He may seem an unlikely health guru – but he’s also the shape of a telegraph pole. No extra pounds on Jacob Rees-Mogg, who recently offered us a few insights on how he maintains his Jack Spratt physique. “I always have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday lunch,” he told comedian Matt Forde on his podcast, A Political Party, adding “that is the key to a stable life.”
There was one occasion, Jacob goes on, when he was newly married and his wife dished up roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on a Saturday instead, explaining that they were having roast chicken the following day. Fortunately, this oversight was swiftly corrected and it’s been roast beef every Sunday since. On weeknights, when he’s in London alone and his family are in Somerset, he has cheddar and biscuits for dinner. In Edinburgh recently, he admits to eating a deep-fried Mars bar – “My word that was good!” – but seems to have been a rare anomaly in the Rees-Mogg diet.
“Do you have a fitness regime? Do you exercise?” presses Forde, to which Jacob merely laughs. “No, of course not. I think shaving every morning is quite enough, and trying to keep broadly clean.”
As we all roll back from our summer holidays, and avoid even looking at the scales after all the wine, bread, crisps and saucisson (just me?), it occurred to me that we should perhaps all be more Jacob regarding our outlook on food. His is the classic posh person’s diet: meat and veg, the odd bit of cheese, sometimes an egg from the henhouse for dinner (very grand to have eggs for dinner). The odd delicacy, such as a deep-fried Mars bar, is an exotic and singular treat.
Go to an old-fashioned posh household, and you won’t find any crisps or sugary snacks stashed in the cupboards. Breakfast will most likely involve eggs and toast, and proper butter; lunch will be light; dinner will be meat and veg. Unless it’s Sunday, in which case this is reversed: big lunch, light dinner. My mother likes a cheese soufflé with a lettuce leaf on a Sunday evening. The only UPF (ultra-processed food) you’re likely to find in a ducal larder is an extremely old bottle of ketchup, gummy around the rim. The last time I went to a certain friend’s house in Dorset, I bought an emergency granola bar in the service station on the way down because I knew from previous visits that I’d struggle on the long gap between lunch and dinner.
There’ll be lashings of booze at such houses, but you won’t find anything processed or nasty. No ready meals; no diet drinks; no packets of synthetic biscuits. If you rootle around in an old tin, you may get lucky and discover a piece of shortbread. But that’s as thrilling as it gets.
It’s what most dieticians tell us to do – eat sparingly but properly. Cheese and beef may sound calorific to some, but they’re whole foods. Avoid chemicals and anything that means a product would remain perfectly edible on a supermarket shelf after a nuclear attack. Fruit and vegetables, ideally from the garden, and therefore seasonal and sustainable. I don’t suppose we can all aim for a vegetable patch the size of the King’s, but on my recent spin around Balmoral I marvelled at the abundance of the kitchen garden: perfect rows of onions and lettuces, broad beans, runner beans and fat cabbages under netting.
Occasionally, a posh person likes to push the boat out by having something more outlandish. A smear of paté on Melba toast; a thick slice of beef Wellington from the carving trolley at Wilton’s. The very idea of the Queen Mother’s favourite treat – eggs Drumkilbo, a gloopy concoction including lobster, crab, chopped egg, sherry jelly and mayonnaise – still makes me laugh. Sometimes, usually for charity, the duch*ess of Hull or similar will compile a cookery book, ask various friends to contribute, and the end product will be a volume of terrifically retro recipes – Bullshot, haddock Monte Carlo, the Countess of So-and-So’s marmalade, quite possibly eggs Drumkilbo. At dinner parties, you may get lucky and be offered a sauce. But day-to-day, such sorts generally baulk at anything too fussy or rich. Comforting and relatively plain nursery food is the thing – shepherd’s pie, cottage pie, fish pie, a ham sandwich. The inventor of the sandwich, after all, was an earl.
Ironically, it’s a way of eating that some seem to be embracing once more. Faddy, restrictive diets – the low-carb Atkins diet, or those revolting regimens where you could only eat cabbage soup, or eggs or grapefruit– have become outdated. Instead, we’re supposed to embrace foods without additives. Waitrose announced last week that it was reintroducing lambs’ hearts to its stores, and I’m a big fan: delicious little morsels which, if cooked properly, are quite as tender and full of flavour as fillet steak. (Although I did once end up in A&E in London, rolling around on the floor with a grumbling appendix after a celebratory dinner that involved duck hearts, sea bass and truffle, and a couple of glasses of port. “What have you eaten recently?” the triage nurse asked, whereupon I replied “a bit of fish and broccoli”, because I was too embarrassed to admit I’d recently feasted like Henry VIII.)
Ocado, meanwhile, says its sales of tongue, liver and bone marrow have increased. Partly because they’re cheap, unfashionable chunks of a cow, of course, but I wonder whether it’s also because we’re becoming less sissy about such foods, more appreciative of the way we should eat.
“When it comes to eating, moderation is not something I find difficult,” Rees-Mogg intones on the podcast. “I think self-control is important. I think self-control is the fundamental part of being human and civilised.” He’s currently filming his fly-on-the-wall reality series,Meet The Rees-Moggs; but a diet book will surely be the next step after that.
