to eat more cheaply than we had ever done before. Back in 1957 a family had to spend on average more than a third of its disposable income on food and non-alcoholic drink. Despite recent food inflation spikes, this figure has fallen dramatically since the 1950s and now stands at only at 17 per cent. Food is still cheap in relative terms.
Most of us can now easily afford to buy all the calories we need, with spare change left over to spend on the fripperies, herbs, spices and exotica that mark us out as sophisticates. Nowadays, that may mean aioli from Tesco’s deli counter or samphire from Morrisons’ vegetable section. We have come a long, long way. It was not until 1970 that Sainsbury’s first sold pasta. It really was that exotic just a generation ago, and didn’t make it into the Office for National Statistics annual basket of goods (used to measure inflation) until 1987. Prior to the 1970s it was the preserve of specialist delicatessens, of which there were plenty in London, Edinburgh and wealthy market towns, but none at all in many working-class areas. That was why, on 1 April 1957, so many people were fooled by the spoof Panorama documentary that purported to show spaghetti growing on trees. Sainsbury’s now sells more than 70 different types of pasta, from wholewheat organic conchiglie to fresh walnut and gorgonzola tortellini. In 2011 the final triumph of continental over British eating habits, of Elizabeth David over luncheon meat, occurred when trade figures showed that, as a nation, we bought more olives than peanuts. The trendy wine bar had overtaken the pub.
The rise of the supermarkets and the rise of the middle classes went hand in hand with the rise of working women. Not only did this post-war phenomenon create a double-income household with the means to enjoy the finer things in life, it involved the woman of the household spending less time in the kitchen – for many a liberating experience their mothers could only have dreamed of. But this was only possible with the supermarket, selling frozen and processed food.
In the early days it was the brands that led the way. They were the ones to hold the hand of the nervous consumer having a go at cooking a cake from a pre-prepared mix, or serving up a TV dinner. And the well-trusted names of Flora, Birds Eye, Heinz, Fry’s, Batchelors, Cookeen, Vesta and Crosse & Blackwell introduced housewives and their families to not just a host of new flavours, but also endless short-cuts. Brands, invariably slightly more expensive than cooking from scratch, were mostly looked up to as an affordable luxury at this stage.
Frozen food could only become part of people’s lives once they had a freezer, which started to happen in the 1950s. By the end of the decade about 20 per cent of households had a freezer, and sales of frozen food doubled between 1955 and 1957.9 Birds Eye even opened their
