by Bee Wilson
Accum was more exercised by the lackadaisical attitude of the British towards the safety of what they ate. The use of copper to heighten the green look of vegetables was a case in point. “Will it be believed,” he exclaimed, “that in the cookery books which form the prevailing oracles of the kitchen in this part of the island, there are express injunctions to ‘boil greens with halfpence or verdigrise,’ in order to improve their colour!”57 In his Treatise on Adulterations, Accum reproduces a sinister recipe from a cookbook called Modern Cookery for something called “greening,” a mixture of verdigris, vinegar, alum, and bay salt to be used with “whatever you wish to green.” In another book called The Ladies Library, Accum had found a recipe for pickled gherkins that recommended boiling the vinegar in a copper pot.58 In a third book, Mrs. Raffald’s well-known The English Housekeeper, there were directions to boil pickles with halfpence “or allow them to stand for twenty-four hours in copper or brass pans.”
The use of copper to make pickles green was a case where commercial manufacturers were following the bad practice of the home cook. Accum regretfully noted that in order to sell well, pickled vegetables— whether gherkins, samphire, French beans, or green capsicums— needed a “lively green colour.” The consequences of this taste for green pickles could be “fatal,” as Accum lamented. He quotes a Dr. Percival on the case of “a young lady who amused herself, while her hair was being done, with eating samphire pickles impregnated with copper. She soon complained of pain in the stomach; and in five days, vomiting commenced, which was incessant for two days. After this, her stomach became prodigiously distended; and in nine days after eating the pickles, death relieved her from her suffering.”59 Copper was used in sweet things, too, “such as small green limes, citrons, hoptops, plums, angelica roots,” always conveying an impression of vitality that was entirely misleading.60 It was Accum’s opinion that
Copper cooking utensils are attended with so much danger, that the use of them ought to be laid entirely aside. They have not only occasioned many fatal accidents (which have been made public) but they have injured the health of great numbers, where the slower, but not less dangerous effect has not been observed. If not kept very clean and bright, the rubbing or scraping that takes place when making stews, or cooking dishes that require stirring and remaining a considerable time on the fire, always wears off some of the metal which impregnates the food, and has a deleterious effect.61
Copper-green foods were—alas—not the only example of reckless stupidity in the kitchen. This stupidity, though it was not illintentioned, could be every bit as damaging as the venality of real swindlers. “For many years,” Accum wrote, British cooks had been using the leaves of the cherry laurel (prunus lauro-cerasus) to flavour custard. The reasoning was that cherry laurel leaves, when steeped in milk, give it a nutty flavour not unlike the much more expensive bitter almond. As a result, cherry laurel was used to communicate “a kernel-like flavour” to custards, puddings, creams, blancmanges, and other delicacies of the table. There was just one flaw with cherry laurel. It was poisonous, and it had been known to be poisonous since 1728, when “the sudden death of two women, in Dublin, after drinking some of the common distilled cherry laurel water, demonstrated its deleterious nature.”62
Yet still cooks used it, believing it to be harmless in small quantities. As Accum remarked in a different context, “different constitutions are differently affected by minute quantities of substances that act powerfully on the system.”63 He cites a case from just the previous year, 1819, when some children at a boarding school in Richmond became “severely ill” after eating some custard flavoured with cherry laurel. A girl aged six and a boy aged five fell into a profound stupor. Two other girls developed intense gastric pain. It took all the children three days to recover. Such pain just for eating a custard! It is impossible not to share Accum’s rage at this dangerous folly. “What person of sense or prudence, then, would trust to the discretion of an ignorant cook, in mixing so dangerous an ingredient in his puddings and creams? Who but a maniac would choose to season his victuals with poison?”64
Accum gives the answer himself. Who but a maniac? A villain. There were plenty of them about, judging from the evidence of the Treatise, “unprincipled modern manufacturers” who hid under the guise of respectability. Accum was angry enough with the “inexcusable negligence” of those cooks who poisoned eaters by mistake by underestimating the dangers of copper pans or cherry laurel, but to poison cunningly and knowingly was a crime akin to murder, driven by naked greed. “The eager and insatiable thirst for gain, which seems to be a leading characteristic of the times, calls into action every human faculty, and gives an irresistible impulse to the power of invention; and where lucre becomes the reigning principle, the possible sacrifice of even a fellow creature’s life is a secondary consideration.”65
Such men would risk even the health of children, if it meant enhanced profits. One of the most chilling chapters in Accum’s Treatise is the one concerning “Poisonous Confectionary,” in which he writes of the “grossest abuses” in “those sweetmeats of inferior quality frequently exposed to sale in the open streets, for the allurement of children.”66 Accum writes about these sweets in the same fearful terms that modern mothers might use to warn children against strangers. Children were tempted to buy these candies by the bright colours, colours that would do their little tummies no good.
The white comfits, called sugar pease, are chiefly composed of a mixture of sugar, starch, and Cornish clay (a species of very white pipeclay;) and the red sugar drops are usually coloured with the inferior kind of vermilion. The pigment is generally adulterated with red lead. Other kinds of sweetmeats are sometimes rendered poisonous by being coloured with preparations of copper.67
After Accum’s Treatise appeared, a father wrote a letter to The Times saying that his family had suffered terrible stomach pains, sickness, and retching after eating some multicoloured comfits the shape of “turnips, parsnips, carrots and beans” bought as a treat.68 Some treat!
Yet the confectioners who sold such poison candy often pleaded ignorance of their side effects; others admitted that lead or copper was bad but claimed that they did not know that these poisonous additives were present in their particular product; and they weren’t always lying. In the world described by Accum, no single person can take responsibility for the quality of a given food or drink, since it has passed through so many hands. Adulteration thrives when trade operates in large, impersonal chains. In a rural setting, swindling is a risky business. If you are the village milkman, the chain between you and your customers is very short: you know them all by name because they are your neighbours. If you start watering down your milk, the chances are that word will soon get out and you will be ostracized. But if you are selling milk in the metropolis of London in 1820, to an ever-shifting clientele, it is easier to cover your tracks. With less perishable goods, such as tea, sweets, or spices, it is easier still. The chain between producer and consumer may be so long that it becomes hard to determine who exactly in the chain did the dirty deed.
Sometimes, indeed, the chain was so long that food could become poisoned without anyone intending it. Accum noted that during “the long period devoted to the practice of my profession,” he had had “abundant reason to be convinced that a vast number of dealers, of the highest respectability, have vended to their customers articles absolutely poisonous, which they themselves considered as harmless, and which they would not have offered for sale, had they been apprised of the spurious and pernicious nature of the compounds.”69
The most startling case Accum cited was of some Double Gloucester cheese, which through a convoluted sequence of events became coloured with red lead. Ordinarily, Double Gloucester—so called because it originally used the milk from two milkings—is coloured, when it is coloured at all (sometimes it isn’t), with annatto. Annatto (now known as E160 (b)) is a vegetable dye that comes from an orange pulp on the tropical annatto tree. A few people are aller
gic to it, but otherwise it is fairly harmless. Red lead, on the other hand, is lethal. Accum repeats a story told by a Mr. J. W. Wright of Cambridge of a gentleman who had reason to stay for some time at an inn in a city in the West Country. One night, he was “seized with a distressing but indescribable pain in the region of the abdomen and the stomach, accompanied with a feeling of tension, which occasioned much restlessness, anxiety and repugnance to food.” Twenty-four hours later, he was completely better. Four days later, exactly the same thing happened—the agony, the tension, the anxiety, the recovery. Now the gentleman remembered that on both occasions he had asked the mistress of the inn for a plate of toasted Gloucester cheese, a dish he often ate for supper at home. The mistress was affronted at this news. Why, she had purchased the cheese from a respectable London dealer. But when the gentleman ordered the toasted cheese for a third time, and for a third time suffered “violent cholic,” there was no mistaking it; the cheese was to blame. Then a serving maid chipped in that a kitten had been violently sick after chewing a rind of the same cheese.70
At this, the mistress swallowed her pride and had the cheese examined by a chemist, who pronounced it contaminated with red lead. The respectable London dealer now asked the farmer who had manufactured the cheese how it had become contaminated; he said he had bought the annatto from a mercantile traveller who had supplied him for years without causing “a single complaint”; but he in turn had got it from another supplier who had touched up the annatto with vermilion (a nonpoisonous dye), which had been mixed with red lead by a druggist who had assumed the vermilion was only to be used as “pigment for house painting,” never imagining it would go into cheese. Thus, concludes Accum’s source, “through the circuitous and diversified operations of commerce, a portion of deadly poison may find admission into the necessaries of life, in a way which can attach no criminality to the parties through whose hands it has successively passed.”71
Often, though, adulteration arose by exploiting the division of labour in a much more conscious way. Given his admiration for industry, it upset Accum to see how the adulterators mimicked “the order and method of a regular trade,” in which sinister kingpins would manipulate workmen who were often “ignorant of the substances which pass through their hands.”72 “It is a painful reflection, that the division of labour which has been so instrumental in bringing the manufactures of this country to their present flourishing state, should have also tended to conceal and facilitate the fraudulent practices in question; and that from a correspondent ramification of commerce into a multitude of distinct branches, particularly in the metropolis and the large towns of the empire, the traffic in adulterated commodities should find its way through so many circuitous channels, as to defy the most scrutinizing endeavour to trace it to its source.”73 The swindlers did everything possible to evade capture:
To elude the vigilance of the inquisitive, to defeat the scrutiny of the revenue officer and to ensure the secrecy of these mysteries, the processes are very ingeniously divided and subdivided among individual operators, and the manufacture is purposely carried on in separate establishments. The task of proportioning the ingredients for use is assigned to one individual, while the composition and preparation of them may be said to form a distinct part of the business, and is entrusted to another workman. Most of the articles are transmitted to the consumer in a disguised state, or in such a form that their real nature cannot possibly be detected by the unwary.74
Take the liquor business. Dodgy liquor manufacturers were in the habit of using something called extract of Cocculus indicus (made by boiling the berries of that plant) to make porter and ales extra intoxicating. But to cover their tracks, the market name for this substance was “black extract,” the implication being that it would be used by tanners and dyers, rather than by liquor-makers.
Some forms of adulteration were crude—such as “P.D.” or pepper dust, a “vile refuse” swept from the floor of the pepper warehouses that often got mixed in with ground black pepper. An even worse version was known as “D.P.D.,” short for “dust of pepper dust,” the very grimiest, nastiest floor sweepings of all. There was little art in this deception. On the other hand, some truly intricate labour went into many of the more outrageous forms of adulteration. Real black peppercorns—which many consumers doubtless bought in preference to ground, thinking, wrongly, that there was no way to adulterate the whole spice—were sometimes padded out with “factitious peppercorns,” which seem to have been the work of an artisan to make. First, blackish “oil cakes” were taken (the residue left over after pressing linseed oil) and mixed together with common clay and some cayenne pepper (to give the “corns” some bite so that consumers might really be fooled by them). Then this paste was pressed through a sieve and rolled in a cask until it formed little pellets. Making these tiny balls of fake “pepper” must have been highly laborious, and swindlers couldn’t get away with adding very many to the real peppercorns before suspicion was aroused—around 16 percent was standard—yet evidently it was still worth the swindlers’ while to do it. Labour was cheap and spice was expensive (the duty on a single pound of pepper was 2s. 6d., a tax that was reduced in 1823), and there was no shortage of workers to carry out this peculiar trade.75
It was in the manufacture of fake tea that the intricacy of the adulterator’s art reached its pinnacle. Accum details numerous cases where “tea” was not tea at all, but elder leaves, ash leaves, or, most often, sloe leaves, boiled and baked and curled and dried and coloured until they resembled the best China green tea. In 1818, the attorney general brought numerous cases against tea swindlers, including one against a grocer, Mr. Palmer, who had been purchasing imitation tea from a pair of crooks called Proctor and Malins. These crooks engaged another man, Thomas Jones, to gather the sloe leaves and whitethorn leaves for them. Jones seems to have been unaware, at least at first, what the leaves were for. He in turn subcontracted the spadework of picking the sloe leaves to another man, selling the leaves on to Proctor and Malins for tuppence a pound.76
Now the real villainy began. To convert the leaves into “an article resembling black tea,” they were first boiled, then sifted to separate out the thorns and stalks, and baked on an iron plate to dry out, then “rubbed with the hand, in order to produce that curl, which the genuine tea had.” It was then coloured with logwood (Haematoxylon campechianum), a dye from the West Indies, which in large doses can cause gastroenteritis. The “green tea” was more poisonous still, being boiled with verdigris (copper acetate, a poison) and, when dry, painted with a toxic mixture of “Dutch pink” dye and more verdigris. To bring the scandal of this to life, the crown prosecutor told the jury that whenever they supposed “they were drinking a pleasant and nutritious beverage, they were, in fact, in all probability, drinking the produce of the hedges round the metropolis, prepared for the purposes of deception in the most noxious manner.” Needless to say, the jury found the defendants guilty.
Accum’s illustration of real and fake tea leaves, from his Treatise on Adulterations (1820). Those on the left with “deeply serrated” edges are real. Those on the right are sloe leaves.
This case—along with the other tea prosecutions of 1818— demonstrated how widespread tea adulteration really was. In his book, Accum included sketches of sloe leaves and tea leaves to show how differently shaped they were. Tea leaves, he noted, were “slender and narrow,” while sloe leaves were round and “obtusely pointed,” with less serrated edges.77 Once rolled up and painted with verdigris, though, the differences would be much harder to spot—unless you brought the tea home and moistened it and rubbed it against a white sheet of paper, as Accum suggested, to bring off the dye; but by this point you would already have been swindled. Even a high price was no guarantee that tea was genuine. Accum himself managed to obtain twenty-seven different samples of “spurious tea” from the merchants of London, ranging from “the most costly to the most common.” Tea fraud was thus a problem affecting the whole of British society. Fo
r much of the previous century, tea had been seen as a rather feminine and aristocratic drink; but now the habit of tea drinking had spread to the working-class masses. Heavily sweetened tea sustained the workforce that powered Britannia’s industrial advance. To poison that workforce with sloe leaves and verdigris was a serious matter. What should be done about it, though, was a matter of fierce disagreement, because it touched on the most divisive political issue of the day, the question of the relationship between government and commerce, law and freedom. How far could legislation interfere with the divine liberty of free trade?
Adulteration and the Law
Reading British newspapers from this period, you often come across the view that, while adulteration was regrettable, it was a natural consequence of the free trade that was necessary to power Britain’s commercial success. To introduce new regulatory measures would have the undesirable effect of stifling the market. It was therefore better to do nothing. Laissez faire, laissez aller, laissez passer, as the Physiocrats said: keep government out of trade. Accum observed that “public opinion” now saw adulteration as just another “mercantile pursuit,” and it was thus “not only regarded with less disgust than formerly, but is almost generally esteemed as a justifiable way to wealth.”78 He summarized the commercial defence of adulteration:
It has been urged by some that, under so vast a system of finance as that of Great Britain, it is expedient that the revenue should be collected in large amounts; and therefore that the severity of the law should be relaxed in favour of all mercantile concerns in proportion to their extent: encouragement must be given to large capitalists; and where an extensive brewery or distillery yields an important contribution to the revenue, no strict scrutiny need be adopted in regard to the quality of the article from which such contribution is raised, provided the excise do not suffer by the fraud.79