Resistances from a Stubborn Past

Abstract

Eels, pie, mash, and liquor is the traditional but largely forgotten food of the cockney, London working class. This paper examines the ingredients, rituals, and culture in one of the few remaining shops that serve a historical dish that is a living gustatory link with a hyper-local, early capitalist past and a gastro-nationalist present. The work takes as its starting point a sensory ethnographic investigation that interrogates a partially hidden world of performative, nostalgic memorialization in one of the very few de facto proletarian spaces within a city of neoliberal modernity. The spaces are, I argue, a negotiation with, and a micro-resistance to, the hegemonic culture memorialized within a largely insular, conservative cockney culture infused with a local patriotism. It further examines a food culture coded through ideas of respectability and manners, and via the concept of a “classed” body, the notion of sensation, disgust, and impurity that condense time and memory around the metaphor of the eel as cockney.