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Rich Food Poor Food is a study of the two food traditions in western society: the food eaten by rich people and the food eaten by poor people. It suggests that, until very recent times, the two traditions have rarely intersected.The book studies the gastronomy of the rich, with some extraordinary accounts of extravagant banquets, but also underlines that poor people had food preferences and pleasures which mattered greatly to them. It contrasts, for example, the turbot of the rich with the mackerel of the poor; the asparagus of the rich with the leeks of the poor; and the truffles of the rich with the mushrooms of the poor.Among the features of the book are its use of a wide range of food proverbs to illustrate its themes, and several humorous sections on the absurdities of etiquette in Western Europe in the past five hundred years - many of which survive to this day.

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Sociologie, société et politique

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Cooking

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Publié par	eBook Versions
Date de parution	21 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781843964810
Langue	English

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Published by Chapelfields Press

Copyright © 2017 David C. Sutton
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ISBN 978-1-84396-481-0

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To my best and favourite
reader, Dr Deborah Jenkins.
RICH FOOD, POOR FOOD

Stories of the Great Divide in
Food History, from Champagne and
Turbot to Salt Cod, Gooseberries
and Meat from Cats

David C. Sutton

CHAPELFIELDS PRESS
Contents

Cover
Copyright Credits
Dedication

Title Page
Epigraph

Introduction:
Food of the Rich, Food of the Poor

Chapter One:
Two Gastronomies: two classic dishes and their cultures
Chapter Two:
The language of the food of the poor: studying proverbs with Jean-Louis Flandrin
Chapter Three:
The stories of bacalao: myth, legend and history
Chapter Four:
The history of English ale
Chapter Five:
The festive fruit: a history of figs
Chapter Six:
Ailurophagists: when, where and why humans have eaten cats
Chapter Seven:
Meats and proteins, taboos and the spectre of cannibalism
Chapter Eight:
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie : a history of surprise stuffings
Chapter Nine:
Nefs: ships of the table and the origins of etiquette
Chapter Ten:
Dining with Pepys and Boswell: British dinners in the 1660s and a century later
Chapter Eleven
The poor fight back: rioters and regulators in Georgian England
Conclusion
Conclusion
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.
ENGLISH COUNTING CHANT

Poor men seek meat for their stomach;
rich men seek stomach for their meat.
MEDIAEVAL ENGLISH PROVERB
Introduction
FOOD OF THE RICH,
FOOD OF THE POOR
The Great Divide
This book is in the form of eleven interlinked essays on aspects of food history, with an Introduction to provide an overview and a Conclusion drawing some of the themes and threads together and then contrasting different traditions of food-lore and knowledge. The principal theme which runs through all the chapters is the extraordinary and dominant historical contrast, manifested in century after century, between the food of the rich and the food of the poor.1

The contrast begins, for most food historians, with the available source-material. The food of the rich has been described in cookery books, collections of recipes and treatises of good behaviour from the earliest times. The recipes collected by Apicius in the late Roman period are well known, but, in fact, there are much earlier recipes, dating back as far as those preserved on cuneiform tablets from Iraq which were written almost 4000 years ago.2 For mediaeval Europe, the best-known sources for “rich food” are probably Taillevent s Viandier , the works of Maestro Martino and Platina, Le menagier de Paris (advice from an elderly knight to his young bride), and the English work known as the Forme of cury , possibly the handbook of the kitchen of King Richard II. When we come to review the history of meat from cats, in Chapter Six, the fifteenth-century Catalan cookery writer Ruperto de Nola will be an important source, but he also collected a wide range of less controversial early recipes in a Mediterranean tradition of fine dining.

In addition to works in the form of books (published or manuscript), the principal archival sources for the food of the rich are accessible and not too difficult to use. We have accounts and also paintings of banquets; stewards notebooks; collections of correspondence including letters of invitation and description; papers and rolls of the courts of Europe; archives of individual abbeys, castles, manors and country houses; letter-books for the governance of the great European cities (notably London); account-books of the treasurers of trading cities (notably Bordeaux); and records, accounts and ordinances of the households of kings and dukes, popes and bishops.

For the food of the poor, there are many fewer sources. The account-books and records of hospitals, army camps, monasteries and poor-houses provide some close comparisons and yardsticks, without directly describing the usual everyday lives of the poor. Legal and judicial documentation may provide incidental data, as well as describing the sort of food which the poor would sometimes steal, but the representativeness of legal archives is generally uncertain. Travellers tales and literary descriptions are anecdotal sources which are often highly quotable but which also need to be treated with care.

Comparing the recipe books of Apicius with the general account in the geographical writings of Columella gives a good example from the Roman period of the greater specificity which can be achieved for the food of the rich. Even for the Roman period, however, inventive food historians have found some quantitative and comparative sources for the food of the poor. Mireille Corbier has suggested that the food rations allocated to slaves in Rome (with advice-texts for slave-masters as a source) and for foot-soldiers (with the rules of the bureaucracy of the Roman state still occasionally available to us) can point to the probable norms of the Roman popular diet, and the importance of vegetable proteins in that diet. Some receipts preserved on papyrus or writing-tablets list the supplies which were sent to the Roman armies in Egypt, Brittany and the north of England, and, while there were some differences from region to region, the base diet can be identified. Meanwhile in the city of Rome itself, edicts against absurd banquetting excesses and ostentatious displays indicate that even comic literary sources such as the Satyricon of Petronius (see Chapter Eight below) can have some value as long as they are not left to stand alone. Roman culture was especially distinguished by literary writing about agriculture, and sources including Cato, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny the Elder give fascinating information, notably about the importance of storage and conservation3. We shall return to the importance of long conservation for the food of the poor when we consider in detail the importance of salted foods (especially salted cod) and dried foods (especially dried figs).

Despite the examples of inventive use of related sources, the general picture remains, however, one of a paucity of sources for the food of the poor. In the light of this, Chapter Two examines the value or otherwise of proverbs and sayings as indicators of popular and working-class attitudes to food and meals. Looking back to some early glory-days for food history at the Universit de Paris VIII-Vincennes, the chapter analyses the thesis that proverbs, when properly placed in their historical context, can provide rich insights into the ways that poor people thought about food six or seven centuries ago. Although many proverbs may be trite and reactionary and unhistorical, those which can clearly be traced to the fifteenth, sixteenth or seventeenth centuries may provide us with a rare opportunity to hear the authentic voice of the people at the very bottom of the social scale. The first nine chapters are all enlivened and enriched by proverbial citations.

Chapters Three (on salted cod), Five (on figs) and Six (on meat from cats) include some reflections on the ways in which the same food can be a food for the rich in certain circumstances and a food for the poor in others. The fresh figs of the rich and the dried figs of the poor provide a cogent but straightforward example4, which can be compared with the soft cheese of the rich and the hard cheese of the poor. In a more arcane example in Chapter Three, we find a contrast between the usual bacalao or morue , which was both salted and dried, and a luxurious version, known in France as morue verte , moist and salted but not dried, which would find its place on the tables of kings and princes.

Chapters One, Six, Seven and Ten appear for the first time in any form in this volume. Chapter Four, on English ale, was presented in a rather different version and in Spanish at a conference on beer and ale in Carmona, Andalucía, in 2007. The other chapters have all developed from presentations at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. The bibliographic record of the earlier publications and papers which were rewritten as chapters for this book reads as follows:

David C. Sutton: The language of the food of the poor: studying proverbs with Jean-Louis Flandrin , in Food and language: proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2009 / edited by Richard Hosking. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2010, pp. 330-339.

David C. Sutton: The stories of bacalao: myth, legend and history , in Cured, fermented and smoked foods: proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010 , edited by Helen Saberi. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2011, pp. 312-321.

David C. Sutton, “Historia de las ales inglesas,” conferencia en el programa del curso La cerveza y su mundo , Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Carmona, septiembre 2007 [re-writing of a paper given at the Universit de Paris VIII-Vincennes, 1979].

David C. Sutton: The festive fruit: a history of figs , in Celebrations: proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2011 , edited by Mark McWilliams. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2012, pp. 335-345.

David C. Sutton: Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie: a history of surprise stuffings , in Wrapped & stuffed foods: proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012 , edited b