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Hi, everybody, welcome, welcome dance notes, history, I'm thrilled to say we've got Penn Vogeler back. And you may remember last year at Christmas we had Penn Vogeler talking about Charles Dickens is Christmas. I went to her house, we cooked. We took more than two metres together. We drank alcohol. We laughed in each other's face. It was wonderful. It was so covid non-compliant and it was heavenly.

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This year we've met over the Internet, distanced in our houses, isolated. Talk about food, grub, scran, nose bag. Yep. We're talking about the history of scoff. She's just written a fantastic new book. And this is all about the words, the practices, the class connotations, everything to do with what we put in our bodies. Fascinating stuff.

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If you were to go back and watch our cooking demo, how Charles Dickens did celebrate Christmas childhood penury, that his obsession with hospitality became something that marked his middle. And later years as he became a success, he spent huge amounts of money entertaining, throwing parties for his friends, having a lovely time. What a nice man. And so you can go and see how he did that on History TV, along with many other hundreds of other history documentaries, the world's best dramas like Netflix for History.

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You can love it over there and do not use the code pod. What do you want? You get a month for free in your second month, which just one pound euro or dollar. Go and check it out.

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And then when you're done with that dotcom slash shop where the knitted knights helmets or the crocheted knight hats, the debate rages are currently selling quicker than we can get them in. So you don't get one of those. In the meantime, everyone enjoy Vogeler.

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Good to see you. Thanks, Carol, on the pod. Thank you very much for having me. Nice to see you. This is ambitious. A thousand years. A thousand years. Our eating habits.

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Well, it was of particular focus. So what I'm really interested in looking at is how are sort of thousand year obsession with social class and status and hierarchy has influenced the way we eat today. So what is it about the way that people have given sort of allocated status to particular food so they think it's appropriate for them to eat or often try to kind of manipulate things. So some class is manipulating so they keep the best off the white bread or the tea or whatever it is that they want, or the venison or the oysters for themselves and say to other people, well, actually it's more appropriate because you're a laborer or, you know, something else.

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It's more appropriate for you to eat brown bread and onions and cabbages.

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We'll talk about, obviously, the history soon. But does this endure to the present day or has the easy availability of cheap food like a historically completely remarkable departure? Has that eroded everything?

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Well, I actually think that one of the reasons we've allowed for this kind of easy availability of cheap food in this country is because we've been looking at the wrong place. So if you compare our kind of food culture to France or Italy or a lot of other cultures, they're much more focused on the idea that good food is what everybody aspires to and it's available for everybody. Whereas we have this culture where there's a sort of hierarchy of food, you know, there's all the words you'd recognize for desirable food.

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It's fresh, it's local, it's organic, it's free range, homemade, and then all that stuff about cheap food. And we seem to think that it's inevitable that poor people or people with less disposable incomes or less education or whatever have to eat cheap food. And I think what I discovered through writing the book is that that has grown out of our obsession with our kind of belief in social class as a kind of inevitability, whereas it isn't necessarily inevitability.

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And things do change as you'd expect over a thousand years things have changed.

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That doesn't surprise me at all because presumably everything else I mean, our ingredients are the list of our foods is just transformed. I mean, a thousand years ago, before the revolution in ship building and ship carriage that took place in the early modern period, what was the English British diet like and how did it differ from class to class?

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What we think of as our national diet today, you know, the meat, potatoes to veg, sort of, you know, with a pudding, custard or whatever, that was very much laid down in the long 18th century, sixteen, eighty eight to 1812 or so. And that grew out of this idea that the people who were starting to kind of have control over what we ate stopped being kingly chefs who and this kind of Tudor idea of spices and all the rest of it and started to be much more domestic and female.

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And so cooks like kind of glass in the kind of mid 18th century. You were showing people how to cook a very kind of English palate.

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And there was a big hierarchy, really, or not a hierarchy, but a sort of fight, a food fight between what was French and what was English. So if you're middle class, like the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice and, you know, the early 19th century, you would have very good local food.

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And interesting, the diet of the laboring classes didn't change very much. They ate bread. They ate bacon and cheese in the winter. They ate cabbages, you know, vegetables. But also this idea that people would be telling them what to eat and would just say if only they would eat more porridge or if only they would eat more oatmeal or only they would eat more vegetables, then they would sort themselves out. These poor people, they wouldn't have a problem anymore.

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We recognise that today. But that happened then as well.

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Fascinated by the Anglo-French sort of food thing, stake fruit is seen as the great French meal. But I heard a rumor that actually beef and fried potatoes, potatoes is in fact British or does it the financial stereotypes. And in fact, there was even both sides of the channel.

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Well, traditionally, we've been so proud and obsessively proud of our roast beef. And, you know, again, back to the 18th century now, actually, even before, you know, Shakespeare talks about, you know, the beef eating Brits, and we've used that as our kind of definition, all those kind of Hogarth and cartoons, you know, the Gillray and everything, they would show impoverished French people eating vegetables whilst big fat, ruddy cheeked, perhaps slightly overfed kind of yeomen.

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We're eating roast beef. But the potatoes is a slightly interesting thing because we got that later and we got that with fried fish a bit later.

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And so the earliest recipe I can see for chip potatoes is kind of midnight. Mid 18th century, and that sounds really rather nasty as this kind of fried potatoes with lemon juice on them, which might be a kind of vinegar substitute, how they came together was probably through French cuisine. But these things exist in their own senses in the way that, you know, fish and chips came together independently a bit later on. But these things exist themselves, and I think we just do them differently.

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Steak fry, it's interesting. My Australian partner says from the Australian perspective, nobody understands quite why we see this massive difference between chips and steak and steak free, because to them it's just, you know, the same ingredients.

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This is something that I feel I spent a lot of time asking on this podcast. What about the names we give our meals in the UK and what that says about us and also what time we eat those meals? It's so complicated.

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The language that we use for food is really key, you know, and the pronunciation, even scones go. If you use that word, somebody will place you.

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And the language we use is what is the way and what we eat and where and how we eat. It is the way we kind of judge each other. And so if you start talking about your tea, you mean your dinner, somebody will say, okay, that's this kind of person that probably from the north and they're probably working class or lower middle class or whatever, you know, taxonomy you want to use. I mean, everybody in the Peeps day, he had his dinner at midday.

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And I think what happened was that because there's a sort of chase going on, people who like to define themselves as higher status would eat later and later and later because they'd see that the people in their class just below them were imitating them. And that was one way that you could do it, was just by kind of making your meals go on later. And so that midday dinner for Peeps has become an evening business within one century, moved by about eight hours.

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So Coleridge, I think, notices as it has moved by about eight hours in the last century.

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But does Coleridge say this is a sign that we're just all working far too hard? Is not a critique of that. You know, you've had a good day when you you can stop work and pile into your main meal of the day, what we now might call lunchtime in the middle of the day.

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And then the rest of the day is a write off because you're just like lounging around full of wine and food.

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Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because in actual fact, you'd expect that the people who have dinner in the middle of the day to be tired in the afternoon and lounge around to be the kind of aristocrats you don't have to do stuff, but they don't. They just introduce this new meal called lunch. And at the beginning of it, about 18, 10 ish, 18, 20 or a bit bit earlier than that.

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And so they keep their dinner with the wine and food and all the rest of it, but have a new meal. And then again, dinner gets later and later later because of this kind of pushing mechanism going on for the aristocrats trying to sort of stop them eating at the same time as the upper middle classes who are trying to kind of stop the lower middle classes joining them.

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And then somebody discovers they get a little bit peckish around four o'clock, say, and has invented this thing called afternoon tea. And it's ascribed to the Duchess of Bedford in about 1840. Now, of course, she didn't call it afternoon tea. She just calls it tea. And you have it with bread and butter, not cake. The whole cake thing is an invention that comes later.

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And again, that's the language.

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It's really important because if you're eating educated, you probably just call that tea because you know that you're going to have a dinner later. Whereas if you're working class or middle class or something, you probably call it afternoon tea to distinguish it from the tea that's in the evening or kind of later on the five o'clock or the six o'clock tea. And that meal gets called tea because for working people didn't have much money. Who wouldn't have had enough money to kind of have hot beef or hot a hot meal or hot ham or something.

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Every day, tea transformed their cold meal into a hot one.

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The drink tea and it's kind of slightly kind of magical properties managed to make their kind of cold repassed. And it probably might have been, you know, again, bread, ham, cheese, if you're lucky, little apple pie if you're lucky.

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But tea makes it hot. And that's one of the reasons that he gives its name to that afternoon meal, that Bucksey afternoon, you know, five o'clock, six o'clock meal.

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And now people in Scotland still call and northern, you know, northern England still call whatever. They have a shepherd's pie, they call it that he.

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This is history, it you're listening to Ben Vogeler. I would just like to apologize to the thousands and thousands of listeners to this podcast abroad who are not living in the U.K. as we try and understand the words that we used to describe the meals we don't even stars on. What is this country's actually called? We're not even going to start going to the sort of overlapping jurisdictions, the U.K. and Britain here. So we have a complicated archipelago we live on, don't we?

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So apologies for listening. So at least we can all agree that breakfast is breakfast, right?

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Breakfast is fine. Breakfast is breakfast. Yes. So luncheon is a fairly new meal. Yeah. So lunch is because you used to have your dinner at the middle of the day and then as dinner guests later you get peckish when they had dinner in the middle of the day.

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What do they in the evenings anyway. They had supper and it would probably just be more of the same. And interestingly, it would be something kind of rather delicious. You know, it might be something, you know, little tasty, savory and all the rest of it. And I suppose dinner gets later and later supper kind of disappears around eighteen hundred as a kind of big meal. And what happens to quite a lot of the nice supper dishes that they get shunted over into breakfast the next day, you know, so we don't lose them, we just kind of keep them and just rename them.

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What are the kind of foods that you've tracked that have a particular significance?

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Well, vegetarianism and veganism is a really interesting one, and it shows us a lot about how important influences and who gets the kind of influence, what we eat and what it means. And one of the mistakes, I think the early proponents of vegetarianism made was that they were directing themselves to male labourers and kept on saying, you are the people who need to change your diet to become vegetarian because it is good for you and it is good for your spirit and your wholesomeness.

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And actually, to be honest with you, those are not the people in our history who have been terribly influential in terms of what we eat. And so now we've got new ways that people influence, you know, social media and all the rest of it.

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But the fact that they are celebrity, they are female, they are given a sort of status by their celebrity that makes a massive difference to the way that we kind of take on ideas and adopt them. So that's been very important, I think.

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What about meat? When I read accounts of 19th century, early 20th century, for example, soldiers, they're being given a portion of meat as important almost as salary, you know, as important as the money in your pocket.

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Meat has this incredible status and it starts with ownership of the land, of course. And, you know, and it goes right back to the norm in England and enclosures of the forest. And the idea that Norman Overlord's eight, this is the thing that comes up and Walter Scott, isn't it? The Norman overlords eat the meat. And so it gets given kind of normal names like pork or beef and the Saxon peasants keepit. The animals keep that kind of Germanic names.

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And meat just has this enormous status because it's used as a way, like you're saying, with the soldiers, it's used as a way of patronage. So this whole thing we are talking about how roast beef has this massive you know, we're seen this the kind of the British dish. If you wanted to be very charitable, you would roast an ox, for example, and share the roast beef out with plum pudding. And so meats indicate status, it indicates patronage, and it indicates obviously calories and and all the rest of it.

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And that hasn't changed completely. Obviously, the vegetarianism, veganism is threatening that a little bit. And that's very, very interesting about whether that will change. But I think it's really interesting. As soon as the clocks went back, I have a fairly flexitarian diet, like, you know, you probably do as well. Since the clocks went back, my body started saying to me, oh, alcohol. Oh, neat, because three or four hundred years ago there wouldn't have been much else available in the winter months, you know, and you have your big meaty blowout at Christmas and then you have salted meat and then you have lent when you're not allowed to eat meat because essentially there isn't any meat around to eat.

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So I think there are lots of ecclesiastical reasons and status reasons for why meat is still such an important part of our lives.

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Sugar is such a big one again. When I was young, being given sugar was a sign of extraordinary affection and a great privilege.

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Sugar used to be used as a spice. Really, the earliest sort of mediaeval recipes would have a teaspoon, you know, a tiny little sprinkling of sugar along with, you know, what other spices they have as a way of flavoring. And the very earliest meals didn't distinguish particularly between sweet and savory things. You know, with the big sort of grand banquet, you'd have had some sweet dishes on the table. At the same time, it starts becoming imported in nineteen hundred, starts to be different ways of kind of finding it from sugar beet and its status falls and falls and.

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And so sugar is interesting, but also how we use it and how we think about it is interesting because the way that we make our cakes, I mean, I don't know if people watching Bake Off at the moment, but the whole kind of bake off thing about the French cakes or the British takes are quite interesting because it has a sort of trail of history for how pastry and patisserie and éclairs and Macron's, all those sort of sweet treats are kind of seen as something that kind of you get on the kind of tiered afternoon table, aren't they?

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They come at the top of your kind of hierarchy, whereas the sugar that was used in farmhouses and farmhouse baking along with all the spices and the fruits and all the rest of it, has a slightly different, much more kind of bucolic and much more kind of stable status.

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And so, yeah, we do think of sugar itself as something with low status, but really we're more interested, I think, in a way of where it goes and what it goes into and how you use it.

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You mentioned the Great British Bake Off, the cultural phenomenon. That is what is about baking.

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We have a strange kind of north south divide historically in this country where the South's obsession was with baking with wheat and in the north where wheat was harder to grow because it requires a kind of, you know, a drier, warmer growing season. Northerners, oats and in fact, were probably had better nutrition because of it.

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And so there was this obsession in the south of baking with wheat. Having the whitest bread is possible, whereas in the north you might be oatcakes or Parkin's, most people would not have even had their own ovens. And right from the medieval period, you had to get your grain milled in by the local miller and then the local baker had to bake it for you.

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And he might often take a piece out for himself. And I think it's quite interesting for me talking about the Bake Off, the way that the baker in the tent. You know, Paul, Hollywood is kind of treated with sort of admiration, but also a bit of kind of anxiety, because actually that's the way that bakers were treated. Historically, every community needed the baker to bake their bread, but they didn't trust them because the bakers might be sort of fiddling them in some way.

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And there's lots of accounts of medieval, all kind of later bakers being pulled around the town on a trestle with moldy bread around their necks and being pelted with bread rolls because they've been found to shortchange their customers.

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So baking has this very kind of central role in communities and who controls it and who has the kind of the wherewithal to decide who gets what. That gets very important when baking becomes more of a sort of sweet thing, a tweet saying you get this difference between cake, which comes from that German word, and it's much more of a kind of farmhouse, local treats. And, you know, the baking that is the high end, the French chef, the patisserie, the chef things.

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Thank you very much for coming on again. You have taught me how to cook in the past. We talked about Charles Dickens, done lots of fun things. What's your new book called?

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It's called Scoff A history of food and Class in Britain must be breathtaking.

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The amount of times we have for food in this country. Food.

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Scoffs Gram, we have this rich lexicon, I suppose, from French and German, but also from countries that have been part of our colonies and all the rest of it. And I mean, even the word Pskov has three different meanings to it. Every word says something about you, about your usage of it, just in the same way that, you know, our shopping bags or what is on our table says something about us where we position ourselves in society.

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Well, thank you very much and thanks for coming on the podcast. Good luck with the book. Great to talk to you. Thanks, Dan. Hardbody, just a quick message at the end of this podcast, I'm currently sheltering in a small, windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundie. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material. You guys, in return, got a little tiny favor to ask if you could go to get your podcasts, if you could give it a five star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review.

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I really appreciate that. From the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favor. Then more people listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.