At Home

• CHAPTER IV •

THE KITCHEN

I

In the summer of 1662, Samuel Pepys, then a rising young figure in the British Navy Office, invited his boss, Naval Commissioner Peter Pett, to dinner at his home on Seething Lane, near the Tower of London. Pepys was twenty-nine years old and presumably hoped to impress his superior. Instead, to his horror and dismay, he discovered that when his plate of sturgeon was set before him it had within it “many little worms creeping.”

Finding one’s food in an advanced state of animation was not a commonplace event even in Pepys’s day—he was truly mortified—but being at least a little uncertain about the freshness and integrity of food was a fairly usual condition. If it wasn’t rapidly decomposing from inadequate preservation, there was every chance that it was colored or bulked out with some dangerous and unappealing substances.

Almost nothing, it seems, escaped the devious wiles of food adulterers. Sugar and other expensive ingredients were often stretched with gypsum, plaster of paris, sand, dust, and other forms of daft, as such additives were collectively known. Butter reportedly was bulked out with tallow and lard. A tea drinker, according to various authorities, might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep’s dung. One closely inspected shipment, Judith Flanders reports in The Victorian House, proved to be only slightly more than half tea; the rest was made up of sand and dirt. Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery products a golden glow and brought radiance to mustard. Lead acetate was added to drinks as a sweetener, and red lead somehow made Gloucester cheese lovelier to behold, if not safer to eat.

There was hardly a foodstuff, it seems, that couldn’t be improved or made more economical to the retailer through a little deceptive manipulation. Even cherries, Tobias Smollett reported, could be made to glisten afresh by being gently rolled around in the vendor’s mouth before being put on display. How many unsuspecting ladies of quality, he wondered, had enjoyed a plate of luscious cherries that had been “rolled and moistened between the filthy and, perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St Giles’s huckster”?

Bread seems to have been particularly a target. In his popular novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Smollett characterized London bread as a poisonous compound of “chalk, alum and bone-ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution,” but such charges were in fact already a commonplace by then and probably had been for a very long time, as evidenced by the line in “Jack and the Beanstalk”: “I’ll crush his bones to make my bread.” The earliest formal allegation of widespread bread adulteration yet found came in a book called Poison Detected: Or Frightful Truths, written anonymously in 1757 by “My Friend, a Physician,” who revealed on “very credible authority” that “sacks of old bones are not infrequently used by some of the Bakers” and that “the charnel houses of the dead, are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living.” Almost at the same time another, very similar book came out: The Nature of Bread, Honestly and Dishonestly Made, by Joseph Manning, M.D., who reported that it was common for bakers to add bean meal, chalk, white lead, slaked lime, and bone ash to every loaf they made.

These assertions are routinely reported as fact, even though it was demonstrated pretty conclusively over seventy years ago by Frederick A. Filby, in his classic work Food Adulteration (1934), that the claims could not possibly be true. Filby took the interesting and obvious step of baking loaves of bread using the accused adulterants in the manner and proportions described. In every case but one the bread was either as hard as concrete or failed to set at all, and nearly all the loaves smelled or tasted disgusting. Several needed more baking time than conventional loaves and so were actually more expensive to produce. Not one of the adulterated loaves was edible.

The fact of the matter is that bread is sensitive stuff: if you put foreign products into it in almost any quantity, people will notice. But then this could be said about most foodstuffs. It is hard to believe that anyone could drink a cup of tea and not notice that it was 50 percent iron filings. Although some adulteration doubtless did happen, particularly when it enhanced color or lent an appearance of freshness, most cases of claimed adulteration are likely to be either exceptional or untrue, and this is certainly the case with all the things said to be put into bread (with the single notable exception of alum, about which more in a moment).

It is hard to overemphasize just how important bread was to the English diet through the nineteenth century. For many people bread wasn’t just an important accompaniment to a meal, it was the meal. Up to 80 percent of all household expenditure, according to the bread historian Christian Petersen, was spent on food, and up to 80 percent of that went on bread. Even middle-class people spent as much as two-thirds of their income on food (compared with about one quarter today), of which a fairly high and sensitive portion was bread. For a poorer family, nearly every history tells us, the daily diet was likely to consist of a few ounces of tea and sugar, some vegetables, a slice or two of cheese, and just occasionally a very little meat. All the rest was bread.

Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker’s dozen.

Alum, however, is another matter. Alum is a chemical compound—technically a double sulfate—used as a fixative for dyes. (The formal term is a mordant.) It was also used as a clarifying agent in all kinds of industrial processes and for dressing leather. It provides excellent whitening for flour, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For a start, a very little alum goes a long way. Just three or four spoonfuls can whiten a 280-pound sack of flour, and such a dilute amount would harm no one. In fact, alum is added to foods and medicines even now. It is a regular constituent in baking powder and vaccines, and sometimes it is added to drinking water because of its clarifying properties. It actually made inferior grades of flour—flour that was perfectly good nutritionally but just not very attractive—acceptable to the masses and therefore allowed bakers to make more efficient use of their wheat. It was also added to flour for perfectly legitimate reasons as a drying agent.

It wasn’t always that foreign substances were introduced with the intention of bulking things up. Sometimes they just fell in. A parliamentary investigation of bakeries in 1862 found many of them filled “with masses of cobwebs, weighed down with flour dust that had accumulated upon them, and hanging in strips” ready to drop into any passing pot or tray. Insects and vermin scurried along walls and countertops. A sample of ice cream sold in London in 1881 was found to contain human hair, cat hair, insects, cotton fibers, and several other insalubrious constituents, but this probably reflected a lack of hygiene rather than the fraudulent addition of bulking agents. In the same period, a London confectioner was fined “for colouring his sweets yellow with surplus pigment left over from painting his cart.” However, the very fact that these matters attracted the attention of newspapers indicates they were exceptional events rather than routine ones.

Humphry Clinker, a sprawling novel written in the form of a series of letters, paints such a vivid picture of life in eighteenth-century England that it is much quoted even now and almost certainly therefore has a lot to answer for. In one of its more colorful passages Smollett describes how milk was carried through the streets of London in open pails, into which plopped “spittle, snot and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, over-flowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s-sake, the spewings of infants … and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture.” What is easily overlooked is that the book was intended as satire, not as documentary. Smollett wasn’t even in England when he wrote it; he was slowly dying in Italy. (He died three months after its publication.)

All this isn’t to say that there wasn’t bad food about. There most certainly was. Infected and rotten meat was a particular problem. The filth of London’s Smithfield Market, the city’s principal meat exchange, was celebrated. One witness to a parliamentary investigation of 1828 said he saw “a cow’s carcass that was so rancid, the fat was no more than dripping yellow slime.” Animals driven in on the hoof from distant parts often arrived exhausted and sick, and didn’t get any better while there. Sheep reportedly were sometimes skinned while still alive. Many animals were covered with sores. Smithfield vendors, in fact, had a private name for bad meat: cag-mag, an abbreviation of two slang words, meaning “cheap crap.”

Even when the producers’ intentions were pure, the food itself wasn’t always. Getting food to distant markets in an edible condition was a constant challenge. People dreamed of being able to eat foods from far away or out of season. In January 1859, much of America followed eagerly as a ship laden with three hundred thousand juicy oranges raced under full sail from Puerto Rico to New England to show that it could be done. By the time it arrived, however, more than two-thirds of the cargo had rotted to a fragrant mush. Producers in more distant lands could not hope to achieve even that much. Argentinians raised massive herds of cattle on their endless and accommodating pampas, but they had no way to ship the meat. Most of their cows were therefore boiled down for their bones and tallow, and the meat was simply wasted. Seeking ways to help them, the German chemist Justus von Liebig devised a formula for a meat extract, which came to be known as Oxo, but clearly that could never make more than a marginal difference.

What was desperately needed was a way of keeping foods safe and fresh for longer periods than nature allowed. In the late eighteenth century, a Frenchman named Nicolas-François Appert produced a book called The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, which represented a real breakthrough. Appert’s system consisted essentially of sealing food in glass jars and then heating the jars slowly. The method generally worked pretty well, but the seals were not entirely foolproof and sometimes air and contaminants got in, to the gastrointestinal distress of those who partook of the contents. Since it wasn’t possible to have total confidence in Appert’s jars, no one did.

In short, a lot of things could go wrong with food on its way to the table. So when in the early 1840s a miracle product came along that promised to transform matters, there was a great deal of excitement. The product was an unexpectedly familiar one: ice.

II

In the summer of 1844, the Wenham Lake Ice Company—named for a lake in Massachusetts—took premises in the Strand in London, and there each day placed a fresh block of ice in the window. No one in England had ever seen a block of ice that big before—certainly not in summer, not in the middle of London—or one that was so wondrously glassy and clear. You could actually read through it: a newspaper was regularly propped behind the block so that passersby could see this amazing fact for themselves. The shop window became a sensation and was regularly crowded with gawkers.

Thackeray mentioned Wenham ice by name in a novel. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert insisted on its use at Buckingham Palace and awarded the company a royal warrant. Many people supposed Wenham to be a massive body of water, on the scale of one of the Great Lakes. Charles Lyell, the English geologist, was so intrigued that he made a special trip to the lake from Boston—not a particularly easy thing to do—while on a speaking tour. He was fascinated by how slowly Wenham ice melted, and assumed it had something to do with its celebrated purity. In fact, Wenham ice melted at the same speed as any other ice. Except that it had traveled far, it wasn’t actually special in any way at all.

Lake ice was a marvelous product. It created itself at no cost to the producer, was clean, renewable, and infinite in supply. The only drawbacks were that there was no infrastructure to produce and store it, and no market to sell it to. In order to make the ice industry exist, it was necessary to work out ways to cut and lift ice on a large scale, build storehouses, secure trading rights, and engage a reliable chain of shippers and agents. Above all, the producer had to create a demand for ice in places where ice had seldom or never been seen and was most assuredly not something anyone was predisposed to pay for. The man who did all this was a Bostonian of good birth and challenging disposition named Frederic Tudor. Making ice a commercial proposition became his overweening obsession.

The notion of shipping ice from New England to distant ports was considered completely mad—“the vagary of a disordered brain,” in the words of one of his contemporaries. The first shipment of ice to Britain so puzzled customs officials as to how to classify it that all three hundred tons of it melted away before it could be moved off the docks. Shipowners were highly reluctant to accept it as cargo. They didn’t relish the humiliation of arriving in a port with a holdful of useless water, but they were also wary of the very real danger of tons of shifting ice and sloshing meltwater making their ships unstable. These were men, after all, whose nautical instincts were based entirely on the idea of keeping water outside the ship, so they were loath to take on such an eccentric risk when there wasn’t even a certain market at the end of it all.

Tudor was a strange and difficult man—“imperious, vain, contemptuous of competitors and implacable to enemies,” in the estimation of the historian Daniel J. Boorstin. He alienated all his closest friends and betrayed the trust of colleagues, almost as if that were his life’s ambition. Nearly all the technological innovations that made the ice trade possible were actually the work of his retiring, compliant, long-suffering associate Nathaniel Wyeth. It cost Tudor years of frustrated endeavor, and all of his family fortune, to get the ice business up and running, but gradually it caught on and eventually it made him and many others rich. For several decades, ice was America’s second biggest crop, measured by weight. If securely insulated, ice could last a surprisingly long while. It could even survive the 16,000-mile, 130-day trip from Boston to Bombay—or at least about two-thirds of it could, enough to make the long trip profitable. Ice went to the farthest corners of South America and from New England to California via Cape Horn. Sawdust, a product previously without any value at all, proved to be an excellent insulator, providing useful extra income for Maine lumber mills.

Lake Wenham was actually completely incidental to the ice business in America. It never produced more than about ten thousand tons of ice in a year, compared with almost a million tons lifted annually just from the Kennebec River in Maine. In England, Wenham ice was more talked about than used. A few businesses took regular deliveries, but hardly any households (other than the royal one) did. By the 1850s, most ice sold in Britain was not from Wenham or even from America. The Norwegians—not a people one normally associates with sharp practices—changed the name of Lake Oppegaard, near Oslo, to Lake Wenham so that they could tap into the lucrative market. By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

As Gavin Weightman notes in his history of the business, The Frozen-Water Trade, Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers, and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice cream became popular—and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors. Manhattan alone consumed nearly 1 million tons of ice a year, while Brooklyn sucked down 334,000 tons, Boston 380,000, and Philadelphia 377,000. Americans grew immensely proud of the civilizing conveniences of ice. “Whenever you hear America abused,” one American told Sarah Maury, a visiting Briton, “remember the ice.”

Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast. Chicago became the epicenter of the railway industry in part because it could generate and keep huge quantities of ice. Individual ice houses in Chicago held up to 250,000 tons of ice. Before ice, in hot weather milk (which came out of the cow warm, of course) could be kept for only an hour or two before it began to spoil. Chicken had to be eaten on the day of plucking. Fresh meat was seldom safe for more than a day. Now food could be kept longer locally, but it could also be sold in distant markets. Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet. For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced. Farmers on the boundless plains of the American Midwest could not only produce food more cheaply and abundantly than anywhere else but also sell it almost anywhere.

Meanwhile, other developments increased the range of food storage possibilities enormously. In 1859, an American named John Landis Mason solved the challenge that the Frenchman Nicolas-François Appert had not quite mastered the better part of a century before. Mason patented the threaded glass jar with a metal screw-on lid. This provided a perfect seal and made it possible to preserve all kinds of foods that would previously spoil. The Mason jar became a huge hit everywhere, though Mason himself scarcely benefited from it. He sold the rights in it for a modest sum, then turned his attention to other inventions—a folding life raft, a case for keeping cigars fresh, a self-draining soap dish—that he assumed would make him rich, but his other inventions were neither successful nor even very good. As one after another failed, Mason withdrew into a semi-demented poverty. He died alone and forgotten in a New York City tenement house in 1902.

An alternative, and ultimately even more successful, method for preserving food—namely, canning—was perfected in England by a man named Bryan Donkin working between 1810 and 1820. Donkin’s invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them. The real breakthrough awaited the development of lighter materials, which in turn enabled mass production. At the beginning of the 1800s, one man, working hard, could produce about sixty cans a day; by 1880, machines could pump out fifteen hundred in a day. Surprisingly, getting them open remained a serious impediment much longer. Various cutting devices were patented, but all were difficult to use or nearly lethal if they slipped. The safe, modern manual can opener—the sort with two rolling wheels and a twisting key—dates only from 1925.

Developments in food preservation were part of a much wider revolution in food production that changed the dynamics of agriculture everywhere. The McCormick reaper permitted the mass production of grain, which in turn allowed America to produce livestock on an industrial scale. This in its turn led to the development of large meatpacking centers and improved methods of refrigeration—and ice remained at the heart of that well into the modern era. As late as 1930, America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars, all cooled with ice.

The sudden ability to transport food over great distances and to keep it fresh enough to reach far-off markets transformed agriculture in many distant lands. Kansas wheat, Argentinian beef, New Zealand lamb, and other foodstuffs from around the world began to turn up on dinner tables thousands of miles away. The repercussions in traditional farming areas were enormous. You don’t have to venture far into any New England forest to find the ghostly house foundations and old field walls that denote a farm abandoned in the nineteenth century. Farmers throughout the region left their farms in droves, either to work in factories or to try their hand at farming on better land farther west. In a single generation Vermont lost nearly half its population. Europe suffered equally. “British agriculture virtually collapsed in the last generation of the nineteenth century,” says Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and with it went all the things it had previously supported—farm laborers, villages, country churches and parsonages, a landed aristocracy. Ultimately, it put our rectory, and thousands of others like it, into private hands.

During a visit to New England in the autumn of 2007, I drove some fifteen miles north from Boston to see Lake Wenham, once briefly the most famous lake in the world. Today Wenham stands along a quiet highway in attractive countryside and provides a picturesque glimpse of water for anyone driving between the towns of Wenham and Ipswich. Lake Wenham now serves as a freshwater reservoir for Boston, so it is surrounded by a high chain-link fence and is closed to the public. A historical marker beside the road celebrates the town of Wenham’s tercentenary in 1935 but makes no mention of the ice trade that once made the lake famous.

III

If we were to step into the kitchen of the rectory in 1851, a number of differences would strike us immediately. For one thing, there would have been no sink. Kitchens in the mid-nineteenth century were for cooking only (at least in middle-class homes); washing up was done in a separate scullery—the room we will visit in Chapter V—which meant that every dish and pot had to be carried to a room across the corridor to be scrubbed, dried, and put away, then brought back to the kitchen the next time it was needed. That could entail many trips, for the Victorians did a lot of cooking and provided an awesome array of dishes. What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a popular book of 1851 by Lady Maria Clutterbuck (who was actually Mrs. Charles Dickens), gives a good impression of the kind of cooking that went on in those days. One suggested menu—for a dinner for six people—comprises “carrot soup, turbot with shrimp sauce, lobster patties, stewed kidneys, roast saddle of lamb, boiled turkey, knuckle of ham, mashed and brown potatoes, stewed onions, cabinet pudding, blancmange and cream, and macaroni.” Such a meal, it has been calculated, could generate 450 pieces of washing up. The swing door leading from the kitchen to the scullery must have swung a lot.

Had you arrived at the Old Rectory at a time when the housekeeper, Miss Worm, and her assistant, a nineteen-year-old village girl named Martha Seely, were baking or cooking, you may well have found them doing something that until recently had not been done at all—carefully measuring out ingredients. Until almost the middle of the century instructions in cookbooks were always wonderfully imprecise, calling merely for “some flour” or “enough milk.” What changed all that was a revolutionary book by a shy, sweet-natured poet in Kent named Eliza Acton. Because Miss Acton’s poems weren’t selling, her publisher gently suggested she might try something more commercial, and in 1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled.

The book enjoyed considerable success but then was abruptly shouldered aside by a brasher work—the vastly, lastingly, powerfully, mystifyingly influential Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton. There has never been another book quite like it, both for influence and content. It was an instant success and would remain a success well into the following century.

Mrs. Beeton made clear that running a household was a grave and cheerless business: “As with the commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house.” Only a moment earlier she had saluted her own selfless heroism: “I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it,” she declared, leaving the reader with a sense of mild gloom and guilty indebtedness.

Its title notwithstanding, The Book of Household Management whips through its professed subject in just twenty-three pages, then turns to cooking for nearly the whole of the next nine hundred. Despite this bias toward the kitchen, however, Mrs. Beeton didn’t actually like cooking and didn’t go near her own kitchen if she could possibly help it. You don’t have to read far into the recipes to begin to suspect as much—when she suggests, for instance, boiling pasta for an hour and three quarters. Like many of her nation and generation, she had an innate suspicion of anything exotic. Mangoes, she said, were liked only “by those who have not a prejudice against turpentine.” Lobsters she found “rather indigestible” and “not so nutritive as they are generally supposed to be.” Garlic was “offensive.” Potatoes were “suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious.” Cheese she thought fit only for sedentary people—she didn’t say why—and then only “in very small quantities.” Especially to be avoided were cheeses with veins, since these were fungal growths. “Generally speaking,” she added, just a touch ambiguously, “decomposing bodies are not wholesome eating, and the line must be drawn somewhere.” Worst of all was the tomato: “The whole plant has a disagreeable odour, and its juice, subjected to the action of the fire, emits a vapour so powerful as to cause vertigo and vomiting.”

Mrs. Beeton appears to have been unacquainted with ice as a preservative, but we may safely assume that she wouldn’t have liked it, for she didn’t like chilled things generally. “The aged, the delicate and children should abstain from ices or cold beverages,” she wrote. “It is also necessary to abstain from them when persons are very warm, or immediately after taking violent exercise, as in some cases they have produced illnesses which have ended fatally.” A great many foods and activities had fatal consequences in Mrs. Beeton’s book.

For all her matronly airs, Mrs. Beeton was just twenty-three when she began the book. She wrote it for her husband’s publishing company, where it was issued as a partwork in thirty-three monthly installments beginning in 1859 (the year that also saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) and produced as a single volume in 1861. Samuel Beeton had already made quite a lot of money from publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was as much of a sensation in Britain as in America. He also started some popular magazines, including the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852), which had many innovations—a problem page, a medical column, dress patterns—still often found in women’s magazines today.

Nearly everything about The Book of Household Management suggested it was done in carelessness and haste. The recipes were mostly contributed by readers, and nearly all the rest was plagiarized. Mrs. Beeton stole shamelessly from the most obvious and traceable sources. Whole passages are lifted verbatim from the autobiography of Florence Nightingale. Others are taken straight from Eliza Acton. Remarkably, Mrs. Beeton didn’t even trouble to adjust gender, so that one or two of her stories are related in a voice that, disconcertingly and bewilderingly, can only be male. Organizationally, the whole is a mess. She devotes more space to the making of turtle soup than to breakfast, lunch, and supper combined, and never mentions afternoon tea at all. The inconsistencies are little short of spectacular. On the very page on which she lengthily explicates the tomato’s dangerous failings (“it has been found to contain a particular acid, a volatile oil, a brown, very fragrant extracto-resinous matter, a vegeto-mineral matter, muco-saccharine, some salts, and, in all probability, an alkaloid”), she gives a recipe for stewed tomatoes, which she calls a “delicious accompaniment,” and notes, “It is a wholesome fruit and digests easily. Its flavour stimulates the appetite and it is almost universally approved.”

Despite its manifold peculiarities, Mrs. Beeton’s book was a huge and lasting success. Its two unimpeachable virtues were its supreme confidence and its comprehensiveness. The Victorian era was an age of anxiety, and Mrs. Beeton’s plump tome promised to guide the worried homemaker through every one of life’s foamy shoals. Flicking through the pages, the homemaker could learn how to fold napkins, dismiss a servant, eradicate freckles, compose a menu, apply leeches, make a Battenberg cake, and restore to life someone struck by lightning. Mrs. Beeton elucidated in precise steps how to make hot buttered toast. She gave cures for stammering and for thrush; discussed the history of lambs as a sacrifice; provided an exhaustive list of the many brushes (stove brush, cornice brush, banister broom, whisk broom, carpet broom, crumb brush—some forty in all) that were needed in any house that aspired to hygienic respectability; and discussed the dangers of making friendships in haste and the precautions to be taken before entering a sickroom. It was an instruction manual that could be followed religiously, and that was exactly what people wanted. Mrs. Beeton was decisive on every manner of topic—the domestic equivalent of a drill sergeant.

She was just twenty-eight when she died, of puerperal fever, eight days after giving birth for the fourth time, but her book lived on and on. It sold more than two million copies in its first decade alone and continued to sell steadily well into the twentieth century.

Looking back now, it is nearly impossible to get a fix on Victorians and their diet.

For a start, the range of foods was dazzling. People, it seems, ate practically anything that stirred in the undergrowth or could be hauled from water. Ptarmigan, sturgeon, larks, hare, woodcock, gurnet, barbel, smelts, plover, snipe, gudgeon, dace, eels, tench, sprats, smelts, turkey poults, and many more largely forgotten delicacies featured in Mrs. Beeton’s many recipes. Fruits and vegetables seemed almost infinite in number. Of apples alone there were, almost unbelievably, more than two thousand varieties to choose from—Worcester pearmain, Beauty of Bath, Cox’s orange pippin, and so on in long and poetic vein. At Monticello in the early nineteenth century Thomas Jefferson grew 23 different types of peas and more than 250 kinds of fruits and vegetables. (Unusual for his day, Jefferson was practically a vegetarian and ate only small portions of meat as a kind of “condiment.”) As well as gooseberries, strawberries, plums, figs, and other produce well known to us today, Jefferson and his contemporaries also enjoyed tayberries, tansy, purslane, Japanese wine berries, damsons, medlars, seakale, screwpine, rounceval peas, skirrets (a kind of sweet root), cardoons (a thistle), scorzonera (a type of salsify), lovage, turnip-cabbage, and scores more that nowadays are encountered rarely or not at all. Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain’s coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week. Americans enjoyed even greater abundance. New York Harbor alone held half the world’s oysters and yielded so much sturgeon that caviar was set out as a bar snack. (The idea was that salty food would lead people to drink more beer.) The size and variety of dishes and condiments on offer was almost breathtaking. One hotel in New York had 145 dishes on the menu in 1867. A popular American recipe book of 1853, Home Cookery, casually mentions adding a hundred oysters to a pot of gumbo to “enhance” it. Mrs. Beeton provided no fewer than 135 recipes just for sauces.

Remarkably, Victorian appetites were really comparatively restrained. The golden age of gluttony was actually the eighteenth century. This was the age of John Bull, the most red-faced, overfed, coronary-ready icon ever created by any nation in the hope of impressing other nations. It is perhaps no coincidence that two of the fattest monarchs in British history did a great deal of their eating in the 1700s. The first was Queen Anne. Although paintings of Anne always tactfully make her look no more than a little fleshy, like one of Rubens’s plump beauties, she was in fact jumbo-sized—“exceedingly gross and corpulent” in the candid words of her former best friend the Duchess of Marlborough. Eventually Anne grew so stout that she could not go up and down stairs. A trapdoor had to be cut in the floor of her rooms at Windsor Castle through which she was lowered, jerkily and inelegantly, by means of pulleys and a hoist to the state rooms below. It must have been a most remarkable sight to behold. When she died, she was buried in a coffin that was “almost square.” Even more famously enormous was the prince regent, the future George IV, whose stomach when let out of its corset reportedly spilled to his knees. By the time he was forty his waist was more than four feet around.

Even slenderer people routinely sat down to quantities of food that seem impossibly munificent, if not positively destabilizing. A breakfast recorded by the Duke of Wellington consisted of “two pigeons and three beef-steaks, three parts of a bottle of Mozelle, a glass of champagne, two glasses of port and a glass of brandy”—and this was when he was feeling a little under the weather. The Reverend Sydney Smith, though a man of the cloth, caught the spirit of the age by declining ever to say grace. “With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment,” he explained. “It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters.”

The golden age of gluttony (photo credit 4.1)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, gargantuan portions had become institutionalized and routine. Mrs. Beeton gives the following as a menu for a small dinner party: mock turtle soup; fillets of turbot in cream; fried sole with anchovy sauce; rabbits; veal; stewed rump of beef; roasted fowls; boiled ham; a platter of roasted pigeons or larks; and, to finish, rhubarb tartlets, meringues, clear jelly, cream, rice pudding, and soufflé. This was, in Mrs. Beeton’s book, food for six people.

The ironic aspect was that the more attention the Victorians devoted to food, the less comfortable with it they seemed to be. Mrs. Beeton didn’t actually appear to like food at all and treated it, as she treated most things, as a kind of grim necessity to be dealt with swiftly and decisively. She was especially suspicious of anything that added zest to food. Garlic she abhorred. Chilies were barely worth mentioning. Even black pepper was only for the foolhardy: “It should never be forgotten,” she warned her readers, “that, even in small quantities, it produces detrimental effects on inflammatory constitutions.” These alarmed sentiments were echoed endlessly in books and periodicals throughout the age.

Eventually many Victorian households gave up on flavor altogether and just concentrated on trying to get food to the table hot. In larger homes that was ambition enough because kitchens could be wondrously distant from dining rooms. Audley End in Essex set something of a record in this respect by having the kitchen and dining room more than two hundred yards apart. To try to speed things up at Tatton Park in Cheshire, an internal railway line was laid down so that trolleys could be rushed from the kitchen to a distant dumbwaiter, there to be hastily dispatched onward. Sir Arthur Middleton of Belsay Hall near Newcastle became so obsessed with the temperature of the food sent to his table that he plunged a thermometer into each arriving dish and sent back for a further blast of heat, sometimes repeatedly, any that failed to register to his expected standards, so that many of his dinners were taken very late and in a more or less carbonized condition. Auguste Escoffier, the great French chef at the Savoy Hotel in London, earned the esteem of British diners not just by producing very good food, but also by employing a brigade system in the kitchens with different cooks concentrating on different foods—one for meats, one for vegetables, and so on—so that everything could be deposited on the plate at once and brought to the table in unaccustomedly steamy glory.

All this is of course at striking variance with what was said earlier about the poverty of the average person’s diet in the nineteenth century. The fact is, there is such a confusion of evidence that it is impossible to know how well or not people ate.

If average consumption is any guide, then people ate quite a lot of healthy food: almost 8 pounds of pears per person in 1851, compared with just 3 pounds now; almost 9 pounds of grapes and other soft fruits, roughly double the amount eaten now; and just under 18 pounds of dried fruit, as against 3.5 pounds today. For vegetables the figures are even more striking. The average Londoner in 1851 ate 31.8 pounds of onions, as against 13.2 pounds today; consumed over 40 pounds of turnips and rutabagas, compared with 2.3 pounds today; and packed away almost 70 pounds of cabbages per year, as against 21 pounds now. Sugar consumption was about 30 pounds a head—less than a third the amount consumed today. So on the whole it seems that people ate pretty healthily.

Yet most anecdotal accounts, written then and subsequently, indicate the very opposite. Henry Mayhew, in his classic London Labour and the London Poor, published in the year our rectory was built, suggested that a piece of bread and an onion constituted a typical dinner for a laborer, while a much more recent (and deservedly much praised) history, Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders, states that “the staple diet of the working classes and much of the lower middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century consisted of bread or potatoes, a little bit of butter, cheese or bacon, tea with sugar.”

What is certainly true is that people who had no control over their diets often ate very poorly indeed. A magistrate’s report of conditions at a factory in northern England in 1810 revealed that apprentices were kept at their machines from 5:50 in the morning to 9:10 or 9:15 at night, with a single short break for dinner. “They have Water Porridge for Breakfast and Supper”—taken at their machines—“and generally Oatcake and Treacle, or Oatcake and poor Broth, for Dinner,” he wrote. That was, almost certainly, pretty typical fare for anyone stuck in a factory, a prison, an orphanage, or some other powerless situation.

It is also true that diets were remarkably unvaried for many poorer people. In Scotland, farm laborers in the early 1800s received an average ration of 17.5 pounds of oatmeal a week, plus a little milk, and almost nothing else, though they generally considered themselves lucky because at least they didn’t have to eat potatoes. These were widely disdained for the first 150 years or so after their introduction to Europe. Many people considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew belowground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

Only the Irish couldn’t afford to be so particular. For them, the potato was a godsend because of its very high yields. A single acre of stony soil could support a family of six if they were prepared to eat a lot of potatoes, and the Irish, of necessity, were. By 1780, 90 percent of people in Ireland were dependent for their survival exclusively or almost exclusively on potatoes. Unfortunately, the potato is also one of the most vulnerable of vegetables, susceptible to more than 260 types of blight or infestation. From the moment of the potato’s introduction to Europe, failed harvests became regular. In the 120 years leading up to the great famine, the potato crop failed no fewer than twenty-four times. Three hundred thousand people died in a single failure in 1739. But that appalling total was made to seem insignificant by the scale of death and suffering in 1845–46.

It happened very quickly. The crops looked fine until August 1845, and then suddenly they drooped and shriveled. The tubers when dug up were spongy and already putrefying. That year half the Irish crop was lost. The following year virtually all of it was wiped out. The culprit was a fungus called Phytophthora infestans, but people didn’t know that. Instead they blamed almost anything else they could think of—steam from steam trains, the electricity from telegraph signals, the new guano fertilizers that were just becoming popular. It wasn’t just in Ireland that the crop failed—in fact, it failed across Europe—but the Irish were especially dependent on the potato.

Relief was infamously slow to come. Months after the starving had started, Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, was still urging caution. “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,” he wrote. In the worst year of the potato famine, London’s fish market, Billingsgate, sold 500 million oysters, 1 billion fresh herrings, almost 100 million soles, 498 million shrimps, 304 million periwinkles, 33 million plaice, 23 million mackerel, and other similarly massive amounts—and not one morsel of any of it made its way to Ireland to relieve the starving people there.

The greatest part of the tragedy is that Ireland actually had plenty of food. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals, and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.