Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  The example of Accum illustrates the extent to which literary fraud is endemic, both in science and in cookery. Hannah Glasse, the best-known English cookery writer of the eighteenth century, stole 263 of her recipes from another source, yet her reputation remains high among culinary historians. Accum was not so lucky. The insertion of someone else’s ideas into your own is a form of adulteration. As much as he hated the adulteration of food, Accum was himself a literary adulterator. Perhaps this was what enabled him to understand the mindset so well.

  Then again, it is not clear how much of this literary theft was premeditated, and how much the result of taking on too much work. In 1820, Accum was pushing himself ridiculously hard. That year alone, he had brought out no fewer than three books on three different subjects, not counting revised editions; the previous year, he had published two more; and a further two were in the pipeline. There must have been moments when note-taking by hand seemed too laborious for the task. Easier to tear the pages out for instant reference. Can we blame him? Had he lived in the era of photocopying, or employed a team of researchers, as his modern equivalents do, Accum would surely never have felt the need to vandalize his source books.

  Even if no conspiracy, Accum’s disgrace undoubtedly set back the battle against the swindlers before it was properly started. Without his energy, the cause stalled. And even in the details of his disgrace, there is proof that he intended to continue his fight against adulteration. The work that Accum was seen stealing from the volume of Nicholson’s Journal on that fateful day in December 1820 was Parmentier’s essay “On the Composition and Use of Chocolate.” Chocolate was not included in Accum’s original treatise; he was evidently considering its inclusion in future editions. Parmentier, a French scientist, was a man after Accum’s own heart, who saw chocolate as both a medicine and a food. In this essay, Parmentier praised chocolate as “agreeable” but warned against the “frauds” committed in its fabrication.101

  Chocolate—which was taken then as a drink rather than in bar form—was often padded with floury substances or spoiled in some other ways. Parmentier warned against chocolate that left a “pasty taste in the mouth”; chocolate smelling of glue; and chocolate that jellified as it cooled down, for all these were signs that “farinaceous matter” had been added. If it smelt of cheese, animal fats had been added. If it left grainy deposits behind, the cocoa beans had been either badly picked or mixed with poor-quality raw sugar. If it tasted bitter, this was a sign that the cocoa used was too green; if musty, the cocoa was “decayed.”102 We can picture just how interesting this would have been for Accum; so interesting that he tore it out instead of transcribing it. Had he not been arrested, might he have set to work analysing the chocolate of London, sniffing it for cheesiness, tasting it for bitterness, scrutinizing it for floury deposits? We will never know.

  Accum was a huge loss to the fight against swindling. He was not just the first systematic campaigner against adulteration, he brought a range of personal qualities to the cause that have never been matched. He may have been a flawed scientist and a plagiarist, arrogant and messy in his methods, but his many achievements dwarf the scandal that ended his career. As well as chemical brilliance, he had enough charisma to carry the public along with him (unlike later scientists, who have sometimes had difficulty persuading consumers that cleaning up the food supply is important). As well as a sense of fun, he had a great moral seriousness—a proper disgust at “death in the pot” that made him politically fearless. By focusing on swindles that were poisonous rather than those that were merely cheats, he gave the cause urgency. Above all, Accum had a great passion and feeling for food. Most of the “pure food” evangelists who came after him got mixed up in sterile notions of purity. Accum never made this mistake. He never threw out pleasure along with poison. He never forgot that adulteration was an attack, not just on people, but on good food: on pure fragrant coffee, fresh wholesome bread, thick apricot jam, Westphalian ham, and malty beer.

  The world of swindling described by Accum is, in many ways, still our world. There is the same reluctance of governments to upset the wheels of commerce, the same ability of science to invent fiddles as well as methods for exposing them, the same long and circuitous chains between consumer and producer, the same reckless willingness of the worst swindlers to sacrifice the health of others to turn a quick buck. That is why the story begins with him. Before Accum, no one had given a complete picture of how adulteration could affect every layer of society, knitting everyone together in a web of falsehood, ignorance, and poison. Then again, before Accum—and the restless, industrializing London he lived in—food swindling had not always been so bad.

  2

  A JUG OF WINE, A LOAF OF BREAD

  Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread?

  —Isaiah 55:2

  What is bread? Walk into the average supermarket and you might be forgiven for thinking that bread could be almost anything that contains flour. It might be long, spongey hot dog rolls or round, dry hamburger buns. It might be cardboardy pitta or floppy tortilla “wraps”; weirdly moist “batch” bread or weirdly crusty “farmhouse” bread. It could be flavoured with any substance from dried onion to chocolate. Regardless of the colour and dimensions, this “bread” could, and probably does, include all kinds of rather unsavoury ingredients: emulsifiers; flour treatment agents; Soya flour; bleach and flavourings; hardened fat to give the crumb its requisite soft and springy texture; hidden enzymes that are not even listed on the label. Even if it has been neither proved nor fermented nor kneaded—but hastily mixed by the so-called Chorleywood method—it can still call itself “bread.” More audaciously, the label will probably claim that this strange, farinaceous concoction is either “superior” or “traditional” in some nonspecified way. You may be seduced into buying it by the artificial baking smells being pumped through the store, yet no one intervenes to stop you from being deceived. No one protests that you are being sold an unacceptably high volume of water and grease along with your flour. Least of all, no one thinks of tracking down the creators of these “breads” and punishing them for their feeble products. No one forces them to eat their own loaves, no one parades them through the streets with bags of inedible sliced white hanging round their necks. What do you expect, at these prices? This is simply what we have become accustomed to.

  Yet this indifference to the quality of bread would have seemed profoundly odd to our ancestors, for whom “bread” had very distinct and sturdy connotations. Bread could exist thanks only to the presence of a miller and a baker. A baker was someone with skill, whether a professional or a home baker. As the old rhyme had it:

  Blow wind, blow! and go mill, go!

  That the miller may grind his corn;

  That the baker may take it,

  And into bread make it,

  And give us our bread in the morn.

  Sometimes bread was brown and sometimes white, but it always needed an exact calibration of ingredients. Governments intervened to protect the quality of bread. When bread got bad—whether through poor grain or sloppy preparation or the addition of nonpermitted ingredients such as peas and beans—customers knew it and complained. In the eighteenth century, the French police stipulated exactly how loaves should be made—to an exact weight, of nonbitter grain, “kneaded,” “well risen,” and “cooked appropriately.”

  In those days, people knew what bread was. They knew it was a staple food properly made of flour, salt, leavening (sourdough or yeast), and water—not too much of the latter. Wine was a different matter. For much of its history, “wine” could be almost anything alcoholic and grapey. Sometimes, even the grapes were missing, replaced by raisins or, in the case of some Victorian “champagnes,” by gooseberries. Wine might contain honey or lead or seawater. It might be watered down or brandied up. It might be dyed with arsenic or tempered with horseradish. As Rod Phillips has said, “Wines have been heated, boiled and cooled, they have been blended, they have been mixed
. . . and coloured . . . And they have all been called wine.”1 Often, it was hard to be sure whether a wine was fraudulent or not, since the definitions of what “wine” was were not clear. People knew when wine was really bad, but they had less sense of what it would mean for wine to be really good, or simply what it meant for wine to be real in the first place.

  A medieval woman selling bread.

  Now, this has changed dramatically. From the early twentieth century onwards, wine quality has become infinitely better than it was in the past. Legally, wine is “the alcoholic beverage obtained from the fermentation of the juice of freshly gathered grapes.” It may contain a few other things—some sulphur to preserve it and sugar added to the must to adjust the alcohol content—but these additives are properly policed by the relevant authorities. When you are buying a bottle of wine, you can be confident that it really is fermented grape juice and that it really does contain the amount of alcohol stated on the label (whether it will taste good is another matter). It has been said that “the wine commercially produced today is a far more pure and reliable product than that produced in any earlier period.”2 In the past, adulteration of wine was the rule; now it is the exception. With bread, the reverse is true, and as with wine in the past, we are no longer sure what bread is, never mind whether it has been falsified.

  How did this change come about? How did bread become (generally) so bad and wine (relatively) so good? The answer to these questions tells us a great deal about the long struggle between producer and consumer to get the most out of their food and drink.

  Wine

  Part of the difference lies in the fact that wine is a much less natural product than bread. Whereas bread is cooked, wine is manufactured; the one is (potentially) ruined by large-scale modern industry whereas the other is (potentially) improved by it. Good wine is the result of a complex interaction between people and the environment, and for a long time people were less than expert at their side of the bargain, making mistakes that they could rectify only by poisoning their own product in order to cover them up.

  Roman wine jugs.

  For all their odes to wine jars and apostrophes to “wine-dark seas,” the Greeks and Romans made some badly corrupted wines. Pliny the Elder was complaining about it in the first century A.D., in his Natural History. “So many poisons,” he wrote, “are employed to force wine to suit our taste—and we are surprised that it is not wholesome!”3 Wine making was an imprecise art, and ancient wine-makers were much less skilled in monitoring the various stages of manufacture to achieve the taste they desired than their modern equivalents. If all the elements came together—a luscious harvest of grapes and accurate fermentation—ancient wine might well have been delicious. Often, though, wine came out wrong and needed to be “adjusted” after the event. So, in Africa, said Pliny, rough wines might be softened with gypsum and, “in some parts of the country, with lime.” The Greeks on the other hand, feared blandness in wines rather then roughness and “they enliven the smoothness of their wines with potter’s earth or marble dust or salt or sea-water, while in some parts of Italy they use resinous pitch for this purpose and it is the general practice both there and in the neighbouring provinces to season must with resin; in some places they use the lees of older wine or else vinegar for seasoning.”4

  Some of the additions for enhancing the wine’s flavour were fairly harmless. Commonest was honey, often added in prodigious quantities—as much as half and half—suggesting that unsweetened wine must often have been a mouth-puckeringly sour drink. The Gauls apparently were fond of adding herbs, such as thyme or rosemary. The Greeks added rose petals, violets, or mint. Pliny mentions such strange additions as asparagus, rue, sorb apples, mulberries, Syrian carob pods (a bit like chocolate), juniper berries, turnips, roots of squills, cassia, cinnamon, and saffron. It is hard to know which of these were adulterations proper and which were simply culinary innovations. We do not believe we adulterate wine when we add cinnamon quills, cloves, orange peel, and sugar to “mull” it at Christmas time (though the quality of the wine can often do with concealing). On the other hand, some of these ancient flavourings were clearly intended to deceive. The Roman farming writer Columella recommended various artificial flavourings but advised wine-sellers not to advertise the fact “for that scares the buyer off.”5

  Other ancient wine additives had a more practical purpose. The great problem with wine was that it went offso quickly. Most Roman wine was essentially alcoholic fruit juice. There were exceptions to this—the poet Juvenal writes of vintage wine laid down in its bottle for centuries, since the time when Consuls had long hair—but these more mature wines were just this: exceptions.6 Beaujolais Nouveau is well aged by comparison with most ancient Roman wines. We can get some idea of how quickly ancient wine deteriorated from the fact that the jurist Ulpian, writing in the third century A.D., described “old wine” as wine made the previous year.7 Anything that could make the wine keep longer in the Mediterranean climate was seized upon, with too little thought for the effect it might have on the wine’s wholesomeness. This was the main reason that so many wines, Greek wines especially, were resinated—the ancient counterparts of modern retsina. The earthenware amphorae in which wines were kept were often porous, letting air in and oxidizing the wine. Wine-makers found that the wine kept better if the inside of the jar was coated with resin; and better still if a little resin was added to the wine itself along with the must, either in powdered form or as a sticky liquid. Eventually, drinkers became connoisseurs of different kinds of resins—the resin of Syria was said to resemble Attic honey—but resin’s primary purpose was preservation; drinking a glass of inferior retsina can still feel a little like being pickled in Cuprinol.

  Preservation was also the point of adding seawater—salt is a preservative—though it must have made for a repulsive drink. Pliny complained that wines made with seawater were “particularly injurious to the stomach, nerves and bladder.”8 Nothing like as injurious, however, as a still more popular preservative, lead, which Pliny saw as harmless; and he was not alone in this belief. The Romans thought that lead was wonderful for wine. Lead ions inhibit the growth of living organisms, so lead delayed the point at which wine turned into vinegar and generally made it less apt to spoil. What is less well known—because we do everything we can not to consume it now—is that lead is delicious. Those Victorian children gnawing on their lead pencils and chewing on their lead soldiers were not just playing out some Freudian oral fixation, they were also satisfying a craving for sweetness. The Romans swore by lead to correct a sour wine, making it sweeter. This was especially the case if the lead was added in the form of sapa or defrutum, a concentrated grape juice or must boiled down in a lead vessel.

  Writing as a landowner in the first century A.D., Columella noted that “Some allow a quarter of the must to boil away after pouring it into leaden pots, some a third,” but that “if one lets half of it boil away, it becomes undeniably a better sapa”—and one with a higher lead content.9 The farming writer Cato recommended using a fortieth part of this deadly reduction during wine making.10 He would surely never have done so had he realized that lead was a poison, capable of causing headache, fatigue, and fever; sterility; loss of appetite; severe constipation and unbearable colic pains; loss of speech, deafness, blindness, paralysis, loss of control of the extremities; and eventually death. Leaded wine must have had terrible effects on the Romans—one historian has suggested that endemic lead disease may have been one reason why so many wealthy Romans were sterile— yet they continued to drink it in the belief that it was good for their health.

  What made lead such a stealthy poison was that its effects are cumulative. Most of the body’s absorbed lead is stored in the skeleton where it builds up over many years. Unlike food poisoning, which quickly affects all those who eat a single meal, the symptoms of lead poisoning build up variably and gradually. And so the use of lead in wine continued long after the Romans, into modern times, reflecting the fact that with
out lead, or some other preservative, “most wine was so unstable that it was likely to deteriorate and go bad within a year of being made, even when it was not shipped over long distances and exposed to rough handling and fluctuating temperatures.”11 Sometimes there would be a mini-epidemic of wine-induced lead poisoning, especially after a cold summer when the sourness of the grapes encouraged wine-makers to overdo the lead. This disease came to be known as the colic of Poitou or colica Pictonum, because the citizens of that French town had suffered an especially bad epidemic. Still the connection wasn’t made between the colic symptoms—of severe abdominal pain, weakness, and nausea—and the lead. Doctors were more apt to blame the sourness of the wine than the lead that had been used to counteract the sourness.

  It was only late in the day, at the end of the seventeenth century, that the danger of lead in wine was spotted, by a German medic called Eberhard Gockel, city physician of Ulm in the Baden-Württemberg region. At that time, lead was still a common addition to wine, though no longer as sapa. Now, the lead additive usually took the form of litharge—a foam or “spume” produced during the refining of lead—or sometimes Bleiweiss (lead oxide) or ceruse (lead carbonate). How did wine-makers get away with these deadly additions? There had been plenty of laws against the adulteration of wine. In 1487, the city of Ulm had passed a law requiring every innkeeper to swear that his wines were pure and that neither he nor his wife nor his servants had added any of a list of additives, which included Bleiweiss. Ten years later, an imperial edict forbade various wine additives, including ceruse. Yet these laws were widely flouted. Penalties for doctoring wines were “surprisingly lenient.”12 In the fifteenth century, German wine adulterers were punished by money fines plus public shaming, and their wine was poured into the river. This was partly because legislators did not realize the effects of lead on the human body; once they did, several German cities issued laws specifically forbidding the use of litharge in wine with stringent penalties—imprisonment and death—for those who broke the law.