In a recent interview, HRH Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, proudly admitted to lumpen proletarian tastes in food.
Asked to name her favourites, she came up with… Caviar? Truffles? Foie gras? No, none of the above.
“One of my favourite foods is baked beans on toast. Always Heinz. And freshly cooked fish and chips, wrapped in paper. That smell. You cannot beat proper fish and chips.” And of course: “I avoid chilli and garlic”.
Probed more deeply, Camilla also came up with frozen chicken pies as another gourmet treat for special occasions. I’m glad she wasn’t asked about her favourite tipple. It would have been a shame for our future Queen Consort to name Strongbow cider or some vile fortified wine, ideally drunk out of a brown paper bag on a park bench.
Considering that Camilla grew up in a wealthy aristocratic family, regularly travelled to Italy as a child and was mostly educated on the continent, her taste, or rather lack thereof, calls for an explanation. I can think of several.
The simplest and least awful one is that she simply has no taste for food. This kind of aesthetic illiteracy is quite widespread among Britons of her generation, and some are actually proud of it, to the point of jingoism.
Appalling taste in food is held up as proof of national superiority, something to separate Britons from the garlic-breathed, hairy-arsed Johnny Foreigner, especially if he is of the froggish persuasion.
The implication is that Britons devote so much time and effort to higher spiritual pursuits that they have none to spare for vulgar corporeal concerns. They do make an exception for drinking and sex, but that’s as far as it goes.
The claim to monastic spirituality doesn’t quite tally with my empirical observations, but it’s nonetheless innocuous enough. Then again, those who grew up during or immediately after the war experienced food rationing, which made gastronomy one of the casualties.
My beloved mother-in-law, for example, grew up in a household served by a staff that included a cook. As a youngster she ate well and her taste buds were quite refined. Then came the war, she became a WREN and spent her days peeling potatoes to feed hungry sailors at a Royal Navy base.
The rationing years followed, she married an academic of modest means, bore three children and had to do her own cooking. The culinary shock to her system was so powerful that she developed tastes similar to Camilla’s. I remember once complimenting her on the garlic aroma coming out of her saucepan. “There’s no garlic in my kitchen!” she said indignantly.
Having said that, she happily ate the food I cooked and didn’t at all mind the taste of such offensive condiments as garlic. Often she’d say, “Oh I remember eating this at home”. Though I’m sure Camilla never suffered post-war shocks to her system, it’s conceivable that she identifies prole grub with true Englishness.
Another possibility is reverse snobbery, common to English aristocrats and rich Anglophile Americans, especially in New York and New England.
Such people eschew, indeed despise, common pleasures, of which tasty food is the most democratic. Anyone with a tenner in his pocket can slap together a delicious meal for two, and I’d even suggest that a fiver may do if you know what you’re doing (wine not included).
Food thus finds itself in the same category as bowling, raves and T-shirts with messages like “Two world wars, one world cup, so fuck off”. Heinz baked beans, on the other hand, become a class statement – gastronomic inferiority acting as social superiority. (Driving cheap old bangers is the automotive equivalent – brand-new BMWs aren’t quite… quite.)
This sort of thing isn’t exactly innocuous, but neither is it too bad. We all display some sort of badges of identity, ethnic, social or professional. The same people who may sneer at reverse snobbery wouldn’t be caught dead with a single thread of any artificial fibre anywhere near their bodies, for example.
The third possibility is so bad, it’s deadly. Camilla is lying. She actually does prefer caviar to fish and chips, truffles to Heinz and foie gras to frozen chicken pies. But she has succumbed to the overall egalitarian tendency of modernity.
Her advisers must have done some private polling and found out that the monarchy’s best chance of survival is pretending to be less, well, monarchic. Eating Heinz baked beans, getting pissed in pubs, professing an affinity for rap, supporting unlikely football clubs (William, for example, claims to be an Aston Villa fan) are all seen as prolier-than-thou signals the royals must send out to the multitudes.
If that’s the case, then we are no longer talking about Camilla’s personal idiosyncrasies. At issue now is the lethal malaise of society, something for which even the odd spoonful of caviar would offer no cure.
I for one would hate to see a By Appointment stamp on a can of Heinz beans. Not that I’ve ever bought any such abomination.
P.S. If HRH likes baked beans so much, she ought to try this trick. Soak a pound of dry cannellini beans in salted water overnight. Then put them in a roasting dish with a glass of white wine, a head of garlic, unpeeled and cut in half, a few slices of lemon and some black pepper. Cover with foil, punch a hole in the middle to let the steam escape, then bake at 400F for an hour. If she still prefers Heinz after that, she’s beyond help.
Your abilities in this field are remarkable, Alexander. I raise my hat to you! And your diagnosis of the nature of Camilla’s (supposed) statement is masterly. For myself I can conclude with some confidence that it is not a genuine opinion because I do still eat baked beans occasionally and try the various brands on the market. Having clear memories of wartime fare, when Heinz were the only brand to be had, I know that today’s recipe used by that brand is only a pale imitation and I abhor it. Too few beans; too much sauce; none of the authentic, expected flavour. It is the degradation of that taste that persuades me that Camilla’s supposed liking in not an authentic expression of a preferred taste.
I’m quite certain it is the last. For some reason, people like to think their leaders are just like them. I somehow ended up with the crazy idea that our leaders should be better than us – that’s what makes them fit to lead.
And Heinz beans? Never! Van Camp’s were what my mother brought to the table every Saturday night. Most other nights my mother cooked a full dinner after working all day, and she somehow fed all five of us on her meager earnings.
Van Camp’s rings an American bell. Am I right?
Yes, sir.
Heinz 57 too. That must be the reason he said there were 57 states.
Obama I meant to say.
Could be. I thought maybe he was planning to invade the southern provinces of Canada (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick).
That you cannot beat fish and chips, with malt vinegar and salt, in an appropriately blowy seafront location, is a sentiment which unites the nation.
That may be why it’s so disjointed.
One of the things that I learnt, from a childhood friend’s collection of Playboy magazines, was that many ‘Playmates’ disliked anchovies. Read into that what you will.
The only possibility that springs to mind is so offensive to womankind that I won’t commit it to paper.
I prefer Waitrose baked beans to Heinz, because Heinz beans seem to me to be excessively sweetened. Besides, Heinz beans nowadays have objectionable misspellingz on their labelz.
I don’t eat beans-on-toast, because the beans make the toast unpleasantly soggy. The only proper rôle for baked beans is as an accompaniment to sausages and chips. (But for about six weeks every year, peas from the garden are even better.)
Some posh foods are good, others are bad. Some proletarian foods are bad, others are good. On the whole, the posh foods are better, but culinary excellence, like all other kinds of excellence, isn’t completely confined to one social class.
But I suspect that (as you indicate) La Camilla’s professed taste in food is more political than gustatory.