Piglet

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating.

In Piglet, Lottie Hazell explores the relationship between food and class in Great Britain, highlighting how a household’s chosen food, its preparation, and its presentation all act as indicators of that household’s class status. This thematic concern is closely tied to Piglet’s desire to build a perfect life with her fiancé, Kit. Piglet associates her working-class family with a lack of culinary taste and sophistication. While Kit’s mother cooks elaborate homemade meals for her family, Piglet’s family relies on cheap takeout: “[O]n Saturday it was a takeaway—Chinese, from the shop in town—and on Friday it was fish” (4). Although Piglet once enjoyed these simple foods, “these routines […] now ma[ke] Piglet feel a crawling embarrassment, a creeping pity” (5). She repeats this idea later in the novel while preparing an elaborate dessert for a dinner party and reflecting on the simple desserts that her mother served. She thinks that “their easy ways—their yellow custard in a Pyrex jug on the small dining table, draped in doilies—embarrass[] her” (35). Piglet’s repeated use of the word “embarrass” reflects her shame in the working-class foods she grew up with.

As a cookbook editor, Piglet aims to signal her entrance to the upper class through the foods she prepares for her friends and family. For her first meal in the Oxford home, Piglet cooks a roast chicken using a recipe developed by celebrity chef Nigella Lawson. Despite the heat of summer, Piglet is determined to roast the chicken because she “had once heard Nigella say something about a house only being home once a chicken was in the oven” (4). The reference to Lawson—whose appeal is based on her upper-class aristocratic persona—reflects Piglet’s desire to mimic that lifestyle in front of her friends and family. Later, when hosting a dinner for her family, she intentionally tries to broaden their culinary horizons by providing posh food and drink. Knowing that her future brother-in-law, Darren, prefers beer, “she had purposefully passed over the Carlsberg and the Coors and purchased brown bottles of Westmalle, a golden beer she had read was one of the best blond ales you could buy on this side of the Channel” (61). Piglet’s refusal to serve basic beers such as Carlsberg and Coors reflects her desire to push her family past what she sees as their pedestrian tastes. Further, the fact that she researches the best beers and believes that European beers are superior to English beers suggests that she sees the relationship between food and class as extending beyond Great Britain. With Piglet’s attempt to transcend her family’s class through food and drink choices, the novel suggests that not only are food and class linked, but Piglet also believes that shaping one’s food choices to reflect class can actually facilitate upward social mobility.