Victorian Food
The Victorians redefined the female gender, a process that can be inferred from the title page of Mrs Beeton’s book when she uses a quotation from Milton: ‘Nothing lovelier can be found/In Woman, than to study household good.’ Mrs Beeton does not give the reference, but these two lines are from Paradise Lost, Book IX, when Adam is speaking to Eve on their role in the ‘work which here God hath assigned us’. The next line is also significant: ‘And good works in her husband to promote’. Milton is full of advice on the roles in marriage: the husband ‘shades thee and protects/The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks,/Safest and seemliest by her husband stays,’ which the Victorians took to their hearts. This passage comes immediately before the Serpent tempts Eve. So Mrs Beeton’s choice of quotation is that the housewife should strive to be like Eve before The Fall, her picture of the female is of an innocent but loving helpmate of man. The Victorian era split the female psyche into two: the idealistic and innocent woman who makes continual self-sacrifices becomes the mother of the ideal family and is therefore the ideal housekeeper; and the fallen woman, Eve the temptress, the whore and sexual betrayer. It was a terrible inheritance, because for several generations afterwards the British male was to see women either as a mother or a whore.
Household management, of course, is all about making the man of the house happy and comfortable. Mrs Beeton was not the first to say so, other female writers had constantly made such a point: the woman was there to serve the man, by inference she was nowhere near his equal. The redefinition of genders had begun in the seventeenth century when the capitalist entrepreneur had needed a wife to be a decorative symbol of his commercial success and not, as in previous centuries, a working partner. As this attractive piece of living art, she was expected to be witty, even feckless, an amusement to entertain her partner and his friends. Two hundred years after Milton, the Victorians had jettisoned this frivolity and taken the poet’s earnest God-fearing words defining gender roles in marriage as a theological blueprint. The Victorian upper and middle class woman was expected to be passive, compliant, modest, fecund and maternal without a mind or a will of her own. She was not expected to cook. Others did that for her, as others changed the babies’ nappies and bathed the children, so others wrung the chicken’s neck and gutted the salmon. In this bewildering world young wives must have found Mrs Beeton’s book a true godsend.
Isabella Beeton
The woman whose name evokes Victorian cooking was born in 1836 and died in 1865 aged twenty-eight from puerperal fever after giving birth to her second surviving son.1 She was born in Milk Street off Cheapside in the City of London, the eldest child of Elizabeth and Benjamin Mayson. In 1841 her father died and left her mother with four children, but luckily she had another suitor in the wings, Henry Dorling, who married her two years later. He was Clerk of the Course at Epsom and the whole family went to live there while her mother bore her second husband thirteen children.
Isabella met Sam Beeton in 1855; she was a capable young woman who was well used to looking after the large family, which grew up first in Epsom and then in a large house built for them in Croydon. Isabella fell in love with the young publisher, who was inclined to be sickly and was thought a bit of a rake, but he was charming and deeply romantic. He was also extremely ambitious and soon after they met had started the Boys’ Own Journal which was an immediate runaway success. In 1856 they married and went to live in Chandos Villas, Pinner. It must have been difficult for Isabella to appreciate how hard Sam worked; he rarely got back before midnight and was off again early in the morning after a cold bath. If he missed the last train back from Euston, then he walked from Fleet Street to Pinner, a distance of about sixteen miles. Isabella always left him a hot supper either in a warm oven or on two plates on two saucepans.
Sam was eager to publish a book of cookery and for Isabella to write it. A friend of theirs, Mrs English, wrote frankly to Isabella: ‘I see difficulties … Cookery is a Science that is only learnt by Long Experience and years of study which of course you have not had.’ She recommends that Isabella compile a book of recipes taken from a:
… Variety of the Best Books Published on Cookery and Heaven knows there is a great variety for you to choose from. One of our best Woman Cooks who is now retired whom I know told me recently one of the Best and Most Useful Books is Simpson’s Cookery, Revised and Modernised.
This letter appears not to have discouraged Sam and Isabella, and Mrs English was anxious that they meet the Duke of Rutland’s cook, a Mr Orpwood who is ‘a very clever little fellow in his Profession and a Great Economist and very minute and cleanly in his kitchen.’ Mrs English went on to add:
You will find the Stockpot is the great secret of the kitchen. Without it nothing can be done, with it everything can be done.
Sam, fortunately for us, ignored the advice of Mrs English and in his Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine wrote to housewives requesting recipes which would be tried and tested then published; ‘We shall be exceedingly obliged to any lady who will spare us a few minutes to write out for us some of her choice recipes and thus make the EDM a means whereby her knowledge and skill may be communicated to the world for the benefit of all.’
The response was amazing, recipes arrived by every post and a terrifying process of sorting, classifying, testing and duplicating began. With the help of her younger sister, Lucy, Isabella whirled about the Pinner kitchen, beating eggs and mixing pastry, butchering, baking and boiling, conscientious in testing every recipe to examine whether it worked and whether it was good enough to be included. Jenny Lind, the famous singer, was represented by Soup à la Cantatrice which was beneficial to the chest and throat (it was made from sago and eggs) and Soup à la Solferino from a war correspondent present at the battle of Solferino in 1859; Isabella proudly writes that this is a Sardinian recipe which has been slightly Anglicised to improve it. One wonders what changes she made, for it is a recipe for flour, egg, cream and butter dumplings cooked in a bouillon. (I suspect she added the cream and butter.)
In the hard winter of 1858 she turned her house into a soup kitchen and was making ‘Soup for Benevolent Purposes’, giving out large helpings to the poor. The children of Pinner brought their bowls and took some soup home with them. The recipe is in the book and it was made from ox cheek, trimmings of beef and a few bones with lots of odds and ends of vegetables; it was thickened with rice or pearl barley, and its only seasoning was salt and pepper. She made 8 or 9 gallons of the soup every week and estimated the cost at 11/2d per quart; she says: ‘The soup was very much liked, and gave to the members of those families, a dish of warm, comforting food, in place of the cold meat and piece of bread which form, with too many cottagers, their usual meal, when, with a little more knowledge of the cooking art, they might have, for less expense, a warm dish every day.’ How well meaning and warm-hearted she is, yet sadly she shows her ignorance: the cottagers would have loved to have cooked soups themselves, but possibly did not have the means to make a fire.
A report by Dr Edward Smith in 1863 investigated indoor workers, needlewomen, kid-glove stitchers and shoemakers and discovered, ‘They are exceedingly ill fed and show a feeble state of health.’ Half the families never received any butcher’s meat and those who did made their Sunday dinner from a pennyworth of sheep’s brains or a pennyworth of black pudding; they survived on bread, potatoes, sugar, milk and tea.2
Beeton’s Book
From 1859-61 the completed Book of Household Management, compiled and edited by Isabella, was published in monthly parts. Strangely enough, Sam, always an eager businessman, did not advertise the event, yet it caught on quickly. Women all over Britain eagerly awaited the parts, then began to collect them and stick them together. As the months rolled on, there could be no doubt of their popularity, so Sam made plans to publish them in volume form as soon as possible. Why did they make such an immediate impact? Considering the ambitious range of the book, which in its comprehension and scope no single woman could possibly hope to embody, one would be inclined to think that it might put off a housewife by the sheer size of the role she had to play. But this was a nation of Empire builders, challenges were stimulating and nothing was too vast for them not to conquer.
Isabella was at pains to structure the book so that it was easy to refer to; she had been made impatient by other such books and took great care that hers would not have the same fault. (This chapter is based on the first and best edition of the book.) The index at the front is over thirty pages long, from accidents to Yorkshire pudding. Secondly, she is comprehensive; the forty-four chapters range from a summary of the mistress’s duties (which begins with a quotation from Proverbs, ‘Her children arise up, and call her blessed’) to legal memoranda. There is little doubt it really does include everything one needs to know about managing a household. Thirdly, she knew her audience; she knew what the middle classes needed to know, for from early adolescence she had looked after sixteen younger siblings and observed her mother manage their own busy household. No book before was so authoritarian in its advice (‘Cleanliness is also indispensable to health … cold or tepid baths should be employed every morning’) or so thorough in its detail (‘As the visitors are announced by the servant, it is not necessary for the lady of the house to advance each time towards the door, but merely to rise from her seat.’). Fourthly, the recipes are representative of a very large readership: Isabella did not invent these recipes; they reflect what the middle classes were eating and cooking in the midst of the nineteenth century. No cookery book had succeeded in publishing such information before. Nor can there be any doubt that this burgeoning and affluent society wanted to continue to eat what it liked, and bought the book to ensure such an outcome.
The book therefore reflects a picture of a society in a very exact and detailed manner; part of the book’s success must have been the clarity of this self-portrait. It served as a document to secure an image that was comforting; the women who perused its pages did not see smugness or arrogance but righteousness and leadership; they did not see domestic tyranny, but order and cleanliness, and were not irritated by constant moral harping and niggardly ethical strictures, but delighted by Mrs Beeton’s piety and pragmatic moral sense. In reflecting a society, however, she also helped to propagate it; such a detailed memorandum was referred to by succeeding generations who took it all to heart, so that Mrs Beeton became the household bible of management. She writes in her preface that what had moved her in the beginning to write such a book was the ‘discomfort and suffering brought upon men and women by household mismanagement’. Perhaps she was thinking of David Copperfield’s wife, Dora, and her constant mistakes like buying a barrel of unopened oysters for a dinner party when they possessed no oyster knife to open them. ‘I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways,’ Isabella wrote.
How good are the recipes? She divides the food up into seventeen chapters which follow the stages of a dinner party. She begins with soups, starting with a rich, strong stock, immediately followed by medium, economical stock (the liquor that the meat has boiled in with added trimmings and vegetables) and white stock (based on veal and poultry). She then gives a recipe for browning. Alas, this is nothing but burnt sugar and water; she says in France they add onion, but she does also add that the process of browning should be discouraged as it can impart a slightly unpleasant flavour to the stock. One hundred years earlier Mrs Raffald had given a recipe for browning which included pepper, cloves, shallots, mace, mushroom ketchup, salt, lemon, red wine and butter as well as sugar. This would have added a delicious note of complex piquancy to any gravy, but eighteenth-century culinary zest for flavouring had gone. Dutifully, even though she disapproved of the practice, Isabella gives directions on how to make burnt sugar and water and to bottle it. Within a few decades gravy browning would be commercially produced, unfortunately from such a recipe as hers.
Her soup chapter is alphabetical (as all the chapters are), continuing with almond soup, based on mutton broth (so this bears no relation to a medieval fast-day soup) and thickened not only with almonds but with egg yolks and cream. She gives soups for the poor and the rich: there is a bread and a potato soup as well as lobster and turtle soup, which she admits is founded on M. Ude’s recipe; nevertheless when giving instructions on how to kill and butcher the turtle, she appears to know how to do it herself. This chapter includes eighty different soups, from all over Britain.
Her fish chapter begins with the biology of fish (yes, she tries to give the reader a comprehensive education) and continues with directions on how to dress the fish before cooking. She begins with anchovies: how to make anchovy butter or paste, how to pot them, and how to make anchovy toast with a warning about adulterations in the commercial pastes. She continues with barbel and brill; often she does not give exact cooking times, and that fish, for instance, should be simmered until it is done, for it depends upon the size; but when she does give a time it strikes me as far too long. She goes on to cod, carp, crabs and crayfish, and ends with several recipes on whiting. The turbot, as are other fish, are simmered in water and salt. There is never any addition of wine, herbs or spices. In The French Cook, M. Ude gives a recipe for a court bouillon for poaching fish with carrots, parsley roots and leaves, thyme, bay leaves, mace, cloves, and two bottles of white and two bottles of red wine plus salt, but he adds:
This manner of boiling fish is too expensive in England, where wine is so dear; and very good court bouillon cannot be made with vinegar. Besides fish with court bouillon is always eaten with oil and vinegar, which is not customary in England.
So there we have it.The French authority M. Ude, who published his book in 1813 and who was working in England then, was as ignorant as Mrs Beeton of the English medieval tradition of poaching fish in wine, stock and herbs. Mrs Beeton did not set out to be innovative, or to bring back older English culinary traditions, nor is she that much interested in the final flavour or how it might be improved. What she does is to set in tablets of stone what is considered good cooking practice about 1860.
After fish, Isabella then gives a chapter on sauces, pickles, gravies and forcemeats, beginning with anchovy butter. The Victorian fear of pungent flavourings vanishes in this chapter; the menfolk would obviously insist on having powerful sauces and pickles, especially when out subjugating the natives in the colonies. She gives a recipe for camp vinegar that includes a head of garlic and cayenne and does not comment on using it cautiously. There is chilli vinegar made with fifty fresh chillies to one pint of vinegar; the chillis are cut in half and infused in the vinegar for two weeks. She says, ‘This will be found an agreeable relish to fish, as many people cannot eat it without the addition of an acid and cayenne pepper.’ One sympathises, for the fish would be overcooked and tend to the tasteless. She gives an Epicurean Sauce for steaks, chops, gravies or fish, which owes more to Mrs Raffald’s Browning than anything else and is also bottled. There is also a ‘very superior’ recipe for Indian Pickle, with garlic, horseradish, ginger, cayenne and mustard seed. The Victorians were very keen on substitutes, so there is a recipe for caper sauce that is made from parsley boiled until ‘it is a bad colour’.
There can be no doubt that meat lies at the centre of the British diet: her recipes for beef, lamb and mutton take up 200 pages, with a further 100 pages on poultry and game, while there are only fifty pages on vegetables. In the chapter on meat cookery there are many recipes that begin with cold roast beef, alerting the reader to the fact that left-over cooked meat was a continual challenge. Isabella calls this ‘Cold Meat Cookery’ and it marks a sharp decline in British cooking. At first glance the titles give the wrong impression: Baked Beef is sliced cold beef laid in a casserole interleaved with root vegetables, herbs and gravy reheated in the oven for half an hour. Beef cake is cold roast beef minced, mixed with bacon and egg, shaped into rissoles and fried. Slices of cold beef can be covered in mushrooms and gravy and reheated; or slices of cold roast beef can be fried in butter, then covered with chopped boiled cabbage which is also fried in butter. She calls this Bubble and Squeak. Cold roast beef can be curried with the addition of a dessertspoon of curry powder and a wineglass of beer. Other recipes included hashed beef, minced beef, beef rissoles, cubes of cold beef in a batter like toad-in-the-hole, for which she also gives a recipe, using steak and kidney; then there is cold meat cookery with mutton, where it is endlessly minced in a variety of recipes. Cold mutton cutlets can also be rejuvenated by being rolled in egg and breadcrumbs and fried in dripping; diced cold mutton could be mixed with cooked rice, suet and seasoning, shaped into sausages, rolled in egg and breadcrumbs (another Victorian favourite) and fried – these were called Dormers. Cold mutton is made into pies, hashed, of course; she adds a note that ‘Many persons express a decided aversion to hashed mutton …’ and goes on to defend the dish if properly done. Cold mutton can be turned into collops with the addition of spices, and again can be placed cold in a batter and called ‘toad-in-the-hole’.
Her section on pork reveals a somewhat equivocal attitude to the pig; she is repulsed by its feeding habits, ‘his gluttonous way of eating’, and thinks they must be prone to disease; she then condemns the Jews for their ‘usual perversity and violation of the divine commands’ by keeping herds of swine. There is an unhappy anti-semitic flavour in the whole passage, but in this she is only representative of Victorian society.
It is obvious, however, that her love for ham and bacon is too strong to banish the pig from the kitchen and she gives directions for curing bacon. She gives few recipes for pork compared to the ones for beef and mutton and only one in cold meat cookery for both pork and veal. Her recipes for game are, as one would expect, comprehensive, beginning with blackcock where she mentions that some cooks roast the birds covered in a vine leaf; recipes follow for wild duck, hare, grouse, corncrake, leveret, partridge, pheasant (five recipes), plovers, ptarmigan, quail, snipes, teal, venison (two recipes), widgeon, woodcock and even the capercailzie, which she believed to be extinct in Britain. She then devotes a few pages to the carving of each bird.
Mrs Beeton appears to come into her own on the subject of puddings and pastry. Perhaps it is here that her readers waxed enthusiastic and sent in the most imaginative recipes. She starts off with general remarks, full of sensible advice on flour, butter, suet and lard, then continues with types of patty-pans and moulds; then comes a lengthy section on how to make puff pastry before we are into the puddings proper. There are over 100 different puddings and over sixty further creams, fritters, jellies and blancmanges. It is no wonder when one reads the emphasis upon dessert that Britain, with more than twice the per capita consumption, used almost half of all the sugar beet consumed in Europe, as well as by far the greater part of the overseas canesugar imported into Europe. Apples are made into various puddings, fifteen in all: there is a Bakewell Pudding, which is very rich and made with puff paste; an orange batter pudding; six different bread and butter puddings; five different suet and fruit boiled puddings; there are some suitable for picnics, gooseberry puddings, ginger puddings, iced puddings, rolled treacle puddings and even a Quickly Made Pudding. Then there are milk puddings, made from rice (four recipes), sago, tapioca and semolina, on which she adds a note:
After vermicelli, semolina is the most useful ingredient that can be used for thickening soups, meat or vegetable, of rich or simple quality. Semolina is softening, light, wholesome, easy of digestion, and adapted to the infant, the aged and the invalid.
The milk pudding came into prominence within this century. Mrs Raffald gives recipes for only three made with rice, as does Eliza Acton. Kitchiner gives two. But they all ignore the other starches which Mrs Beeton and her readers love so much. Milk puddings were thought excellent for invalids and the young, a notion that the twentieth century, still so influenced by Mrs Beeton, took on board. It stemmed from her fervent belief in the efficacy of milk for all ailments: ‘This bland and soothing article of diet is excellent for the majority of thin, nervous people, especially for those who have suffered much from emotional disturbances …’ Was she thinking of her husband by any chance, a highly active man with tendencies towards manic-depression and who possibly had a secret sado-masochistic life?3 She goes on, ‘Milk is in fact a nutrient and a sedative at once … from no other substance, solid or fluid, can so great a number of distinct kinds of aliment, be prepared as from milk.’
Mrs Beeton’s book shows us in vivid detail all that is good and bad in British cooking, but because she was an honest reporter she did not try to change any errors she saw (as in the use of browning) but included them, so that she supports the status quo; in supporting it she fosters and entrenches it. Her cold meat cookery would become the standby of lodging houses and institutions, of provincial cafes and myriad homes from every class which could not or would not buy it fresh. It should never have been enshrined within the pages of a cookery book for she gave it respectability. It was a method of disguising old food as fresh, for few of the masters and mistresses would have recognised the roast beef of a few days before resurrected as Baked Beef or Beef Cake and would have been under the impression that cook had made the dish from freshly slaughtered butcher’s meat. Such cooking came about because of the urge to economise; if the master’s table did not finish the dish it became food for the servants who were not fussy. But in such an affluent society why should economy be a presiding motive in the kitchen? Because social climbing necessitated a great show of wealth when entertaining, and to pay for the cost at other times the family ate more modestly. Punch was full of such cartoons depicting social pretension and the hypocrisy and facades it involved.
She was not, by far, the first to give respectability to the re-use of cooked meat; the French cooks had done so before her. In 1813 Ude, in his best-selling book The French Cook, gives a recipe for beef hash, but specifies it is for the servants and also says it must not be reheated for long otherwise it will be tough. Alexis Soyer in his Modern Housewife of 1849 writes for the middle-class housewife of differing means and imagines one, a Mrs B., whose husband’s fortunes change from being a small shopkeeper to a prosperous merchant and the way her cooking changed over the years. In version one she has roast beef on Sunday, hashes it on Monday and makes a stew of it with vegetables on Tuesday; on the Wednesday she has fish if it is cheap, on Thursday pork, but on Friday they eat the remains of the pork. Two years later her husband’s business is doing so well that Mrs B. is feeding three clerks who live with them; her meals have become more intricate, but on Monday two of Sunday’s dishes are rejuvenated and so it continues until the end of the week. Later, becoming still more affluent, Mrs B. says that the remains of their extensive dinners are required for breakfast, lunch, nursery and servants’ dinners.
Hodge-Podge, one of the most favoured recipes, was simply a mixture of leftover meats cut up into pieces combined with any old vegetables in leftover gravy. Alexis Soyer simply calls his recipe for the same dish ‘Remains’. Nothing is wasted was a proud cry of the Victorian housekeeper. Whereas in the past and on the continent the scraps were fed to the pigs and chickens outside the kitchen door, now they were thrust beneath a floury sauce, reheated and sent up to the nursery. This is a product of urbanisation, the result of being cut off from the country roots, but it also springs from an obsession with how pennies can be saved, for the Victorian entrepreneur knew that riches and success would follow if the pennies were hoarded. No cookery books before or since, except in the war years, have been quite so full of remonstrations to make food that is economical; this is all the more astonishing when one knows that Britain was riding upon a tidal wave of profit. Or was it?
The growth of urbanisation marked Britain out as quite different from any other country. In 1851 about a quarter of British males were employed in agriculture; this figure dropped to seventeen per cent in 1881 and twelve in 1900. In France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the United States throughout that time over half of the labour force worked on the land. The acreage devoted to wheat in Britain had halved by the end of the century; we supplied less than a quarter of our own needs in butter, cheese and pork and even less in beef, mutton and lamb. We could no longer be considered a farming nation; factories, slum terraces with open cesspits running between them and shops, shops, shops had been built upon the green fields.
We all know that leftovers used with dexterous flair can make an excellent dish. There is an account by a French bon vivant in the Second Empire that celebrates the art when he speaks of croquettes Périgord:
These croquettes are truly delicious, the day after such luxurious feasts as those served on meat eating days, with subtle and patient skill the finely chopped meat of the preceding day blends, mingles, harmonizes, somehow comes together in a single dish. Garlic scented roast beef and leg of lamb, a subtle hint of roast veal rump, the delectable aroma of chicken, quail and partridge with their exquisite bouquet – each makes its own contribution and adds its own touch to the admirable whole … It perfumes the entire house. Then they arrange it on a platter, a masterpiece, a golden pyramid browned in fat, topped with a bonnet of green parsley… . Sometimes these croquettes made from a variety of meats are hidden by an artistically browned batter, similar to the way some cooks prepare salsify or artichoke hearts. But when served in this way it is a venial sin if the chopped meats are not ornamented with lovely slices of black truffles, cooked in champagne.4
One can imagine any number of French cooks working in England making such croquettes: the women would be delighted, for the croquettes were perfect to nibble on and toy with, while the men would be longing for a large piece of underdone beef. Yet how often were the leftovers turned into gastronomic art?
To the society she wrote for, Mrs Beeton’s strength was that her book covered all social occasions, from the grandest to the most modest, but it also gave recognition and seemingly also approval to domestic practices that had become ingrained. It was an extraordinarily good-mannered book; for example, when talking of the origin of sugar beet she avoids pointing out that its discovery was prompted by the English naval blockade of France in the Napoleonic Wars. Instead she says, ‘circumstances having, in France, made sugar scarce’. On family relations she taught moral virtues gently; she instilled into the pages a sense of politeness, restraint and caution, she gave credibility and distinction to the middle classes who had had no champion before. She knew exactly who her readers were as when she advised against dinners à la Russe in households without sufficient resources. They were scarcely suitable for small establishments, she thought, as they required a large number of servants.
A la Russe
At the time that Mrs Beeton’s book was first published there was a change in the way that dinner was served for the most fashionable segment of society. The previous dining style had been called à la Française and involved, as we have seen, a number of different dishes being placed on the table all at once as a first course, with the diners helping themselves and others. When these were eaten and removed, the second course involved more dishes being placed in the same position. If there was a haunch of meat to be carved then the host carved at the head of the table. This sometimes caused accidents: a large goose might fly into a lady’s lap, or fat spurt into someone’s eye. It also meant that at a large dinner party the host carved for some length of time before being able to sit down himself to eat. For festive meals at home, most of us still go in for this method of dining; several dishes are placed on the table, we help ourselves, while the host or head of the family carves the joint or bird. Such an arrangement often helped or hindered romantic matters, as Jane Austen wrote to her sister:
I could see nothing very promising between Mr P. and Miss P.T. She placed herself on one side of him at first, but Miss Benn obliged her to move up higher; and she had an empty plate and even asked him to give her some mutton without being attended to for some time. There might be some design in this … (Jan. 1814)
Carving became an accomplishment of gentlemen, one of the minor arts of polite life; ‘to dance in hall and carve at board’ were classed together, according to Meg Dods. Not only did everyone have to have a good portion of the meat, but the carver must leave the joint looking as presentable as possible, ‘sometimes by rearranging the garnishing over it or, as in the case of fish, by folding it beneath part of the napkin on which it was served,’ wrote William Kitchiner. When the first course was finished the host gave a signal to the servant to remove the dishes; the signal was as discreet as possible, so that servants would silently enter to do the work. (I recall in a private home in the 1950s a bell upon the floor near the host’s feet which could only be heard in the kitchen.) After the second course all the plates and cutlery were removed. The richer the host the more dishes at each course and the more servants to bring and take them away.
So why change the manner of service at all, for surely à la Française allowed for conspicuous consumption in the grand manner? The change allowed the host much greater control over the event; it was a method of structuring the dinner with rules for the time of dining, the pace of the meal, rules for how to serve it, how to eat it and to whom to speak.5 It allowed for the dining table to be laid with epergnes, posies, folded napkins and decorative flower displays, the finest glass and all the silver with printed menus. Table decor was highly significant, showing at once the expense the host had gone to and his position in society. The new service relied on butlers, footmen and parlourmaids to serve all the dishes individually offering to each diner from the left the dish on a silver salver, while the butler carved the meat at the sideboard. At the grandest dinners there was almost a footmen to each guest; to have servants swarming around guests gave considerable prestige to the host. It was not so much the visible splendour that held a guest in awe and respect, however, but the unseen rules of etiquette, the secret code that imposed the strictest and most pernickety dos and don’ts on the social outsider, rules that had to be learnt in order to become part of such a society, and which, if broken, meant ostracism.
It could be a minefield, particularly for a young woman entering society. She would be paired off with a gentleman in the library some minutes before dinner began. Name cards would be placed upon the table with a folded table napkin hiding a bread roll at the place setting. After sitting down she would first take off her gloves which were laid in her lap, and then covered with her table napkin; she would place the roll to her left. At each setting there were two large knives, three large forks, a silver knife and fork for fish and a tablespoon for taking the soup; on the right there would be a wide-rimmed glass for champagne, a small one for sherry and a coloured glass for hock. The dessert spoon and fork were not placed upon the table, but would appear for the sweet course; the salad would be served on a small crescent-shaped plate placed on her left. Both plates were used at once, meat taken from the main plate and salad from the other.
Part of the fashion was to serve an hors-d’oeuvres as a beginning to these grand dinners; this would be served from a large platter with several partitions containing, for instance, anchovies, olives, prawns, oysters; you were intended to take a small morsel of one or two to be eaten with a knife and fork on a small plate. This cutlery would be removed before the soup which would be a choice of two. Mrs Beeton gives a menu for twelve people in November and offers Hare Soup or Julienne Soup, followed by Baked Cod or Soles à la Normandie, then the entrées,6 then meat, fowl, game and sweets. ‘All entrées, such as patties, or mince, must be eaten with a fork only; but when sweetbreads, cutlets or game enter into the composition of the dish, a knife is of course requisite.’7
For her November dinner party Mrs Beeton recommends lobster patties, croustades of marrow with fines herbes, a riz de veau aux tomates and mutton cutlets with soubise sauce, all of them entrées. These might be followed by a sirloin of beef, braised goose, boiled fowls with celery sauce and a bacon cheek with sprouts. Everything would be cleared away before the dessert course and a silver slice used to remove all the crumbs; the wine glasses would go only to be replaced with three fresh ones, for claret, port and sherry. The fruit already on the table would be handed around by a servant after the dessert plate with a finger glass, doily, and dessert knife and fork had been placed before each person. Etiquette demanded you should remove the finger bowl from your plate, placing it on the doily on the left; you might then dip your fingertips into the water. The hostess, after the ladies have finished, should bow to the lady on her husband’s right and rise from her seat; this was the signal for the ladies to retire, led by the lady of the highest rank with the hostess the last to leave. For the inexperienced all this rigmarole must have been a nervous nightmare, but it was meant to be; such detailed rules were a secret code to keep hoi polloi at bay, firmly outside the castle walls.
Why should this new form of service be named ‘in the Russian manner’? The change had been a long time happening; Dr Kitchiner had said, ‘It would save a great deal of time etc if poultry, especially large turkeys and Geese were sent to the table ready cut up.’ A little later Meg Dods hoped ‘to see the day when all large troublesome dishes will be taken to the side-table and carved by a maître d’hôtel or whoever waits on the company, as is now the general practice of France, Germany and Russia.’ The two forms of service almost merged into each other; to call the new one Russe was one way of differentiating it from what had gone before. It was said that the manner derived from the Czar’s mode of dining and was introduced into France at the peace of 1814 in honour of the Russian Emperor, but this is uncertain. What is clear is that it ushered in not only a more rigid way of entertaining hemmed around with formality, but also a more lavish use of French terms and dishes. What now grew up in the last half of the century was pseudo-French cooking, an anglicised version of Gallic dishes adapted to banquets and grand dining but which omitted much of the essential qualities of the originals.
French and British Cooking
French cooking had been fashionable ever since the Restoration, when it had been associated with Papism and the Jacobite cause. In the nineteenth century these associations had faded away. In the seventeenth century, if we look at William Verrall, Charles Carter and others, there had been French chefs working for Roman Catholic families and the cooking they created was very nearly authentic. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries French chefs were more common and not only allied with great aristocratic families. Jane Austen’s brother, the banker, had one who wrought ‘exquisite dishes’ from the turkey sent from Chawton.
The first French cook who came to prominence in Britain was, as we have seen, Louis Eustache Ude. His father had been cook to Louis XVI and he briefly followed him in that position until the Revolution. He was maître d’hôtel to Princess Letizia Bonaparte, but found that unsatisfactory, so he came to England, where he became chef to Lord Sefton, and was happy. On Lord Sefton’s death he went to the Duke of York and finally became director of St James’s Club; after he retired on an annuity bequeathed by Lord Sefton, he published The French Cook in 1813; so successful was it that it was republished many times up to 1833. He was sensitive to Roman Catholic fast-day requirements because he mentions adapting recipes on those times. When an English m’lord appointed a French chef he knew he was also possessing a fragment of French history, an additional aura that boosted such chefs’ renown. Ude begins his book with the statement ‘Broth is the foundation of Cookery,’ (so this is where Mrs Beeton’s friend got the idea from) and goes on to describe the various types. Ude has obviously adapted his own cooking to British tastes – see his method with fish below. Besides, every chef had to adapt to the tastes of his employer and Ude gives a recipe of a ramequin Lord Sefton’s way: it is puff paste with layers of Parmesan folded over several times and baked. This is one of the dishes that Mrs Beeton uses without acknowledging the source.8 Her book shows Ude’s influence, for there is no difference in the making of soups and sauces except that Mrs Beeton has many more of them. (There are almost fifty years between the two books.) British cooking had by then absorbed a bastardised French influence.
Ude boils salmon, John Dory, turbot and even a sturgeon in salt and water. In 1759 Verrall had written of his chef, M. Clouet: ‘He never boiled any fish of any sort in the plain way,’ and continued by giving several recipes of fish poached in wine, herbs and sauces. Ude’s section on pastries is quintessentially French, and Mrs Beeton, as if knowing there was no real competition here, again uses his recipe, calling it French Puff Paste; she also gives Soyer’s recipe for puff paste and throughout her book borrows from Soyer frequently, again not always acknowledging her source. (This, of course, in many cases may simply be as a result of her readers sending in unacknowledged borrowed recipes.)
Because of this idolisation of French chefs, there was no chance of an English chef learning how to practise British cooking. In fact British cooking was disdained by the rising middle classes as something inferior. That a whole nation could embrace the cooking of a nation that had been historically its fiercest rival and enemy might seem astonishing. But Britain in this century felt itself to be far superior to any other nation in the world, and that like Ancient Rome before it, it could steal with impunity any idea or culture it thought desirable. Hence, French titles for a bastardised French cooking were utterly reasonable. With the disdain for British cooking came a disdain for the female cook, and most domestic cooks were women for the very good reason that they cost less. Marcham, the Duke of Rutland’s French chef at Belvoir Castle, was paid £147 in 1810, rising to £161 14s in 1814 while a woman cook would have received something like £14.9 The average female cook in a middle-class home need not even have been literate, only to have picked up a vague knowledge of cooking from being a parlourmaid at her previous place of work; untrained and unskilled she learned as she went along. The middle classes, however, if they were honest and not in pretentious mood, really loved British cooking; the very heart of their meals was meats, boiled and roasted, great haunches (if they were rich enough) of beef, mutton and pork, with a gravy made from their juices and drippings; these they enjoyed almost daily. They were aware that roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were thought by their superiors to be inferior food, yet beef with lashings of mustard and horseradish sauce remained an integral part of the food of chop houses, inns and taverns all over Britain.
What the British thought was French cooking was a radical adaptation towards their own tastes; as much as an Indian restaurant gives a British interpretation of curry today. Secondly, many of these so-called French influences were medieval, and had been enjoyed here for hundreds of years; after the Reformation we had forgotten about them. The tragedy for our own cuisine was that this snobbish idolisation of the French cuisine, which reached its peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century, made us feel that British cooking was far inferior. Without skills expended upon it and without credence, it very often did become inferior; it was thus despised even more and became a butt for jokes. Other factors in the same century conspired to help its fall. (See end of chapter.)
Cheap Imports
Food imports up to the nineteenth century had always been limited to foods such as dried fruits and spices, which could travel distances without spoilage; the problem with other foods was how to keep them free of harmful bacteria. The answer to the problem, which would radically change world economy and trade, began quietly with some experiments by a Frenchman. Nicolas Appert, a Parisian confectioner, discovered that he could preserve food by putting fresh food in glass jars, standing the jars in hot water to expel air and then hermetically sealing them with alternate layers of cork and wax. In 1804 Appert was awarded a prize by Napoleon who saw the discovery as of military strategic importance. An Englishman, Peter Durand, conceived the idea that tin might be more suitable as a medium as it was lighter, cheaper and more amenable to being shaped, while it could conduct heat more efficiently than glass and would not be vulnerable to breakages in transport. He took out a patent for the use of tin canisters in 1810. In the early 1820s the firm Donkin & Hall, having bought the patent from Durand, was supplying the Admiralty with canned meats for use in ships’ stores, and by 1839 tin-coated steel containers were widely used all over the world. It was there the can stayed for the next two decades until the American Civil War in the 1860s, where as Napoleon had foreseen, tin cans of meat that could be quickly opened were a convenient way of getting a quick nutritious meal inside a fighting soldier.
The meat-canning industry as well as armaments quickly began to flourish and by the 1870s tinned meat was being exported to Britain from the States, Australia and Argentina, where a canning industry with the name of Fray Bentos had started by the River Plate in 1871. The meat was not of good quality; it was mostly boiled mutton from Australia, and canned with sinews and fat, so it looked highly unattractive. A number of food poisoning scares had made the British public nervous and they were suspicious of the new product. Its only charm was its cheapness: it cost from 5d-7d per lb, half that of fresh meat. Fray Bentos Corned Beef first appeared in 1876 and soon became popular with the working classes as it could be sliced and placed between bread as a packed lunch.
The canning technique was now being applied to milk, fish, vegetables and fruit. The commercial manufacture of tinned condensed milk had begun in the 1850s in America and Switzerland, and was a success despite its drawback of contributing to the increase of rickets and other diseases. Fruit canning began in California in the late 1860s and by the 1880s tinned peaches, apricots, pears, cherries and pineapples were part of the store cupboard in middle-class kitchens and became integral to quick desserts. By the 1870s canned salmon from Columbia and Alaska was exported all over the world. (In Britain Crosse & Blackwell began canning salmon as early as 1849, opening a factory in Cork.)
A small tin cost around 9d and was far too expensive for the working classes, but it became yet another standby of the middle-class kitchen. In 1880 a firm in Maine first produced cans of pork’n’beans; fifteen years later H.J. Heinz of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania came up with the recipe for baked beans in tomato sauce, but it was another ten years before the first tins were on sale in the north of England, only to receive a lukewarm response.
It took thirty years of experiments with freezing in order to achieve the refrigerated hold packed with mutton and beef in the SS Strathleven when she sailed from Melbourne to London in 1880. Meat that sold in Australia for only 11/2d could sell in London for 51/2d; the voyage opened the flood gates to cheap meat imports from USA which sent pork, from the Argentine with its beef and from New Zealand with its lamb. By 1902 more than 56 lb per head per year was being eaten in Britain; the farmer at home only contributed less than half of our requirements.
By the end of the nineteenth century such meat was now affordable at least once a week for the working classes, whose wages had risen. A joint of beef, pork or lamb could be eaten on Sundays and the remains used up on the weekdays. After all, such necessary economies had been authorised by the middle classes emboldened by eminent cookery writers, hence rehashed food for the weekday diet became the normal routine for the average working family.
Convenience Food
In the second half of the century, industry and technology began to be an integral part of Britain’s food supply; it was another factor that crept into Britain’s kitchens and did them fatal injury, a harm they are still reeling from – convenience food.
It began innocently enough. In the late 1860s roller mills came into use. Millers liked to use ‘hard’ American wheat; it was cheaper and also had a high gluten content, which was good for rising, but it did not grind well beneath the milling stones and gave a brown flour. Bakers used additives to whiten the loaves, using anything from chalk, alum and ammonium carbonate to ground-up pipe clay, powdered bones, gypsum and ground stone. (Adulteration of food had reached such alarming proportions that in 1875 the Government at last passed the Sale of Food and Drugs Act that formed the basis of food law until 1955.)
Porcelain rollers were the answer, giving the miller more control over the refinement of the flour by passing it through a series of rollers, so that the bran and wheatgerm that gave the flour its colour could be sifted out. A roller mill in Glasgow in 1872 began producing white refined flour and the invention spread rapidly; by the end of the century everyone wanted pure white flour without wheatgerm. It was a necessary prelude to the sliced loaf, which arrived in the 1930s. It was also a significant change in status, for that centuries-old symbol that white bread had always stood for could now be eaten by the whole of society, even the very poor, as part of its daily diet. Brown bread was slowly to become the status of elitism where it still is today. There was one exception to this universal trend: the firm of Hovis (from the Latin construction hominus vis – strength of man) which began marketing its loaf in the 1890s; it was formed by millers who manufactured a flour that retained a high amount of wheatgerm; the formula was patented in 1885 by Richard Smith, a miller from Stone in Staffordshire. In 1898 the Hovis Bread Company was founded.
On the heels of the roller mills there came new processed, packeted, bottled and canned food, which made the life of the cook beneath stairs easier. It erased some time-wasting chores of beating and sieving, which helped to streamline her cooking by reducing the time she spent at the stove, but affected the original flavour of many dishes by rendering them even blander. It gave them an artificial flavour and texture which some would find addictive and others repellent.
These commercial packages included quick-acting compressed yeast, self-raising flour and baking powder, which made bread and cake making simpler; there was shredded suet, custard powder without eggs, blancmange made of flavoured gelatine mixed with dried milk and concentrated egg powder, and jellies in various flavours. As well as farmhouse cheeses, there were now great blocks of cheese matured very quickly, and tins of sweetened, condensed milk. Margarine was made from beef fat and milk; there were bulk dried vegetables and dried packets of soup mix; commercially bottled pickles and sauces; and cans of vegetables and fruit.10 There were mixes for gravy, beef tea from a jar for invalids and tins of tripe, peas and beans; meals were now augmented by these first convenience foods.
The 1870s were years where the food industry began to boom: biscuit, jam and chocolate manufacturing were among the first to lead the way, with confectionery manufacturers such as Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury. Another great change in the national diet was the emergence of breakfast cereals which were imported from the States. They were a product of the policies of various vegetarian groups and dietary reformists,11 but the concept originally came from Dr John Harvey Kellogg, director of the ‘medical boarding house’ which later became a sanatorium at Battle Creek, where he developed his concept of ‘natural foods’. In the 1860s he formulated Granola, the first ready-cooked breakfast cereal, made from a mixture of wheat, oatmeal and maize baked in a slow oven. In 1896 he produced Granose, the first flaked cereal food made of wheat, and three years later the cornflake, which was to invade and take over Britain. By the 1890s all the manufacturing processes to treat cereals had been invented and a rash of flaking, toasting, puffing and extrusion dominated this new breakfast industry. Shredded Wheat was invented in 1892 by Henry D. Perky of Denver, Grape Nuts in 1898 by Charles W. Post, Puffed Wheat in 1902 by Alexander Anderson and Toasted Oat Flakes in the 1890s by the Beck Cereal Company of Detroit. (My mother, as a small child, remembered a free sample of Shredded Wheat arriving through the letter box – this would be around 1907-09. It arrived without instructions or they were not read, and her family sampled it straight, decided it was most unpleasant and never tried it again for years.)
Whether it was quick breakfasts that needed no cooking or a custard made from a powder, British cooks now relied on a host of manufactured goods, which required no skill, erased any singularity and further deprived it of its rural roots.
The Rise of the Fancy Biscuit
Biscuits originally were not fun or destined to give pleasure at all; they did you medicinal good, or they were ship’s biscuits. At Deptford, Portsmouth and Plymouth the victualling authorities in the King’s dockyards set up their own baking establishments for the navy where these biscuits were produced. They were a kind of hard, dry bread made to be carried to sea and consisting only of flour and water. The process was mechanised in 1833. The medicinal biscuit was made by Dr William Oliver (1695-1764) of Bath, to be chewed with the medicinal waters, and by Dr John Abernethy (1764-1831). It was Lemann’s of Threadneedle Street, London (founded in 1747), which brought out the first recorded non-medicinal biscuit to commemorate the marriage of the Duke of York in 1791. This was copied by small London pastrycooks or confectioners, who made sweet biscuits as a sideline during the daytime, using the ovens that baked bread throughout the night.
It was Quakers who were the pioneers in fancy biscuit-making, concerned in the manufacture of goods that could do no harm to anyone, free from adulteration and fairly priced. In the late 1830s Jonathan Dodgson Carr, a miller and baker of Carlisle, began to design machinery for cutting and stamping biscuits. By 1846 Carr’s of Carlisle, which believed it was the first to mechanise the process, was producing 400 tons of biscuits in a year. Another Quaker, miller and confectioner George Palmer, joined up with his cousin, Thomas Huntley, who made biscuits entirely by hand in his Reading shop; they built a small factory behind the shop and were producing biscuits early in the 1840s. Ten years later they were making biscuits containing butter, eggs, milk and flavourings, caraway, cinnamon, essence of lemon and orange flower. By 1870 they were the largest biscuit company in the world, making 120 varieties and claiming that their names Ginger Cob and the Osborne had been borrowed by others, including Carr’s.
Peek Frean & Co. was established in Bermondsey by 1860 making fancy biscuits; among them were the Garibaldi and the Marie, but half its output was ship’s biscuit. All the biscuit manufacturers had used agents to recruit family grocers all over the country to stock their biscuits. By the 1860s Huntley and Palmer had 700 retailers in nearly 400 different towns throughout the British Isles. In the next decade the chain grocers like Liptons and Home & Colonial Stores, seeing how profitable biscuits had become, made their own arrangements for manufacturing them. Towards the end of the century Scottish and Irish firms like McVitie & Price, Macfarlane Lang and Jacob’s of Dublin began to impinge upon the English market.
The rise of the fancy biscuit was due to the changes in meals and the time they were eaten, to the affluence of the middle classes and the spread of tea drinking. They were also amazingly convenient, sold in charming tins that could be re-used. Between 1840 and 1860, when large breakfasts were being eaten and people dined at five, lunch or luncheon was a snack of a beverage and bread and cold meats; biscuits easily fitted into this meal or as the other snack eaten before retiring to bed. During his large hunting breakfasts, R.S. Surtees’ Mr Jorrocks consumed a few ship’s biscuits, which were probably a generic name for plain biscuits, while the ladies of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford nibbled a lady’s biscuit with their mid-morning wine. Long before mechanisation, in Jane Austen’s Emma, Savoy and Sponge biscuits were served at evening parties, so the biscuit had long been there.
In the beginning the new sweet biscuits were priced high, and so could only be eaten by the upper classes or the well-heeled. By far the most expensive were Huntley and Palmer’s Rout biscuit for formal parties, which cost 2s a pound; Ratafias, Lemon and Orange Dessert and Raspberry biscuits cost 1s, while Ginger Nut and Osborne cost 6d, a quarter of what labourers earned in a day. In 1859 Huntley and Palmers sold six million pounds and Peek Frean’s one million pounds. Biscuits became fashionable for the affluent clergy and institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge colleges, public schools and gentlemen’s clubs.
By the 1860s, as the solid Victorian villas began to spread in the suburbs around the centre of London, mealtimes were changing again. Breakfasts were served earlier for the Victorian businessman had to travel to work, while dinner time was now around seven to give the paterfamilias time to return home. Luncheon and afternoon tea now became common; at both these meals biscuits were served, biscuits for cheese for the gentleman at his club, and sweet biscuits for tea at home for the mistress and her guests. By the late 1870s Huntley and Palmer were selling 37 million pounds of biscuits a year and Peek Frean another 17 million.12
As did tobacco barons and big brewers, food producers sometimes came to national prominence as well as local eminence: the Colmans of Norwich, the Frys of Bristol, the Cadburys of Birmingham were all seen as leaders of British industry. Some of them reinforced their market power by the shrewd use of advertising: Hovis was perhaps the most brilliant, giving away baking tins which had its name imprinted upon the side so that it appeared on the bread itself; but Oxo, Rowntree and Bovril all used early poster design to great effect. The mustard and starch manufacturer, Colmans, established an advertising department to create new marketing ideas as early as 1870.
Drinking Milk
As London grew in size its food demands covered the whole country, which inevitably changed the nature of farming, so that farmers turned to artificial fertilisers for their land and concentrated winter feeds for their livestock. Railways helped to bring in fresh produce from the country, but in such quantity that mono-culture crept on to the acres, which brought the problem of disease and deterioration of quality. In 1847 the Lancet had condemned the unhygienic character of London’s milk supply, which was hardly surprising when you read a description of the cowsheds in Golden Square behind Piccadilly Circus:
Forty cows are kept in them, two in each seven foot space. There is no ventilation, save by the unceiled tile roof, through which the ammoniacal vapours escape … Besides the animals, there is at one end a large tank for grains, a storeplace for turnips and hay, and between them a receptable into which the liquid manure drains, and the solid is heaped … the stench thence arising is insufferable.13
By 1855, the early milk trains had made their appearance in London, bringing the milk in churns. As the capacity of the churns 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, a little more than Dr Edward Smith’s figure (see below). In country districts, small towns and the suburbs of cities milk was sold from handcarts or horse-floats by retailers who were either part of the farm that had produced the milk or buyers who had bought directly from them. If farmers did not actually deliver the milk, then they drove the milk to the nearest railway station and from there it would travel into the nearest town or city. The urban areas were already divorced from links with the producers in the country; the London market drew its supplies of milk from Essex and Suffolk, fifty miles or more distant, and then as it grew ever larger, from even further afield, from Wiltshire, East Dorset and Somerset, and from the Midlands as far north as Derbyshire.
The demands of London converted farmers who were making butter and artisan cheeses from summer grass milk into selling the milk (this was milk of the highest quality for cheese-making) and influenced them to change their methods so that they could produce winter milk too. This meant autumn calving cows, fodder crops and the purchase of concentrates, which produced milk of less quality but perfectly suitable for drinking.
In the 1860s Dr Edward Smith’s report to the Privy Council on the food of the labouring classes found that the average person drank less than one pint of milk per week. As the milk supplies came from further and further away, it brought the twin problems of souring and adulteration. As people could not rely on milk not going off through the night, deliveries of milk arrived very early in the morning in time for breakfast, having travelled by train in the night. The further away from London the milk came from, the more special milk depots and creameries had to be built beside the railway depot to ensure the milk was cooled before the journey. London firms advertised that they delivered three times daily, inflicting upon the roundsman a working day of 13-14 hours. The cooling rooms at the depots helped, but in the hot summers of 1893 and 1911 people ran short of milk because of sourness. All the hot summers of the 1890s through to the First World War produced a rise in infant mortality which was ascribed to summer diarrhoea. In hot years when there was an epidemic infected milk was considered to be a factor.
By the 1890s pasteurised milk had made its appearance and the first milk bottle arrived by 1900; both took some time to be accepted. By then the diet of rural labourers had much improved; a survey in 1902 showed that their consumption of raw milk was between 3 and 7 pints of milk per week. It was not until 1910 that a few firms had adopted pasteurisation or sterilisation. People had complained rightly that both changed the flavour and the latter tinged the milk grey; also some doctors rejected it as lacking in any nutritive qualities. Despite the introduction of the bottle, as late as the 1920s pasteurised milk was still being delivered in the usual manner dipped from a churn into jugs provided by the housewife. Bottling milk helped to prevent adulteration by the roundsmen, but the supply of bottles, their cleaning, sterilisation and capping were expensive extras for the dairy. The most serious problem, however, was tuberculosis in the dairy herd: of 750 samples of milk taken by health inspectors at London railway stations in 1913, a tenth were found to contain active tubercle bacilli and it was discovered that the infection was rampant in those dairy herds that provided winter milk. This did not cause panic, however, as it was believed that bovine tuberculosis could not be transmitted to human beings.14
Reasons for the Decline of British Cooking
Britain in the nineteenth century was an aggressively, socially mobile society, and people in fierce competition to gain a place on the next rung of the ladder formed rigid rules and regulations as a method of selection. These rules were comprehensive, covering the whole lifestyle, and any infringement in the codes of dress, deportment, language, family and the rituals of entertaining and offering food, ensured an obstacle to social improvement possibly for a lifetime. To court social disapproval was to become a pariah which few were brave enough to contemplate. There was a real fear of difference and a strong need within every class for sameness amongst its members, all, of course, aping the class above. Hence there was a mass movement towards the bland and the nondescript which food reflected. The appearance of the food was more important than the flavour and to achieve the right look, flavour was either secondary or entirely ignored.
A part of this was a delight in mock recipes: the most famous was Mock Turtle Soup made from a calf ’s head, which bore no relation to the flavour of real turtle soup which had a greenish hue and was, as Mrs Beeton puts it, the most expensive soup to be brought to the table. She advises that a tin of turtle flesh which contains the green fat would be more economical than buying a live turtle. Mock turtle cost 3s 6d a quart while the real thing cost a guinea. There were many other recipes which were a kitsch version of something else: mock crab was made from coarsely grated Leicester or Cheshire cheese mixed with chicken, tossed in mustard and salad oil and piled up in a crab shell.15 A boiled salad, made from potato, celery, brussel sprouts and beetroot, with a superhuman effort of the imagination pretended to be a lobster salad.16 None of these three dishes added any fishy essence so that it might taste like produce from the sea; taste was of no concern for the dishes were aping their superiors as were the diners themselves.
It is the unsophisticated, untroubled by the anxieties of social climbing, who can often see through the facades of their age, like this streetseller who told Henry Mayhew: ‘I don’t know nothing of the difference between the real thing and the mock, but I once had some cheap mock in an eating house, and it tasted like stewed tripe with a little glue.’
There was a belief that raw or undercooked food was bad for you, since it harboured germs, and so everything had to be thoroughly cooked and boiled. Medical opinion was divided on this, but whatever the experts said on the subject the public were suspicious of raw vegetables. Mrs Beeton fostered this opinion: ‘As vegetables eaten in a raw state are apt to ferment on the stomach, and as they have very little stimulative power upon that organ, they are usually dressed with some condiments, such as pepper, vinegar, salt, mustard, and oil. Respecting the use of these, medical men disagree, especially in reference to oil, which is condemned by some and recommended by others.’ She gives two pages to salads out of 1,112 and begs the cook to ask her employer on the use of such vegetables as the spring onion and the radish. The Victorians loved both because they were decorative, but the fear of them upon the breath, or what they might do to the digestion would have induced women to have avoided them. Imagine those platters and bowls of uneaten salad going back downstairs to the kitchens where the footmen could then chew on onions and radish to their hearts’ delight spending the rest of the night and day burping with pleasure.
The Victorian middle class was nervous of pleasure, not in feeling it, but in showing it: any outward exhibition of pleasure should be controlled, so a sensual appreciation of food, any rolling around the mouth of an oyster for example, would be deeply shocking; it would in fact be vulgar and reminiscent of the working class. So anything that gave any possible potential pleasure was viewed with suspicion, as being an instigator towards the road to ruin and social downfall. Food must be eaten with a show of decorum; if hungry, one should never show it; meats should be sliced small and thinly; one should eat slowly, masticating thoroughly. A mouth bulging with food was disgusting and to speak while the mouth was full, well, again only the working class male behaved so. A social dinner party was viewed as a minefield where the civilised veneer could crack to show the Darwinian beast beneath. There was nervousness as to what food could do to one. (Though the subject of this book does not cover drink, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the Temperance movement grew in power in this century.) Food should be tamed to make it powerless, and the only effective way of doing that was to make it uninteresting and unattractive.
The Victorian era used food as a moral weapon to condition the young. Various writers throughout the century wrote books on child-rearing, which were eagerly bought by a middle class anxious over matters of moral guidance. Dr Pye Henry Chavasse was one of the most authoritative and best-selling of these authors: ‘His tone appears to owe more to a vengeful deity’17 than anything else. His view on desserts and cakes was extreme:
I consider them so much slow poison. Such things cloy and weaken the stomach and thereby take away the appetite and thus debilitate the frame. If the child is never allowed to eat such things, he will consider dry bread a luxury.18
Notice the child is ‘he’. New emphasis was given to the doctrine of original sin by the revival of Protestantism and the growth of non-conformist religions, hence children were viewed in a new and darker light. These tots were bundles of original sin which had to be disciplined and purged from it. It was considered that food was a strong persuader. This attitude continued until well into the next century. For example in W.B. Drummond’s The Child: his Nature and Nurture (1901), the author thought tasty titbits should not be allowed in a child’s diet, ‘if for no other reason than they are apt to make the children discontented with the plain and wholesome food with which they are perfectly satisfied so long as they have never had anything else’.
The modern Irish novelist Molly Keane, writing about her first four years, came to the realisation that ‘nursery food was so disgusting that greed, even hunger, must be allayed elsewhere’.19 Ruth Lowinsky in 1931, looking back on her childhood, wrote: ‘When we were children it was considered good for our souls as well as our bodies to be continually fed on any food we disliked.’ The Victorians felt certain that they were highly civilised; anything untouched by civilisation made them nervous and not a little frightened. Darwin’s theory of evolution with its suggestion that the primate was a distant cousin seemed at first horrific and blasphemous. Children too could be untamed and unruly, not unlike that primate at times, and so they were punished severely, beaten and starved, to crush the devil within.
‘Aunt Marjorie was always alert for greed in the young,’ Molly Keane continued, ‘a vice that was a depravity to be commented on and corrected whenever evident … for years I had a sensation of shame as well as guilt about second helpings; a deep rooted sense that the enjoyment of food was unattractive, something to conceal.’ Nursery food was plain and monotonous. The day began with bread and milk or porridge for breakfast; mutton and vegetables were considered suitable for dinner.’ Lady Sybil Lubbock, in her book From Kitchen to Garret about her childhood in the 1880s, was still eating a nursery luncheon of boiled or roast mutton, mashed potatoes, greens and rice pudding; there was also steaming potato water for chilblains.20 These meals were often made unpalatable by careless cooking or by resentful and angry relationships between the nurse and the cook. Nursery quarters behind baize doors and at the top of the house cut children off from the rest of the family and were unpopular with staff, for bowls of hot water had to be carried upstairs as well as trays of food, which tended to be furnished with left-overs from downstairs with concessions to juvenile taste or stature. The formidable lines of Dr Watts against lying might also serve as a warning against food:
Then let me always watch my lips,
Lest I be struck to death and Hell,
Since God a book of reck’ning keeps,
For every lie that children tell.
Ursula Wyndham in Astride the Wall recalls:
greasy mutton, overcooked vegetables wallowing in the water they had been cooked in, burnt rice puddings … This prison fare was the unsupervised production of the kitchen maid, whose more important task was to assist the cook in preparing many courses for the dining room twice a day.21
Mrs Leyel comments in 1925: ‘The repugnance of many English children for green vegetables is explained by the dishes of stringy, watery, tasteless, tough green leaves that are sent up for nursery dinner, a relic of the Victorian days when grown-up people ate far too much meat, and when butter was regarded as a superfluous luxury for children brought up almost exclusively on starch.’22
Gwen Raverat, writing in the 1950s about her late Victorian childhood, asks: ‘Surely our feeding was unnecessarily austere?’ They began the day with porridge without sugar or salt, with toast and butter; if they had jam there was no butter, for they could not have both. For tea there was only bread and butter again, no cakes, unless they had visitors when there would be sponge cake, which the children nibbled the ends off.23
Nor did children’s food improve when they went away to board at public school, if anything it got worse. Harold Acton recalls the food at Lawnwood Crammar as blotched oily margarine, hairy brawn and knobbly porridge smuggled into his handkerchief and thrown down the lavatory.24
Gwen Raverat was puzzled that her loving parents were so severe; it was difficult if not impossible to understand how those who love you could plunge vulnerable growing lives into such regimented days erased of all pleasures. Yet those parents in their defence would have said it was all done with love, though such regimes allowed those with a sadistic cast of nature to give full reign to it. The zeitgeist of the age demanded such severity, but why should it? Why should it have inflicted upon children such a regimen of disgustingly unpalatable food, bequeathing them with a diffidence for food throughout their lives which in turn affected their children; it was only after the Second World War that as a nation we managed to emerge from this baleful inheritance.
At the heart of Victorian society there was guilt. The wave of affluence, which brought the middle classes into prominence with an excess of capital to be spent on opulent household furnishings and on palatial municipal constructions, also intensified the guilt they felt about being surrounded by poverty and pauperism. Victorian religion was a sadistic one: it encouraged men to flay their souls and spirits with arduous tasks and penances; eating plain food was but one of them and inflicting it upon your children became a religious duty.
The reasons for the decline of British cooking were, firstly, the Enclosures Acts which removed the constant stimulus that peasant cooking gives to any nation’s cuisine; our roots were cut away. Secondly, Victorian society praised French cooking and belittled the traditional British cuisine, so that no distinguished cook was encouraged to develop it and lead the way. Thirdly, as the first industrial society we became to a great extent urbanised, which created new and acceptable practices not conducive to good food. Fourthly, the architecture of the suburban villa and the hierarchy of servant labour drove a wedge between kitchen and dining room, turning cooking into a mercenary duty. In addition to which there was a dearth of experienced cooks. With the huge expansion of the middle classes needing more and more kitchen staff; illiterate and untrained women were employed as cooks who could only muddle through, presenting their employers with overcooked, tasteless meals, which they learnt to accept rather than lose their staff. Fifthly. the advent of technology in canning, packaging, freezing and retailing was enthusiastically and uncritically embraced in the kitchen, bringing standardised tastes and textures. Sixth, a fear of the untamed, the raw, the hearty and the vulgar caused dishes to be bland and overrefined with their emphasis upon appearance rather than flavour. Seventh, religious zeal made bad cooking acceptable and insensitivity over food praiseworthy. Eighth, and this factor was to continue with even greater disaster into the twentieth century – war. Wars caused naval blockades and the halt of food supplies from distant countries, severely limiting the diversity of ingredients on which British cooking had traditionally relied. The Crimean War (1853-1856) and then the Boer War (1899-1902), though both only of three years’ duration, halted supplies. Lastly, in the seventeenth century, we had lost a royal court that thought of food as a developing aesthetic form. Our monarchy thereafter followed bourgeois practice; it was the bourgeoisie that took over the role of food guardians and in the eighteenth century fulfilled the role admirably. It was totally unaware of the role it played, however, so tragically threw it away; instead, it pursued a French culinary chimera, which they often felt inadequate to create.
By the end of the nineteenth century, all these factors had combined to wreak their havoc upon the British kitchen, without the British people being quite aware of what had happened. They remained smug, defensive and not a little arrogant on the British food they offered to guests from other nations, they found criticism of their food hard to accept. For the process of its decline had occurred at their finest hour, so how could the sustenance of Empire builders be in any way inadequate?