Chapter Three
Country Matters
Pork – no animal is more used for nourishment and none more indispensable in the kitchen; employed either fresh or salt, all is useful, even to its bristles and its blood; it is the superfluous riches of the farmer, and helps to pay the rent of the cottager.
(Alexis Soyer, nineteenth century French chef, The Modern Housewife, 1851)
To supplement their diet, many Victorian labourers kept a pig. The animal was an integral part of the cottager’s life and would be kept in the yard, on a patch of land adjoining the cottage, or in a makeshift sty. There are even some instances when the pig was given space within the house. Living in close proximity to their animal, the whole family would take responsibility for its welfare. In autumn, the children would be sent out to collect acorns to enliven the pig’s diet, and even neighbouring villagers who did not have their own beast, would contribute to its feed with scraps from their kitchens, in return for some of its meat when the animal was slaughtered.
The pig was primarily a source of meat not a pet, so slaughtering the pig was a reality of rural life. The animal would be fattened before slaughter in the late autumn and then smoked or salted to provide a meat source during the winter and spring. Thomas Hardy dedicated a whole chapter to this necessary act in his 1895 novel, Jude the Obscure.
The services of a pork butcher or ‘pig sticker’ were required to despatch the animal and the skill of the expert had a huge impact on how quickly and cleanly the pig was slaughtered. Born in the late 1890s, Northamptonshire cottager Sid Tyrell recollected the occasion: ‘with a clumsy rough butcher there would be men shouting and a pig squealing for no end of time so that the entire village would know what was going on and the boys would come from all directions to see the gory spectacle’. But Sid only had words of praise for his own local pig sticker, who killed pigs ‘in the most gentlemanly sort of way’.
In Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson recalled the brutality of a pig-killing which took place in her Oxfordshire village. ‘The killing was a noisy, bloody business, the animal was hoisted to a rough bench that it might bleed thoroughly and so preserve the quantity of the meat’. The slaughter took place after dark, and she described how lanterns would provide light and a fire of burning straw would be lit to singe the bristles off the carcass of the animal. ‘The whole scene, with its mud and blood, flaring lights and dark shadows was as savage as anything to be seen in an African jungle.’
Although Flora’s childhood memories lingered into adulthood ‘she was sorry for the pig … as she stood alone in the pantry where the dead animal hung suspended from a hook in the ceiling,’ children’s author Beatrix Potter was not quite so sentimental. Three years after buying Hill Top Farm, she drafted a letter of protest against proposed legislation to make it ‘illegal for a child of under sixteen years of age to be present at the slaughter and cutting up of carcasses’. Beatrix reminisced that one of her early memories was of ‘helping to scrape the smiling countenance of my grandmother’s deceased pig with scalding water and the sharp edged bottom of a brass candlestick’.
But once the horrors of despatching the pig had begun to fade, the preservation of the meat for the coming months began. Hams and bacons were salted and dried, lard was collected and the pig’s intestines, known as chitterlings, were cleaned; pies were made and hog’s puddings created from a mixture of pork meat, fat, suet, bread, and barley. The joy of eating the delicious meat was traditionally celebrated with a ‘pig feast’, which took place on the Sunday following the slaughter.
In later weeks, when it was time to eat the bacon, ‘salamandering’ – a unique cooking method described by Flora Thompson as ‘peculiar to smithy families’ – was carried out:
Thin slices of bacon or ham were spread out on a large plate and taken to the smithy, where the plate was placed on the anvil. The (black) smith then heated red hot one end of a large, flat iron utensil known as the ‘salamander’ and held it above the plate until the rashers were crisp and curled.
Owning a pig was undoubtedly a huge bonus to a Victorian family, but if you had the wherewithal to keep a cow, then the benefits also extended to creating the by-products of its milk.
Cheese-making
For wealthy Victorian families cheese was just one of several courses at a meal, whilst for the poorer classes it was often the mainstay of a meal, inspiring the quote by author and food connoisseur Eugene Briffault, ‘Cheese complements a good dinner and supplements a bad one’.
By the nineteenth century, cheese-making had been carried out in Britain for hundreds of years. Eleventh century monks helped to refine the techniques still used today. The processes used in making the traditional favourite, Wensleydale can be traced back to the twelfth century Cistercian monks at Jervaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. It soon became a tradition to name the cheese by the region in which it was made and by the early 1800s an assortment of cheeses were being produced in farmhouses across the United Kingdom.
Despite a long period of success for the British cheese industry, the Industrial Revolution and the development of the railways would have a huge impact on local cheese-making operations. Gradually, it became more profitable for dairymen to sell their milk on, rather than to use it to make cheese, as the efficiency of the rail network made transportation over longer distances much more viable.
As a rule, better quality milk meant better quality cheese. Factors such as the diet and the type of grass, hay or silage that the cattle had been fed upon all contributed to the taste of the finished product. Cheese was made by a process of separating the milk into the ‘curds’ or solids, and the ‘whey’ or liquid. Many different methods were used to begin this process – including the addition of lemon juice or vinegar to the milk to encourage separation. Perhaps the most common, which also guaranteed success and an edible cheese, was to use ‘rennet’, the natural enzyme which was found in a calf ’s stomach. By draining off the whey, which was used to feed the pigs, the curds could be milled, salted and packed in a cloth-lined mould, before being weighted in a press for approximately one week to squeeze out any excess moisture. The resulting cheese could then be left on a cool, dry shelf to mature.
Mentioned in the Domesday Book, Cheshire Cheese is Britain’s oldest variety of cheese – a particular favourite at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and Royal Navy ships were said to be stocked with it in the 1750s. Although it was originally aged to varying levels of hardness to withstand transportation from the country to the city by horse and cart, the crumbly texture we know today later became the preferred choice, requiring a shorter storage time during production and reducing the price of the final cheese.
Such was the importance of cheese-making in counties like Cheshire, that in the village of Peover it was said that if a girl wished to be a good farmer’s wife she had to lift the lid of the parish chest one-handed before she was betrothed, in order to prove that she had the strength required for cheese making.
The parchment-covered journal of John Byram, a farmer who lived in Cheshire, creates an accurate picture of exactly how agriculture, farming and the kitchen were inextricably linked during the early to mid-Victorian period. A hefty one-inch thick, the book is filled with notes, clippings and recipes. Started on Lady Day in 1831 and covering over 50 years, it sheds light on the worries and wonders of a different world, also revealing how the life of a dairy farmer and cheese-maker revolved around his cattle.
1849 – 16 cows died of Pleura pneumonia. Began March 1st 1849 and continued till August 12th. Sold five off for £11. Lost in all 21 cows.
He then jots down a recipe that he hopes will cure any more outbreaks of the pneumonia:
John Morton’s receipt for Pleura Pneumonia
2 oz Carbonate of Soda
4 oz Cream of Tartar
8 oz Sulphur
To be given … in 3 pints warm water.
Do not bleed or give much meal for two or three days.
John’s notes constantly refer to the planting and harvesting of food crops essential for the family table, with numerous entries in the spring giving us an idea of the types of seeds he was sowing.
March 19th 1863 – Onions and Radish.
March 20th 1863 – Oats sown and Potatoes set.
However, the product from which he made most of his income was his cheese.
11th July 1853 – sold 40 cheese at Chester Fair to Thomas of Liverpool.
Such was John’s pride in his cheese-making skills that he cut and pasted a clipping out of the newspaper into his journal. It reads:
Prize cheese made in 1857
The prize cheese for which John Byram, Pool Farm, Eastham received
The Royal Agricultural Society’s prize of £20 in July 1858, are on view and sale at T & R Bells, 58 St John’s Market, Liverpool.
After numerous cheese sales and cattle bought and sold, one entry at the end of the book sums up John’s agricultural career: ‘Finished farming by the grace of God February 2nd 1871’. This gives the impression that he felt lucky to have survived this turbulent era of farming, having provided a sufficient income for his family.
Butter-making
In rural Britain, one of the necessary skills for nineteenth century countrywomen was butter-making. Using the cream from the milk and a little added salt, the process of butter-making was simple – all it took was time, energy and some basic equipment. The low-tech butter-making process was basically the same wherever it was carried out. The cows were milked by hand, usually twice a day, by the dairyman or milk maid. In the 1880s, without the aid of modern equipment, 200 gallons of milk could be collected per year from one cow. As the farming world developed and new machines were introduced, a century later, quantities had drastically changed and 1,000 gallons were expected from each cow.
Sitting on a small three-legged stool, the dairymaid would place a wooden bucket underneath the cow’s udder to collect the liquid. Then, with the aid of the yoke – a wooden support laid across the shoulders, which took the weight of the containers hanging beneath – the buckets would be carried from the place of milking into the farmhouse, where this liquid was sieved into an earthenware crock pot to cool. During this rest period, the cream would rise to the top, allowing it to be easily skimmed off and separated from the milk. The cream would be poured into the butter churn and agitated with a wooden pounding stick, breaking down the fat membranes. The liquid fat, or buttermilk, was released and the remainder would ‘cement’ together to make a cream solid. Salt was also added to taste.
Churning butter could be a laborious process and many housewives would get their children to help. Reciting a popular old rhyme known as an ‘Essex Charm for a Churn’, the words are said to date back to 1650, according to Percy B. Green’s History of Nursery Rhymes, published in 1899. Although originating from Essex, this traditional ditty was adopted by women across the country, to pass the time whilst churning and to encourage the butter to ‘appear’ from the milk:
Come, butter, come; Come, butter, come,
Peter stands at the gate
Waiting for his buttered cake,
Come, butter, come.
Folklore and superstition also surrounded the butter-making process. Old tales focus on the healing properties of this precious commodity, with butter made in the month of May thought to have special healing powers. As a result, the rural housewife would keep a small piece of ‘May butter’, then mix it with herbs to soothe scalds and burns at a later date. Each county had its own ideas and Lincolnshire legend would have us believe that throwing salt into the fire before churning would guarantee a good batch of butter. Lancashire tales spoke of putting a hot iron into the cream during the process to expel the witch from the churn, whilst a Gaelic superstition required sods of turf, or cinders to be laid beneath the churn to stop the fairies from stealing the butter.
In Ireland, some believed that if a visitor arrived at the house whilst the churning was taking place, then he was expected to take a turn. If he refused, he was called a ‘Balor’, after ‘Balor of the Evil Eye’, king of the giants and a legendary figure in Irish mythology, whose eye was said to have remained open once slain, its deadly beam burning a hole into the earth. Being given this title would apparently bring bad luck, so the cream would have to be removed from the churn.
To complete the butter-making process, ‘butter pats’ were made with ridged wooden paddles known as ‘Scotch Hands’, used to stabilise the butter into one-pound blocks and shape them ready for storage or sale. Some blocks were wrapped in printed paper, but wooden stamps made of sycamore – a wood that did not taint the flavour of the butter – also gave the option of impressing a pattern into the pats to identify the maker. Designs on stamps could include thistles, crowns, cows and swans.
Fluctuating food prices became a regular topic in the periodicals of the day. A column in The Penny Magazine of 1835 refers to the soaring cost of butter in different parts of the country:
With respect to the prices of butter, it appears by the household book of Lord North that a pound of butter in the reign of Queen Elizabeth cost four pence: at the present time, a pound of best butter in the West of England costs from seven pence to eight pence, while in the metropolis the price is fourteen pence.
A Hedgerow Harvest
Like their urban cousins, plenty of rural labourers had very little to eat. Poverty was not limited to the industrial cities, and country folk on limited means could find life equally tough. Food that was affordable and provided basic nutrition, tended to be starchy and pulse-based, with porridge, gruel and sago pudding top of the menu. When we think of gruel, the fictional character of Oliver Twist immediately springs to mind, as he summons up the courage to confront the workhouse overseer and, holding out his bowl he asks, ‘Please, sir, I want some more’. In the novel, Charles Dickens describes Oliver’s diet of ‘three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sunday’.
Made of oats and flour boiled in water or milk to form a thin porridge or watery soup, gruel was not only eaten by the poor, but was also part of the daily diet of some middle-class families. Emily Brontë mentions this in Wuthering Heights – ‘but you’ve caught cold: I saw you shivering, and you must have some gruel to drive it out’, the housekeeper Mrs Dean comments, as she bustles off to fetch Lockwood a warming dish. Similarly, in Jane Austen’s Emma Mr Woodhouse enjoys eating gruel to restore his health. This dish may have consisted of very few ingredients and lacked flavour without the addition of salt, but it was considered the perfect meal to maintain strength and energy.
Country housewives became clever at making ends meet, supplementing meagre supplies and duller dishes with whatever ‘free food’ they could acquire. Even the children had a part to play and they were sent out mushrooming in the fields, to gather beech and cobnuts in season, berries from the hedgerows, fallen crab apples from the woodland and watercress from the streams. At the end of the harvest they would ‘glean’ the fields for vegetables which had been overlooked, collect wild garlic and herbs to flavour soups and stews, or catch pigeons to make a hearty pigeon pie.
To avoid spending the little money they had, country-people used a barter system with their neighbours, swapping produce, or an item they already had a quantity of, for another ingredient that they required. Those with a large patch of rhubarb might swap a few sticks with a neighbour who had a glut of beans, whilst those with extra hen’s eggs might trade them for a bag of flour.
Those living on the edge of a country estate might even risk a spot of poaching – catching fish from the rivers and bagging the odd pheasant or rabbit for their table. Seen as a nuisance because they could entirely destroy a crop of vegetables, and as a blessing providing meat for the table the wild rabbit was among the poacher’s most sought-after quarry. Yet, catching them was by no means an easy task.
An 1852 newspaper cutting outlines a recipe and procedure to help make the a task little easier:
To take wild rabbits alive:
Approach the warren, or holes, very quietly and place a small purse net, the same as are used for ferreting, over the mouth of each hole, then put a common tobacco pipe full of the preparation hereafter named, into the mouth of each hole, always on the windward side of the warren only, and ignite it with a Lucifer match. After igniting, close up the opening.
The preparation is made thus: Dissolve two drachms of Nitrate of Potash in one ounce of water, then wet one ounce of tobacco with the solution, freely sprinkling it with half a drachm of Cayenne Pepper. Let it dry gradually in the sun, or by a very slow fire, and it will be ready for use.
To make rabbits bolt for shooting:
Put the same preparation in the opening of the holes, on the windward side, stand perfectly still in a convenient place and shoot the rabbits as they leave their holes.
[NB: A drachm was a unit of weight formerly used by apothecaries and equivalent to 60 grains or one eighth of an ounce. Lucifer matches were a brand marketed by Samuel Jones and known for their bad burning odour; they even carried a warning that people with delicate lungs should not use them.]
Medicinal Remedies in the Victorian Kitchen
Early Victorian country recipe books tended to focus on remedies, rather than instructions of how to prepare a certain dish, as the lack of ingredients meant that most housewives knew their limited repertoire off by heart. Instead, it was customary to take clippings of interest from newspapers and other publications and paste them into a scrapbook or jot them down in a journal. Illness and infirmity of both livestock and family members was always a concern and, with little or no funds to pay for medical practitioners, any remedies were duly noted and treated seriously.
In 1882, the Byram family cut out the following cure for smallpox or scarlet fever from The Weekly Post, which relied on the powerful plant foxglove. There is no evidence to suggest that they ever had cause to try it out, though.
Sulphate of Zinc – one grain
Foxglove (Digitalis) – one grain
One half teaspoon of sugar
Mix with two tablespoonfuls of water, when the above has been thoroughly mixed, add another 4 oz of water. Take one teaspoon every hour … the disease will disappear in 12 hours … for a child- smaller doses according to age.
Not all nineteenth century recipes were concerned with curing such severe diseases, but instead used natural remedies to help ease ailments suffered on a daily basis, treating them with herbs and plants collected from the kitchen garden. The humble stinging nettle was particularly highly esteemed by our ancestors. ‘Nettle tea, made by boiling six handfuls of washed nettles in a quart of water, is one of the best blood purifiers’, reported one Victorian newspaper’s ‘Health from Field and Garden’ column, also claiming that ‘People liable to spots and other skin eruptions drink it in large quantities’. Chickweed was declared to be ‘one of nature’s best remedies for skin troubles and should be well washed in salt water, then boiled like spinach, for which it makes a cheap and appetising substitute’.
Wood Sorrell, ‘with its brilliant green leaves and pink stem’, was seen as another valuable salad plant and again said to be ‘largely used in France as a tonic and blood purifier’. No matter how hard life was for the cottager, it seems that taking care of the skin and restoring vigour in both the young and the old by cleansing the body of impurities was just as important, at least according to the newspaper.
Further advice from the same column states that bilious attacks could be alleviated by ‘pouring boiling water over a handful of sage leaves, a cut up lemon and half an ounce of sugar’ and this was believed to be ‘splendid for digestion … relieving pain and also improving the condition of the stomach and digestive organs generally’.
The medicinal properties of vegetables too, were highly recommended:
Onions are amongst the finest nervines known, and a splendid sedative. A large boiled onion, taken before going to bed, would ensure a good restful sleep and soothe the entire nervous system … The milky juice of a lettuce, too, possesses valuable sedative properties and is most useful for calming jaded nerves and calming the mind to sleep.