Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  In 1769, the year of Accum’s birth, chemistry was in many respects still alchemy. The names that chemists used for their materials were quaint and confusing—“butter of arsenic,” for example, or “liver of sulphur.” Central to the theory of combustion at this time was an entirely fictitious substance called phlogiston: a colourless, odourless, weightless substance believed to be present in all flammable materials. Materials containing this substance were called “phlogisticated”; when burned, they were said to be “dephlogisticated.” All kinds of sensible people believed in this theory, until Lavoisier used oxygen to come up with the true theory of combustion. Lavoisier, moreover, swept aside the old alchemical names and unified chemistry into a single modern science. Lavoisier also prefigured Accum in making the first attempts to analyse the composition of alcohol, burning spirit of wine over mercury. He broke olive oil down into hydrogen and carbon. He shared Accum’s interest in fruit; a memoir of 1786 by Lavoisier on the nature of organic acids analysed acids produced from pomegranates and barberries, cherries and currants, peaches, apricots, and pears.

  Accum’s Treatise on Adulteration was very much part of this newly prestigious chemistry; he saw clearly that chemical science was both the source of much adulteration and the only way of combating the growing use of adulteration. How “lamentable” it was, he thought, that chemistry, which ought to serve the “useful purposes of life” had been “perverted into an auxiliary of this nefarious traffic.” Many “wholesale manufacturing chemists” occupied themselves in crystallizing alum, knowing full well that it would be used by bakers to falsify bread. On the other hand, “happily for the science,” chemistry could also be “converted into a means of detecting the abuse.”31 As a later chemist wrote, analytical chemistry had the power to be “the great enemy of adulteration.”32 Before 1820, if you wanted to find out whether a certain food was pure or not, you would most likely use your eyes, nose, and tongue. If milk tasted thin and looked bluish, you might surmise it had been watered down. If coffee was too bitter, you might guess it had been tainted with chicory. If lemonade tasted too acidic and was sold too cheap, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that it had been made with tartaric acid instead of lemons. This sort of common-sense testing of food is probably the method most employed even now to judge the quality of food. It is called the “organoleptic” approach, and so long as the food being judged is fairly natural and simple, it can work quite well. If you compared two eggs, one of inferior quality and one spanking fresh from some well-looked-after hens, you would know at once which was the good one—all your senses would tell you that the egg whose yolk was rich, orange, and flavourful was better than the anaemic one with its watery whites. But the organoleptic approach has its limits: it depends entirely on the person testing the food knowing what a certain substance should taste, smell, or look like; and it doesn’t work so well when food has been tampered with in clever and subtle ways.

  By 1820, Accum wrote, adulteration had reached “such a perfection of ingenuity” that “spurious articles of various kinds are every where to be found, made up so skilfully as to baffle the discrimination of the most skilful judges.” Modern food fraudsters were using a little chemical know-how to come up with ever more cunning ways of tarting up cheap ingredients to look as good as new. If they had some old cayenne pepper on their hands, they might touch it up with red lead (just as modern fraudsters touch up stale chilli pepper with red azo dyes). Conversely, if they had some young, raw brandy that they wanted to pass offas the finest aged cognac, they might, wrote Accum, use “tincture of raisin stones” to give the brandy a “ripe taste.” These new forms of adulteration made a mockery of the old organoleptic tests. Take cream, for example. By sniffing a jug of cream, you can usually tell if it is fresh; and by looking at the consistency, you can attempt to judge how rich it is—the thicker the cream, the richer and more desirable. But what if the thickness in the cream came not from butterfat but from the addition of rice flour or arrowroot, a common trick in Accum’s day? Could you still trust your eyes to know the difference? With the swindlers raising their game, the process of detection had to become cleverer as well. Chemistry needed to be fought with chemistry. In the case of the adulterated cream, Accum offered a simple procedure to test for the addition of thickeners. If you thought you had some arrowroot-thickened “cream” on your hands, you needed “a few drops of a solution of jodine [iodine] in spirit of wine” to add to a sample of the cream. Real cream would turn yellow; fake cream would turn dark blue.33

  Much of Accum’s power to shock came from the way he subjected food to rigorous scientific analysis, and so he could not be dismissed as a scaremonger. At his Soho premises, he had a little sideline as a practising consultant on the adulteration of food: victimized members of the public could bring him samples of suspect food, and, like a Sherlock Holmes of the mustard pot, he would whip out his pipettes to give them dazzling proof of the crime. Accum claims in one of his books that he had twenty-eight years of experience in analysing the respective strengths of British beer and porter (the same kind of specialist knowledge as Sherlock Holmes’s ability to spot 140 different types of tobacco ash). The Philosophical Magazine of 1819 told the story of how Accum had helped a poor charwoman solve the mystery of some strange blue tea.34 This charwoman was in the habit of drinking green tea mixed with a teaspoonful of spirit of hartshorn, or ammonia, which she presumably added for medical reasons, since it can have done nothing for the taste (ammonia was sometimes taken internally to help circulation or relieve headaches). One day, this woman purchased an ounce of her customary green tea from a grocer’s shop and made up a pot of tea, adding the hartshorn as usual. She was amazed at the “lively blue colour which the beverage made of it assumed.” She took the tea back to the grocer, who seems to have professed ignorance. Puzzled, she took a sample of the tea leaves to Accum, who wasted no time in pronouncing the leaves to be coloured green with toxic copper, since copper mixed with ammonia goes bright blue. This he proved by mixing two parts of the leaves with one of nitrate of potash, throwing the mixture into a red-hot crucible. All that was left behind was copper, “in combination with the alkali of the saltpetre.” Clearly, the so-called tea was actually some other kind of leaf—probably sloe leaves—tinted green with copper to look like real China tea. Thus were the lies of the grocer exposed and the humble charwoman vindicated.

  The Treatise is filled with simple chemical tests that could be done to ascertain whether the food you had trustingly bought and brought home was real or fake. For example, Accum noticed that olive oil was often diluted with cheaper poppy seed oil. By freezing a sample of the oil, he could tell whether it was pure.35 The olive oil would freeze, while the poppy seed oil would remain fluid. Equally, to tell whether lemonade had been doctored with tartaric acid, he recommended adding a concentrated solution of muriate of potash.36 If a precipitate ensues, “the fraud is obvious.” Few readers of Accum probably went to the trouble of obtaining and carrying muriate of potash samples around with them on the offchance that they should be offered a refreshing glass of lemonade. But the mere existence of these tests gave far greater potential power to the consumer than he or she had ever had before. Too often, a consumer in a pub complaining that a pint of beer was not pure would be met with brazen denial by the publican. Accum’s chemical tests proved beyond doubt that the adulteration of beer was “not imaginary” but real, ranging from the relatively harmless additions of molasses and honey for sweetness and orange peel for fragrance to the more sinister admixtures of quassia and wormwood for bitterness, capsicum for pungency, and green vitriol, a substance to enhance the head of a pint of beer, giving it the sought-after “cauliflower” appearance. As a Westphalian, Accum took his beer very seriously and wrote another treatise, still popular among real-ale enthusiasts, on the most wholesome ways of making this essential beverage.

  But to understand what made Accum’s original Treatise so electrifying, we have to see it in the context of its times. Its
appeal was partly due to the fact that it appeared at a point and place in history when, for the first time, adulteration on an industrial scale had become a serious and endemic problem. Accum himself quotes an anonymous source from 1773 saying that “Our forefathers never refined so much; they never preyed so much on each other; nor, I presume, made so many laws for their restraint, as we do.”37 Many of the deceptions Accum was describing were relatively new. It was only in an industrialized and impersonal city that the swindlers could get away with the crimes Accum described. Britain in 1820 had the most highly industrialized cities in the world, coupled with a relatively laissez-faire government that failed to police bad food in the way that it was policed in other industrial cities, such as Paris. As a result, adulteration affected the lives of everyone. One of Accum’s reviewers described as “almost ludicrous” the extent to which the deceptions were carried on:

  So inextricably are we all immersed in this mighty labyrinth of fraud that even the vendors of poison themselves are forced, by a sort of retributive justice, to swallow it in their turn. Thus the apothecary, who sells the poisonous ingredients to the brewer, chuckles over his roguery and swallows his own drugs in his daily copious exhibitions of brown stout. The brewer, in his turn, is poisoned by the baker, the wine-merchant and the grocer.38

  And yet they all continued in their business, as if nothing were the matter. This is why the story of adulteration starts with Accum, who, while half in love with the magnificent industrial activity of his chosen country, retained a Germanic dismay at the British failure to care enough about the way that food was falsified “to a most alarming extent in every part of the United Kingdom.”39

  Industrial Britain and the “Insatiable Thirst for Gain”

  Accum depicts Britain in 1820 as an exciting but terrifying place, where anything could be bought for a price—even the tremulous foetuses of young cows, purchased by pastry cooks “for the purpose of making mock turtle soup”40—but where staples are pushed to the lowest prices possible, making padding and adulteration almost inevitable. This is a society intensely and foolishly class-conscious, with everyone aspiring to eat the white bread of the rich and to feed their children an array of multicoloured candies that would once have been the preserve of the wealthy, but where almost no one asks how their bread can be so cheap and yet so white, or why their children’s sweets can be coloured in shades not known in nature. It is a country where cunning and ignorance combine to create hazardous patterns of eating. Accum conveys how easy it was for the unprincipled to debase food often already debased—when Lancashire dairies heated up milk in lead pans, and innkeepers in the north of England witlessly ground mint for “mint salad” using a giant ball of lead instead of a pestle and mortar so that “portions of the lead are ground off at every revolution of the ponderous instrument.”41

  To a certain extent, such ignorance was not new. Lead had been used in cooking since ancient times, as we shall see in the next chapter. The difference was that no one in ancient times had known that lead was poisonous, whereas by 1820 scientists had known of lead’s toxic properties for over a hundred years. What shocked Accum was that as the elite of British society progressed in science and industry, general ignorance in the kitchen seemed to get worse, not better. The problem was partly that the British had already lost much of their heritage of peasant cooking, as land enclosures drove smallholders off the land. These enclosures had been taking place since the sixteenth century, but they escalated in Accum’s lifetime; between 1750 and 1850, there were more than four thousand Acts of Enclosure. These deprived tens of thousands of country-dwellers of the ability to forage for wild greens and berries—as woodland got swallowed up into vast country estates—or to grow their own vegetables and keep their own chickens, as they had once done.42

  After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, agriculture was in an even worse state, with a slump in prices leaving many farmhands either out of work or living on a miserably low wage. The skill of soup making, always a basic part of peasant knowledge, now declined. The cookery writer Eliza Acton, in 1855 looking back over the previous half-century, observed in 1815 that the English had lost “the art of preparing good, wholesome, palatable soups, without great expense.”43 Already, in The Cook’s Oracle published in 1817, Kitchiner was complaining that when the English did make soup, they smothered it with spice. What had been forgotten was the art of the simple pottage made from roots. A cook who could not so much as make a basic soup was not likely to have the necessary knowledge to guard against the wily tricks of swindlers.

  It was not that Accum found all English food bad. He thoroughly admired the English habit of eating a lot of fresh meat, and he credited this diet with “the striking fact that the English soldiers and sailors surpass all those of other nations in bravery and hardihood,” an ingratiating comment that contrasts with his insistence on accuracy elsewhere.44 From his recipe book entitled Culinary Chemistry, it is obvious that Accum enjoyed foraging for seasonal foods, picking nasturtium pods in July, red cabbage in August, and mushrooms in September. He adored the whole calendar of English “domestic fruits.” He gives recipes for conserved gooseberries, greengages, damsons, peaches, nectarines, bullaces; for apricot paste and other lovely things.45 As well as having a passion for making jams and jellies (always with punctiliously well sterilized jars), he wished to overcome the “vulgar prejudice” against turning these fruits into wine. English blackcurrants, he thought, were ideally suited to making a wine like “the best of the sweet Cape wines.” Sloe and damson juice mixed with elderberry juice would make an approximation of port. Meanwhile, “grapes of British growth, are capable of making excellent sparkling and other wines, by the addition of sugar. I have made wine from immature grapes and sugar, which so closely resemble the wines called Grave and Moselle that the best judges could not distinguish them from foreign wines.”46 High praise, from a German.

  The frontispiece to Accum’s Culinary Chemistry (1821), a book that showed him to be a connoisseur of good, simple food.

  The main problem with British food, in Accum’s opinion, was not the raw materials themselves but the dreadful things British cooks did with them. Accum reproved the English tendency to hurry over dinner yet waste “whole hours over the bottle as if time were of no value.” He contrasts this with France, where a “good table” is “a grand object in life.”47 For a coffee-addict such as Accum, it was evidently distressing to live among people who had never learned the basics of coffee making. Coffee, Accum believed, “diffuses over the whole frame a glow of health, and a sense of ease, and well-being which is extremely delightful.”48 The English version, however, simply made him miserable. Most of what passed for coffee in England was little more than bitter “coloured water,” he grumbled—hardly surprising given the ubiquity at grocer’s shops of “sham coffee,” made from burnt peas and beans.49

  Even when real coffee was used, it often tasted terrible. The standard advice was to boil the coffee for five minutes, then boil for another another five minutes with isinglass (a clearing agent made from the bladder of sturgeon), before leaving it to stew for a further ten minutes until it was soot-black and acrid.50 Accum much preferred fresh strong coffee roasted to a “deep cinnamon” colour and brewed for a minimum amount of time. He bought his own beans, roasted them, and ground them himself in his own coffee mill, following the advice of a retired grocer that you should “never, my dear fellow, purchase from a grocer any thing which passes through his mill.”51 As for brewing, he used the modern percolation method invented by the American scientist Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814). Accum agreed with Rumford that “Coffee may easily be too bitter, but it is impossible that it should ever be too fragrant”; not a lesson that the English had learned.52 Accum also agreed with Dr. Johnson that “he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.”53 He writes, a little wearily, of the way that melted butter forms the basis of almost every English sauce—“melted butter & oysters, melted butter & pars
ley, melted butter & anchovies, melted butter & eggs, melted butter & shrimps, melted butter & lobsters, melted butter & capers.” You can tell he has himself endured one too many plates of meat swimming in butter at grand English tables on his way up the social ladder. He is impatient of English snobs, citing an absurd “Lord Blainey” who claims that hams “are not fit to be eaten unless boiled in Champagne.”54

  A coffee pot invented by Accum’s hero, Benjamin Count Rumford.

  While the rich boiled their hams in champagne, the basics of a good diet were neglected. People judged food too much on what it looked like, and not enough on what it tasted like, or whether it did their bodies any good. Bread was the capital example. In “this metropolis,” wrote Accum, bread was “estimated entirely by its whiteness.”55 According to the “caprice of the consumers,” white bread was good bread. Yet it was almost impossible to produce properly white bread, “unless the very best flour is employed,” which was too expensive for most pockets. Therefore, to please their customers, bakers would take low-grade flour and “improve” it by adding the bleaching chemical alum, which could make the bread whiter, lighter, and more porous. Without the alum, the bread would remain moister longer, but have a “slight yellowish grey hue,” like greying laundry, which put people off. Accum believed that the use of alum was almost universal in London at this time. Nor did he blame the bakers as much as he blamed other swindlers (partly because he thought that alum was relatively inoffensive compared to copper or lead). “I have been assured by several bakers, on whose testimony I can rely, that the small profit attached to the bakers’ trade, and the bad quality of the flour, induces the generality of London bakers to use alum in the baking of their bread.”56 They got away with it because commercially minded Londoners did not expect them to do otherwise.