Daily
Bread
8oz
6oz
6oz
Bread
8oz
6oz
6oz
Bread
8oz
6oz
6oz
Gruel
1pt
1pt
1pt
Porridge
1pt
Cocoa
1pt
1pt
1pt
Milk
½pt
Gruel
1pt
Cocoa
1pt
CLASS A
CLASS B
CLASS C
M
W and J
M
W and J
M
W and J
Dinner
Sun
Sun
Sun
Bread
8oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Porridge
1pt
1pt
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
12oz
8oz
Meat
4oz
3oz
Meat
5oz
4oz
Mon
Mon
Mon
Bread
8oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
12oz
8oz
Beans
10oz
8oz
Beans
12oz
10oz
Bacon
2oz
1oz
Bacon
2oz
2oz
Tue, Fri
Tue, Fri
Tue, Fri
Bread
8oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Porridge
1pt
1pt
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
12oz
8oz
Soup
1pt
1pt
Soup
1pt
1pt
Wed, Sat
Wed, Sat
Wed, Sat
Bread
8oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Suet Pud.
8oz
6oz
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
12oz
8oz
Suet Pud.
10oz
8oz
Suet Pud.
12oz
10oz
Thu
Thu
Thu
Bread
8oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Bread
6oz
6oz
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
8oz
8oz
Potatoes
12oz
8oz
Beef
4oz
3oz
Beef
5oz
4oz
The Sunday meat ration – served cold – was to be ‘Cooked meat, preserved by heat’, also known as Colonial beef because it originated in Australia or other British colonies. It was manufactured by encasing raw meat in a tin, then heating it gradually in a boiling solution of calcium chloride. Air and steam were allowed to escape by a small vent hole which was then sealed up to make it airtight. Thursday’s dinner-time beef could also be replaced by Colonial beef, mutton or – occasionally – fish, either 8oz of fresh fish or 12oz of salted fish. Potatoes could be substituted by other fresh vegetables or ‘sparingly’ by rice.
For ‘ill-conducted or idle’ prisoners, the punishment diet broadly continued existing practice, with a daily allowance of 1lb of bread, with water, for up to three days. Beyond this, the Class B diet was alternated with bread and water for three days at time. For those on hard labour, the punishment diet – for up to twenty-one days – comprised 8oz of bread at each meal, with an additional 8oz of potatoes and a pint of porridge at dinner time.
BEANS AND CUSTARD
As well as the food in local prisons, the 1898 review also examined convict dietaries, which had been largely unchanged since 1864, but were said by many of those giving evidence to be deficient in three main respects: the breakfast and supper were insufficient; a greater variety of food was desirable; and the amount of fat in the dietary was deficient. To address these complaints, the committee recommended a new convict dietary based on its proposed Class C local dietary, but with some alterations. The weekly bread allowance for male convicts on hard labour was increased from its former 168oz per week to 196oz per week, while that for those on light labour rose from 145oz to 168oz. The new hard labour diet included porridge instead of gruel for breakfast, plus a daily supplement of ½oz of butter in the autumn and winter, or ¼ pint of milk in the spring and summer. All convicts received an increase in their weekly allowance of potatoes and meat, and a more varied dinner menu, which now included bacon and beans.
Finally, a new hospital dietary for sick prisoners was introduced which, for the first time, was to be used at both convict and local prisons. The scheme, based on the existing convict hospital dietary, contained three variations (‘Ordinary’, ‘Pudding’ and ‘Low’) covering different grades of illness:
Ordinary Diet
Pudding Diet
Low Diet
Breakfast
8oz bread
1 pint tea
6oz white bread
1 pint milk
6oz bread
1 pint tea
Dinner
5oz (cooked) meat
8oz potatoes
4oz vegetables
6oz bread
½oz salt
Rice pudding (1½oz rice, 1 egg, 10oz milk), or Batter pudding (3oz flour, 1 egg, 10oz milk), or (1 egg, 10oz milk)
Cornflour (1oz cornflour, 1 pint milk, 1oz sugar)
Supper
8oz bread
1 pint tea
6oz white bread
1 pint milk
6oz bread
1 pint tea
The cooked meat in the hospital dietary was specified as fresh beef or mutton which was to be roasted, baked, stewed or boiled; when boiled, it was to be served in its own liquor, thickened with 1/6oz of flour and flavoured with ½oz of onions with pepper and salt. The meat could also be substituted by fowl, rabbit or fish. Sago or tapioca could be served instead of rice. The Low Diet’s cornflour dish is what we would now generally call a custard sauce.
On the topic of food preparation, the committee recorded their experience of some prison kitchens being ‘slovenly and ill-provided’, with appliances for the preparation of food being ‘scanty or defective’. The replacement of tin utensils by enamel-ware was also recommended.
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The Prison Cookbook
The idea of a cookery book for prison staff had its roots in the report of the committee inquiring into prison dietaries, published in 1878. In addition to its dietary proposals, the report complained that much food was wasted by unskilful cooking. This was particularly said to be true of meat, which prison ki
tchens often cooked at too high a temperature, turning it into ‘a condensed shrunken mass of little or no nutritive value’. The use of a thermometer had been suggested as a remedy for this problem.
To try and improve culinary skills, the committee recommended ‘the advisability of forwarding instructions on this important subject to each prison, or of passing the prison cooks through a short course of tuition’.208 In the meantime, it offered a brief list of ‘ingredients and instructions’ for various dishes in the revised dietary:
Bread
To be made with whole meal, which is to consist of all the products of grinding the wheaten grain, with the exception of the coarser bran.
Soup
In every pint 4oz clod (or shoulder), cheek, neck, leg, or shin of beef; 4oz split peas; 2oz fresh vegetables; ½oz onions; pepper and salt.
Suet Pudding
1½oz mutton suet, 8oz flour, and about 6½oz water to make 1 pound.
Gruel
2oz coarse Scotch oatmeal to the pint, with salt.
Porridge
3oz coarse Scotch oatmeal to the pint, with salt.
Stirabout
Equal parts of Indian meal and oatmeal, with salt.
The Indian meal requires more cooking than the oatmeal.
To make 1½ pint stirabout, boil 2½ pints water, to which a ¼oz of salt should be added; stir in 3oz of Indian meal, and afterwards 3oz of oatmeal; keep constantly stirring.
Cocoa
To every pint, ¾oz flaked or Admiralty cocoa. Sweetening:
For flaked cocoa, ¾oz molasses or sugar to the pint.
For Admiralty cocoa, ½oz molasses or sugar to the pint.
Meat liquor, or broth
The liquor in which the meat is cooked on Mondays and Fridays is to be thickened with ¼oz flour, and flavoured with ¼oz onions to each ration, with pepper and salt to taste.
THE MANUAL OF COOKING AND BAKING
The call for a prison recipe book was reiterated by the Departmental Committee conducting the 1898 dietary review. The report also expressed disapproval of the existing method of issuing cooking instructions on loose sheets. Instead, it proposed that a ‘manual of cooking’ similar to that issued for military cooks should be placed in the hands of cooks in the prison service. The result was the Manual of Cooking & Baking for the Use of Prison Officers – published in 1902 and printed at Parkhurst prison.
The Manual, reproduced in its entirety as part of this book, was much more than a list of recipes. It encouraged its readers to understand the scientific principles that underpinned successful food preparation, and to adopt a methodical approach, without which the results would often be ‘unsatisfactory and disappointing’. It thus contained chapters on: the chemistry of food; basic kitchen practice; guidance on the inspection, selection and storage of ingredients; the basics of cooking; prison diets; hospital diets; and – being a prison cookbook – an extensive section on the principles and practice of bread-making. Despite its ‘scientific’ approach, a modern reader will often be surprised by some of the directions, particularly for the cooking times of various items, for example porridge (‘for at least half an hour’), cabbage (‘40 to 45 minutes’), carrots (‘one hour when old’) and cornflour sauce (‘fifteen minutes’). Tea was to be brewed for ‘about 10 minutes’. On the subject of hospital food, the Manual had a fairly liberal interpretation of the official dietary and included recipes for dishes such as veal broth, chicken balls, fishcakes and stewed figs.
Coincidentally, the Manual appeared the year after a similar though unconnected work was published for use by workhouses. 209 Comparison of the two shows how much attitudes towards the workhouse had changed, with inmates there now receiving dishes such as meat pasties, sea pie or hotch-potch stew, with roley-poley pudding, golden pudding or seed cake to follow.
A similar broadening of the prison diet took several decades to materialise. A second edition of the prisons’ Manual appeared in 1935 when, thanks to the work of the 1925 Departmental Committee on Diets, items such as Irish stew, hot pot, shepherd’s pie and treacle pudding had joined the menu.
THE GUIDE FOR COOK AND BAKER OFFICERS
A more comprehensive overhaul of the Manual resulted in the 1949 Guide for Cook and Baker Officers, itself updated in 1958. By this time, the contents of the Guide looked little different from a typical domestic cookery book of the day, except that the quantities specified in its recipes were to serve 100. The making of cocoa, for example, required 4lb 11oz of cocoa, 7 pints milk and 12 gallons water – the cocoa to be boiled in the water for one hour.
Amongst the innovations was a section on herbs and spices, such as the use of bay leaves for flavouring stews, pickles, prunes and soused herrings; carraway seeds for flavouring cakes and buns; fennel for flavouring sauces – usually served with fish; and mace for minced meat or fish dishes. Potatoes still featured prominently in the Guide, with ten suggested ways of serving them (boiled, baked, fatless roast, croquettes, au gratin, steamed, jacket, mashed, savoury and sauté). Porridge recipes were limited to a mere three – for fine, medium and coarse oatmeal. The range of other dishes had grown enormously and included items such as mulligatawny soup, baked herrings, cottage pie, Cornish pasties, toad in the hole, Vienna steaks, roast pork and stuffing, Windsor pudding, apple turnovers, gingerbread, chocolate sauce and doughnuts.
A selection of the much wider range of recipes on offer in the Guide for Cook and Baker Officers, first issued in 1949.
TRAINING
As well as the production of a cookery book, the 1898 Departmental Committee called for the systematic training of all prison cooks, bakers and millers, and for those involved in the inspection of food supplies. By the time the committee’s report was published, a training scheme had already been set up by the Prison Commissioners. Training courses for prison cooks and bakers were introduced in 1898 as part of a wider initiative to set up ‘training schools’ to be given to all newly appointed prison personnel, including warders, hospital attendants, and clerical staff. The first school of cookery was held at Wormwood Scrubs prison under the supervision of the inspecting and examining chef from the National School of Cookery.210 Following the training courses, it was noted that reports had been received ‘from all quarters as to the improvement that has taken place in the quality of the prison cooking’.211
fourteen
Prisons Enter the Twentieth Century
By the end of the nineteenth century, the prison system had undergone enormous changes. Gaolers no longer lived off fees extracted from their prisoners. The hulks had long gone and transportation had ended. Unproductive labour such as the tread-wheel had been abolished. Some well-known prisons had disappeared – the Marshalsea closed in 1842, Millbank was demolished in 1890 and Newgate was to go the same way in 1902. New prisons, still in use today, had taken their place, including Parkhurst (opened in 1838), Pentonville (1842), Dartmoor (1850), Wandsworth (1851), Holloway (1852), Brixton (1853) and Wormwood Scrubs (1883). In 1818 there had been 338 prisons in England and Wales.212 By 1900, only sixty-one prisons remained – fifty-six local and five convict – although the total capacity remained virtually unchanged at around 24,000 inmates. 213
Despite this dramatic reduction in prison establishments, the number of those serving prison sentences had actually risen. In 1818, about 107,030 persons had been put in prison, while in the year up to March 1901, 148,600 were sent by the ordinary courts to local prisons, with a further 12,576 imprisoned as debtors. In the same period, convict prisons received 797 new inmates, and 785 convicts were placed in local prisons. However, the rise in prison sentences was much smaller than the growth in the overall population (from 11.8 million in 1818 to 32.6 million in 1900). Most of those in local prisons were now serving very short sentences – an average of thirty-six days, with many being inside for two weeks or less. Very few sentences were longer than three months. 214
Some of those most affected by the changes in the penal system were young offenders. In addition
to the existing reformatories and industrial schools for those under 16, the Gladstone Committee had proposed that a special institution be set up to deal with offenders aged from 16 to 21. An experimental scheme was set up at Bedford in 1899, and then extended in 1901 using part of the convict prison at Borstal in Kent. The young inmates were kept apart from the adult prisoners and given a routine which included physical exercise, school lessons, work training, strict discipline and follow-up supervision after their discharge. The formal adoption of the Borstal system came in the 1908 Prevention of Crime Act. A second borstal institution was established at Feltham in 1910 (in the premises of the former Middlesex Industrial School), and another at Portland in 1921, with one for girls being set up at Aylesbury prison in 1909. Some existing prisons implemented a ‘modified borstal’ system, providing accommodation and treatment for those serving short sentences.
Changes were taking place for other groups too. There were moves to concentrate female prisoners in a small number of dedicated institutions. Holloway became an all-women’s prison in 1902, while outside London prisons such as Liverpool began to develop in this role. Following the 1898 Inebriates Act, a number of special inebriate reformatories were set up for ‘habitual drunkards’ who committed offences while under the influence of alcohol. Some of these were operated by the National Institutions for Inebriates, a charity run by clergyman and former missionary the Rev. Harold Burden, which took over former workhouses for the purpose at Lewes in Sussex and at Guiltcross in Norfolk.
The Prison Cookbook Page 16