I Just Can't Stand It

[Sundae]

Trotters!
Now you're talking.

Hot meat pies, saveloys and trotters!
Something you can talk about, something that will blow you out

Have you ever read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning?
Best description of London food (pre-war) I've read.
By a non-Londoner I mean.
Laurie Lee liked his grub though. He's the reason I went to Spain. Well, him and George Orwell. Eric Blair was more into politics than food though.

Anyway, that was the food my Nanny and Grandad lived on. London/ Irish, suet, gravy, offal (now prized by the nobs who would've turned their nose up back in the 30s) bacon, cabbage, your own rabbits, share of a pig if you could get one, fresh fish from Billingsgate and anything you could filch from the place you were working in. There's a complex set of morals in the East End, and stealing from your employer is (was) simply a perk of the job. Lord alone help you if you were caught with something taken from a local shop though.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Sundae

There's a complex set of morals in the East End, and stealing from your employer is (was) simply a perk of the job.

I don't think that's specific to the East End ye know. It's a survival of a much older arrangement between employer and employee and there are/were remnants of it in many traditional working class communities. Though it probably survived in a more defined way in London. The balance between money wages and in kind entitlements was a site of contention between employers and employees from the 18th century on. And within working class communities that sense of entitlement along the margins never really went away.

Personally, I think it has a small survival in the way we view taking home odd bits of office equipment (pens, paper, a holepunch etc), or the way many people who work in the NHS somehow acquire bits of bedding or kitchen towels with the NHS logo on them :P

It's something I've been looking at in relation to eighteenth-century conceptions of crime and criminality. A lot of the cases of theft in both civil and military cases hang on this sense of entitlement to chips and other perks.