Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  After the storming of the Bastille, the need to express ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ revived a more equable form of public feasting. Consciously evoking the democratic dining of ancient Athens, the Marquis Charles de la Villette proposed that all Parisians should dine together in the streets, for at such a feast, he declared, ‘the capital, from one end to the other, would be one immense family and you would see a million people all seated at the same table’.48 The immediate result was the Fête de la Fédération, a two-week-long rolling banquet at the Champ de Mars, at which thousands of Parisians supped to the accompaniment of music, dancing and plays. Impromptu ‘fraternal feasts’ continued to be held in the streets of Paris for several years after the Revolution, to which all residents were invited to bring their own tables, chairs and food. However, by all accounts the feasts were fraught affairs. Those who made too modest a contribution to the meal were often accused of unfraternal selfishness, while those who were overly generous risked being branded bourgeois. But the worst sin of all was to miss the banquet altogether: absentees were considered traitors to the cause. What began as a spontaneous popular celebration soon became a political nightmare, and when fraternal banquets died out due to natural causes during the 1790s, one imagines it was to private sighs of relief all round.

  Meat and Drink

  Even the briefest glance through the history of dining makes one thing clear: food lends itself naturally to ritual complexity. Yet the vast majority of meals we consume have no hidden agenda: they are simply eaten because it is ‘lunchtime’ or ‘teatime’, or, less often, because we are actually hungry. Food can never be completely free of messages, but for the most part, those messages are buried by habit or necessity. It is ordinary meals, not politically charged feasts, that have exerted the greatest influence over cities. Unburdened by the heavy symbolism of their ‘higher’ relatives, ordinary meals make their presence felt through iterative, cumulative effect, building up the social and spatial structures of everyday life.

  The diurnal rhythm of breakfast, lunch and dinner – or something very like it – is common to cities everywhere. Whether or not we eat regular ‘proper’ meals ourselves, the cities we inhabit are geared to them, their streets, cafés, restaurants and bars filling and emptying to their rhythm as surely as the sea turns with the tide. We are usually too busy queuing for a sandwich at lunchtime or a drink after work to notice how animated cities get at mealtimes. However, when we travel abroad, the effect is obvious. Many an Englishman out in the midday sun has been puzzled by the complete shutdown of Mediterranean cities for the post-prandial siesta; similarly, many have felt ready for bed just as the rejuvenated locals come out for their evening stroll, such as the Italian passeggiata, followed by dinner. Cities eat according to their climates, and during the summer months in the Mediterranean it is far more comfortable to eat out of doors and after dark than at any other place or time. The fact that young children share in such meals can seem strange to northern visitors, for whom night life is an adult-only pursuit mainly based around alcohol, not food. Such differences are fundamental not just to the way we socialise, but to the way we inhabit the public spaces of cities.

  Our own mealtimes seem so immutable that it can be a surprise to discover that they have shifted considerably over time. In the twelfth century, the main meal of the day in Britain was eaten as early as 10 a.m., and it has been gradually moving later ever since. By Georgian times it had reached between 2 and 4 p.m.; today it is usually eaten around 8 p.m.49 The shift towards evening was due to the nineteenth-century arrival of artificial lighting, which lengthened the day and made room for a more substantial midday meal. Lunch, or luncheon, was the result, derived from ‘nuntions’, a light snack eaten in Tudor times to stave off hunger between what were then the two main meals of the day – breakfast and supper.50

  All meals in the past carried a social code in Britain: the times they were eaten, the names they were given, what was consumed all connoted class. Breakfast for the gentry in the eighteenth century was usually taken after exercise around 10 a.m., and consisted of rolls and coffee; a very different meal, except in name, to that of the working classes, who typically set off for work four to five hours earlier on a breakfast of bread, meat or cheese and ale. By 1936, the first comprehensive survey of British eating habits found that all classes were now eating breakfast before they went to work, but what they ate had effectively reversed. The upper classes were now eating a high-protein breakfast of bacon and eggs, while the poorer made do with porridge or cereal.51 The same survey found that the midday meal – ‘dinner’ to all but the richest group, who called it ‘luncheon’– was mostly eaten at home, with 50 to 60 per cent of husbands returning from work in order to eat it. For all but the upper classes, this was the main meal of the day, consisting of meat, potatoes and greens followed by pudding for the relatively well-off, and stews, pies or sausages for the less so. Only the wealthy ate ‘dinner’ in the evening: a five-course meal taken around 7–8 p.m. and consisting of soup, fish, meat or poultry, pudding, cheese and fruit. The rest of the population ate a light ‘supper’ of bread and butter, biscuits, cheese and cake between 9 and 10 p.m.; similar to the northern working-class ‘tea’, eaten between 5 and 6 p.m.

  Although such rigid class distinctions were blurred by the Second World War, the basic patterns of British meals were still discernible in 1972, when the social anthropologist Mary Douglas – more used to focusing on the dietary habits of African tribespeople – turned her anthropological attentions on herself.52 In her essay ‘Deciphering a Meal’, Douglas analysed what she ate over the course of a year, attempting to classify the results. She found that her unvarying daily routine consisted of breakfast, lunch and dinner, which fitted into a weekly rhythm starting on Monday and running through to Sunday lunch, the main meal of the week. The meals themselves also fell into distinct patterns, with ‘proper’ breakfast consisting of fruit juice, cereal and eggs (in that order), and ‘proper’ dinner a starter, main course and pudding. ‘Higher’ meals such as Christmas dinner, wedding feasts and so on were superimposed on to this everyday rhythm. Together, suggested Douglas, the meals formed a continuous hierarchy, in which the rituals of the ‘higher’ ones were echoed by those of the ‘lower’, investing even simple snacks with significance. They combined to form a ‘grammar of food’ that could be read as a social code. Douglas’s analysis, carried out from a middle-class perspective and before the demise of the nuclear family, would require some revision today. However, her basic premise still holds true. Even our least ritualised meals – burgers stuffed down on a station platform, drunken late-night kebabs – register against an underlying social code, and are mostly found wanting.

  London – the Business Lunch

  Although the great majority of meals in the past were eaten at home, dining out has always been a feature of urban life. In pre-industrial cities, public eateries were classless, and rich and poor often shared the same table, just as they lived together in the same street. Sixteenth-century Londoners ate in taverns offering ‘ordinaries’, fixed-price meals consisting of several dishes all brought to the table at once. As some satirical advice to a ‘young gallant’ in 1609 suggests, eating such meals required particular skill. The youth is advised to arrive

  … some half hour after eleven, for then you shall find most of your fashionmongers planted in the room waiting for meat. When you are set down to dinner, you must eat as impudently as can be (for that’s most gentlemanlike). When your knight is upon his stewed mutton, be you presently (though you be but a captain) in the bosome of your goose; and when your justice of peace is knuckle-deep in goose, you may, without disparagement to your blood, though you have a lady to your mother, fall very manfully on your woodcocks.53

  Taverns varied greatly in size, from single-room establishments to premises with as many as 30 rooms. The historian Hazel Forsyth describes the typical arrangement as a bar entered directly off the street, fitted with tables, benches, stools an
d a fireplace; then a taproom, cellar and kitchen, plus various rooms for hire. The latter varied greatly in price, but the most expensive provided a high degree of comfort, with wall-hangings, upholstered chairs, paintings, a mirror, clock and privy.54 Larger premises were arranged around courtyards, with outhouses and gardens at the back. A survey by Ralph Treswell of some of London’s most famous cookshops and taverns in 1611 (those at ‘Pye Corner’ frequented by, among others, that most notorious English epicure Sir John Falstaff) gives some idea of their physicality.55 The buildings are so tightly packed that many rooms either lack windows, or face on to narrow courtyards. The premises are long and narrow, with street frontages no more than 14 feet across, and corridors and stairs two and a half feet wide at the most; the latter winding steeply up like corkscrews. Heated by open fires and lit by candlelight, the rooms must have built up some serious fug, to say nothing of the massive ovens, some of them as large as rooms themselves. Londoners clearly spent a lot of time in cramped, airless, smelly spaces, but to judge from the literary evidence, that did little to dampen their appetites.

  Taverns operated rather like clubs, with credit extended to regular clients and small favours carried out. Like many of his class, Samuel Pepys used them a great deal, often preferring the convenience of the tavern to dining at home, and treating the former as an extension of the latter. In August 1630, Pepys records having bought a lobster in Fish Street and bumping into some friends carrying a sturgeon, whereupon the group repaired to the Sun Tavern in order to get their fish cooked and enjoy it together.56 The sociability of taverns made them natural places to do business, and Pepys often entertained colleagues there, and was frequently schmoozed himself.

  Taverns ruled supreme in London’s social and business life for several centuries, but during the 1650s their supremacy was threatened by the arrival of an ‘outlandish’ new drink, coffee. Treated at first with suspicion (as new foods generally are), coffee soon gained in popularity, thanks largely to its relative cheapness compared to the wine that brought the taverns most of their profits.57 For the price of a dish of coffee, anyone was free to sit for as long as they liked – anyone male, that is: although coffee-house proprietors were frequently women, the clients were all men. In appearance, coffee rooms were generally well lit and plainly furnished, with large communal tables and benches and a coffee booth from which the proprietor dispensed drinks. They usually had a large open fire, with a copper boiler over it and an iron for roasting the beans. Within 11 years of the first one opening in 1652 (the exotically named Pasqua Rosee in Cornhill), there were more than 80 coffee houses in the City, but the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666 was when business really took off.58 While the Royal Exchange was being rebuilt, coffee houses became de facto trading houses, incidentally giving birth to one of the City’s oldest institutions, Lloyd’s of London, first formed in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house nearby.

  Coffee houses soon became the favourite haunt of newsmen, for whom their open debate made them ideal places to pick up the latest gossip – although, as one contemporary ballad noted, its veracity might be doubtful:

  You that delight in wit and mirth,

  And love to hear such news

  That come from all parts of the earth,

  Turks, Dutch and Danes and Jews;

  I’ll send you to the rendezvous,

  Where it is smoking new;

  Go hear it at the coffee house

  It cannot but be true.59

  By the end of the century, coffee houses were well established in the City; they also dominated political and intellectual life in London. As we saw earlier, Covent Garden drew coffee houses like a magnet, and there was intense rivalry between various establishments as to which was the most ‘happening’ place in town. Will’s in Russell Street boasted the patronage of Dryden for 40 years: he could be found in winter occupying a large chair by the fire, or in summer on the balcony, dispensing witty remarks to a captivated audience. Meanwhile, up the street was Button’s, established in 1712 by Joseph Addison, founder-editor of the Spectator, who played host there to a gallery of influential politicians and writers including Richard Steele, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Anyone was welcome to join in the debate: the front door even had a letter box shaped like a lion’s head, through which passers-by could post contributions to the paper.

  Chewing the fat in a seventeenth-century London coffee house.

  With their shared intimacy, free speech and political leanings, coffee houses created a completely new sort of urban social space. They represented the arrival of what the sociologist Jürgen Habermas called the ‘bourgeois public sphere’: a domain in which people from all walks of life could meet and converse as equals; where, for the first time, ‘public opinion’ could form.60 During the eighteenth century, the sphere would expand into the salons and academies of Paris and ‘table societies’ of Germany; during the nineteenth, it would include London clubs and Parisian cafés. But in the days of London’s first coffee rush, that was still a long way off. While Londoners sat around and dished the dirt, Parisians remained mired in the Ancien Régime: a milieu that was to give rise to a radically different kind of eatery – one that would eventually challenge the very sociability of public dining.

  Paris – Rise of the Restaurant

  Paris before the Revolution had no equivalent to London’s taverns and coffee shops, nor to the intellectual life they fostered. The nearest to the former were traiteurs, eating-houses that enjoyed a state monopoly over the sale of cooked meats, and served table d’hôte meals to loyal groups of regulars. However, as fashionable society in the eighteenth century responded to the Romantic rediscovery of nature, a dissatisfaction grew with the traiteurs’ heavy fare, and various figures, Rousseau prominent among them, began to call for an altogether lighter, more natural diet. In 1767, a traiteur by the name of Minet responded, opening an establishment in Paris with the following advertisement: ‘Those who suffer from weak and delicate chests, and whose diets therefore do not usually include an evening meal, will be delighted to find a public place where they can go and have a consommé without offending their sense of delicacy …’61 The consommé in question was a restorative meat bouillon known as a restaurant, kept on the boil all day long so that clients could pop in for a cup of it any time they liked. More medicine than food, the restaurant – and the establishments to which it gave its name – was destined to change the face of public dining for ever. The new restaurateurs were soon dishing up other ‘healthy’ foods such as semolina, rice-creams, fruit in season, eggs and white cheeses; the very foods, as Rebecca Spang pointed out in her book The Invention of the Restaurant, that were eaten by Rousseau’s rustic heroines.

  Restaurants presented an entirely new way of eating out. Anyone, including women, could go there at any time of day, sit at their own table, order what they liked off a menu, and pay for it separately. Individual, independent, anonymous; restaurants were about as far from the enforced camaraderie of traiteurs as one could get; which, as the latter soon realised, made them hugely attractive. Soon traiteurs began opening their own salles du restaurateur, many of them staffed by ex-courtly chefs relieved of their posts by the Revolution. Richly decorated with boudoir-like interiors complete with mirrors, chandeliers and painted nature scenes, restaurants were unlike any previous public eating-house, and tourists flocked to Paris to be shocked by their louche decors and even loucher clients, whose behaviour they found utterly perplexing. This account by Antoine Rosny, who visited Paris in 1801, is typical:

  On arriving in the dining room, I remarked with astonishment numerous tables placed one beside another, which made me think that we were waiting for a large group, or were perhaps going to dine at a table d’hôte. But my surprise was at its greatest when I saw people enter without greeting each other and without seeming to know each other, seat themselves without looking at each other, and eat separately without speaking to each other, or even offering to share their food.62

  It would tak
e another hundred years for restaurants to catch on outside Paris, but what Rosny was witnessing was nothing short of a social revolution. By giving clients a choice of what to eat, restaurants were dismantling the ancient laws of the table, replacing its companionship with theatrical individualism. From now on, dining out would focus not on the camaraderie of diners, but on the gastronomic genius of the chefs who cooked for them.

  Restaurants required a whole new kind of diner to appreciate them fully, and Grimod de la Reynière, maverick nobleman and gastronomic guru, was the self-appointed man. In 1803, Grimod went on a series of ‘nutritive strolls’ through Paris, publishing the results in his Almanach des Gourmands, the world’s first restaurant guide. It was an instant hit. Where the bourgeois had once fallen over themselves to learn how to give the perfect dinner party, they now clamoured to be told where to go out and eat. The Almanach became an annual publication, acquiring the sort of holy status reserved today for the Guide Michelin, with the power to make or break the restaurants it reviewed. Professional gourmandism was soon flourishing in Paris, along with the idea that fine food could only be enjoyed by refined aristocratic palates. The latter notion appealed to restaurateurs themselves, many of whom were used to pleasing noble employers. The bouillon-serving simplicity of early restaurants soon disappeared under a cuisine of towering complexity. Menu comprehension replaced effortless grace as the new social test, as arriviste diners struggled to decipher florid descriptions of dishes and the processes that went into producing them.