A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (10 page)

Sunday – Apple tart and tea (no meat as a rule, partly to leave the mother leisure for church, etc.)

Monday – Soup, meat and potatoes; half pound of boiling meat.

Tuesday – Stewed meat and vegetables and potatoes; three-quarters lb. stewing meat.

Wednesday – Soup made with bone, and remainder of apple tart left from Sunday.

Thursday – Collops, vegetables and potatoes; three-quarters lb. stewing meat.

Friday – Soup and semolina pudding.

Saturday – Stewing meat and potatoes; three-quarters lb. meat.
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He added that ‘Children get no butcher’s meat; they get the sauce and potatoes, and a piece of bread after, and mother and I have always a cup of coffee after dinner.’ Their weekly outlay on food was thirty-seven shillings. Though they were able to eat healthily, the amounts they consumed were probably less than a modern nutrition expert would prescribe.

This family was fortunate in having a garden to grow vegetables. Millions of others among the poor and moderately well off could do the same, and therefore ensure a supply of
essential vitamins. The absence of ‘quality control’ for foodstuffs during the early part of the reign in many cases meant that adulteration was commonplace. Any commodity could be made more profitable for those selling it by making it go further. Milk was therefore watered down as a matter of course. It would also sell more readily if it looked attractive, so it was whitened by adding chalk. This was at least preferable to the traditional means of whitening bread – which was done with ground bones – though alum and even plaster of Paris were also used. Coffee was adulterated with acorns, sugar with sand, pepper with pea-flour, cocoa with brick-dust. The froth on beer might be the result of adding green vitriol. Tea, whether China or India, was one of the things most commonly interfered with. The former, which was green, was often counterfeited by using thorn leaves treated with verdigris. For the latter, which was dark in colour, black lead could be used. It was in any case possible to ‘recycle’ tea by obtaining used leaves – or floor sweepings – from commercial premises and repackaging them. The results of adulteration could be unpleasant at best and lethal at worst.

The public was aware of these abuses, some of which were caused by the fact that a commodity – such as tea – might simply be too expensive in its original form, and that substitutes brought it within reach of millions who would not otherwise have been able to afford the genuine article. Nevertheless, efforts were made to address the issue. A publication by a German chemist in 1820 had drawn public attention to the worst abuses. In 1850 an Analytical and Sanitary Commission was set up, and over the next three years its findings were also published. Parliament eventually brought in legislation, with the Food and Drugs Act 1860, extended twelve years later. Though the quality of foodstuffs therefore gradually improved, there was no adequate means of checking the
goods sold by thousands of street vendors, and abuses continued throughout the century.

By the time the railway had become an established part of life, its implications for feeding the population had already become obvious. It was possible, for instance, to send fish inland from coastal ports within a matter of hours (fish could be frozen aboard the trawlers that caught it), thus providing a new source of relatively cheap protein to people throughout the country, not least through the proliferation of fish and chip shops. Even more importantly, the railway could carry vastly more food than the lumbering wagons that had preceded it, and this in itself helped to bring down the price of many things. Livestock had always been herded to the towns by drovers and slaughtered in the shambles once it arrived. Now it could be killed at home and sent as prepared carcasses even from the farthest-flung regions. Milk was one commodity that was not easily transportable, for it could not be kept fresh even on short journeys, and it was not until the sixties that the development of a mechanical cooler, and of metal churns, solved this difficulty.

From the seventies – a decade when bad harvests were ruining agriculture in Britain – grain imported from the United States and Canada was a godsend. These territories had experienced their own railway revolution, enabling the vast granaries of the western prairies to send their produce eastward to Atlantic ports for shipment. Australia was to join these suppliers by the end of the century. The availability of this grain effectively meant that, for the first time in history, Britain was free from the danger of famine. Although the population was increasing alarmingly, the availability of food kept pace and shortages could be avoided.

The other part of this process concerned the shipping of meat, and this was an even greater breakthrough. The preservation of food, first in sealed glass jars and then in metal cans, had been achieved by the second decade of the century, though food packed in this way was initially too expensive to command wide sales. Gradually a canned-meat industry developed (from 1868 cans were made by machine and not by hand, enabling huge ‘canneries’ to operate) and the cost fell, but because manufacturers came only slowly to understand how the canning process killed bacteria, the contents of tins were often rancid when they were opened. Not only meat but fruit and vegetables were preserved and shipped in these containers, but there might be hidden dangers: it is thought that members of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition were poisoned by the lead used to seal their canned supplies. Canned meat initially came from Australia, and was so unappetizing that only its cheapness made it acceptable. By the seventies, when America began seriously to compete in supplying Britain, the killing of bacteria had been perfected and canned food was part of everyday life – though no one could pretend that it tasted like the fresh variety. Tinned mutton was derisively known as ‘Fanny Adams’ in reference to a young woman murdered – and chopped up – by her lover in 1867.

Even this was not the end of developments, however. In 1877, for the first time, a cargo of frozen meat was brought to England from Australia, three months after a similar cargo had crossed the Atlantic from Argentina to France. Shortly afterwards, New Zealand lamb also arrived by sea. By that time the ice machine was already known throughout the world, and there were ice-making factories. The use of refrigeration on ships was a new venture, and one that was successful from the beginning. Though the transport of carcasses from the Antipodes represented a tremendous achievement, it was more
expensive than American meat, which therefore gained a greater share of the market. Fruit and vegetables could come by the same means, and for the first time pineapples and bananas could be bought cheaply, when earlier only hothouse specimens would have been available. Steadily, gradually, more and better food was becoming available to a greater number of people.

New kitchen equipment also made a noticeable difference. Stoves had begun to replace the open fireplace with its range of spits. A British diplomat, Benjamin Rumford, used his observations of artillery – which grew hot after sustained firing – to formulate a theory of heat conservation that enabled him, in 1795, to design a stove for cooking. Over sixty years later stoves, or ‘ranges’, were cheap enough to be widely available to householders, and to become an essential part of kitchen equipment. In the eighties gas cookers began to be used, and in the following decade the electric version arrived, though its use was extremely limited until the next century.

By this time yet another revolution had taken place. The rising middle class was interested in food because of the social rituals that surrounded it. The giving of dinners was not simply a matter of impressing one’s neighbours with the skill of the cook – who was often hired only for the occasion – but of showing off the sophistication of one’s kitchen and dining-room and one’s knowledge of correct form. Since, as always, many members of this class were unsure about such matters, there was an opportunity for qualified authors to assist them. The result was the bestselling cookery books that not only told readers what to offer their families and their guests, but also gave information about how to entertain. Two of the best-known appeared in quick succession. One of them,
Modern Cookery for Private Families
(1845) by Eliza Acton, made a household name out of a lady whose original desire had been to be published as a poet.
The Modern Cook
by Charles Francatelli (1846) commanded
respect because the author was employed by Queen Victoria (though he was dismissed for hitting one of the maids!). The third seminal work on the subject of middle-class entertaining – and the one that eclipsed all others – was Mrs Isabella Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
, published in 1861. This, as its title suggests, was not simply a cookbook (Mrs Beeton championed simple English cooking rather than French) but a veritable bible for housewives, including as it did a great deal of information on the mechanics and finances of running a home. She listed, for instance, thirty-seven ‘articles required for the kitchen of a family in the middle class of life’, including one pair of brass candlesticks, one cinder-shifter, one bread-grater and six spoons. She tells readers where to buy them (Messrs Richard & John Slack, 336, Strand) and exactly how much it should all cost: £8 11s 1d. She also informed her audience of what meat, fish, fruit and vegetables were in season during every month: in January, dace, eels, flounders and lampreys were among the fish that could be offered to guests, while in February ‘cod may be bought, but it is not so good as in January’. She warned that ‘in very cold weather, meat and vegetables touched by the frost should be brought into the kitchen early in the morning and soaked in cold water.’ Armed with such a wealth of detailed advice, what young wife could go wrong? Not all of her advice would seem to us sound, or necessary. She cautions, for instance, that ices, a standard finale to a dinner, should not – because their coldness may be a shock to the system after several hot courses – be eaten by elderly people, children (!) or those of delicate constitution.

One book of this type that was
not
aimed at a bourgeois audience came from an unusual source. Alexis Soyer, a Frenchman (which automatically conferred gravitas on anyone in the world of cookery), was head chef at the Reform Club. He had shown a compassionate nature by opening soup kitchens for
the London poor, and ran similar facilities for soldiers in the Crimea, using a field kitchen of his own design. In 1855 he published a book of sensible and nutritious recipes,
A Shilling Cookery for the People
. It offered no touch of clubland – or indeed French – glamour, for both ingredients and recipes were basic and somewhat lacklustre, but it provided a sound basis for healthy eating on a small budget. It sold almost a quarter of a million copies.

The propertied classes did not stint themselves when it came to eating. It would give a modern reader indigestion just to examine some of their menus. A typical breakfast might involve bacon and scrambled eggs, chops, kedgeree, snipe and woodcock, often devoured in such quantities that one wonders how they could even get up from the table. Domestic staff in a grand house might have much the same breakfast in the servants’ hall, and at least one account describes how the footmen, having consumed a massive repast, were in the habit of filling the pockets of their livery coats with boiled eggs – to see them through to luncheon.

The result of such consistent indulgence was, unsurprisingly, a great deal of illness and early death; many otherwise healthy young men did not survive even into their mid-forties because of a diet that was too rich and too extensive. Both ladies and gentlemen wore such tight-fitting clothes that the effects were exacerbated. Their unhealthy eating habits explain the immense and enduring popularity among Victorians of health spas and all manner of ‘cures’, for it is ironic that a people so given to sport and exercise should also have suffered from such excesses.

Dinners in mid-Victorian households had traditionally been served in the French style, which meant that the components of the meal were all placed on the table together, cluttering its surface with tureens and serving-dishes. Meat was carved by the host at the table, and the plates passed to his guests. Gradually,
this habit was replaced by what was known as
à la russe
dining, in which the dishes were all prepared on a sideboard and then handed to guests by the servants. This meant that the table itself was given over to ornamentation: silver set-piece ornaments, complex flower arrangements, elaborate place-settings with folded napkins and desserts on stands that were admired by the guests before being demolished.

Menus were commonly in French. A sample one, from a dinner at a wealthy private house in London, gives some indication of how many courses there were and what they comprised:

87 Eaton Place, Diner, du 30 mars, 1878

Potages

Consommé à la Doria

Crème d’Asperges Faubonne

Poissons

Suprème de Saumon Richelieu

Turbot sauce Crevette

Entrées

Cotelettes Hasseur aux Pointes

Mousselines à la Princesse

Relèves

Quartier d’Agneau sauce Menthe

Jambon à la Gelée et Mirabelles

Salade assortie

Punch au thé

Rôts

Ramier de Bordeaux

Asperges d’Argenteuil sauce Maltaise

Entremets

St. Honore aux Pistachio

Abricots à l’Almedorine

Corbeilles de Glaces
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The accompanying of each course with an appropriate wine was an important part of the ritual. A contemporary book described the rules governing this:

Sherry is always drunk after soup, hock either with oysters before the soup or with fish after the soup, and Chablis sometimes takes the place of hock. Champagne is drunk immediately after the first entrée has been served, and so during the remainder of dinner until dessert. Claret, sherry, port, and Madeira are the wines drunk at dessert.
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