Passing secrets in class

[muckefuck]

This opinion piece by fellow alum John Scalzi is sparking some interesting online discussions, particularly on the role of class. (Here's a thoughtful response from nihilistic_kid highlighting the importance of that factor.) One of these was in the Facebook feed of a friend, and a friend of hers made this interesting observation:

Upper class kids, especially those from academic families, view knowledge as something to be shared, and it is not just right but proper to defer to superior expertise. I think one of the most telling markers of class, honestly, is family recipes. If you ask someone from a lower class background about the recipe for some particular dish, nine times out of ten you'll get some waffle about my/mother's/grandmother's "secret recipe," with all the song and dance that sounds like something between the trade secrets of the medieval guilds and some occult mystery tradition. If you ask someone from an upper class background, this is invariably taken as an invitation to talk about themselves, their ancestry, or their travels, giving the provenance of the recipe, mentioning personal variations, and more often than not referring to "tricks" rather than "secrets," as the assumption is shared common knowledge rather than secrecy, and mentioning "tricks" is just a way to gauge a person's expertise. With that sort of worldview, it's not surprising that upper class kids have a leg up in academia because it comes out of the later tradition.

I'm interested in hearing how this does or doesn't jibe with the experiences of others here. My family background is pretty firmly middle class (though Dad's family was on the borderline, his father being a workman-cum-farmer) and the description of "upper class" behaviour sounds about right for us and our milieu. But I don't really have enough experience trading recipes with members of the "lower class" to speak to that part of it. Most of the working-class people I've chatted with about food have been recent immigrants and I think that skews the sample.

Comments

[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

Who cooks?

No, really -- who cooks? Yes, everyone eats, some even put food on the table, but cooking...

Hobbyists. People with spare time. People who make enough money within a household to allow a member of that household to "do cooking" and who don't make enough money to hire a cook or to eat in restaurants. Cooking-as-hobby has as a pre-requisite the investment of food with a more-than-fuel significance. This is shared-family-meal significance for some, the my-body-is-a-temple significance for others, the individuation-through-proclaimed-expertise significance for still others. (I cook for shared-family-meal reasons and to save money. Not that I could immediately turn hours spent in food shopping and preparation into cash; but I certainly can immediately make cash disappear by buying cooked food.)

Other people, non-hobby cooks, just eat.

The upper-class person eats in restaurants and goes to Waitrose / Marks & Spencer for any readymeals, the lower-class person goes to Aldi / Tesco / Iceland for readymeals and when in a can't-be-arsed-to-work-the-microwave mood pops into a chippie, a Tennessee Fried Chicken.

Neither the upper-class person nor the lower-class person has "family recipes". For them, other people do the cooking.

To have opinions on food, to know and to trade recipes, strikes me as a very middle-class characteristic.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

As I was telling my partner the other night, I spent part of my boyhood in a rural area and people absolutely had opinions about food there. The authorities they cited weren't Julia Child or Justin Wilson but revered relatives or people known in the local community. Every corn grower was convinced he knew the best variety of sweet corn for eating and the best way to cook it, but he might be too modest or retiring to get into a dispute over it.

Not all "working class" or "lower class" people are as alienated from the source of their food as your typical post-industrial city-dweller, and you don't have to be "middle class" to have a strong opinion on which fry shack has the best fried chicken or which smokehouse has the best barbecue.

[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

That was my boyhood, too. "Sparkle" strawberries. "Country Gentleman" white sweet corn. "Martha Washington" asparagus. And Mrs Heritage's lemon curd at church suppers, Mrs Carter's apple pie, Mrs Thompson's raised yeast rolls.

But that boyhood, mine, not yours!, is fifty years gone.

You move from "It was thus" to "It is thus". Is it? In Chicago, in Missouri? I can't say.

I think that I've given a faithful rendering of how things are now among the people I know in London.