Underhand tricks were likewise done with milk. In a survey of agriculture in 1806, John Middleton, a land surveyor, reckoned that over 8500 cows were kept for milk near London.96 Farmers were paid for milking the herds by dairy retailers who, as he explained, diluted the milk:
Every cow-house is provided with a milk room…mostly furnished with a pump, to which the retailers apply in rotation; not secretly but openly, before any person that may be standing by; from which they pump water into the milk vessels at their discretion. The pump is placed there expressly for that purpose, and it is seldom used for any other. A considerable cow-keeper in Surrey has a pump of this kind, which goes by the name of the black cow (from the circumstance of its being painted with that colour); it is said to yield more than all the rest put together.97
Matters were worse where no pump was provided,
for in that case the retailers are not even careful to use clean water. Some of them have been seen to dip their pails in a common horse-trough. And, what is still more disgusting, though equally true, one cow-house happens to stand close to the edge of a stream, into which runs much of the dung, and most of the urine, of the cows; and even in this stream, so foully impregnated, they have been observed to dip their milk-pails.98
The milk was next taken to the retailers’ homes and left for a day, so that the cream rose to the surface to be skimmed off. The deteriorating milk was then sold as fresh, while the cream was sold separately or made into butter, particularly when the upper classes were in town: ‘When the families of fashion are in London for the winter season, the consumption, and consequent deterioration, of milk, are at the highest. During the summer months, when such families are for the most part in the country, the milk may probably be of a better quality.’99 Middleton rightly thought that the situation was scandalous: ‘A cow-keeper informs me, that the retail milk-dealers are, for the most part, the refuse of other employments; possessing neither character, decency of manners, nor cleanliness. No delicate person could possibly drink the milk, were they fully acquainted with the filthy manners of these dealers.’100
All kinds of other foods were adulterated, either by adding cheaper substances to increase profits, or else by freshening unfit food, such as sprinkling fresh blood over putrid meat. For the lower classes, the best meat they might eat was ham or bacon, but more likely the less popular parts of pigs or else rabbits and hares, sometimes obtained by poaching. Birds of all sizes were eaten by all classes, from larks and pigeons to pheasants, chickens and occasionally swans. In June 1808 Nelly Weeton received a gift from her brother Tom: ‘My uncle is obliged to you for your present of rooks. As my uncle is so very fond of those little nick-nacks…I took the liberty of presenting the two you intended for me, to him, so that the whole five composed a handsome pie for his dinner, and my Aunt’s too.’101 Rooks were a nuisance, but at least they were edible.
Other birds were often considered a delicacy. In 1788, when John Byng and a friend were exploring the Sussex downland around Hastings, they gathered ingredients for their dinner:
After walking the beach, we ascended the steep hill…searching many turf-traps set for wheat-ears [which nest in holes in the ground], when the custom is to leave a penny for every caught bird you take away. Within the castle, we seated ourselves for some time, delighted with the weather, the freshness of the sea-breeze and the cheerfulness of the scenery; till the shepherd came to survey his traps, when we paid him sevenpence for his capture of seven birds, whom we sat instantly to pluck in preparation of our dinner spit; and it wou’d have made others laugh to have seen us at our poulterers work; which, being finish’d, we hasten’d back to the inn [to have them cooked].102
Some cookbooks included recipes for preserving these birds: ‘To pot wheatears. Pick them very clean, season them with pepper and salt, put them in a pot, cover them with butter, and bake them one hour; take them and put them in a colander to drain the liquor away; then cover them with clarified butter, and they will keep.’103
Parson Woodforde enjoyed his meals and recorded numerous details about food in his diary. In January 1780 he ate some swan at a dinner with the squire:
We had for dinner a calfs head, boiled fowl and tongue, a saddle of mutton rosted on the side table, and a fine swan rosted with currant jelly sauce for the first course. The second course a couple of wild fowl called dun fowls, larks, blamange, tarts &c. &c. and a good desert of fruit after amongst which was a damson cheese. I never eat a bit of swan before, and I think it good eating with sweet sauce. The swan was killed 2 weeks before it was eat and yet not the least bad taste in it.104
Beef roasted on spits was so popular that the French nickname for the English was ‘le rosbif’ (roast beef), though mutton, lamb, pork and venison were likewise favoured. Most of the carcass was cooked, with nothing allowed to go to waste, as seen in cookbooks which had recipes for dishes like ‘Ox cheeks, baked’, ‘Neat’s feet, fried’, ‘Pigs feet and ears, to pickle’, ‘Lamb stones, fried’ and ‘Calves heads, in ragout’.105 Various kinds of fish were consumed, and being cheap and plentiful, oysters were widely eaten by the lower classes.
Vegetables were frequently referred to as ‘garden stuff’, which most people with gardens grew. Virtually nothing was imported, but wealthy estates had hothouses (greenhouses) for delicate produce like grapes. William Holland with his manservant was constantly growing vegetables. ‘Busy in my garden this day with Robert,’ he noted in mid-March 1800, ‘preparing ground for early potatoes.’106 Four days later: ‘Very busy with Robert in the garden, we sowed some onions and carrots’,107 then ‘Five rows of peas put in this morning, and I myself raked the asparagus bed and howed the cabbage.’108 Later that week he recorded: ‘Robert…sowed some turnap [turnip] seeds among the currant and gooseberry bushes.’109 Salads largely comprised lettuce and cucumbers, with Holland commenting later in June: ‘Robert busy in the garden. He manages a cucumber bed for me but brings it on very slow, and late, like himself, yet the plants look healthy. As to myself I regard cucumbers little, and only eat them stewed, and the dung of the bed serves afterwards for the garden.’110Holland never mentioned tomatoes. Few people grew them, and like most vegetables including cucumbers they were cooked, a fortunate precaution considering that cesspit contents were spread as manure.
He also took pride in the rest of his garden, with its lawns, shrubs and flower borders, and Louis Simond certainly found English lawns attractive, as he noted in June 1810:
The ground, ploughed and harrowed carefully, is either sown or sodded; rolling and mowing, and a moist climate do the rest, for there is nothing at all peculiar in the grass itself. The rolling is principally done in the spring…The mowing, or rather shaving of this smooth surface, is done once a week…The grass must be wet with dew or rain, and the scythe very sharp; the blade is wide, and set so obliquely on the handle, as to lye very flat on the sod. The rollers are generally of cast iron, 18 or 20 inches in diameter, and two and a half or three feet long, hollow, and weigh about 500 pounds, moved about by one man; those drawn by a horse are, of course, three or four times heavier.111
In Norfolk Woodforde was also obsessed with his garden, and in June 1794 he bought a new roller for £4: ‘Sent Ben early this morning to Norwich with my great cart, after my new garden roller of cast-iron. He returned home with it before two o’clock…It is a very clever roller and is called the ballance roller, as the handle never goes to the ground. It is certainly very expensive, but certainly also very handy.’112 Most fruit that was grown in people’s gardens was cooked rather than eaten raw, and sweet boiled puddings were so popular with all classes that they were another characteristic of the English. Along with roast beef, plum (or ‘plumb’) pudding was a national dish, frequently appearing in satirical prints – ‘plums’ in these puddings meant dried raisins:
A good plum pudding.
TAKE a pound and a quarter of beef sewet [suet], when skinned, and shred it very fine; then stone three quarters of a pound of raisins, and mi
x with it; add a grated nutmeg, a quarter of a pound of sugar, a little salt, a little sack, four eggs, four spoonsful of cream, and about half a pound of fine flour, mixing them well together, pretty stiff; tie it in a cloth, and let it boil four hours. Melt butter thick for sauce.113
Food was difficult to keep fresh. In order to survive the winter, fruit and vegetables were stored, but vermin, mildew and freezing weather were constant hazards. Caught by an unusually hard frost in December 1784, Gilbert White in Selborne recorded: ‘We were much obliged to the thermometers for the early information they gave us; and hurried our apples, pears, onions, potatoes, &c. into the cellar, and warm closets; while those who had not, or neglected such warnings, lost all their store of roots and fruits, and had their very bread and cheese frozen.’114 The dreadful winter of 1798–9 prompted Woodforde to despair: ‘Scarce ever known such distressed times…no vegetation, every thing almost dead in the gardens…All kind of garden-stuff, except potatoes that have been well covered and in ground, are almost all gone dead; potatoes that have been dug up, tho’ kept in house are allmost all froze and useless.’115
Meat and dairy produce could be kept cool in pantries and cellars, but in hot weather everything deteriorated rapidly, as White observed in the summer of 1783: ‘from June 23 to July 20 inclusive…the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed’.116 Even during normal summers meat did not remain fresh for long, and so animals were slaughtered close to markets in the heart of towns and cities, especially in London. Cattle were driven to fairs across England from as far afield as Ireland, Wales and Scotland, their hooves fitted by blacksmiths with iron shoes specifically for the lengthy journey. Such was the huge number seen at Wetherby in Yorkshire in the autumn of 1789 that the local newspaper commented: ‘A greater quantity of Scotch and Irish cattle have passed through Wetherby turnpike-bar, this season, than the oldest person ever remembers to have seen – most of which were for the South-country markets. One drover in particular had near 1000 beasts, all Irish ones.’117
A lot of food could be preserved by smoking, pickling or salting, while fruit might be made into jams and meat potted to keep it longer. Ice helped to chill food and drinks and enabled iced dishes to be made, including ice creams and sorbets. When she was staying at Lyme Regis in September 1804, Jane Austen wrote satirically to Cassandra: ‘Your account of Weymouth contains nothing which strikes me so forcibly as there being no ice in the town. For every other vexation I was in some measure prepared, and particularly for your disappointment in not seeing the Royal Family go on board…but for there being no ice what could prepare me? Weymouth is altogether a shocking place.’118
The wealthy had ice-houses in their gardens, in which ice could be kept successfully for much of the year. In severe winters, servants and labourers obtained ice from frozen lakes, canals and rivers, piling it on sledges or carts and then taking it to these ice-houses. During mild winters, ice may have been obtained instead from whaling vessels.119 Most ice-houses were brick-built, domed or arched structures, partly underground, and the ice was loaded through the roof or a doorway. Bundles of straw or reeds were placed on the floor and sides as further insulation, enabling the ice to remain frozen for months. One story amused the Morning Post newspaper in 1811: ‘A well-known miser not having given an entertainment during a summer, and his ice-house remaining still quite full in the month of January, his steward asked him what he should do with all the ice? “Why!” replied Mr. B. “let it be given to the poor! ”’120
Ice-houses were even constructed beneath London’s streets, sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as in 1802 by St Mary le Strand church: ‘A Confectioner, who rents a house directly opposite…on the northern side of the Strand, some time ago formed a plan of making an ice-house directly in front, under the street…The workmen then proceeded to excavate…digging below the cellars of the neighbouring houses.’121 The whole lot caved in and ‘the three houses next to it were placed in the most imminent danger, the flag-way and cellars having fallen into the excavation’.122
The wealthy might have had ice, but water itself was not widely drunk because palatable supplies were not readily available. Elizabeth Ham recalled that for supper at her boarding school at Tiverton in Devon, ‘we had a little bit of bread with a little bit of cheese on it, and a little cider in a little mug. No one in these days ever dreamt of drinking water.’123 Devon was a county that made prodigious quantities of cider, but the main drink in England was ‘small beer’, also referred to as ‘small ale’ or ‘common beer’. Woodforde called it ‘table beer’, while strong ales were just ‘beer’ or ‘strong beer’. Small beer was safer than water, and because of its low alcohol content, it was not intoxicating.
As well as making his own table beer, Woodforde also made mead: ‘Busy most part of the afternoon in making some mead wine, to fourteen pound of honey, I put four gallons of water, boiled it more than an hour with ginger and two handfulls of dried elder-flowers in it, and skimmed it well. Then I put it into a small tub to cool, and when almost cold I put in a large gravey-spoon full of fresh yeast, keeping it in a warm place, the kitchen during night.’124 The honey for the mead came from the beehives that both he and his niece Nancy kept. In January 1798 Nancy received a new swarm: ‘Mr. Stoughton of Sparham sent Miss Woodforde to day a skep of bees by his farming man Jon. Springle who brought them all the way on foot and upon his head tyed up in a cloth. He was 4 hours almost coming from Sparham [about 4 miles away]. I gave the man a good dinner, some strong beer, and made him a present besides of half a guinea in gold 10.6.’125
Alcohol was popular and drunk to excess by many, but a class divide existed, because the poorest drank beer and spirits – but rarely wine. The tax known as excise duty, payable on all alcoholic drinks, was frequently increased to help fund the ongoing wars. This was a highly unpopular move with most consumers, such as the clergyman William Jones: ‘Most men know when they have had too little wine, especially since Mr. Pitt has poisoned – alias – highly taxed – wine.’126 Apart from home brewing, one way of avoiding tax was buying liquor from smugglers. Smuggling formed a nationwide industry operated by numerous gangs, such as those encountered by John Byng in August 1782 when travelling through the New Forest: ‘I cross’d a black heath where I met two gangs of smugglers, whom I wonder’d not to have seen oftener in my ride.’127
Parson Woodforde constantly bought gin, brandy and rum, as on one occasion the previous year when ‘Clerk Hewitt of Mattishall Burgh called on me this even’ by desire of Mrs. Davy to taste some smuggled gin which I tasted and he is to bring me a tub this week.’128 With much else heavily taxed, smugglers supplied a range of goods, including tea, which Woodforde also purchased: ‘Andrews the Smuggler brought me this night about 11 o’clock a bagg of hyson tea 6 Pd weight. He frightned us a little by whistling under the parlour window just as we were going to bed. I…paid him for the tea at 10s/6d per Pd.’129 He regularly recorded illicit purchases, as in his diary entry for 17 May 1780: ‘I did not go to bed till after 12 at night, as I expected Richd. Andrews the honest smuggler with some gin.’130 Ten days later he paid Andrews £2 10s for two casks, so avoiding around £3 in duty – at a time when his senior maid earned £5 11s 6d a year and his highest-paid manservant £10.131 In September 1809 William Wilkinson, serving in the Royal Navy, warned his wife: ‘Don’t buy any more tea or sugar. I expect some from Guernsey, but say nothing about it for fear that it should be seized.’132
Better-off families kept their tea in special lockable tea-caddies to prevent it being pilfered by the servants. It tended to be used sparingly, so that it was made as a fairly weak drink, to which milk and sugar were added. Temperance campaigners advocated tea instead of beer, but others insisted that beer was more nutritious for working people on poor diets, as well as better value for money. While tea had filtered down to the working classes, coffee remained the preserve of the coffee house and the middle and upper classes. It was drunk at h
ome less frequently than tea, and the quality was extremely variable, often being criticised for being too dark and burnt, though Carl Moritz found the opposite: ‘I would always advise those who wish to drink coffee in England, to mention before hand how many cups are to be made with half an ounce, or else the people will probably bring them a prodigious quantity of brown water; which (notwithstanding all my admonitions) I have not yet been able wholly to avoid.’133
For those who could afford to eat well, breakfast was the first meal of the day, though a minimal affair, rarely more than toast with tea or coffee, while poorer households drank small beer. Often the toast was made during the meal by holding slices of bread in front of the fire on toasting forks. ‘A breakfast is a comfortable meal when our little family assemble around the breakfast table in good spirits with a strong blazing fire,’ William Holland wrote in February 1800.134 His daughter Margaret usually prepared the family’s breakfast, which they had in the study or the arbour outdoors when fine, and a few months later he noted: ‘Margaret made breakfast in the study. My wife did not join us, tho Little William [did] and tho he had breakfasted before, [he] eat up a great quantity of toast, whey and curds and sugar.’135
On another morning, Holland grumbled: ‘We did not breakfast before ten this morning…I do not like this,’136 and when Woodforde rose late after a rather late night, he observed: ‘We breakfasted quite at a fashionable hour 11-o’ clock.’137 Holland preferred having breakfast fairly early, but the lower classes worked for several hours before they had anything to eat.
In Georgian times lunch hardly existed, although for those who breakfasted early, a small snack might be eaten. In towns many shops sold pies and pastries, while street sellers offered shellfish and other ready-to-eat items. Dinner was the main meal, eaten at any time in the afternoon between two and five o’clock. The timing of dinner was related to the hours of daylight, since the cooks needed to work in daylight, especially for formal dinners with guests where preparations could take hours. Dinnertime for the elite became later and later, and in contrast to the meagre breakfast, a formal dinner could be a dazzling array of food. The first course, served on the table all at once, had numerous dishes, and was followed by a second course with a smaller selection of meats and fish, along with savoury and sweet items. Finally, a selection of nuts, sweetmeats and occasionally fruit constituted the dessert course, at which point the servants withdrew.
Jane Austen's England Page 14