Movin' On Up (Theme to The Jeffersons) 2 Lyrics line question

Question

In the Jeffersons theme song there are two lines I don't understand:

Fish don't fry in the kitchen

Does this mean they are now wealthy enough to have fish catered? But they still cook in the kitchen?

Beans don't burn on the grill.

Same question.

Answer 1

Fish don't fry in the kitchen conveys that things do not always happen where or in the way you expect them to.

This particular song speaks about moving up on the social ladder, becoming rich from poor. You expect the poor to live in poor areas, but the song shows that if you have opportunity and you persistently make the effort, this can change. Fish don't fry in the kitchen is a metaphorical images of the poor having access to success against all odds, so that you will find them, not in the poverty you would expect, but in a life of luxury because they moved up "to the East Side".

Having said that, we must keep in mind that it is a song after all, and although all the connotations I have mentioned are present, you cannot claim with the authority of a dictionary that this is the whole meaning of these idioms. Songs are very flexible, subjective and can be interpreted in many ways.

EDIT: I thank the downvoters for prompting me to check the information of the site which was accused of AI generated information, and to my shock, I could not find any support for that post. So I edited my post to delete it. It's a good lesson, next time I will check, as I never trust AI and would hate to propagate its gibberish.

Answer 2

I don't have a separate reference for this, but I always understood it as Tinfoil Hat's comment mentions: fish and beans are inexpensive fare in many places. If you eat them constantly, you get annoyed with them.

If you're forced to cook a lot of fish indoors often, the cooking grease gets everywhere and is a pain to clean. One night of fish can be interesting, but multiple days of fish and you get very tired of the odor.

Fish frying in the kitchen (often) is annoying because of the smell and grease. Beans burning on the grill is a problem that happens when you're constantly cooking beans (because they burn easily if not constantly attended).

The song is celebrating that these are two annoyances that they expect to leave behind by having more money.

Answer 3

In their move to the Upper East Side, the Jeffersons leave behind—metaphorically, if not literally—soul food, or what Wikipedia describes as the “ethnic cuisine of African Americans.” Born of subsistence hunting, fishing, and farming by slaves in the antebellum Deep South, the economical cuisine was “seen as low-class food.” (Wikipedia—Soul food)

For a sociological take on the role of food and dining in African American culture, you can read Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America, wherein author Jennifer Jensen Wallach analyzes “the various attempts of African Americans who . . . used food practices [to experiment] with different ideas about who they were and who they wished to become.” But the “tl;dr” can be found in those two lines of the theme song: Fish don’t fry in the kitchen; Beans don’t burn on the grill.

So, no more fried fish and beans for the Jeffersons — at least not emanating from their deluxe kitchen. They eat like upper-middle-class folks now. In this scene from The Jeffersons, George explains the concept of “brunch” to a perplexed Weezy:

. . . that’s how rich folks get more time to enjoy their money—because they make one meal do the work of two. I call that smart.

Weezy replies:

When we had to do it in Harlem, it was called poverty.

The lyrics extend the food metaphor by trading the, uh, aromatic fish and beans for “a piece of the pie”—the sweet smell of success, maybe.