When did the quality of British food begin to decline, for by the early twentieth century the reputation of our food was depressingly low? How early in the nineteenth century did the seeds of that decline germinate? Abraham Hayward in his Art of Dining (1852) thought that gastronomy had emigrated to England in the years following Waterloo. The chef Louis Eustache Ude, writing in 1813, thought that ‘Cookery in England, when well done, is superior to that of any country in the world.’ So it would appear that the first quarter of the nineteenth century won international gastronomic approval, but perhaps the salient phrase in Ude’s remark is the qualification ‘when well done’. This chapter and those following will attempt to pursue what went wrong with British cooking, the reasons for its decline and exactly when this began to happen.
A Leap Forward
The nineteenth century was one of great expansion and change, which succeeded in making the rich richer (often beyond the dreams of avarice) and the poor poorer, sinking to depths of neglect, exploitation and the inevitable malnutrition, which earlier had only been experienced in medieval famines. This was pinpointed by a writer in 1840: ‘Society has been startled by the discovery of a fearful fact, that as wealth increases, poverty increases in a faster ratio and that in almost exact proportion to the advance of one portion of society in opulence, intelligence and civilisation, has been the retrogression of another and more numerous class towards misery, degradation and barbarism.’1
Britain was the home of the industrial revolution and of a triumphant bourgeoisie; both Carlyle and Marx agreed that the successful industrialist was the new aristocrat. From the great period of canal building which had reached its peak in the 1790s, there was a sense among the affluent of an immense leap forward, which seemingly had no end, and where human and animal strength was to be replaced by machines. At the same time there was this astonishing feeling that the country was shrinking: distance was no longer a formidable problem; food could travel now from one end of the country to the other within a short space of time; and new methods of travelling, by water, road and rail, succeeded each other within decades. Firstly there was the canal system, which looked forward to linking great rivers like the Severn, Mersey, Thames and Trent; the Leeds and Liverpool canals were joined; and the coal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s coal mines at Worsley in Lancashire could be brought to Manchester by barge. Secondly, there were improved roads and coaches: in 1754 there were six firms operating coaches from Manchester to London, a journey that took four days; thirty years later the time had been cut by half and by 1816 there were 200 land carriers transporting goods to and from Manchester in wagons and carts; by 1830 there were fifty-four passenger coaches travelling every day. Thirdly, the railway network began between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Between 1825 and 1835, Railway Acts were passed permitting railway buildings, and by 1838 there were already 500 miles of track. But this was nothing. In the next four years there was a railway boom, when fifty-four companies concerned with nearly 1,500 miles of track were approved; and so the network grew. The most notorious of the railway contractors, Thomas Brassey, left over £3,000,000 on his death in 1870.2 There were plenty of critics of this new method of travelling who thought it far too democratic, and that it would lead heaven knows where. ‘A dangerous tendency to equality,’ was Disraeli’s phrase in his novel Sybil (1845), and the headmaster of Rugby School, Dr Arnold, thought it was ‘destroying feudalism forever’.
Industry had already changed the British Isles irrevocably. A German visitor in 1844, J.G. Kohl, wrote of ‘black roads winding through verdant fields, the long trains of waggons heavily laden with black treasures … burning mounds of coal scattered over plain, black pit mouths, and here and there an unadorned Methodist chapel’, and he was speaking of the countryside. The new towns were another deep scar upon what was once farming land. A visitor to Manchester in 1814 wrote:
The cloud of coal vapour may be observed from afar. The houses are blackened by it. The river which flows through Manchester, is so filled with waste dye-stuffs that it resembles a dyer’s vat.
Government policy was determined by manufacturing interests; a strong belief in free trade was ignored when the British home market might be damaged by imports.
In 1750 there had only been two cities in Britain with more than 50,000 inhabitants – London and Edinburgh. By 1801 there were eight and in 1851 there were twentynine. There was a sudden population increase of eighteen per cent between 1811 and 1831 spread all over the country, but mostly in the manufacturing towns; many migrants flooded into the towns from the country so that by 1851 many villages were smaller than they had been thirty years before. Between 1700 and 1801 the population rose from 61/4 million to 101/2 million – at least a tenth of whom were paupers.
London, by the middle of the century, had fifteen per cent of the population and an insatiable demand for food and fuel, which transformed the south and east of England into one huge larder; London drew regular supplies into its maw not only from them but also from remoter parts of Wales and England. The productivity of the coal mines of Newcastle was thus stimulated. We were the first industrial society, far in advance of our neighbours across the Channel. As in the example of the Reformation and the Civil War, such factors changed us irrevocably from other European countries even again to the extent of what we ate.
The Disappearance of Peasant Cooking
What was perhaps one of the most startling differences between Britain and the continent was the decline of the peasantry in Britain.3 The growth of a market economy had already undermined local self-sufficiency and enmeshed the village in a network of cash sales, for it was not immune to the popularity of the imported foods, such as tea, coffee and sugar. The smallholder who cultivated his own plot had become a rarity, except in the Celtic fringe and in other out of the way areas in the north and west. By 1750 the land had been swallowed up through the enclosures acts into the hands of a few thousand landowners. They leased their land to tens of thousands of tenant farmers, who operated it with the labour of some hundreds of thousands of farm labourers who were nearly always hired. Also much of the work of the small industries, such as cloth, hosiery, and metal goods, was sent out to rural workers, turning the peasant into a cash earner. Villages now became full of knitters and weavers working in their single cottage room. Deprived of the ability to grow vegetables or keep hens, and in fact having no time for either, the cottage artisan worked long hours and lived on a diet that was little better than his cousin in the industrial town.
What the change had wrought was to erase the English rural cuisine; there were now no ingredients for the soup or pottage flavoured with wild greens, thickened with dried peas or beans and if they were lucky a bacon hock bone to give added lustre and flavour. Eliza Acton, who was born in 1799, must have been aware of this, for she notices that the making of soup seems to have entirely disappeared: ‘The art of preparing good, wholesome, palatable soups, without great expense, which is so well understood in France, and in other countries where they form part of the daily food of all classes of the people, has hitherto been very much neglected in England.’ And she further adds a note: ‘The inability of servants to prepare delicately and well even a little broth suited to an invalid, is often painfully evident in cases of illness, not only in common English life, but where the cookery is supposed to be of a superior order.’ The servants, of course, came from that very class that had no ingredients or heating to boil such a soup; they had gone into service in order to survive. A hundred years before Eliza Acton, Mrs Glasse had given over twenty recipes for soups, and Mrs Raffald had started her book with a chapter upon them. In The Cook’s Oracle (1817) Dr Kitchiner includes a chapter on broths and soups, but complains that the English soup has an excess of spice and not enough roots. For the affluent at least soup was surely still one of the dishes amongst the first course at dinner, but if we are to believe Eliza Acton (and no one is a more honest observer than she) soup was hardly eaten in the first half of the century, although it is listed in all the cookery books. Although it appeared on menus soup as a separate course altogether at formal dinner parties did not appear until the 1850s. We shall return to these cookery books later.
What the farm labourers’ hard-earned wages (and in the first three decades of the 1800s they were paid between 3s and 4s a week, when a 4 lb loaf cost 1s 2d and a pound of butter cost 9d) bought was tea, sugar, white bread and potatoes. Sir Frederick Eden comments in 1797: ‘No vegetable is, or ever was, applied to such a variety of uses in the North of England as the potatoe; it is a constant standing dish, at every meal, breakfast excepted.’4 But often they did not even have the means to cook the potatoes. Arthur Young, who wrote a series of forty-eight Annals of Agriculture between 1784 and 1809, commented in 1795, that: ‘Our cottagers are without bedding, without fuel, unless stolen, and in many places inhabiting buildings, or rather ruins, which keep out neither wind nor rain … the whole is a disgrace to Christianity.’ He goes on further: ‘The common lands should be served out to them and they would save themselves with potatoes and a cow … a man with 10 children should have 4 and a half acres.’5
In his journeys on horseback in the 1820s around the counties near to London, Cobbett grows passionately indignant as to the plight of the rural labourer:
I saw in one single farmyard here more food than enough for four times the inhabitants of the parish; and this yard did not contain a tenth, perhaps, of the produce of the parish; but, while the poor creatures that raise the wheat and the barley and cheese and the mutton and the beef are living upon potatoes, an accursed Canal comes kindly through the parish to convey away the wheat and all the good food to the tax eaters and their attendants in the Wen.6
He comments later that the more he sees good corn country, the more miserable and poverty-stricken are the labourers.
The cause is this, the great, the big bull frog grasps all. In this beautiful island, every inch of land is appropriated by the rich.
Near Leicester he is horrified at the miserable sheds of the labourers beside the beautiful churches and impressive vicarages.
Look at these hovels, made of mud and straw; bits of glass, or of old cast off windows, without frames or hinges frequently, but merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them and look at the bits of chairs and stools; the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table; the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare ground …
As late as the 1830s over ninety per cent of the food consumed in Britain was grown in these islands. British farmers had to feed a rapidly expanding population. Before the Agricultural Revolution farmworkers were hired annually at the great hiring fairs; they lived in and ate at the farmer’s table, so most of their income was in kind. Now the men were hired weekly, daily or by the job required and paid a miserable cash wage. The growing wealth of the tenant farmers themselves gave them socially mobile aspirations, which made them into remote and unfeeling masters; old familial bonds between employer and workman had been broken. Productivity rose, however, because more and more land was under the plough. In 1844 a Suffolk clergyman wrote of his villagers:
They have no village green or common for active sports. Some thirty years ago, I am told, they had a right to a playground in a particular field, at certain seasons of the year, and were then celebrated for their football; but somehow or other this right has been lost and the field is now under the plough …7
The landed interests were paramount; the workforce could be exploited with the connivance of Parliament, until the Corn Laws were abolished in 1846. The game laws had now become of horrific severity; desperately hungry villagers were driven to poach, but landlords, parsons and farmers continued to erect barriers against trespass of private property. Gamekeepers patrolled the woods with firearms and the poachers, once caught, were either hanged or transported.
Success in business and sudden wealth were an open sesame to the ranks of the gentry, and a gentleman had a country house with a large estate and hundreds of acres of farmland; eventually he also had a seat in Parliament, perhaps a knighthood or peerage, while his wife became a lady instructed by dozens of etiquette books on how to behave in polite society, how to manage servants, and how to choose a menu for every occasion. Manners ruled this aggressively upwardly mobile society and manners began to exert rigid limitations upon the food eaten.
A New Town
As early as the 1770s Thomas Percival, a doctor and founder of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, had estimated the population of Manchester to be over 29,000, making it one of the more crowded of urban settlements. The food needs of such a sudden congregation of this number required new supplies and distribution dependent on the resources of its near neighbours, the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. A traveller in Lancashire in 1800 thought the agriculture was much neglected, while another observer of Cheshire thought that agricultural improvements had made but slow progress. It was thought by them that though farmers and their families worked hard in both counties they received scant return for their labours.
Early in the century, very little of the meat was produced locally, except for veal and pork; all the cattle were driven from a distance. Meat was a by-product of dairy farming, farmers sold their calves to butchers either soon after birth or after a few months’ fattening and when the milk yield of cows fell they were slaughtered. Pigs were kept in the towns, sometimes in the houses themselves. Irish immigrants were blamed for this, but there is plenty of evidence from court records of pigs running wild in the streets so the practice was common before the major wave of Irish immigration.
Butchers sometimes kept herds of pigs next to their premises, but as more and more sanitary regulations crept in it became more difficult. In 1866 the Salford authorities complained of ‘a passion or infatuation amongst many of the working classes for pig breeding and pig fattening’, but ten years later they were managing to clear away the pigs without too much resistance. Sheep from the Welsh borders were brought into Cheshire and were fattened for sale to Manchester, and local farmers, seeing the profit, began also to graze flocks of sheep and to keep more pigs. The sheep that grazed on the high eastern Lancashire hills, and were considered half starved were now brought down into the valleys to be fattened. Farmers much further afield in Northumberland, Durham and Westmorland now felt it worthwhile to fatten their livestock for sale in the Midlands, though Manchester turned towards the Yorkshire grazing area of the Craven which had bred longhorn cattle.
With the advent of steam traffic across the Irish sea livestock could be sent from Dublin to Liverpool; a voyage of seven days was reduced to fourteen hours. These cattle and sheep had been fattened up in Ireland and were now ready to be slaughtered by the Liverpool butchers. By the late 1820s it was expected that the new railways would carry livestock; cattle and sheep wagons were built and a cattle station developed at Broad Green, Liverpool. However, railways met competition from the canals which had all been built in the previous century, and by the mid 1830s the number of pigs that travelled to Manchester from Liverpool was evenly divided between rail and water. Even by the 1850s about half of the cattle still travelled by road. The railways were more successful on long journeys from Scotland and the north, and by the 1860s more cattle were being eaten in Manchester from these regions than Ireland. Cumber-land and Westmorland also supplied bacon and ham. The lower paid workers, if they ate meat at all, bought the cheaper cuts of bacon or salted and pickled pork.
As we have seen, Lancashire had cultivated potatoes from the middle of the seventeenth century. Now they had a hungry market in Manchester and supplies of early potatoes, as well as main crop, were sent from the Wirral and Ormskirk to Liverpool and Manchester. They were producing a prodigious amount, something like 6,000-8,500 tons per year; some were exported to Ireland, however, and surplus was fed to livestock. Market gardens around Warrington and Altrincham had sprung up from the 1780s, producing cabbages, peas, beans, carrots, turnips and onions with a very small amount of cucumbers and asparagus. From the 1820s the wholesale price of potatoes, carrots, onions and turnips was reported in the local newspapers and until 1846 the price was low and unchanged; the potato blight which struck then made prices rocket, but from 1850 the price fell again. From the 1850s onwards, the railways brought in supplies of peas from Evesham, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, and apples from Worcestershire and Kent; the affluent in Manchester, a growing number with industry booming, now also bought supplies of delicacies from America.
In the latter part of the 1700s experiments had taken place on how to get supplies of fish inland: live cod in seawater tanks came by barge down the canals, carriages with ventilated boxes suspended to reduce jolting were also tried, but both methods proved too expensive. In the nineteenth century, weekly supplies began to arrive from Scarborough; cod, haddock and lobsters took two days to travel. As early as 1831 there is a record of oysters sent by rail from Liverpool, but rail transport for fish failed to catch on to any great extent until the 1840s when fish prices were stabilised on the east coast and the price of cod fell from 6d to 2d per pound. The amount of fish carried by rail then rose from 31/2 tons to 80 tons a week. By the 1850s Hull and Grimsby were supplying fish to Manchester, and later both Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Nevertheless the difficulties of keeping fish fresh loomed large: ten fishmongers were fined in October 1844 for selling ‘diseased’ herrings and another two were charged the next year in respect of fifty unwholesome salmon. That the authorities were watchful and prosecuted the fishmongers goes some way to explain the fact that the cases declined after the 1870s.
In Liverpool there were 500-600 cows in town dairies, but none at all in Manchester. The activities of various sanitary inspectors in the period 1780-1880 show the overall unimportance of town milk. Among countless reports of insanitary slaughterhouses and piggeries, dairies were hardly ever mentioned.8 Manchester, like many of the new towns, was supplied by the surrounding countryside; a ten-mile radius was thought the safe limit, for more than this and the milk was bound to arrive sour.
By 1825 these growing industrial towns were being supplied by canal, a smoother journey than by road which shook the milk about, and it arrived in the centre of Manchester twice a day. The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal had a special milk boat and now many dairies outside the towns switched from cheese and butter production to the supply of raw milk. The Bridgewater canal also had a special milk boat, which travelled along the Cheshire branch. Hundreds of milk cans were commonly to be seen stacked on the wharves in Manchester.
In 1844 the Manchester and Birmingham Railway started bringing milk to Manchester from farmers close to the Manchester-Crewe part of the line. By 1846 the traffic amounted to 100-150 milk cans a day. As the capacity of the cans varied from 9-18 gallons it is impossible to estimate how much milk was produced and drunk, but it was thought no more than a weekly consumption of 1.4 pints. By 1869 most of Manchester’s milk supply was coming by rail.
By 1855, the early milk trains had also made their appearance in London. Adulteration was a great problem. In the 1850s milk was bought wholesale at 3d a quart and retailed at 4d, but the addition of only ten per cent of water increased the profit by forty per cent. It was estimated that seventy-four per cent of milk was adulterated with water, in a ratio of anything from ten to fifty per cent water to milk. The 1863 report claimed milk had been diluted by the addition of four to six times its volume.9 It was pointed out that the food value was thereby much reduced.
By 1855 both dried milk powder and condensed sweetened milk had come on to the market; the first was too expensive for the working classes, but condensed milk quickly became a big success. With all the fat skimmed off, it was, however, nutritionally deficient in both vitamins A and D, so rickets became common among working class children. As flies were attracted to the open tins containing this sticky liquid, it also played a part in the gastritis and enteritis which killed one-third of infants before 1914.10 Raw milk was a perfect carrier of infection, especially bovine tubercle bacillus. Between the years 1896 and 1907, a tenth of Manchester and Salford’s milk supply was found to be contaminated with the bacillus.11 Milk can also carry scarlet fever, and incidence of this infection was as high in the rural districts of Manchester as in the central poorer regions.
In 1845 Engels inveighed against the deceit practised ‘in the sale of all articles offered to workers’, instancing potatoes which were shrivelled and bad, stale cheese, rancid bacon and meat which was old, tough and partially tainted. He criticised small shopkeepers of generally using false weights and measures. Adulteration of food reached its height after 1850 when public concern began to mount leading to the acts of 1872 and 1875, which are thought to have been conducive to some improvement; certainly they form the basis of the present laws relating to food safety.
At times of poverty, as in the cotton famines of the 1860s, overall consumption of food fell, mostly in meat and potatoes, though bread consumption also fell; the sugar intake decreased least of all, suggesting that people were surviving on sweetened tea, bread and treacle. More oats were eaten as porridge, the only ingredient that was cooked, possibly overnight in the embers of a fire.
A Manchester clergyman wrote: ‘There is not a town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed.’ An American, Colman, was far more depressing in 1845 when he wrote of the Manchester poor: ‘wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society. Every day that I live I thank Heaven that I am not a poor man with a family in England.’12
Servants and Cooks
As the new booming industries produced more affluence in the middle classes so domestic servants grew in number, for the safest way of distinguishing oneself from the working class was to employ them. Their number increased substantially in the second half of the century, growing from 900,000 in 1851 to 1,400,000 in 1871; there were then 90,000 cooks, slightly more than this number of housemaids, and 16,000 private coachmen. From 1870 among the upper and middle classes, the birthrate began to fall when birth control methods were discovered; given a choice between a higher living standard or more children the married couple chose the lifestyle, so with smaller households servant numbers began to decline.
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century the fate of British cooking was essentially in the hands of a burgeoning bourgeoisie and its kitchen staff. How intelligent, skilled and knowledgeable the cook was, and how trained and experienced, was of course, checked out by the mistress who would judge her suitability. But mistresses like putative cooks come in all shades of accomplishment and all too often the cooking of many a middle-class household must have been a hit and miss affair. That great bond of familial loving care between a mother and her brood which was at the centre of cooked meals was now broken; the intimacy that lies at the heart of so many created dishes was shattered. Where it might still have existed in working-class families, the mother would be only too thankful to have scraps to feed her young, and these far too often were uncooked.
Cooks, however, were now almost certainly to be literate and there were plenty of publications to give her advice of the most detailed kind. Dr Kitchiner, whose 1817 book The Cook’s Oracle went through many editions until 1840, gives over a chapter to advice for the cook and other servants. He begins by suggesting that immediately the cook arrives she should get into ‘good graces’ of the other servants, especially those that waited on table; she should not listen to gossip, requesting an early interview with the master and mistress and trusting in her own judgement. If she was a good cook she would soon become a favourite domestic, which would excite envy, hatred and malice in her fellow servants. He advises her to be an agreeable companion in the kitchen without compromising her duty to her patrons in the parlour. She should ask her employers these questions:
Do they like their roasts of a gold colour, or well browned and if they like them frothed?13 Do they like Soups and Sauces thick or thin, or white or brown, clean or full in the mouth? What Accompaniments are they partial to? What flavours they fancy, especially of Spice and Herbs? … Be extremely cautious of Seasoning High – leave it to the Eaters to add the piquante condiments, according to their own palate and fancy … Enter into all their plans of Economy … many things may be readdressed in a different form from that in which they were first served.
He then gives examples of cold leftovers reheated which are less than stimulating, but I will return later to the Victorian preoccupation with using up food remains.
Two factors in the advice above would generate a decline in cooking; a willingness to connive and abet the master’s economy drives in the kitchen could easily succeed in too many mediocre dishes and in addition it would encourage a tendency towards blandness through a fear of pungent herbs, especially garlic, upon the breath; this was a cardinal social sin which would have been sufficient cause to be ousted from society forever. There was a third reason against which Kitchiner also warns. The structure of a middle-class home did not help the serving of meals. Kitchiner writes: ‘Long before dinner is announced all becomes lukewarm; and to complete the mortification of the grand Gourmand, his meat is put on a sheet of ice in the shape of a Plate, which instantly converts the gravy into jelly and the fat into something which puzzles his teeth and the roof of his mouth as much as if he had Birdlime to masticate.’14 He advises a complete meat screen with a hot closet and plate-warmer; this was like a Dutch oven but on wheels, about 31/2 ft wide by l ft deep.
But that was only one problem. Kitchiner complains of ‘modern-built town houses’ which have no proper place to preserve provisions, except a hanging safe; if you feared meat would not keep, then it should be par-roasted or par-boiled. As to the cooking range, he warns against ‘deleterious vapours and pestilential exhalations of the charcoal … the glare of a scorching fire and the smoke so baneful to the eyes and complexion’. He ends by summing up: ‘Besides understanding the management of the Spit, the Stewpan, and the Rolling Pin, a Complete Cook must know how to go to Market, write legibly, and keep Accounts accurately.’
When Mrs Beeton was writing (1859-61), the cook was paid £20- £40 a year, which included an extra allowance for tea, sugar and beer; if no extra allowance was made, she was paid £14-£30. Mrs Beeton thought it essential that the cook rise very early in the morning ‘for an hour lost in the morning will keep her toiling, absolutely toiling, all day’. Her first duty was to set her dough for the breakfast rolls if that had not been done the previous night. She lit the fire and boiled the kettle, went to the breakfast room and made things ready, she cleaned the kitchen, pantry, passages and kitchen stairs all before breakfast. Though Mrs Beeton lists all this under the duties of the cook it is her charges, the scullerymaids, who do the work. After breakfast the cook gave directions and made preparations for the different dinners of the household and family. The cook answers the back door in the morning, as it is the tradesmen who call.
Her main duty of the day is in the preparation and cooking of the dinner; she must take upon herself all the dressing and preparation of the principal dishes; while these are cooking, she must be busy with her pastry, soups, gravies, ragouts etc. Stock must be at hand with sweet herbs and spices for seasoning. Vegetables and sauces must be ready, while dishes must stand for some time covered on the hot plate or in the hot closet until the order to serve is given from the drawing room. ‘Then comes haste, but there must be no hurry.’ The cook takes charge of the fish, soups and poultry, the kitchenmaid of the vegetables, sauces and gravies. These are now all put into the appropriate serving dishes. Everything has to be timed to prevent it getting cold. Great care has to be taken that between the first course and the second no more time is allowed to elapse than is necessary. When the dinner is over the cook has to look to her larder to preserve the leftovers ‘to keep everything sweet and clean’.
Mrs Beeton considers that ‘Modern cookery stands so greatly indebted to the gastronomic propensities of our French neighbours, that many of the terms are adopted and applied by English artists to the same as well as similar preparations of their own.’15 There is no rage, as in Mrs Glasse, at French culinary fashions, in fact we gather that according to Mrs Beeton British cooking has absorbed what it wants and adapted it in a seamless marriage. The Napoleonic Wars finished almost fifty years earlier, and even though Cobbett, writing in the 1820s about defending the country against French Jacobins, elsewhere showed an active hatred of Catholics, time has moved on and there is not an iota of such feelings in Mrs Beeton. She goes on to explain fifty-five different French terms from aspic to vol-au-vent. (Miss Acton explains thirty-five French terms in her book, while Dr Kitchiner uses a few but explains nothing.) On garlic Mrs Beeton comments:
The smell of this plant is generally considered offensive, and it is the most acrimonious in its taste of the whole of the alliaceous tribe… . On the continent, especially in Italy, it is much used, and the French consider it an essential in many made dishes.
Kitchiner makes a garlic vinegar from 2 oz of chopped garlic with a quart of vinegar, but observes: ‘The Cook must be careful not to use too much of this; a few drops of it will give a pint of Gravy a sufficient smack of the Garlic, the flavour of which, when slight and well blended, is one of the finest we have – when used in excess it is the most offensive.’ Then to be on the safe side he adds: ‘The best way to use Garlic is to send up some of this Vinegar in a Cruet, and let the Company flavour their own Sauce as they like.’ Miss Acton gives a recipe for a Mild Ragout of Garlic or L’ail à la Bordelaise where the garlic is boiled in water, but the water is changed three times in the 15 to 25 minutes of cooking. She says: ‘By changing the water in which it is boiled, the root will be deprived of its naturally pungent flavour and smell and rendered extremely mild.’ We know that such a change of water is unnecessary, that garlic becomes mild in flavour when cooked. This fragment of cooking lore was not known to Miss Acton, who is nearly always as thorough and pernickety as her great admirer Elizabeth David. I would suggest that this was because Miss Acton showed a nervousness about the use of garlic, which is shared by the other cookery writers mentioned above, and that therefore she had not cooked it often enough. This recipe and one for garlic vinegar are the only ones in the book.
Servants slept in the attics and ate and lived almost exclusively in the basements; they moved around the house silently and if possible invisibly, using tradesmen’s entrances and back stairs. From the 1810s cooking was done on the closed range which had an oven, boiler, hot plate and hot closets which could bake, boil, roast, steam, stew and heat flat irons, and provided ten gallons of boiling water. It was made of cast iron; Count Rumford had already pointed out that this absorbed the heat and radiated it out into the room and that ovens were better made out of brick. Cast iron was the material of the age. It used up a great amount of coal and had to be cleaned every morning early before being lit; this labour depended on a willing workforce, so only the comfortably off in their large suburban villas installed them. The closed range had its ashes and cinders raked, its flue cleaned, its grease removed, the steels polished with bathbrick and paraffin, the iron parts blackleaded and polished and finally its hearth washed and polished.16 How this monster must have been cursed by succeeding teenage girls on their hands and knees early in the morning.
In the rows of substantial new villas being built throughout the century around the new towns and cities, consuming the green fields which the sheep and cattle had so recently grazed on, kitchens were located in the basements above the cellars next to coal holes with pantries and washrooms grouped around the tradesmen’s entrance. Stairs led up to the ground floor with a corridor towards the dining room; trays laden with dishes were heavy, and serving a meal was laborious work; keeping it hot was always a knotty problem. Corridors were not well lit, gaslights gave only a dim glow and gas mantles needed constant attention if they were to remain bright. Later in the century a hatch worked with weights and pulleys was built into the kitchen and the dining room located above it, which simplified the ritual of serving. In larger houses the kitchens might be located in another wing of the house and dishes would have to travel longer distances, only to be placed in another warming oven nearer the dining room, waiting to be served. At Chatsworth it took the butler six minutes to walk from the kitchen to the dining room. Such systems could never produce good food.
Jane Austen and the Brontes
We may obtain a glimpse of the food that people ate in the first half of the century if we examine Martha Lloyd’s Household Recipe Book.17 She was a friend of Jane Austen’s who came to live and cook for them, and eventually, eleven years after Jane’s death, married her brother, Admiral Sir Frances Austen. A couple of decades later the novels of the Bronte sisters give us details of the type of food they ate. Both homes were parsonages, so they are variations on a theme that we have already examined in the Norfolk home of Parson Woodforde. The Reverend George Austen’s stipend was £600 a year to care for his two small livings, Steventon and Deane, a mile apart, in Hampshire. On this he supported a wife and eight children. Mrs Austen was industrious, however, and was often seen even when quite elderly hoeing her vegetable patch; she also kept a poultry yard where she reared chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, guinea fowl and bantams. She taught her maids how to make butter and cheese, bake bread, brew beer, cure bacon and hams and make all kinds of preserves, pickles and home-made wines. There was nothing unusual in this; on their limited income the Austens were counted as lesser gentry, most of whom would have attempted selfsufficiency. What was bought in, of course, was the ubiquitous tea, sugar and some citrus fruit. In the garden they planted (for George Austen worked in the garden too) fruit trees and a strawberry walk.
At Chawton Cottage near Alton where they lived from 1809 until Jane died in 1817 they had an enclosed garden and some fields where they kept five Alderney cows, pigs and some sheep as well as being able to grow wheat. Jane took an interest in food from a child, after a nursery meal with two nieces she wrote: ‘Caroline, Anna and I have just been devouring cold souse and it would be difficult to say who enjoyed it most.’ Souse was a medieval dish which became Elizabethan Christmas fare: ‘brawn, pudding and souse and good mustard withal’. It was pickled pork made in the winter; the hind parts, ears, cheek, snout and trotters were soaked in brine with ale or verjuice or wine added, and they were then made into a brawn. It was a way of using every scrap of the pig left over from the butchering of the carcass.
As George Austen kept a coach they travelled and visited grand relations; after stopping once in Devizes Jane wrote to her sister, Cassandra, that the dinner was good: ‘Amongst other things we had asparagus and a lobster, which made me wish for you.’ On visits to her rich relations Jane gathered recipe ideas and took them back home to try. ‘I am very fond of experimental housekeeping,’ she wrote in 1798, ‘such as having an ox cheek now and then … I mean to have some little dumplings put into it …’ Jane’s favourite brother, Henry, kept a French cook, and she was fond of M. Halavant’s cooking. After sending her brother one of their turkeys, she wrote to Cassandra: ‘Pray note down how many full courses of exquisite dishes M. Halavant converts it into.’ At the height of the Napoleonic Wars M. Halavant’s post might seem surprising, but the Prince Regent led the way, as his own cook was Carême.
At Chawton Jane ordered China tea from Twinings, but warned Cassandra that her brother liked coffee with his breakfast, which was taken late, about 10 a.m. Staying at Stoneleigh Abbey in 1806, Mrs Austen wrote: ‘At nine we meet to say prayers in the Chapel. Then follows breakfast, consisting of Chocolate, Coffee, and Tea, Plumb Cake, Pound Cake, Hot Rolls, Cold Rolls, Bread and Butter and dry Toast for me.’ The hour they dined grew later over the years: in 1798 they sit down to dinner at half past three; in 1805 they dine at four, occasionally at five; by 1808 ‘we never dine now before five’; in fashionable households dinner was now at 6.30. As the gap between breakfast and dinner widened people began to feel pangs of hunger and cold meats, pickles, cakes and jellies were laid out on the sideboard; there was also a growing fondness for picnics, which later in the century would become an enthusiastic passion. Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility was ‘a blessing to all the juvenile part of the neighbourhood, for in summer he was for ever forming parties to eat cold ham and chicken out of doors’.
When Jane’s rich uncle, James Leigh Perrot, was in London on one occasion for consultation with Dr Budd, he dined at Hachetts. ‘Our dinner was Mackerel at top, chicken on one side and beans and bacon the other; Peach and Cherry tart succeeded.’ No doubt he made an excellent breakfast the next morning, but hunger struck him and he took giblet soup, giving this snack a name; he refers to it as ‘luncheon’. The words ‘nuncheon’ and ‘nunch’ occur as early as the fourteenth century. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) gives ‘nunchin’ as ‘a piece of victuals eaten between meals’, but defines lunch and luncheon ‘as much food as one’s hand can hold’.18 In a French-English dictionary of 1580, the French lopin is translated as ‘a lumpe, a gobbet, a luncheon’.19 From then on food in a great lump was referred to as luncheon. Jane uses the word earlier in a letter (1808) where she spells it ‘noonshine’. Perhaps far more apt than the correct spelling. Her word is a mixture of two in use at the time, ‘noonings’ and ‘nuncheon’. Mrs Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806) stated: ‘When noonings or suppers are served (and in every house some preparation is necessary for accidental visitors) care should be taken to have such things in readiness as are proper for either.’ In 1811 Jane uses ‘luncheon’ in Sense and Sensibility and later, in 1813 when Pride and Prejudice was published, Lydia and Kitty Bennet buy salad and cucumber and add ‘such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords’ so as to make ‘the nicest cold luncheon in the world’. The word is now in full use.
As we have seen with Parson Woodforde, a dinner invitation from friends or neighbours was extended to include supper with the interval in between filled with card playing or musical entertainments. Jane described a ‘delightful evening’ spent with her young niece Anna with neighbours in Chawton: ‘Syllabub, Tea, Coffee, Singing, Dancing and a Hot Supper at eleven o’clock’. Tea was also beginning to be served now in the interval between dinner and supper.
Martha Lloyd does not bother to write down in her book instructions for the roasting and boiling of joints and birds; these pages are reminders of favourite methods and recipes which she and the Austen family enjoyed. She begins with a collection of soups. Jane wrote that she was not ashamed to ask their doctor, a Mr Lyford, to sit down to dinner when he called unexpectedly, as they were just about to eat pease-soup, a spare rib and a pudding. Here, when the family were alone, one sees how modest the table was. Soup gets mentioned often in Jane’s novels, for it was always served at balls and dances; a large tureen of hot soup fortified with wine, spice and lemon, warmed the guests as they arrived from a journey in an unheated coach. This, of course, contradicts Miss Acton, though not her statement that a soup was unable to be made by the very poor.
Martha’s pease soup was flavoured with celery, onion, pepper, salt, mint, parsley and spinach. Just a small handful, she says; I suspect it was to give colour. The most interesting addition was two anchovies and half a spoonful of sugar. But there could be no doubt that the ‘pease’ would override the other flavours as she uses two quarts and does not specify the amount of water. This, I estimate, would make enough soup for about twelve people and still have some left over. Other soup recipes include a Veal Soup from a Mrs Hartly, which is made from a knuckle of veal and a ham bone with a head of celery and sweet herbs; it is stewed for four hours, skimmed then left to cool, the fat taken off, strained and finally thickened with cream, white breadcrumbs and a little flour. A white soup was made from a gravy from any kind of meat, thickened with pounded egg yolks, sweet almonds and ‘as much cream as will make it a good colour’. A Swiss Soup Meagre is a Soup Maigre, meaning a vegetable soup without meat, which appears in all the recipe books, as it was eaten regularly in France as a dish for fast days. In Britain it seems to have been eaten because we liked it. Martha’s recipe uses cabbage, lettuces, endive, sorrel, spinach, chervil, onions, parsley, beet leaves, cucumber, peas and asparagus which gives us a picture of what was growing in the garden outside the kitchen door. All these vegetables are cut up fine and stewed in a quarter of a pound of butter with a small teaspoonful of flour; then boiling water is poured over and the soup is stewed further; then the yolks of three eggs are added in a teacup of cream and the juice from some Seville oranges. This seems to me an excellent recipe. The flour, as in Martha’s other recipes, is such a small amount, for she thickens with egg yolks and cream and the addition of the Seville oranges would lighten and be stimulating in the final flavour.
There are several sauces to have with fish, the simplest being two anchovies simmered in a little water with horseradish, elder vinegar, white wine, and a little mushroom ketchup thickened with a little butter and flour. Another begins with a pint of port, a quarter of a pint of vinegar, pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg, onion, bay leaves, thyme, parsley, bits of radish and anchovies; it is boiled until the anchovies dissolve, then it is bottled, stored and used to flavour melted butter. A sauce to have with sea fish is made from pounded crawfish or lobster shells, mixed with gravy, cinnamon, and crusty bread all stewed together until it is strong; then it is strained and mixed with butter and anchovy. The most interesting sauce comes from Captain Austen who eventually was to marry the cook, and who is obviously not afraid of strong flavours: he uses two heads of garlic, cutting each clove in half with an ounce of cayenne, two spoonfuls of Indian soy, and two ounces of walnut ketchup or pickle, placed in a quart bottle and filled with vinegar. ‘Cork it close and shake it well. It is fit for use in a month and will keep good for a year.’
There are recipes for hogs’ puddings, scotch collops, how to hash a calf ’s head, to make pigeon pies, sausages, little patties and rissoles, a ‘receipt to make curry after the India manner’, vegetable recipes, and how to make macaroni and toasted cheese. There are recipes for rice pudding and ‘Blanch Mange’ which is ground almonds, cream, sugar and isinglass – so here is mawmenny again. There is a recipe for a trifle using sponge fingers or ‘Naples biscuits’, which is identical to the sixteenth-century one for ‘foole’ and one for ‘Bread Pudding’ which is bread, suet and dried fruit mixed with four eggs and boiled for four hours. There is a New College Pudding, Orange Pudding, a Baked Apple Pudding and Lemon Mince Pies, all of them excellent recipes that we would enjoy today.
What is interesting is how the remnants of medieval ideas and ingredients linger on, yet how contemporary Martha’s recipes also are. The food the Austen family ate was squarely based on the freshest of produce; it was well flavoured with fresh herbs, and at times intensely flavoured with spices and home-made sauces. Here, in the first decade of the century, there was no fear or nervousness of pungency in the cooking; it was gutsy and relaxed. We are still within the age of the glories of the country estate and the meals the Austens enjoyed must have been the most delicious and certainly inherently British of any age. If we want to see what the best of British cooking is then I think much of it is contained in this slim book.
The food the Brontes ate was rather different, but they lived much farther north and had less money than the Austens. They started the day according to their servant, Sarah Garrs, with ‘a plain but abundant breakfast of porridge, milk, bread and butter’. They dined at 2 p.m. on ‘Plain roast or boiled meat and for dessert … bread and rice puddings, custards and other slightly sweetened preparations of eggs and milk’. The last meal of the day was tea which they ate in the kitchen.20 Other details about their diet can be gleaned from the novels; every type of meal is mentioned in them as well as Christmas, wedding feasts and picnics. Different characters choose a different time of meal for dinner to show their class status. Mrs Reed, for example, the housekeeeper in Jane Eyre, likes to eat dinner early at midday if there is no company, while Mr Lockwood in Wuthering Heights asks for dinner at 5 p.m., but Nelly, one of the most strongly individual women in fiction, insists on serving it at the latest at one o’clock. So much for social pretension. Mr Lockwood is the only one to drink coffee except for Charlotte’s Belgian characters; all the others drink tea. Tea as a meal is popular among the farming families. They hardly ever drink milk, it is for the young and invalids, when it is boiled with sugar.
The aristocratic Isabella has to eat porridge once married to Heathcliff and attempts to take it upstairs away from the servants. The meat and poultry are either mutton or chicken; beef features little. Fish only gets one fleeting mention in the whole Bronte oeuvre: in Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey Mrs Bloomfield lists the major dishes for dinner as ‘Turkey, grouse and fish’. It seems extraordinary, yet considering the lack of decent roads, it is not surprising that little fresh fish arrived in Haworth, which is what one surmises.
This is plain food, far plainer than the meals Jane Austen was delighting in; there is no mention of pigeon pie, a green herb sauce, asparagus, green peas, cheesecake and trifle, which were everyday dishes in Chawton. The dinner table in Haworth seems almost as bleak as the moors surrounding it: roast mutton (Was there ever caper or onion sauce? One somehow doubts it.), with boiled potatoes and cabbage, followed by a custard or boiled suet currant pudding. For breakfast there was porridge, for they are in the north, and bread and butter. Surely they made preserves and pickles? If so, there’s no inkling of it; in the novels, characters who like sweet things appear almost weak in their craving.
Both parsonages are more representative of the eighteenth century in their food habits than the nineteenth. But what in food terms was characteristic of this age?
Breakfast
If the British are known for any culinary achievement it is the great British breakfast and it was in this century that it achieved its status. Even in the nineteenth century bacon for breakfast would become almost de rigueur, even for the lower classes, as long as they could afford it. In 1901 a railworker earning 44s per week, with two children and a lodger, ate for his breakfast bacon on every day except Sunday, when he had a sausage, and Thursday, when he ate ham; with this he had bread and butter and tea.
At the beginning of Victoria’s reign the essence of the breakfast, eggs and bacon, with the eggs cooked in a variety of ways, had already become the expected way to start the day. The meal began with porridge or cream of oatmeal (exactly the same dish but with the Scottish connotation omitted), continued with the cooked part, and finished with toast and marmalade; coffee or tea was drunk with it. Both the porridge and the eggs and bacon could be cooked beforehand and left in heated dishes upon the sideboard for the master and mistress to help themselves.
As our immense resources of economic power exalted our position in the world our importance grew in international affairs. Apart from the Crimean War we kept aloof from the great wars of Europe in the years 1854-78 and only involved ourselves in colonial expansion and Far Eastern skirmishes. It was the policy of prestige, which Palmerston pursued, that we need not court the favour of any power in particular; his actions showed that a ‘pax Britannica’ had now replaced the old ‘pax Romana’ and in 1850 in Parliament he made that clear by saying that the strong arm of England would protect any British subject abroad if they suffered injustice and wrong. Our annual export and imports of goods trebled in value between 1850 and 1870. We were considered ‘the workshop of the world’: we produced two-thirds of the world’s coal, perhaps half its iron and five-sevenths of its supply of steel. The British Empire, of which Canada, India and Australia formed the greater part, was booming and immigration from England to these new lands was rising.
As a family became richer the breakfast grew, almost as a reflection of the power and affluence of the British Empire itself. As the map of the world glowed pink, the sideboard in the morning room began to be laden with extra dishes. It already had a choice of cold cuts, comprised of sliced meats, and perhaps even a whole leg of ham or tongue (for the master was fond of cutting his own in chunks); it was a short step to dipping chicken or pheasant legs in mustard and heating them up in the oven. Leftover rice was a boon, for it could be turned into kedgeree (another dish stemming from India) with a few fillets of smoked haddock, a spoonful of curry powder and the Victorian standby which crept into so many dishes, a few hardboiled eggs; mixed and reheated it could be piled up onto a warm silver salver.
When Mrs Beeton’s famous book was first published in 1861, breakfast had hardly got into its stride, but she devotes three small paragraphs to the subject:
Suffice it to say, that any cold meat the larder may furnish, should be nicely garnished, and be placed on the buffet. Collared and potted meats, or fish, cold game or poultry, veal-and-ham pies, game-and-rump-steak pies are all suitable dishes for the breakfast table …
As to hot dishes, Mrs Beeton lists:
broiled fish, such as mackerel, whiting, herrings, dried haddocks, etc; mutton chops and rump steaks, broiled sheep’s kidneys, kidneys à la maître d’hôtel (with butter, parsley and lemon juice), sausages, plain rashers of bacon, bacon and poached eggs, ham and poached eggs, omelets, plain boiled eggs, oeufs-au-plat, poached eggs on toast, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter …
In the summer she advises a bowl of flowers and fresh fruit to be added to the table. The 1888 edition of the book added some vegetarian dishes.
A Breakfast Book of 1865, suggesting a huge number of other dishes which it claims are ‘more or less in daily request for our ordinary breakfasts’, makes Mrs Beeton’s list appear modest. Here, as well as Mrs Beeton’s choice, one may have brawn, pickled pork, curries and devilled bones, fried potatoes, pork chops, veal cutlets, bloaters and anchovies. As well as this, the cook could make up dishes like ham toast, croquettes, hashed game and rissoles (the last three being very useful for getting rid of the leftovers). Then there were savoury puddings, savoury pies, galantines and meat in jelly, but snobbism has set in, for black puddings ‘are not bad in their way, but they are not among the things we would make to set before our friends’.21
Major L., who published Breakfasts, Luncheons, and Ball Suppers in 1887, divides breakfasts into four types: the family breakfast; the déjeuner à la fourchette, where the items were introduced in courses similar to dinner; a cold collation (which must produce an ornamental effect); and the ambigu which is ‘an entertainment of a very heterogeneous character, having the resemblance to a dinner, only that everything is placed upon the table at once; relevés, soup, vegetables, and hot entremets are held to be ineligible. Our everyday breakfasts are in a small way served en ambigu, inasmuch as broiled fish, cold pasties, devilled bones, boiled eggs, cold ham etc. all appear together.’22 Major L. sounds too, too much, but totally characteristic of his age. One is relieved that the term ambigu did not catch on, though it would be a useful term for so many functions today, as Major L. meant an ambiguous medley.
These are breakfasts designed for the weekend house party; Major L. suggests that they should contain a variety of items and he repeats much of what we have heard before: he thinks that sportsmen can eat whatever they like, but he is concerned that ladies should be more abstemious though he admits that ‘they rarely eat meat for breakfast’. By meat he means roasts and cutlets because he then goes on to list what ladies may eat; this includes ham, bacon, chicken, kidneys, roast larks, broiled ducklings and devilled turkey.
Cookery books gave detailed menus for breakfasts for ten or twelve people, seasonal breakfasts throughout the year, breakfasts for every day throughout three months; new ideas spawned a medley of dishes from pickled oysters, shrimps, plovers’ eggs and Russian caviar – tossed. (As the last comes under hot dishes, one fears that it might have been cooked.) Even dishes that involved much cooking, such as blanquette of lamb, a mayonnaise of turbot, a raised pie of pigeons and periwinkle patties, were all seriously suggested. Did people follow these ideas? I suppose ambitious society hostesses might have taken the books to their housekeeper and requested them to tell cook to make periwinkle patties for Sunday breakfast. One hopes the cook had enough sense to say that the periwinkles were unavailable.
Such opulence and conspicuous consumption of luxuries is reminiscent of Renaissance princes, medieval kings and Roman emperors. As their capital grew so did male headgear: top hats became taller, accentuating the height and impressiveness of the male, just as the skirts the women wore grew rounder, larger and more womblike accentuating the breeding fecundity beneath. By the later part of the century, the amount of capital in the hands of the rich appeared almost an embarrassment to them. They were constantly searching for ways to invest the money abroad; gambling money away in South America on shaky investments and being conned in the Far East seemed an integral part of extreme wealth. From 1881-4 Britain invested abroad at the average rate of £29,000,000 per year.
Street Food
The well-established tradition of street food continued into the Victorian era. The range of food offered to the public by itinerant traders in the London streets was a prolific medley, conjuring up the vigorous hybrid society it catered for. In one sense it can be compared with our own contemporary supermarkets where everything is immediately accessible to the hungry shopper. The Victorian, as he strolled the streets, could have eaten or taken back home hot eels, pickled whelks, oysters, sheep’s trotters, pea soup, fried fish, ham sandwiches, hot green peas, kidney puddings, boiled meat puddings, beef, mutton, kidney and eel pies and baked potatoes. For dessert there were tarts of rhubarb, currant, gooseberry, cherry, apple, damson, cranberry and mince pies; plum dough and plum cake; lard currant, almond and many other varieties of cake as well as of tarts; gingerbread-nuts and heart-cakes; and Chelsea buns, muffins and crumpets, street ices and in Greenwich Park strawberry cream could be purchased at 1d a glass.23
To drink there was tea, coffee and cocoa, lemonade, Persian sherbet, elder cordial or wine, peppermint water, curds and whey, and rice milk. From the beginning of the century new articles had appeared, such as Brazil nuts, rhubarb, cucumbers, pineapples and ginger beer. The coffee stall superseded the saloop stall.24
In the midst of the century it was estimated that there were 500 traders in pea soup and hot eels, which were often sold together from the same stalls. Near the Bricklayers Arms at the junction of the Old and New Kent Roads a hot eel man sold what a customer described ‘as spicy as any in London, as if there was gin in it’. The price of eels was a half penny for five or seven pieces and three parts of a cupful of liquor; the charge for a half pint of pea soup was a halfpenny. The most successful trader was one in Clare Market, who on one Saturday sold 100 lb of eels, but on an average Saturday he sold 80 lb.
Sheep’s trotters were sold in London, Liverpool, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and some other major cities. It paid the fellman to dispose of his trotters by cooking them to be sold to the poor rather than selling them to the gluemaker, as the price of glue and size had fallen by mid-century. The trotters were scalded for half an hour; small boys then scooped out the hoofs which were sold for manure, or to manufacturers of Prussian blue used by painters. Women were then employed to scrape the hair off without injuring the skin, and the trotters were then boiled for a further four hours.
Baked potatoes were sold from about 1835 onwards throughout the winter months. The cleaned potatoes were taken to the bakers to be cooked in large tins for about an hour and a half. They were then taken from the bakehouse in a basket protected by green baize to keep them warm, and then placed in tins, some of which were highly decorative with brass ornaments; the tins stood on legs with an iron fire pot beneath, and there was also a compartment for butter and salt.
Whelks were brought to London live and boiled for ten minutes. ‘They never kicks as they boils, like lobsters or crabs, they takes it quiet,’ Mayhew reports a whelk dealer saying. They are sold from two to eight a penny depending on their size, and for sale in public houses they were carried around in a jar. ‘People drinking there always want to eat. They buy whelks not to fill themselves, but for a relish.’ They were seasoned with pepper and vinegar.
At the beginning of the century there existed a trotting butcher, who would carry raw meats into the suburbs with a horse and cart; his appearance might be hailed as saving a walk of a mile to a butcher’s shop. As the suburbs merged together shops appeared among them and hawking butchers, unable to afford a horse and cart, made do with meat in a basket carried on their shoulders; the meat was mostly pork and veal, which did not weigh so heavily as beef and mutton; and they were also hawked around the pubs.
In the late 1830s a man who had been unsuccessful in keeping a coffee shop in Westminster hit upon the idea of vending ham sandwiches outside the theatre as the audience left. Ham, loaves and mustard were all that were required and he was immediately successful, making 10s a night, half of which was profit. He was soon joined by others, lads in service, errand boys, potboys, footboys or lads hawking around the inns. Around the theatres, concert rooms and music halls there were about seventy such hawkers of ham sandwiches.
The sellers of hot green peas go back, as we have seen, to the medieval era; the cry of ‘hot peas-cod’ meant that the peas were not shelled but boiled in the pod; they were eaten by being dipped in melted butter with a little pepper, salt and vinegar, and then drawn through the teeth to extract the peas, the pod being thrown away. Pea-sellers carried a round or oval tin pot with a swing handle with a ladle attached; the pan was wrapped around with a thick cloth to retain the heat. Mayhew observed only four of them: three were ladies who were shoemakers in the daytime and pea-sellers in the evening; the other was a man who had been in the trade for twenty-five years.
Another ancient streetseller was the pieman. The meat pies were made from beef or mutton, the fish pies from eels; the fruit from apples, currants, gooseberries, plums, damsons, cherries, raspberries or rhubarb, according to the season – and occasionally from mincemeat. By the 1850s the trade had almost been destroyed by the pieshop. The pieman visited the taverns and cried out, ‘Here’s all ‘ot, toss or buy! Up and win ’em.’ This is the only way the pieman could get rid of the pies; the customer tossed a coin and the pieman called head or tail; if he won, he received 1d and did not give a pie, if he lost the pie is free. Often the customers used the pie to throw at each other, or at the pieman. As one might surmise, the pies were not highly thought of as food.
Rice milk was made by boiling four quarts of skimmed milk with one pound of rice which had already been boiled in water for an hour; the addition of the rice increased the quantity to six quarts. Some sellers sweetened the milk, but others left it to the customer to sweeten it when they purchased. Mayhew noticed that the sellers of curds and whey were not doing very good business; the curds were sold in mugs with a spoon in each, ‘but those that affect a modern style have glasses’.
The street pastries were of a strong flavour, attributable to the use of old or rancid butter, but this taste was enjoyed, especially by the young. Such food sold in the street included meat and fruit pies, boiled meat and kidney puddings, plum duff or pudding, and an almost infinite variety of tarts, cakes, buns and biscuits. Plum dough was a boiled currant pudding, either made in a ball or more frequently a ‘roly-poly’. Duffs were boiled in cotton bags in coppers or large pans and were sold for half a penny each. Thirty years before Mayhew, Yorkshire pudding with raisins had been popular. About thirty Jewish pastry cooks who all lived in Whitechapel made all the pastries; the street vendors, who had other jobs in the daytime, bought from the pastry cooks. They sold coventrys (three-cornered puffs with jam inside), raspberry biscuits, cinnamon biscuits, chonkeys (a kind of mincemeat baked in a crust), Dutch butter cakes, Jews’ butter cakes, bowlas (round tarts made of sugar, apple and bread), jumbles (thin crisp cakes made of treacle, butter and flour); and jams or open tarts with a little preserve in the centre.
Four thousand costers visited Billingsgate fish market on a Friday morning to buy oysters, soles, red-headed gurnets (gurnards) and cod, as well as eels placed on large cabbage leaves to keep them from writhing and falling off. Women held bunches of twigs for stringing herrings; there were blue, black piles of small live lobsters with their bound-up claws and long feelers; there were transparent smelts on ice whelks stood in sackfuls, yellow shells piled up at the top; and turbots were strung up so that their white bellies shone like mother-of-pearl.
The costermongers themselves ate in the streets. They breakfasted at a coffee stall; for 1d they procured a small cup of coffee and two thin slices of bread and butter, for dinner they bought ‘block ornaments’, their name for the small dark-coloured pieces of meat exposed on the cheap butchers’ blocks or containers. Half a pound cost 2d, and they cooked them in a pub taproom. If they were in a hurry they bought a pie or saveloys with a pint of beer or a glass of neat gin called a ‘short’. On Sunday they enjoyed a joint of roasted shoulder or half shoulder of mutton with ‘lots of good taturs baked along with it’.
Fish and Chips
One of the earliest references to fried fish itself is made in Oliver Twist, first published in serial form between 1837 and 1838, where a fried fish warehouse is mentioned. This tallies with Mayhew who in the late 1840s spoke to a fried fishseller who mentioned he had been in the trade for seventeen years. The fried fish was sold with a slice of bread and it was hawked around the London pubs, the cry of the seller being ‘fish and bread, a penny’. This fishseller had been a gentleman’s servant, had married a servant maid, had a family and then neither of them could get a situation. He told Mayhew, ‘I’ve lived in good families, where there was first-rate men-cooks, and I know what good cooking means.’ He made 7s-10s each night (on a good night he sold 120 pieces), and half of that was profit. His wife opened a fried fish stall too, opposite wine vaults, and she made nearly half as much as he did on his rounds. Later in Memoirs of Alexis Soyer (1859) the editors25 described Soyer buying fried fish and eating it as he walked through Soho. Frying fish was a good way of arresting its deterioration; Mayhew talks of fish-frying areas around Bishopsgate, the Inns of the Court and near London Bridge, where Jews often plied the trade.
Chip shops which only fried potatoes also existed; they were associated with slums and poverty, and were often run by widows in their front rooms, with an old boiler filled with rank lard set up on a block of bricks, with a small coal fire underneath. The tiny terraced houses would have stunk of fat, but people were content to buy chips wrapped in newspaper and ate them in the back room or took them home. In the latter part of the century, the greatest density of chip shops was in the industrial districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire between Oldham and Bradford, and it is thought it was in this area that the marriage of the chip with a piece of fried fish occurred. When exactly this was no one seems to know.
A method of preparing chip potatoes is detailed by Dr Kitchiner who suggests that after peeling the potato curls should be shaved off it, and then fried in lard or dripping. In her 1845 Modern Cookery for Private Families Eliza Acton copies the idea and improves it; she calls them potato ribbons, and pares them in long strips; she also cuts potatoes into chip-like lengths and described this as ‘an admirable way of dressing potatoes, very common on the Continent, but less so in England than it deserves to be’. She was right, for the fried potato can be traced back to 1755 to Menon’s Les Soupers de la Cour, while Audot in 1823 gives a recipe for pommes frites that must be bien cassantes, while Carême is very specific about the thickness of the raw potato which must be one twelfth of an inch.26
In 1861 Mrs Beeton gives a recipe for fried potatoes in the French fashion in which the potatoes are peeled and sliced, but it is obvious these are cut into rounds, then fried. Kitchiner’s alternative method was to slice the potato a quarter of an inch thick, but neither method seemed to catch on until much later. Who was the first to have a chip stall is disputed. Some say it was Edward de Gurnier, who in 1865 had a stall with his wife in the Green Market, Dundee, where they sold fried chipped potatoes and boiled peas, a ‘buster’ for a halfpenny a saucerful.27 Two years earlier John Lees had built a hut in Mossley and sold pea soup and pigs’ trotters; on a visit to Oldham he found a man selling chipped potatoes in the ‘French and American style’ which was thought of as à la mode. Lees moved to a shop opposite and copied the style claiming it to be ‘The Oldest Chip Restaurant in the World’.
In the US, the shaving method of chipped potatoes is now called Saratoga chips, in honour of George Crum, the chef at Moon’s Lake House at New York’s fashionable nineteenth-century spa, Saratoga Springs. It is said that in 1853 George Crum, impatient because a customer had sent back his French fries complaining that they were too thick, cut the potato as thinly as he could in a spirit of irony. As it caught on and spread throughout the country, a machine was invented to make these parings. At least this story points to the fact that chips were known and loved in America before 1853 and that they originally came from France. In fact, the story goes that French fries were brought back by Jefferson in the mid 1780s, and there is a note with corrections in his hand that points to it.28 Further, the ribbon technique is given in a recipe in The Virginia Housewife (1824) by Mary Randolph which went through 19 editions throughout the century. Ude gives a recipe for fried potatoes in 1813, but there they were cut when raw in rounds as thick as two-penny pieces; this is the style that Mrs Beeton followed.
Frying ranges began to appear in Britain in the mid 1860s; there was even a version of a frier on a handcart which had a tall chimney. The earliest ranges were made of cast iron and heated by coal; tinsmiths fashioned the pans to hold the fat. Faulkner & Company of Oldham began manufacturing ranges between 1870 and 1875, by which time the fried fish shop was a booming business. At the same time deep-sea trawlers were coming into greater use, bringing abundant supplies of cheap Icelandic cod into the northern fishing ports. Yorkshire friers found that haddock was the most popular while Lancashire preferred hake though both were enthusiastic about cod. By 1914 fish and chip shops were selling 800,000 fish suppers every week.
They had become a central part of the working class diet. Cheap and convenient, and wrapped in newspaper, they were easy food to be eaten in a relaxed way outside on the street or taken back home and shared out, sometimes reheated in the oven for a few minutes. Salt and malt vinegar were available at the shop for seasoning, while back home in the latter part of the century the sauce bottle, either HP or tomato ketchup, became an inevitable addition. Some fish and chip shops had austere dining rooms where you could also get bread and marge and a hot cup of tea. The fragments of batter were given away free and the very poor could scrounge a cup of soup which was the dregs from the mushy pea saucepan.
The Food of the Poor
By the middle of the nineteenth century urbanisation had deprived millions of people of experiences that had been commonplace for humankind before. A London streetsweeper remarked to Mayhew that, ‘I’ve never tasted honey, but I’ve heard it’s like sugar and butter mixed.’ Others had never seen a wheatfield or realised that it had any connection with bread. The sweeper earned 12s 6d a week; his food cost him 1s a day and beer 6d. On most days he ate boiled salt beef at any taproom; he didn’t care for vegetables except for onions and cabbage, which he ate smoking hot with plenty of pepper. Mayhew observed that working scavengers or nightmen seemed fonder of strong flavoured and saltier food than other working men; they had ‘a great relish for highly salted cold boiled beef, bacon or pork, with a saucer full of red pickled cabbage or dingy looking pickled onions, or one or two strong, raw onions, of which most of them seem as fond as Spaniards of garlic’. This sort of meat, ‘sometimes profusely mustarded, is often eaten in the beer shops with thick shives of bread, cut into big mouthfuls with a clasp pocket knife’.
Another sweeper had bread, butter and coffee for breakfast, for dinner a saveloy with potatoes or cabbage, or a faggot with the same vegetables, or fried fish, or a pudding from a pudding shop or soup from an eating house; then his tea was the same as breakfast. The coster-boys lived off what they could scrounge and beg, but when in work they ‘are fond of good living’, as Mayhew puts it, and would choose a relish at breakfast, a couple of herrings or a bit of bacon. They never dined except on a Sunday when they would have a fourpenny plate of meat at a cookshop. They were very fond of pudding and should a plum duff at an eating house contain an unusual quantity of currants the news soon spread and the boys then endeavoured to work that way so as to obtain a slice.
The coster-girls started to sell when they were about seven, hawking oranges, apples, watercress or violets; they left home at four or five in the morning to go to the markets, they were on the streets until ten at night having nothing in all that time except one meal of bread and butter and coffee. They seldom got meat except on Sunday.
Industrial workers earned only a little more than costers; the London compositors, the highest paid of all artisans, earned £1 17s 6d in 1810. Their bread and flour cost 6s, 14lb of meat cost them 10s 6d for a week for one man, his wife and two children. Skilled workers and factory operatives earned about one pound a week, and after 1825, when potatoes had been accepted as part of the daily diet, they lived off those, and a little meat, bread, tea, sugar and milk.
A Manchester operative in 1832 rose at five in the morning, worked at the mill from six to eight, then returned home for half an hour for breakfast of tea, coffee and a little bread, returning to work until noon; dinner was potatoes with melted lard or butter poured over them and if they were lucky a few pieces of fat bacon. Work then began again at one o’clock, and continued until seven in the evening; before going to bed he ate his last meal of tea and bread.29
This was a subsistence diet which was barely adequate for survival and malnutrition was rife among the working class, which in 1867 over three-quarters of the 24,100,000 inhabitants of Great Britain. This comprised office workers, shop assistants, shopkeepers, foremen and supervisory workers, who were all slightly better paid than the unskilled.
In 1861 Charles Elmé Francatelli wrote and published A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, which contained simple and nutritious recipes like boiled beef, pea soup, bacon and cabbage broth; but he, a pupil of Carême, former chef to Queen Victoria and chef de cuisine at the Reform Club, found it difficult to continue such a theme for a hundred pages. So we find baked suckling pig, baked goose, stewed steak, and baked skate creeping in. But as Francatelli knew, often the poor did not have a fire or stove to cook on and in his introduction he gives a list of necessary equipment and its cost, eleven items which cost £6 12s 4d. – six weeks’ work for the highest paid artisan, almost a fortune.
Agricultural workers earned far less. Farmhands in the 1870s took home 7s 6d a week. The spread of labourers’ allotments, which had been encouraged by national policy since early in the century, was what saved most of these low-paid farming families from starvation. Even so, this meant labouring for long hours in all weathers and on rations that were meagre, especially if there were young children. The mother might glean enough corn to keep the family in flour for much of the year; if the father had a few rows in an allotment for potatoes, he could grow peas and cabbages. Potatoes were eaten for breakfast, dinner and supper, and were often added to the bread dough. In the winter they might eat swedes and parsnips or buy two pennyworth of scrap meat from the butchers. The mother would make potato pies for the men to take with them for the day. If they kept a pig, they sold most of the carcass in return for boots, shoes, clothes and food, but kept back remnants to cure so as to flavour soups throughout the year. They made a ‘mock tea’ from burnt crusts and boiling water, and bread would be soaked in boiling water first before being added to milk for breakfast.30
In towns there was a greater range of cheap foods, so the reliance on the potato was not so pronounced. Forty per cent of the working class lived in abject poverty on a weekly wage of between 18s and 21s. It was calculated in 1899 that a couple and three children living off 21s 8d spent half of that on food which included no meat at all, their rent was 4s and the rest was clothing and fuel.31 In Liverpool, a farthingsworth of milk could be bought, even delivered to the house. But by the end of the century food habits had altered radically, for those families that were not struggling on subsistence began to eat fruit in the form of jam and the imported banana, which supplemented or replaced apples as the only fresh fruit eaten by the urban poor. Also, the neighbourhood shop began to stock a greater variety of food, in competition with the new chain stores which suddenly flowered. In 1880 there were ten chains of butchers, by the end of the century there were 2,000, while from twenty-seven chains of grocers there grew to be 3,444. Shoe shops and menswear shops followed; women’s wear came more slowly, and this sudden boom quietened to a more steady growth in the new century.
The rise of urban society, often clustered around an industrial nucleus, led to another important movement which would alleviate the worst rigours of poverty: the co-operative movement. Its origins are found in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the Woolwich Co-operative Flour Mill (1760), the Hull Co-operative Corn Mill (1797), the Sheerness Baking Society and others, which were all dedicated to the reduction of flour prices and the supply of unadulterated, full weight produce, to people who had only latterly been stripped of the means to grow their own. In 1844 a group of twenty-eight poor weavers from Rochdale opened a small store in Toad Lane. They had been unsuccessful in a strike and sixteen of them were disciples of the philanthropist and socialist, Robert Owen, whose imaginative schemes had been dedicated to a more equitable life for the working man. They called themselves the Pioneers and stored goods, at first food and clothing, in the shop to sell for cash at local retail prices, while any profit they made would be shared out at the end of the year to their customers. They sold flour, oatmeal, butter and sugar, later tea and other groceries and later still, coal and furniture. Their purpose was to improve the moral character of trade rather than to make large profits, but the movement successfully cut out the middle man, reduced the price of necessities and was a form of saving. It became popular and after 1850 scores of societies sprang up in the north and the Midlands. In 1862 fifty co-operative stores in the Manchester region formed the English Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS); by 1873 it boasted 250,000 members and an annual turnover of £2,000,000; by 1876 it possessed a fleet of ships and depots, and agencies and plantations in four continents. By 1890 the CWS had grown to 700,000 members and an annual turnover of about £7,700,000. Though some critics considered the CWS had now become a self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine, a great impersonal business enterprise, the CWS still fought for fairness in the marketplace in the interest of its customers, and more importantly it still gave its customers ‘a divvy’. It was a key element in the struggle of working people and they went on flocking to the Co-op for food, clothing and housing. It was the best deal as consumers they had ever had.32