A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (11 page)

These rigid conventions were eminently risible. Thackeray, in his
Book of Snobs
, pokes gentle fun at them:

Everybody has the same dinner in London, and the same soup, saddle of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue, entrees, champagne, and so forth. I own myself to being no better than my neighbours in this respect, and rush off to the pastrycook’s for sweets, &c.; hire sham butlers and attendants, have a fellow going round the table with still and dry champagne, as if I knew his name, and it was my custom to drink those wines every day of my life. I am as bad as my neighbours; but why are we so bad, I ask? – why are we not more reasonable?

If we receive great men or ladies at our houses, I will lay a wager that they will select mutton and gooseberry tart for their dinner; forsaking the entrees which the men in Berlin white gloves are handing round on the Birmingham plated dishes. Asking lords and ladies who have great establishments of their own, to French dinners and delicacies, is like inviting a grocer to a meal of figs, or a pastrycook to a banquet of raspberry tarts. They have had enough of them. And great folks, if they can, take no count of your feasts, and grand preparations, and can but eat mutton like men.
⁵

Something very familiar to us appeared at Victorian tables, and that was curry. The British connection with India dated back more than two hundred years to the founding of the East India Company, and many thousands of families had members or acquaintances who had been to the sub-continent. They brought back with them some of the eating habits they had acquired, and one was the use of spicy powder to sharpen the taste of meat or vegetables. As with so many imported foods (‘chop suey’ is another example), the ‘curry’ consumed in Britain would not have been recognized in its place of origin. The term itself is thought to have been a corruption of the Tamil word
karbi
, meaning sauce, and it came to be a general term for any Indian food that was prepared with sauces. Curry powder – a blending of more or less whatever spices were available in an Indian kitchen – was a British invention, and is likely to have horrified Indian cooks. Curries had been an accepted part of the national diet in the eighteenth century, and by the 1860s commercially produced powder, as well as curry paste, was widely available in the shops. A New York chef described how the powder should be made:

One ounce of coriander seeds, two ounces of cayenne, a quarter ounce of cardoman seeds, one ounce salt, two ounces of turmeric, one ounce ginger, half an ounce of mace and a third of an ounce of saffron.
⁶

And Mrs Beeton advised on how to prepare the dish:

Put all the ingredients in a cool oven, where they should remain one night; then pound them in a mortar, rub them through a sieve, and mix thoroughly together; keep the powder in a bottle, from which the air should be completely excluded.
⁷

Another cookbook then recommended:

Two tablespoons of meat curry paste, a tablespoon of curry powder, and as much flour as may be required to thicken the quantity of sauce needed.
⁸

A similar national institution was chutney. This means of preserving fruit or vegetables by a form of pickling (the difference was that in chutney the ingredients were pounded rather than left in large pieces, and that sweet ingredients were included) was actually used by Indians, although the British took it home and made it their own. Once again, British firms quickly produced a range of these products (and at least one such Victorian firm, Sharwood’s, is still in business), which became a familiar sight on the shelves of grocers.

Many other products also became familiar, for with developments in printing the possibilities for producing, at small cost, colourful and elaborate packaging greatly increased. Whether on paper bags, cardboard packets or tins, eye-catching slogans, detailed pictures (showing the product itself or some other image) and striking lettering began to command the attention
of shoppers. Some products – such as Lea and Perrin’s Sauce or Lyle’s Golden Syrup – have kept their Victorian labelling to this day. Many items that we still consume had their origins in the Victorian era, as did some of the places from which we buy them (Sainsbury’s, for instance, began trading in 1869). A glance at any picture of a nineteenth-century streetscape will show, through a wealth of placards and posters on walls and on the sides of buses, the power of advertising and the extent to which products were thrust into public awareness: Fry’s Chocolate, Keen’s Mustard, Keiller’s Dundee Marmalade, Bovril and Oxo. The era of mass advertising, as well as the world of standardized food products in which we ourselves unquestionably live, began with the Victorians.

‘Convenience food’ was as much a characteristic of Victorian times as of our own. There were both sit-down dining-rooms in which quick meals could be consumed, and kerbside stalls at which refreshment could be taken standing. These were hugely popular, not just because they were fast and cheap but because for many thousands of the poor there was no alternative way to eat.

A great proportion of the urban poor had no cooking facilities, and in the cramped, highly inflammable buildings in which they lived the risk of accident would outweigh the benefits of lighting a cooking fire. Vegetables could be had cheaply, but could not easily be prepared. Thus people bought hot or cold food in the streets or bought ingredients and paid someone else to prepare them. Because whole generations had grown up in this way, there were numerous families in which not even the mother possessed basic cooking skills.

To serve the needs of this vast group of customers, there were thousands of street vendors selling both food and drink, luxuries and necessities. The men and women who dealt in comestibles might walk through a city, selling as they went, or set up a stall, a barrow or a pitch at some strategic place and wait for custom. Sellers of fruit or watercress (the latter were usually little girls) would need only a tray or a basket, while those who sold pies, gingerbread, chestnuts or potatoes would have to carry not only the viands themselves but the means – usually a charcoal oven – of preparing them. There was a hierarchy among street-traders, and those who merely carried a basket were at the bottom of it. The owners of stalls and complex equipment, who might be helped by family members or even paid assistants, were at the top. Some of these tradesmen had followed their specialist calling for a considerable time; Charles Spurgeon photographed in 1884 a ‘champion pie-maker’ whose sign claimed that he had been in business for ‘upwards of 50 years’. Henry Mayhew, who made a study of these itinerant vendors in the London streets of the 1850s, described how:

Men and women, and most especially boys, purchase their meals day after day in the streets. The coffee-stall supplies a warm breakfast; shell-fish of many kinds tempt to a luncheon; hot eels or pea soup, flanked by a potato ‘all hot’, serve for a dinner; and cakes and tarts, or nuts and oranges, with many varieties of pastry, confectionery, and fruit, woo to indulgence in a dessert; while for supper there is a sandwich, a meat pudding or a ‘trotter’.
⁹

Coffee stalls were everywhere. Mayhew estimated that the capital contained over three hundred in the forties, and in the following decade he made the calculation that they sold about
550,000 gallons a year – far more than stalls that sold chocolate or tea. Both coffee and tea stalls remained open all day. Some were not so much money-making ventures as attempts to reform social habits: the temperance movement sponsored a number of them to ensure that alternatives to strong drink were available. They were doing business at roadsides from early morning, for many people depended on them for sustenance on their way to work. The coffee, costing a halfpenny a cup, was made in large cans over a charcoal burner, and would be drunk on the spot from a china cup and saucer that would be returned and – it is to be hoped – rinsed before it was offered to the next customer. The drink itself might well be adulterated, containing more acorn or carrot than coffee beans. Piled on the stall would also be hard-boiled eggs, perhaps hot or cold bacon, rolls and bread and butter. The latter was a staple that Victorians seem to have appreciated more than we do, for it was always popular.

Another item that to us seems somewhat bland was the ham sandwich. There were stalls that dealt in nothing else, and Mayhew computed that almost half a million of them were sold in London every year. They were eaten for breakfast, but were also much in demand outside theatres in the evenings. These would not, of course, have been the thin and neatly triangular affairs that are found in supermarkets today, but made with thick ‘doorsteps’ of bread and with meat that would have been cut from joints in front of the customers.

Fish and chips is often considered to be the most traditional of British ‘convenience foods’, but it does not have a long pedigree. Strips or chunks of fried potato were introduced from the Low Countries (where they remain an emblematic national dish to this day), and it was a Belgian who first sold them from a street barrow, in the 1850s, at Dundee in Scotland. Initially they were served with peas, and it was only later that the notion of
combining them with fried fish was tried. Potatoes already had a place on the streets, though the trade in them dated only from the 1830s. Roast potatoes were sold in paper bags or twists of newspaper, baked ones could be bought individually for a halfpenny. Heated at a bakehouse, they were carried in, and sold from, metal cans, although as the trade developed it became more common to use portable ovens. Once ready, the potatoes were impaled on metal spikes attached to the top of the oven, where their aroma would tempt passers-by. After years of eclipse, the baked potato has re-emerged as a popular snack, though the Victorians did not, as we do, stuff them with assorted fillings. Saveloys, a type of spicy sausage still found in chip shops, were also warmed in these ovens and sold by dealers in potatoes.

Pies were the traditional British fast food, and numerous varieties could be bought both from stalls and from ‘pie-men’ who carried trays on their heads. Ham, beef, mutton, veal and eel pies cost about a penny. With no procedures for testing the authenticity of the contents, meat might well not be what it pretended to be, and it was widely suspected that dogs and cats ended up in some of them. Pies were also filled with whatever fruit was in season – apple, gooseberry, rhubarb, plum, cherry.

Oysters were such a staple of the nineteenth century poor that in Mayhew’s time they could be had for a penny a dozen. By the later years of Victoria’s reign they were more than a penny each, though still within reach of the poor. They were sold from barrels at stalls and eaten, standing up, from the shell. They were on sale from 25 July, the beginning of the oyster season, and this was celebrated by children, who sought to collect coppers from passing adults by holding out empty shells.

A number of other items were also sold from trays carried about the streets. The muffin man, who traditionally bore his wares on his head, and the signal of whose approach – the ringing of a handbell – was one of the most joyous sounds in a
Victorian childhood, continued in business until the Second World War. Cakes, pastries and puddings, such as bread pudding and ‘spotted dick’, were also sold in this manner.

Ice-cream was something of a latecomer to the streets. Although it was available by the time of the Great Exhibition, it became common only in the eighties, when portable freezing equipment was invented by Agnes Bertha Marshall, the principal of a London cookery school. The author of books on the subject of ice-cream, she made it with a mixture of cream, egg yolks and caster sugar. Placed in an aluminium and wooden drum, these ingredients were mixed and frozen by rotating a handle, a process that took about ten minutes. It was she who invented the cone in the late eighties. Prior to that, ice-cream had often been frozen onto metal rods that had to be returned after it had been licked off!

The streets were fairly flowing with drink, then as now. Gin was favoured as the cheapest narcotic, but beer was the universal thirst quencher and was highly useful, given that water was often unsafe to drink. Lemonade and ginger beer were the most popular in hot weather. Both were sold by vendors from barrels on a stall or from portable cans that were simply put down at a kerbside. Before there were such things as disposable cups, the customers drank on the spot and returned the glass.

Though the Victorians, as a whole, may have been less fastidious than we are regarding both hygiene and ingredients (Mrs Marshall, of ice-cream machine fame, called the items proffered by vendors ‘poisonous filth’), we can only conclude that the taste-buds of our nineteenth-century ancestors functioned differently from ours. Mrs Marshall herself included in a cookery book the recipe for a Parmesan ice flavoured with Leibig’s meat extract, and the peckish could find themselves tempted by frozen curries in cups of aspic.
¹⁰
Though we have much to learn from the Victorians, their eating habits are not worthy of our admiration.

In the nineteenth century Britain was able to enjoy the benefits of the Industrial Revolution on a grand scale. Despite an economy that often veered between boom and bust, this meant a steadily rising standard of living for the middle classes as well as a huge rise in their numbers. It also meant a vast increase in technology. Not only did domestic conveniences – such as piped water – make houses more comfortable, ornaments and furnishings became far more inexpensive and readily available. ‘Taste’ therefore became something that many millions could afford to exercise for the first time.

In the Georgian era, items such as wallpaper, carpets and furniture had been extremely costly, and beyond the reach of most. It had also been a matter of taste to devote attention to the outside of a house rather than the interiors in order to
make a good impression on others. Inside, even in the homes of the wealthy, decoration was simple and even severe. Since the Greeks and Romans, the inspiration for all things Classical, were perceived as having lived in sparse surroundings, this fashion was blessed by historical precedent. When Victoria came to the throne there was no sudden alteration in the way things were designed or laid out. Regency taste continued to dominate architecture and interiors for well over a decade after her accession.