Dining with the Victorians: A Delicious History

217 Pages·2015·3.49 MB·English

by  Emma Kay

First published 2015
Amberley Publishing
The Hill, Stroud
Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP
www.amberley-books.com
Copyright © Emma Kay, 2015
The right of Emma Kay to be identified as the Author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 9781445646541 (PRINT)
ISBN 9781445646558 (eBOOK) All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without the permission in writing from the Publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing
Printed in the UK.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1 - Regency to Regina
2 - The Poor, Philanthropy and Plenitude
3 - Childhood and the Victorian Family
4 - High Days and Holidays
5 - Culinary Culture
6 - Training the Masses
7 - Public Dining (and Everything In Between)
8 - Population and Empire
9 - Empire to Emancipation
Picture Section
Notes
Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly I would like to say a big thank you to Antony Worrall Thompson and
Simon Jenkins, two very talented men in the field of culinary excellence, who
were gracious enough to endorse my last book. I consider myself very lucky that
the wonderful Amberley Publishing invited me to write a second book,
following on from Dining with the Georgians. To be honest I didn’t think I had it
in me, having a three-year-old still at home almost full-time and embarking on a
big house move. But somehow despite all the odds I achieved it. Writing about
cooking and food in the eighteenth century was challenging in terms of the
resources available and I believe I unearthed a great deal of new research in this
area.
When writing about Victorian history there is an abundance of information
out there, almost too much, which made this book challenging in other ways.
I took heed of readers’ suggestions following my first book, one of which
was the desire for more recipes, so I have attempted to include a few interesting
ones to accompany the themes of each chapter. As before, my amazing husband,
who I am so thankful for, has created some wonderful images using my private
collection of kitchenalia and I hope to be out and about in the next year
promoting both my independent museum and my books that have been the
inspiration from it.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death and she has
frequently been on my mind throughout the writing of this book. Not only did
she manage to bring up three children, paint amazing works of art and
photograph for leading magazines, all from home, but she also managed to
produce the most incredible food, the memory of which continues to inspire
some of my own dishes.
There remains in this country a strange underlying and unfounded criticism
of women who choose to stay at home to bring up their children, while also
working from home, but believe me it is the hardest thing in the world to do. I
salute all those women and men out there who do it and are not recognised for
their achievement.
PREFACE
I hope that the one thing both Dining with the Georgians and Dining with the
Victorians have achieved is to highlight some of the wonderfully talented men
and women who are, or were, working in the field of culinary arts in many
forms, who have been denied recognition. Both the past and the present have
influenced this book. It was important to me to draw attention to the fact that
actually very little has changed in our current British society. Just as back then,
we now have celebrity chefs, a mass consumerist market for literature on
cooking, endless expos and large scale food exhibitions, an obsession with
French and Continental cuisine and a retail industry flooded with new food
products and kitchenware designed to cook and prepare food. We also have an
abundance of choice where restaurants, tea shops, cafes, public houses and
independent artisan craftsmen are concerned. Britain is still even sharing the
same debates about health and diet – in schools and on our shelves. All of this
has been available to us for centuries, sometimes in different guises but always
with the same purpose: to provide the public with good food. Food that is both
high-end and affordable, food that inspires and food that delights. Long may it
continue to do so.
INTRODUCTION
The pleasure of eating is one familiar to us all. What, how and why we consume
what we do in Britain today has largely been shaped by our history, a fact that
we all take for granted. My last book, Dining with the Georgians, explored the
way Britain as a nation ate, drank, cooked and dined at a time when the country
was ripe for change, innovation and a broadening of cultural avant-garde. Dining
with the Victorians considers the next stage of this culinary transformation in the
context of class, society and the overall modernisation of Britain.
The golden age of the European Enlightenment transformed Britain’s
cultural and intellectual outlook. The Victorians were the first to truly implement
these ideals of reason, rationality and individualism through industrial evolution
and philanthropic social empathy. This is perhaps best illustrated by the great
visionaries, artists and writers of the time. While the Brontë sisters and George
Eliot provided both a romantic and realistic insight into the minds of
contemporary female consciousness, Dickens exposed the underbelly of urban
society, while Thomas Hardy revealed the harshness of Britain’s declining rural
communities, all while Oscar Wilde playfully exposed the more ridiculous
nature of British aristocracy. Scientists such as Darwin changed the very fabric
of human understanding, while William Morris legitimised the notions of a
social utopia from a middle-class perspective. He, like the Pre-Raphaelite artists
and poets of the age, reclaimed old English folklore, myths and legends and in
many ways transformed Britain’s aesthetic approach to design and architectural
style. This was an age rich in transformation across every discipline of life.
From an everyday perspective following the famines and crop failures of
the mid-nineteenth century, England’s commercial and industrial progress
changed the country forever. People flocked to the towns and cities, generating
extreme overcrowding and public health systems on the threshold of crisis, with
the wage of an urban labourer significantly higher than that of his rural
neighbour. There were radical changes for the countryside as well. The
chemistry of agriculture determined revolutionary new information in relation to
how plants behaved in different types of soils, providing the necessary means
with which to balance these differences. As a consequence, Britain’s agricultural
productivity improved considerably by the 1870s. Somewhat ironically though,
free trade and the increasing reliability on cheaper imports from abroad
eventually made the country’s crop-growing and animal-rearing responsibilities
less demanding.
Alongside cheaper imports Britain also adopted new ways of storing
foodstuffs, such as drying, preserving and canning.
Robert Roberts lived as a child in turn-of-the-century Salford. A typical
industrial city composed of individual communities, or ‘villages’, with their own
different standards and social stratas. Roberts described the food situation in the
city slums as basic. By 1904 luxury goods were still only available at middle-
class grocery stores. Luxury foods afforded by the working classes were
purchased solely for the benefit of the male head of the household, who needed
protein-rich foods to work in physically demanding environments. These would
be bought from corner shops and consisted of items such as corned beef, boiled
mutton, cheese, bacon, eggs, saveloys, tripe, pig’s trotters, sausage, cow heels,
herrings, bloaters and kippers. Often ‘parings’, or a handful of tripe bits,
provided a substitute to any of these items in times of financial difficulty.
Similarly a dish called ‘brewis’ consisting of a strip of bread, covered in dripping
and mixed up in boiling water made an excellent substitute meal for the
labouring poor. Everything was cooked in a frying pan, which only added to the
unhealthy nature of their diets. Roberts explained that the very poor never got
into debt, as no one allowed them credit, so no money simply equated to no
food.
Robert’s ‘village’ neighbourhood consisted of a network of around thirty
streets and alleyways, within which some 3,000 people resided. To the west of
this district lived the middle classes, as Roberts emphasises, ‘We knew them
not.’ This area, as many typically were at the time, was dominated by food and
drink related businesses, including fifteen beerhouses, a hotel (which would have
housed a cafe, grill or restaurant of some kind), two off-licences, nine grocery
stores, three greengrocers, two tripe shops, two cook shops, one fish-and-chop
shop and an array of colourful street-food hawkers.1
Much of the food that was bought and eaten by the poor and not so poor,
including Robert’s own family, was heavily adulterated. Bread contained alum,
beer contained copperas (a poisonous, often fatal copper sulphate), capsicum
was added to mustard, oatmeal was mixed with less superior barley-meal and
even general refuse, and milk was frequently diluted with filthy water.
It was the German chemist Friedrich Accum who would alert the people of
the world about the dangers of adulterating food. Accum was really a pioneer of
the Georgian age, but his research would have the most profound impact on
Victorian society. Living and working in Britain in the early part of the
nineteenth century, Accum published the highly controversial and contentious A
Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons in 1820. He exposed the
individual businesses who were adding other substances to their products to
make them cheaper to produce. Almost every town bakery was using alum and
the breweries were adding all number of chemicals to enhance wine and beer.
Even cheesemakers came under scrutiny for using red lead to give
Gloucestershire cheese its trademark colour, while cream was thickened with
arrowroot and flour. Unsurprisingly, Accum became a wanted man. He had
interfered with the big corporations and blatantly made allegations against
tradesmen and manufacturers across the country. It is understood Accum was
subsequently framed for a petty crime that he did not commit and, fearing the
worst, fled England for his native Germany. By 1850 the Lancet had picked up
where Accum had started his campaign and once again those accused of
adulterating their products were exposed in a series of new revealing
publications.
The satirical periodical, Punch picked the story up in 1851 writing:
Our contemporary the Lancet has conferred a great boon on the public
by establishing a new order of constabulary, which may be called the
Scientific Detective Police. The function of these detectives is to
investigate and expose the fraudulent adulteration of articles of food
practised by a set of scoundrels under the names of grocers and other
tradesmen. In his researches into this rascality, the Lancet’s policeman
is assisted by a microscope, which, in throwing light on the fraud in
question, exerts a power far superior to that of the common bull’s eye.
By the help of this instrument, an immense quantity of villainous stuff
has been discovered in coffee, arrowroot, and other substances sold for
nutriment, and some of them, ‘particularly recommended to invalids’.
The Lancet seconds the exertions of its intelligent officer by
spiritedly publishing the addresses of the rogues at whose swindling
establishments the samples of rubbish were purchased. If any of the
knaves thus pilloried in the Lancet, abetted by a disreputable attorney
and a dishonest barrister, endeavour to avenge themselves through the
technicalities of the law, Punch hopes they will meet with twelve true
men in the jury-box who will scout both them and their legal
accomplices out of court’.2
Punch’s early consumer support is refreshing during an age where profit-making
nearly always out-rivalled the underdog. As Friedrich Accum died in 1838, he
would sadly not have witnessed the contribution his early valiant and
enlightening research eventually made ensuring that proper regulations