At noon on Monday 22 January 1748, Nany Latham heard the sound of the family’s newly shod mare trotting into the yard as her husband, Richard, returned from the blacksmith. There was a great deal of squawking as he released the two new hens he had bought to replace the ones that had stopped laying. The children, Sara, Rachael and Ann, put aside their spinning to help their mother set the food on the table. Sara doled helpings of beef and potato stew onto pewter platters and Rachael unwrapped the cloth from around the pudding, which had been simmering in a cauldron of water. Ann put a crock of treacle on the table so that everyone could pour a generous measure over their pudding while Nany set out mugs of strong, sweet ale.1 Dicy, the Lathams’ only son, came in from cutting turf for fuel on a neighbour’s farm and their two other daughters, Alice and Martha, rushed breathlessly into the room a few minutes later, having run all the way home from school. While they ate, the parents exchanged a few words about the hens, which had cost Richard 1s. 3d, but for most of the mealtime the family were silent, concentrating on the pleasure of consuming the food.2
This was a solidly English dinner of the kind that New Englanders like the Holloways aspired to eat. Richard recorded in a little leather-bound notebook the family’s expenditure between 1724, when he married Ann (Nany) Barton, and 1767, when he died. From these careful records we can see that the family of a carter with a smallholding was able to lead the kind of comfortable rural life that the harried middling emigrants of the seventeenth century felt they could not achieve in England, and which they had attempted to create in the New World.
On his smallholding in south Lancashire, Richard practised the mixed farming that agrarian reformers advocated. He grew wheat and barley, and Nany made most of the family’s bread, eking the wheat out with additions of barley flour. That morning Nany had not baked, however, because she and her daughters were too busy trying to finish spinning into yarn that week’s cotton consignment. They wanted to have it finished so it would be ready for Thomas Holecroft, the representative of a Manchester textile manufacturer, who was due to pick the yarn up the next day, when he would also deliver more supplies of cotton. Making pudding was much quicker and easier than baking bread, and earlier that morning Nany had mixed a dough out of flour, beef suet, milk and some eggs. She had flavoured it with a spoonful of ginger powder and a handful of raisins and formed it into a ball, which she wrapped in a cloth and set to simmer in a cauldron of water hung over the turf fire. In the seventeenth century the British began wrapping dough in cloth and then boiling it to make puddings eaten with treacle and by the eighteenth century it had became the favourite fare of the rural population: the sweet–savoury divide that characterised elite cookery had not yet penetrated the countryside.3
The Lathams owned three cows, which made them virtually self-sufficient in milk, butter and cheese; and as there is scant mention in Richard’s accounts of purchasing pork products, it seems likely that they slaughtered their own pigs to make salt pork and bacon. But beef they had to buy, and on a trip to the nearby town of Liverpool a few days earlier, Richard had bought 12 lb, some of which had now found its way into the hearty beef and potato stew that Nany served her family.4 The stew was typical of the meat, grain and vegetable pottages that ever since the Middle Ages rural cottagers had let simmer slowly over the fire while they went about their household tasks.5 Nany would have grown the vegetables and herbs in her kitchen garden; Richard frequently recorded payments for seed potatoes. The family may even have grown potatoes as a cash crop to sell on the Liverpool market.6 Although the English lower classes are thought to have regarded potatoes with suspicion when they were introduced from the New World, labourers in northern areas, where they relied on peat as a cooking fuel, seem to have willingly integrated them into their diet. Slow-burning turf fires were well suited to cooking potatoes, which could be set to simmer slowly over smouldering peat or buried in the ashes.7
Labourers’ wives like Nany Latham would not have consulted recipes. Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy was aimed at a middle-class audience, but although Nany would probably have used fewer eggs in her pudding, and stewed her beef in water or ale rather than in red wine, these recipes give a sense of what her cooking might have been like.
TO MAKE A FINE PLAIN PUDDING
Take a Quart of Milk, put into it six Laurel-leaves, boil it, then take out your Leaves, and stir in as much Flour as will make it a Hasty-pudding pretty thick; take it off and then stir in half a Pound of Butter, then a quarter of a Pound of Sugar, a small Nutmeg grated, and twelve Yolks and six Whites of Eggs well beaten; mix it well together, butter a Dish, and put in your Stuff: A little more than half an Hour will bake it.
ANOTHER WAY TO STEW A RUMP OF BEEF
You must cut the Meat off the Bone, lay it in your Stew-pan, cover it with Water, put in a Spoonful of Whole Pepper, two Onions, a Bundle of Sweet Herbs, some Salt, and a Pint of Red Wine; cover it close, set it over a Stove or slow Fire for four Hours, shaking it sometimes, and turning it four or five Times; make Gravy as for Soop, put in three Quarts, keep it stirring till Dinner is ready: Take ten or twelve Turnips, cut them into Slices the broad Way, then cut them into four, flour them, and fry them Brown in Beef Dripping. Be sure to let your Dripping boil before you put them in, then drain them well from the Fat, lay the Beef into your Soup dish, toast a little Bread very nice and brown, cut in three Corner Dice, lay them into the Dish, and the Turnips likewise, strain the Gravy, and send it to Table.8
The first half of the eighteenth century was a prosperous period for British agriculture. The rise in the value of land – and the consequent rise in rental income – made landlords embark on agricultural innovations that greatly increased productivity. Smallholders like Richard Latham also tried to improve their plots. Richard’s account book records frequent purchases of marl to use as manure, and he also grew the new fodder crops – clover and turnips – to feed his livestock.9 Farming was productive while population growth had slowed, so food was both more plentiful and relatively affordable. But the real key to the prosperity of the eighteenth-century countryside was the increase in women’s earning capacity.10 Nany and her daughters were able to substantially boost their household’s ability to spend by joining an army of putting-out workers spinning yarn for the textile manufacturers who had begun setting up around Manchester. In 1739, when the two oldest girls had reached the age when they were able to spin, Thomas Holecroft had sold the Lathams two new cotton spinning wheels at 2s. each. That year the family had also invested in cotton cards, steel spindles and whorls, which altogether cost them about 10s. – a sizeable proportion of the £12 they spent in the entire year.11 We do not know how much Nany and her daughters earned, but a history of the village of Wilmslow, south of Manchester, claimed that in the 1740s, a diligent woman spinning yarn on a Jersey wheel in her cottage could make up to 4s. a week, while seven- or eight-year-old children could earn 3d or 4d a day.12
The Latham women’s earnings allowed the family to participate in the consumer revolution that swept through Britain in the eighteenth century.13 The cottage in which Richard and Nany began their married life in 1724 was much more comfortable than a seventeenth-century labourer’s would have been. They spent 82s. on a horse and cart, a feather bed and bolster, a spinning wheel and bobbins, various pots, cups and earthenware ‘mugs’ for cooking and butter-making, a large stew pot, chafing dishes, knives, ladles, a sieve and six wooden trenchers, some platters and twelve pewter plates. Over the next 16 years, Nany gave birth to eight children (one died in early infancy), and the family had little spare cash to spend on items to add to their domestic comfort. Indeed, most of the goods they bought when they married seem to have lasted the family a lifetime.14
Once the older girls began contributing to the household income, however, the Lathams’ cottage was gradually made more elegant, with the addition of window curtains, four upholstered and two rush chairs, a clock and a looking glass. Richard bought himself and the children books and newspapers on a regular basis, and his account book shows that the family were drawn into the consumption of textiles that had infected all levels of society.15 This had been sparked by the East India Company’s introduction of Indian textiles, but by the mid eighteenth century, the popularity of these had stimulated the home textile industry – in which the Latham women themselves participated – into the production of fine cottons and stuffs.16 The family purchased hats, gloves, caps, trimmings, handkerchiefs, lace, lengths of blue flowered damask, plainer woollen cloths and linen, as well as ready-made plain and check gowns. When the eldest daughter, Betty, went into service in 1747, she was given a new gown and a red cloak and shoes.17
The Lathams enjoyed their new-found prosperity just as colonial goods began entering the country in unprecedentedly large quantities. This brought their price down sufficiently for people from all walks of life – blacksmiths and miners, midwives and dancing masters – to be able to afford them.18 The Lathams began to buy small treats, such as three pennies’ worth of raisins, a few cloves and a little gingerbread. The combination of efficient industrial production methods and the systematic exploitation of slave labour meant that the West Indian plantations produced millions of hogsheads of sugar a year. The further the price of sugar fell, the more people could afford to buy and so the greater the amounts that were imported. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the per capita consumption of sugar doubled from 4 lb to 8 lb and more than doubled again to 20 lb by the end of the century.19 Throughout the 43 years that Richard Latham recorded his family’s expenses, sugar and treacle were the most frequently purchased foodstuffs. In the 1740s, when their family was at its largest, the Lathams consumed an average of 50 lb of sugar and 20 lb of treacle a year.20 Sugar and treacle had become staples of the English labourer’s diet.
If the consumption of empire goods changed ordinary people’s diet, it also transformed their shopping habits.21 The Lathams probably purchased their sugar and treacle in one of the many small local shops that began to appear in England’s villages and towns during the eighteenth century. Before the advent of the village shop, people bought trinkets and small luxuries from pedlars or at fairs; if they needed to buy staple foodstuffs, they visited the local town on a market day. The influx of colonial groceries radically altered the way poor people shopped. It soon became a habit among labourers to pop into their local shop on a daily basis, sometimes twice or thrice a day. In the 1780s, William Wood, who ran the Ring O’ Bells Inn in Didsbury, catered to the needs of the humbler village folk in a room on the side of the inn.22 On the morning of 3 January 1787 Matha (sic) Chase is recorded in the shop ledger as having bought 1 lb of treacle for 3½d. She came in again later in the day to pick up three pennies’ worth of currants and a clove.23 No doubt they were destined to flavour that evening’s pudding, which Matha and her family would have eaten with a generous helping of treacle.
Colonial groceries were the backbone of these small shops’ trade, and sugar and treacle in particular were among the most frequent items on the shopping list of the villagers who frequented Wood’s store.24 William Cash was typical of Wood’s customers: in just one week in February 1786 he bought 6 lb of treacle and 1 lb of sugar.25 Sugar and tea accounted for three quarters of Mrs Taylor’s trade in the tiny shop she ran in Niddry near Edinburgh.26 Larger enterprises like the shop Mrs Elizabeth Kennett ran out of her front parlour in Folkestone in the 1730s sold a small range of useful household items such as soap and powder blue, tape and binding, mops, candles and brushes as well as foreign and colonial groceries – raisins and currants, spices, snuff, rice, lump sugar and tea.27
In some parts of the country these commodities were still seen as luxurious fripperies. The ironmonger known as ‘Roberts’ who sold agricultural supplies, textiles and medicines in the remote village of Penmorfa in North Wales added colonial groceries and haberdashery to his stock in the 1790s. While their husbands came in to buy alum, indigo, logwood, linen and thread, the wives would buy pennyworths of sugar, screws of tea, handkerchiefs and lace. Many of these purchases evidently had to be smuggled past the men, as Roberts frequently noted down ‘nor to tell’ next to the record of the sales.28 But even if they were still frowned upon in Britain’s remoter regions, colonial goods – bought in small quantities on a daily basis – had become integral to the lives of eighteenth-century rural labourers.
It is remarkable that while they embraced sugar and treacle, the Lathams do not appear to have fallen under the spell of tea. Tea-drinking did, however, become a widespread habit in the eighteenth century, especially in the south of England.29 In 1713, the East India Company finally managed to persuade the Chinese authorities to allow them to establish a trading post at Canton.30 Now that they had easier access to the Chinese market, the number of Company ships calling in at the new trading post rose steadily from three or four to around twenty a year, and the quantity of tea arriving at Britain’s docks rose from 142,000 lb in 1711 to 890,000 lb in 1741, reaching 15 million lb a year by 1791.31 Once the infusion was widely available and affordable, the practice of taking afternoon tea spread throughout the whole population and was even adopted by the most humble. When Arthur Young travelled through England in the 1760s, he found that the inmates of alms houses at Nacton in Suffolk had petitioned to replace the pease porridge served on Fridays and Saturdays with bread and butter, which was ‘their favourite dinner, because they have tea to it’.32 When he expressed surprise that they were allowed this indulgence, he was told that ‘they were permitted to spend 2d in the shilling of what they earned, as they please; and they laid it all out in tea and sugar to drink with their bread and butter dinners’.33
The consumption of colonial goods integrated the Empire into ordinary people’s everyday lives. The images on the trade cards shops used to advertise their wares would have left people in no doubt as to where these goods came from or how they were produced.34 Tobacco, known as the ‘Indian weed’, was advertised with images of American Indians in feathered headdresses smoking pipes, while black African slaves were shown toiling in the fields and processing sheds of the Virginian plantations. Pictures of crates of tea marked with mock Chinese writing being loaded onto an East Indiaman by pigtailed Chinese peasants depicted the tea trade. Sometimes the cards showed the East India Company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street in London. It would have been easy for people to recognise the connection between the foodstuffs they enjoyed and Britain’s commercial empire.35
In the eighteenth century, the English, Scots and Welsh were united into a single state and began to define themselves as British. This new identity derived from a sense of a shared Protestantism, which was highlighted by their opposition to Catholic France. With the British triumph over the French in Canada and India during the Seven Years War (1756−63), public pride in Britain’s navy and imperial strength grew.36 Victories at sea were now marked by the ringing of church bells, and there was a populist dimension to the celebration of empire – merchants, artisans, people in the provinces all took pride in Britain’s overseas triumphs.37 National morale was affected by imperial success (or failure). And Britain’s military might was financed by its empire. In the 1760s, the duty the government made on sugar imports was roughly equivalent to the cost of maintaining all the ships in the British navy.38 More directly, the government raised loans from the East India Company to finance its wars.39 The consumption of colonial goods became linked to pride in Britain’s imperial greatness, and both became an integral part of what it meant to be British.40
Ironically, the origins of the colonial product of which British people consumed the most were the least visible in advertising. Pictures of slaves cutting cane, refining the juice in boiling houses or loading muscovado sugar onto ships rarely appeared on trade cards. Sugar appears to have been considered such a standard commodity that traders did not feel the need to assure their customers of its authentically West Indian origins. It was sold according to the level of its refinement – brown muscovado or white lump sugar – not according to its place of origin. One did not need to be a connoisseur to judge the quality of sugar, unlike the teas it was used to sweeten, which came in a variety of types and grades.41 In her shop near Edinburgh, Mrs Taylor sold a range of middle-quality Congou teas, which the labouring classes preferred as they were stronger than the cheaper teas. And for every pound of tea she sold, she sold seven pounds of sugar.42
Tea sweetened with sugar eventually displaced beer as the primary drink of the poor. Tea itself does not seem an obvious alternative to beer until the sweetness of the eighteenth-century brew is taken into account: the amount of malt it contained would have produced a heady, sweet beer that may have predisposed people to develop a liking for strong, sugary tea.43 In 1767, the social reformer Jonas Hanway was outraged by the indulgence of beggars, road menders and haymakers, who he observed had developed a passion for tea, a luxury he considered they could ill afford.44 What Hanway and other middle-class commentators who condemned the habit failed to understand was that rather than a sign of profligate spending, tea-drinking was in fact a symptom of the worrying impoverishment of the labouring classes.
Enclosure had left many rural labourers without access to even a small patch of common land on which to graze a cow or some sheep. It also denied them access to woodlands, where they had gleaned firewood and caught the odd rabbit for the pot. In addition, employment for live-in agricultural servants declined as farmers began to hire in labour only as and when they needed it. The rural labouring population thus gradually turned into a wage-earning proletariat as they lost their means of economic independence and, most importantly, the means to produce their own food. This was less troubling when the cost of food was reasonable.45 But the rural population’s dependence on wages became a grave problem when the population explosion from the middle of the century began to put pressure on food supplies. Poor harvests in the 1760s and 1770s pushed wheat prices up by 40 per cent.46 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1792–1815 caused further inflation and food prices went spiralling upwards. Those rural families who did not own a cow lost their access to milk as its price rose from 4d a gallon in 1770 to 10d in 1800. At the same time, deforestation also led to a rise in fuel prices in southern England, where people were dependent on wood for cooking and heating and the cheaper coal that was being mined in the north was not available. Brewing beer therefore became an expensive process: the wort had to be boiled, and this was preferably done over a fire made with high-grade fuel, as impurities affected the flavour.47 Many labourers who could no longer afford to brew their own beer turned to sweetened tea as a less expensive alternative.
Those who criticised the labourers’ tea-drinking habit were correct in their assertion that it was detrimental to their nutrition and health. Brewing beer was an alternative way of turning grain into edible food. Beer was, in effect, liquid bread. It was nutritious, containing protein and vitamin B, as well as providing energy (about 350 calories per pint).48 Tea, on the other hand, contained neither vitamins nor protein, and even when it was heavily sweetened, it provided far less energy. Even if a man heaped his cup with four teaspoonfuls of sugar, it would only have contained about 64 calories. Labourers would have been under the illusion, however, that tea gave them more energy because the sugar would have been immediately accessible to the body, whereas the sugars in beer are released far more slowly.49 Tea had the added advantage that it was hot, which must have been welcome to labourers working outside in the inclement English climate, and to the increasing number of families who could no longer afford to cook on a daily basis. For if the rise in fuel prices led to a decline in brewing, it also had a calamitous impact on the ability of many people to prepare a warm meal.
Those who could not afford fuel to cook or heat their homes were now forced to buy in bread. Bakeries began to appear in England’s villages in the middle of the eighteenth century. There were striking regional differences. In the southern county of Berkshire by 1815 there was one baker to every 295 inhabitants; in comparison, there was only one for every 2,200 people in the northern county of Cumberland.50 Surveys conducted in the 1790s found that although the north too had been hard hit by price rises, porridge, potatoes and barley broths still constituted an important part of the diet of labourers there. Cheaper peat and coal in the north meant that people could still afford to cook warm meals.51 Southern labouring families, on the other hand, were barely able to scrape a living together. Not only warm, home-cooked broths and stews but milk and butter had virtually disappeared from their diet. They subsisted on an industrial ration of shop-bought bread and the occasional bit of cheese or scrap of bacon. What irritated Sir Frederick Eden, who conducted one of the surveys, was that these poor families spent at least 10 per cent of their annual income on tea and sugar.52 A family of seven in Northamptonshire, for example, spent £2 7s. 6d a year on tea and sugar out of an annual income of £26 8s.53 While Eden’s instinct was to judge the poor as shamefully wasteful, a fellow surveyor, David Davies, understood that they were now entirely reliant on hot sweet tea to give them some small measure of comfort: ‘Spring water, just coloured with the leaves of the lowest-priced tea and sweetened with the brownest sugar is the luxury for which you reprove them. To this they have recourse from mere necessity, and were they now to be deprived of this they would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not the cause, but the consequence of the distresses of the poor.’54
Initially, the lower classes bought sugar and treacle in order to fulfil a novel desire for sweetness, but before long they metamorphosed from luxuries into necessities. When milk became unaffordable, porridge made with water tasted much better if it was covered in treacle.55 Treacle spread on a slice of bread was a good substitute for butter, which was now too expensive. It was cheaper to boil a kettle to make a cup of tea than simmer the wort to brew beer at home. And a cup of sweet tea with a slice of bread and treacle at least created the illusion that this was a warm meal. Last but not least, tea also had the advantage that it acted as an effective suppressor of appetite.56 Sugar and treacle replaced the fresh meat, milk, butter, cheese and vegetables that had disappeared from labourers’ diets. The problem was that the calories they contained were empty of any additional nutritional value: sugar contains neither vitamins, minerals nor protein. Looking back in the 1890s on the change in the labourer’s diet, an old man complained to Arthur Fox, a commissioner for the Royal Commission on Labour, that the reliance on ‘foreign stuff’ had had a deleterious effect on the poor. ‘Tea is no forage for a man,’ he complained. ‘Bannocks made of barley and peas made a man as hard as a brick. Men would take a lump of bannock out for the day, and drink water, but now they eat white bread and drink tea, and ain’t half so hard.’57
By the end of the eighteenth century, the meat and vegetable pottages, the porridges and puddings had all but disappeared from the tables of rural labourers in the south. The prosperity they had enjoyed in the first half of the century had allowed them to take part in the consumer revolution and integrate colonial foodstuffs into their diets. These foods changed the way the British ate and shopped. But when population growth and food shortages sent the price of fuel and foodstuffs spiralling, the colonial groceries that had once supplemented their diet became essential to their sustenance. This marked an important shift in the contribution of the Empire to Britain’s economy and society. And the Empire’s underlying importance was reinforced when the rural labouring classes took these eating habits with them as they moved into the urban slums that grew up around the textile mills.