‘Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it’
anon., after George Santayana
For some, it is their occasional standby when they are late home from work. For others, it is their signature dish. Either way, the ready meal is their guilty secret. No one has a good word to say about convenience food any more, apart from the fact that it is convenient. Rubbishing the ready meal is an international ritual. Just read the bleakly comic novels of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, with their recurring figure of the bored, single man who goes home alone to eat gourmet TV dinners (plats cuisinés) in front of vapid television shows. Or Bowling Alone (2000), in which the American social scientist Robert Putnam uses the decline in meal preparation times, and the rise in solitary dining on TV dinners, as indicators of the loss of ‘social capital’, the sense of solidarity that binds American society together.1 America has the biggest market for TV dinners in the world, but Britain is second, and eats more of them than the rest of Europe put together.2 Our ambivalence about the TV dinner, and its perennial attempts to persuade us that it is anything other than what it is, explain its complex history.
The British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s 1972 essay ‘Deciphering a meal’, outlines the nature of the problem. To save time one evening, Douglas suggested to her family that she make them all a dinner consisting of a thick, nutritious soup and some pudding, only to be met with the complaint that this meal had ‘a beginning and an end and no middle’.3 Instead of telling her family to go and make their own dinner if they weren’t happy with hers, Douglas was inspired to write her classic essay, which argued that there were deep-seated ideas in any society about what form a meal should take. A meal had a certain grammar and architecture, a series of elements based on repeated patterns and analogies. A meal’s main course, for example, typically had a tripartite structure with a centrepiece (meat or fish) covered with liquid dressing (gravy or similar), a staple (potato, rice or bread) and trimmings (one or two vegetables). The whole meal involved a series of plate and cutlery changes, and savoury/sweet, hot/cold and liquid/ dry contrasts which were ‘as formally structured as a Bach cantata’.4 Even the most convenient of convenience foods has had to gesture towards these deeply ingrained habits of the dinner table.
The oven-ready meal naturally originated in America, the pioneer of both convenience food and commercial television. In 1953 Gerald Thomas, an employee of the Omaha food company Swanson, came up with the TV dinner as a way of using up 270 tons of turkey left over after the Thanksgiving holiday. Thomas was inspired by the heated-up frozen meals on trays, so-called ‘Strato-Plates’, that he had been served on Pan Am flights. It was the airlines which pioneered methods of successfully reheating precooked food; they discovered, for example, that potatoes reheated better when they were made into croquettes, and that covering a meat entrée with gravy (made with new thickeners that did not curdle) kept it from drying out. Like the airline meal, the Swanson dinner was arranged in a three-compartment metal tray, packaged in a box made to look like the front of a television set. In July 1954, Swanson applied for a US patent for the ‘TV Dinner’, a frozen turkey meal comprising ‘Turkey, Dressing, Giblet Gravy, Sweet Potatoes, and Green Peas’.5 (A cynic might have said that this meal had already been invented; it corresponds fairly closely with Mary Douglas’s definition of a meal.) By 1955, Swanson was producing 25 million frozen dinners a year.6 Its well-known advertising slogans – ‘Have a Swanson night’ and ‘Have dinner with the Swansons’ – suggested that a TV dinner could be a gourmet occasion. In America they are proud of this frozen-food heritage: when Swanson replaced its aluminium trays with plastic ones suitable for microwave ovens in 1986, Gerald Thomas placed his hand-prints in a block of cement, along with an imprint of the original Swanson tray, on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. The hallowed tray itself was donated to the Smithsonian Institution museum.
When TV arrived in most UK households in the 1950s, eating in front of it soon became commonplace. (Americans and Britons brought the meal to the TV, whereas French people have traditionally done the opposite, bringing the TV to the dining table.7) Firms marketed customised plastic trays like the ‘Tea-V-Tray’ or the ‘Armchair tray’, which replaced eating on laps with a special tray hooked to the arm of the sofa.8 But those Britons who did eat in front of the telly were not quite ready for the ready meal. Television viewing was highest among the over-forties, who were more likely to cook from scratch.9 Cookery books and magazines were full of recipes for ‘television entertaining’, meals that could be eaten on a tray so as not to miss a show. The first British TV dinner was probably coronation chicken, a dish created in 1953 by the royal florist Constance Spry and the cookery writer Rosemary Hume for Elizabeth II’s coronation. Many people bought their first television to watch the coronation, and this dish – a pre-prepared snack of cooked, cold chicken in a curried mayonnaise sauce – was easy to combine with television-watching. Designed to appeal to all the new queen’s subjects across the Commonwealth, it combined convenience with exoticism in what would become a classic ready-meal combination. But TV cookery programmes at the time were still dominated by elaborate cooks like Fanny and Johnnie Cradock, who always dressed in evening wear and devised recipes to match. Fanny’s ‘TV-meal menu’, for example, consisted of iced tomato juice, a dip’n’dunk platter, stuffed baked snails, chicken liver sauté, raspberry tartlets with orange cream sauce and a Chablis cup. A 1957 Mass-Observation survey found that housewives with TVs spent an average of a half-day a week more preparing the dinner.10
It did not take long for Swanson imitations to arrive in Britain, such as the ‘Birds Eye Roast Beef Dinner for One’ with Yorkshire pudding, peas and creamed potatoes. But two things prevented the all-in-one frozen dinner becoming as popular in Britain as in the US. First, in the mid-1950s only 2 or 3 per cent of British homes had a fridge, let alone a freezer.11 Second, housewives still seemed to want to assemble the meat, fish, vegetable and potatoes for their returning menfolk or children, even if the individual items were all tinned or frozen. A classic example was the phenomenal success of Birds Eye Fish Fingers (the story that they were about to be called ‘cod pieces’, until someone realised the possible confusion, is probably an urban myth). They arrived in September 1955, a fortnight before the start of ITV, which would advertise this new foodstuff and give people something to watch while they were eating it. By 1962, fish fingers had the honour of becoming the first frozen food to be listed in the Retail Price Index, which uses staple goods to calculate inflation rates. They encouraged children to eat fish and grown-ups to buy fridges. Without the fish finger, frozen convenience food might not have developed in Britain on such a large scale, as it didn’t for a long time in the rest of Europe.12
Another watershed was crossed in 1961 with the launch of Vesta ready meals, a product of the new art of acceler- ated freeze-drying. Named after the Roman goddess of the hearth, they were little boxes of dehydrated meat granules, rice and noodles which could be magically rehydrated into exotic curries. (‘Expert chefs have done all the hard work for you … All you do is cook it … and take the credit!’13) But a Vesta ready meal wasn’t very ready. It came with two types of noodle, one lot being placed in boiling water to make soft white noodles, the other in a frier to make crispy noodles. You needed separate pans for the meat granules and the rice, and there were lots of fiddly sachets containing sauce and flavourings. By today’s standards, it was hard labour – inconvenience food, even. In fact, it was only in the early 1960s that the phrase ‘convenience food’ arrived in Britain from the US, in the sense of food that allowed people to save and rearrange their time conveniently. By 1963, Good Housekeeping magazine was warmly recommending quick-cook pasta, frozen peas and the ominous-sounding ‘pizza in a bag’.14
As the 1960s went on, convenience food developed a somewhat plebeian reputation, not simply because it was now cheaper but also because cookery had been reinvented as a middle-class pastime – albeit one which did not involve the elaborate preparation of Cradock-style hostess-trolley cookery. The most influential cookery writer of this era, Elizabeth David, appealed to the now servantless middle classes with the maxim of the French chef Escoffier: ‘Faites simple.’ David was appalled at a vision of the future she encountered at the 1956 Olympia Food Fair: a frozen TV dinner with everything on a plastic tray, ‘so that the awful fag of transferring the frozen chop and two frozen veg from shopping basket to dish is eliminated’.15 David’s meals could often be described in a few lines and prepared in minutes, but they were also supposed to be a labour of love and to use fresh, in-season ingredients. ‘The deep freeze appears to have gained over the minds of the English housewife and restaurant keeper a hypnotic power such as never was exercised by the canning factories,’ she complains in Summer Cooking (1955), in an attack on frozen peas.16 Those people who bought into the promise of convenience were coming to be seen as indolent and slobbish. By 1972, the critic Barry Norman was referring casually to ‘the average pleb, dozing in his carpet slippers in front of his set with his pre-frozen dinner congealing on his lap’.17
By the mid-1970s, dedicated freezer centres were arriving on the high street and supermarkets had more freezer space. The most popular frozen foods were still not the all-in-one TV dinners, however, but meat and fish portions, which could be served with another recent innovation, frozen oven chips. ‘Ovenability’ was the new marketing concept used to promote food that could taste fried simply by heating it up in the oven. The bestselling Birds Eye Crispy Cod Steak, introduced in 1982, was an ovenable piece of fish in batter which did away with ‘the fuss, bother and unpleasantness of deep-frying’.18 It had a memorable advertising campaign featuring the actor Gemma Craven in 1920s flapper gear, feeding her flannelled beau with a fork, and singing, ‘Goodbye old frying pan’ to the tune of ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’, in a knowing reworking of the old Swanson idea of convenience food as posh treat. The other great oven-ready innovation of this era was the frozen pizza, which came from nowhere in the late 1970s to become, in the words of one excited marketing director, ‘the beans on toast of the eighties’.19
Into this eclectic situation entered our old friend, the re-inventor of the sandwich: Marks & Spencer. When M&S launched its Chicken Kiev in 1976, it single-handedly created the middle-class market for what it called, in a neat piece of ready-meal rebranding, ‘recipe dishes’. Ironically, the origins of this bourgeois dish lie behind the Iron Curtain in the form of Chicken à la Kiev, which the food writer Lesley Chamberlain describes as a ‘Soviet hotel and restaurant classic’ unknown before the Russian Revolu- tion.20 M&S’s ready meals were ‘cook-chill’, a move away from the American tradition of the frozen dinner. After being cooked in the factory, the meal would be chilled rather than frozen and transported to stores in refrigerated lorries.
Although M&S recipe dishes could be heated up in the oven, what Peter York named ‘the Chicken Kiev revolution’21 relied fundamentally on the microwave. The early 1980s was a boom period for microwaves, with sales rising from 45,000 in 1978 to 900,000 in 1984. According to John Lewis, 1984 was the ‘microwave cooker Christmas’; it was ‘this year’s most fashionable present from husband to wife’.22 The microwave had arrived in Britain in 1959, but it took much longer to catch on than in America, because of both cost and Cold War suspicion of its nuclear techniques, particularly the fear that it might ‘leak’ radiation. Many Britons thought that it was dangerous to look through the oven door while it was cooking food, or to open the door in mid-cycle to stir the food23 – concerns that do not seem to have troubled appliance-loving American consumers. But it is easy to see how those now familiar actions – pulling the ready meal out of its cardboard sleeve, pricking the plastic film with a fork and sticking the tray in the microwave – must have seemed alarmingly space-age when done for the first time. It was only in the late 1980s that this futuristic process began to seem normal and domesticated.
‘Ready-made meals, once the tinned provender of elderly widowers and young boozy bachelors, are climbing the social ladder,’ reported the Guardian in 1987. ‘The advent of exotic recipes, low-calorie concoctions, new chilling techniques and the ubiquitous microwave have all helped give market cachet to the instant sachet.’24 The cookery writer Nigel Slater identified a new generation of ‘Thatch-er’s bachelors’, affluent single men who could afford to pay more for convenience with quality.25 Of course, M&S Chicken Kievs were not solely, or even mainly, eaten by wealthy young city dealers in their trendy, loft-style apartments. But what mattered was the new perception that the ready meal was no longer for sad singletons or lower-class layabouts. Margaret Thatcher gave M&S her well-publicised support, and made its chairman, Marcus Sieff, a life peer in 1980. Later in the decade, she announced that her favourite meal was a frozen lasagne heated up in the microwave.26
M&S ruled over the middle-class kitchen in the 1980s in the way that Elizabeth David had in the 1960s, drawing on its established reputation as ‘the retailer that would never let you down’. One woman said that if she had an M&S meal and it was not as nice as she had hoped, she thought she must have ‘done something wrong in heating it up’.27 If you had a posh dinner party, you could easily disguise some M&S prepared food as the product of your own labours, or simply confess brazenly, a favourite expression being that you were ‘dining with Lord Sieff tonight’.
M&S also cornered the market because, as with its wedge sandwiches, it could offer reassurance to the customer, making its ready meals appear safe and reliable. This issue became particularly sensitive in the late 1980s, when the microbiologist Richard Lacey created a media storm by claiming that the salt levels in ready meals meant that microwaving did not destroy toxic bacteria.28 Lacey was also a general campaigner against the ready-meal lifestyle:
What are the two things that Britain spends more on per head of population than any other country? Videos and microwave cookers. That says a lot about what has happened to our society – a culture that is TV-dominated and puts convenience, speed and price above quality, desirability and enjoyment. Eating food has become like going to the lavatory – something private to be got over with as quickly as possible.29
Lacey was the slow food movement’s John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness speaking to our nascent anxieties about convenience. In the meantime we had reliable old M&S, who could safely channel the food through the whole ‘cool-chain’ system of temperature-controlled depots, refrigerated lorries and in-store chill cabinets.30
Where M&S led, the supermarkets soon followed, realising the huge mark-ups they could make on own-brand ready meals. Soon they were the supermarkets’ prestige item, placed in well-lit refrigerator cabinets near the entrances, next to the fruit and vegetables to give them an aura of freshness and healthiness. The supermarket cook-chill meal also skilfully aligned itself with a particular type of consumer: the young, middle-class professional. This hard-working individual was the target for what the industry calls ‘basket trade’ – the small, top-up shopping done after work in the new ‘metro’ or ‘local’ supermarkets in city centres. The image has become a familiar one: ‘Haughty, power-dressed and still running on adrenalin after a 12-hour day in the office, young professionals in modish suits stalk the aisles of late-opening supermarkets looking for comfort food – and usually comfort alcohol as well – with which to settle on the sofa and relax for what little is left of the day.’31
The packaging and content of the meals themselves are clearly designed to differentiate them as much as possible from the traditional, primitive rectangular box of the slob’s TV dinner. Frozen dinners – which are more likely to be time-honoured Swansonesque affairs with meat, gravy, two veg and sage-and-onion stuffing balls – are now marketed at poorer shoppers, which is one reason why the freezer section of the supermarket is always furthest from the entrance. Ambient ready meals, the canned and freeze-dried products stored at room temperature, are almost as unfashionable. But chilled meals are marketed as premium ranges, with distinctive graphics and telling descriptions – ‘fresh’, ‘slow-cooked’, ‘restaurant’, ‘home-grown’ – to appeal to food-conscious professionals. You’ve had a hard day at the office. What you need is a microwaveable meal in a transparent plastic bowl that doesn’t need washing up, a bland salad in a bag, a half-carafe of overpriced wine, and a soggy, single chocolate éclair for pudding. Go on, be good to yourself; you deserve it.
We want food preparation to be quick and easy without losing the associations of mealtime with conviviality and good taste. The majority of chilled meals consist of international recipes such as Italian, Indian and Chinese, for which we have developed a taste through eating out, cookery programmes or books, but are too busy or incompetent to make ourselves. An unintended side-effect of our so-called ‘foodie’ culture has been to expand the market for the cosmopolitan ready meal – although in more recent years the arrival of the ‘gastropub’ (now the name of an M&S ready-meal range) has made more traditional British meat recipes trendy again. The ready-meal market is sophisticated and responds quickly to changing tastes. It is certainly a more reliable indicator of our shifting culinary habits than all those unread recipe books, unused new kitchens and unheeded cookery programmes.
This foodie culture assumes that the kitchen is where we unleash our creative, sociable selves. Market analysts are more pessimistic, dividing food consumers into three types. First, there are the ‘scratchers’, the goody-goodies who always cook from scratch with fresh ingredients. Second, there are the ‘helpless avoiders’, who cannot or will not cook under any circumstances. Finally, there are the ‘help seekers’, a growth sector of up to 30 per cent of consumers.32 Not as energetic or virtuous as the scratchers, they still like to feel they are doing more than simply waiting for the ping of the microwave. They want convenience without its connotations. Sainsbury’s first discovered this in 1991, when it ran successful one-minute ads in which celebrities like Selina Scott and Ian McShane rustled up pasta with mozzarella or salmon en papillote from part-prepared ingredients. Help-seekers buy ‘meal centres’ with ‘vegetable accompaniments’, giving themselves the arduous task of opening two packets instead of one, and assembling their boeuf bourgignon and creamy mash together on a plate. If they’re feeling intrepid, they buy ready-to-cook foods such as stir-fry mixes, cooking sauces or meat that has been deboned, pre-stuffed and marinated; if they want to impress, they buy gourmet meal kits under a celebrity chef’s imprimatur, with prepared ingredients and idiot-proof instructions. The trade-off between foodiness and convenience means that we have invented an activity somewhere between microwave instantaneity and cooking from scratch: food assembly. But opinion is divided as to what this actually entails. A survey by the Co-op, for example, discovered that 60 per cent of interviewees thought that chicken nuggets and beans, and pasta in a cook-in sauce, constituted ‘home-cooked meals’, and that 44 per cent thought the same applied to heating up a frozen pizza.33
Today’s market analysts might go on about ‘flexi-eating’ and ‘pit-stop dining’, but the idea of the meal has survived all this innovation. Mary Douglas’s stipulation that a meal requires ‘a table, a seating order, restriction on movement and on alternative occupations’34 now seems outmoded. But her central point that the meal contains a number of contrasting, hierarchically organised elements remains true. Some modern forms of convenience food seem bizarre (frozen baked beans on toast? Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in a can?) precisely because they are still attached to this idea of a complete meal. Even if you eat it by yourself with a tray across your knees, dinner is a social event laden with cultural expectations. Your little plastic tray is acknowledging a collective ideal of what a meal should, and shouldn’t, be. That is why eating a ready meal on your own can feel slightly shameful – and why its makers try in vain to rid you of your shame.