Culinary class codes

Along with the lists of ingredients and calorie-counts, almost every item of English food comes with an invisible class label. (Warning: this product may contain traces of lower-middle-class substances. Warning: this product has petit-bourgeois associations and may not be suitable for upper-middle-class dinner parties.) Socially, you are what you eat – and when, where and in what manner you eat it, and what you call it, and how you talk about it.

The popular novelist Jilly Cooper, who has a much better understanding of the English class system than any sociologist, quotes a shopkeeper who told her, ‘When a woman asks for back I call her “madam”; when she asks for streaky I call her “dear”.’ Nowadays, in addition to these two different cuts of bacon, one would have to take into account the class semiotics of extra-lean and organic bacon, lardons, prosciutto, speck and Serrano ham (all favoured by the ‘madam’ class rather than the ‘dear’, but more specifically by the educated-upper-middle branch of the ‘madam’ class), as well as ‘bacon bits’, pork scratchings, and bacon-flavoured crisps (all decidedly ‘dear’-class foods, rarely eaten by ‘madams’).

English people of all classes love bacon sandwiches (the northern working classes call them ‘bacon butties’), although some more pretentious members of the lower- and middle-middle classes pretend to have daintier, more refined tastes, and some affectedly health-conscious upper-middles make disapproving noises about fat, salt, cholesterol and heart disease.

Other foods that come with invisible labels warning of lower-class associations include:

prawn cocktail (the prawns are fine, but the pink ‘cocktail’ sauce is lower-middle class – and, incidentally, it does not suddenly become any ‘posher’ if you call it ‘Marie-Rose’ sauce)

egg and chips (both ingredients are relatively classless on their own, but working class if eaten together)

pasta salad (nothing wrong with pasta per se, but it’s ‘common’ if you serve it cold and mixed with mayonnaise)

rice salad (lower class in any shape or form, but particularly with sweetcorn in it)

tinned fruit (in syrup it’s working class, in fruit juice it’s still only about lower-middle)

sliced hard-boiled eggs and/or sliced tomato in a green salad (whole cherry tomatoes are just about OK, but the class-anxious would be advised generally to keep tomatoes, eggs and lettuce away from each other)

tinned fish (all right as an ingredient in something else, such as fishcakes, but very working class if served on its own)

chip butties (a mainly northern tradition; even if you call it a chip sandwich rather than a butty, it is about as working-class as food can get).

Very secure uppers and upper-middles, with the right accents and other accoutrements, can admit to loving any or all of these foods with impunity – they will merely be regarded as charmingly eccentric. The more class-anxious should take care to pick their charming eccentricity from the very bottom of the scale (chip butties) rather than the class nearest to them (tinned fruit in juice), to avoid any possibility of a misunderstanding.