Many of the dishes that we regard as delicacies started out as peasant food. Sturgeon roe (fish eggs) or caviar, as we know it today, was usually discarded by fishermen, and scooped up by adaptable, undernourished poor folk, happy to have a nibble at anything that would keep them alive for a few more days. It wasn’t until the 16th century, when Russian aristocrats acquired a taste for it, that anyone regarded caviar as a delicacy. Subsequently the price skyrocketed, and the treat that Russian peasants once sourced for free was now earmarked for the privileged classes only. Staying on the beach, another world class delicacy, lobster, had humble beginnings.

 

Once nicknamed ‘the cockroach of the sea’, lobsters would wash up on the beaches and provide a free snack for gulls, until peasants got the bright idea of collecting them, smashing through the tough carapace and helping themselves to the surprisingly tasty flesh within that went rather well with lemon wedges. Even the unappetising looking claws were worth breaking into and raiding for the tastiest meat. Yum yum, just don’t tell the landowners! But then nothing good ever remains a secret for long. Nowadays lobsters retail for anything between £38.50 and £200, depending on size and provenance. Good news for the fisherman, not so great for the peasant. How irritating it must have been for poor folk having to give up caviar and go back to scraps, only to discover lobster, and have history repeat itself. Other foods that were once seen as fit only for the poor include: foie gras; oysters; salmon and escargot.

 

The foie gras claims are mostly apocryphal. The Romans popularised goose liver but it vanished when their empire crumbled. Some historians claim that French farmers preserved the tradition throughout the middle ages, but since French peasants subsisted on mainly pigs and sheep it’s unlikely that they ever sampled foie gras. You can understand why the nobility and the wealthy turned their noses up at oysters and snails. When you can have roast swan and all manner of fancy soufflés, why would you bother with slimy garden pests or bivalve-molluscs, eaten raw and alive? Yuk, but a cheap source of protein for the underfed peasantry, and not so yuk as it transpired. The upper classes soon cottoned on, denying the poor of another culinary treat, and inventing a new industry. Resigned to the fact that they were never going to hang on to their delicacies, the poor got creative. In northern England resourceful cooks found a way to make use of the fat that dripped into the ‘dripping pan’ while the meat roasted. Combined with wheat flour, which arrived in the UK around 5000 years ago, but didn’t become popular until the 12th century, meat dripping could be used to bake a very filling and satisfying ‘batter pudding’.

 

The original recipe become popular through word of mouth (“don’t tell his lordship!”) until male chauvinist pig, Sir Alexander William George Cassey let the cat out of the bag by including it in his 1737 cookbook ‘The Whole Duty of a Woman’, now out of print; don’t bother looking for it. In 1747, Hannah Glasse used an updated, puffier, version of the recipe in her own book ‘The Art of Cookery’ using the name ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ for the first time. In lean times Yorkshire Pudding was a favourite with the poor as a starter. Once consumed, you were so full that you didn’t mind the shortage of meat (or lobster/ caviar) so much. Such a practical treasure! Even good for rich folk. Now there’s a delicacy worth hanging on to.