"On Good Friday I eat 16 hot cross buns, Laura and Jenny eat 8." Thus wrote the 12-year-old Eleanor Marx to her father Karl on 26 April 1867. Apart from the wondrous scale of the gluttony, it is a good example of the way that the Marx family, during their long exile in London, often participated enthusiastically in the bourgeois - and even religious - habits that Karl wanted to render obsolete. Karl himself enjoyed speculating on the London Stock Exchange - but that's another story . . .
Marx had a very coarse palate, as befits a materialist. His biographer Francis Wheen once told me he thought that, if Marx were alive today, he would be a devotee of curry houses, ordering the hottest vindaloos, the spiciest pickles and the strongest lager. As it was, he enjoyed assaulting his mouth with pickled herrings and cockles, washed down with beer. He had robust tastes, in drink, food and philosophy, enjoying piquancy in everything. That these tastes dated from childhood is shown by the anxious advice his mother sent him in a letter, written when Marx was 17, and unwell. "You must avoid everything that could make things worse, you must not get over-heated, not drink a lot of wine or coffee, and not eat anything pungent, a lot of pepper or other spices. You must not smoke any tobacco, not stay up too long in the evening, and rise early." In fact, his whole life, Marx, a born contrarian, did the opposite of what his mother advised, staying up far too late smoking and reading, eating spicy food and drinking strong coffee and stronger wine.
The example of Marx shows what a peculiar phrase "champagne socialist" is. It used to be levelled disparagingly at people such as Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, implying that drinking champagne disqualified you from true socialism. If so, then neither Marx nor Engels qualifies as a socialist. So long as someone else was paying, Marx was only too delighted to get drunk on champagne (though he tended to stick to ale when he was buying). Wine was, like religion, a way of escaping from this vale of tears. But unlike religion, that opium for the people, wine did not entail self-alienation, except perhaps in the form of the hangover. As in matters of food, Marx was more interested in intensity and quantity than quality. Engels, being wealthier, was more of a connoisseur. For Christmas 1859, the year after the Grundrisse, he sent the Marx family some wine, remarking: "The champagne and the Bordeaux [Chateau d'Arcin] can be drunk at once, while the port wine should be allowed to rest a little, and won't be in proper condition until about New Year."
These were rare sybaritic delights for Marx and his wife Jenny, who were struck, on and off, by terrible poverty. During the early years in London, Marx wrote to Engels: "For the last eight to ten days I have been able to feed my family with bread and potatoes, but it is questionable whether I can get anything today . . . How can I cope with this devil's shit?" Jenny was forever being pestered with butcher's bills and baker's bills, and by what she called "hard, gnawing worry".
But there were some good times, too - summers when the Marx girls ate cherries, strawberries and grapes, and merry picnics on Hampstead Heath. When asked his favourite dish, for a parlour game, Marx answered simply: "Fish." Helene Demuth, the Marx household's maidservant (by whom Karl fathered a son), was an excellent cook, known for her delicious jam tarts. Francis Wheen describes the meals she laid on for the family's Sunday picnics, "often their only substantial meal of the week. In spite of her tiny budget, [Helene] usually managed to conjure up a large joint of veal, supplemented by bread, cheese, shrimps and periwinkles bought from vendors on the heath and flagons of beer from the local pub, Jack Straw's Castle." After lunch, the girls would sometimes get Marx to shake chestnuts down from the trees.
This gentle side of life is not really dealt with in Marx's works, though he sometimes used food imagery to refute his intellectual enemies. There is a brilliant section of The Holy Family (1845) demolishing speculative philosophy by reference to fruit. The trouble with philosophers, Marx says, is that they think that apples, pears, almonds and raisins are simply so many manifestations of "Absolute Fruit". They pretend they are saying something remarkable when they speculatively state the difference between apples and pears, while ordinary men do the same thing easily, without any fuss.
But you will search in vain in Marx's work for any theory of gastronomy. He never tells us what food would be like in a communist society, scorning the "utopian socialists" for their "recipes for the cookshops of the future". As Marx's contemporaries observed, communism is the philosophy of the belly (a theme dealt with in Gareth Stedman Jones's outstanding new edition of the Communist Manifesto, due out in May). So long as the stomach was filled, Marx did not greatly care how.
