Inquiring readers: Paul Emanuelli, author of Avon Street, has contributed posts for this blog before about the City of Bath as a Character and Law & Order and Jane Austen’s Aunt. He has graciously sent in an article about food preparation in the 18th and 19th centuries. The content will astonish you. Paul writes about Bath in his own blog, unpublishedwriterblog. It is well worth a visit.
Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart–a very little bit. Ours are all apple-tarts. You need not be afraid of unwholesome preserves here. I do not advise the custard.”
Michael Gambon as Mr. Woodhouse, Emma, 2009
So says the ever-cautious, Mr Woodhouse, in Jane Austen’s Emma as he entertains his guests at supper. Yet Mr Woodhouse’s fears were not entirely in his imagination. At the time it was relatively common for commercially bought pickles and preserves to contain poisonous sulphate of copper to improve their eye-appeal. And even when prepared at home, the copper pans in which they were cooked, unless properly looked after, could also poison the ingredients.
Churning butter
Yet for most people who lived in the country, as Jane Austen did for much of her life, food-safety was not a major concern. Food was prepared and preserved either by the family themselves or by their domestic staff, and cooking and baking was done at home.
Food preparation in the kitchen.
The ingredients were for the most part grown and bought locally, and word travels quickly in small communities. Meat came from local farms or estates, and farmers and landowners had reputations to maintain, as did the local mill for flour, and the local shopkeepers for all that they sold.
Costermonger from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, 1840s.
The situation though, was very different in towns and cities. Here it was the shopkeepers and “costermongers” who sourced, stored, prepared and supplied the produce. And with a wider market at their disposal these tradesmen were often less concerned with quality, as they were with cost. The worst affected were the poor. For the most part they lived from hand-to-mouth and bought food in “pennyworths” or even “half-pennyworths.” Buying in these smaller quantities (enough for the day) meant goods often cost four or five times more than they would have cost had they been bought in regular quantities.
Bread Seller, William Henry Pyne, ca. 1805
Bread itself could be bought as quarter or half loaves and the poor subsisted largely on bread. But even then, bakers used chalk to make the bread whiter, and alum to enable the use of inferior flour, and while alum was not poisonous it inhibited the digestion and decreased the nutritional value of anything else their customers ate.
Rabbit seller, William Henry Pyne, 1805
The wealthier residents in towns and cities could afford a “better” diet, yet this too carried its own dangers. There was of course no refrigeration at the time and little concept of hygiene. In towns and cities most meat was killed locally, but then it had to be stored, sold and transported to the home. As late as 1862 the government estimated that one-fifth of butcher’s meat in England and Wales came from animals which had died of disease or were carrying considerably disease. And at the start of the nineteenth century butcher’s boys would deliver meat to the wealthier homes, carried on their heads, in baskets or trays, open to the heat and dirt of the day.
A butcher’s shop, by James Pollard
As the Industrial Revolution took hold, the British population grew, and so did the towns and cities. The nation became more dependent on imported and processed foods. The growing “middle classes” were acquiring a growing taste for tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa, and sauces and spices from around the world. The problem that the fictional Mr Woodhouse had been concerned about a few years earlier rapidly became a fact of life as the century progressed.
Coachman, seated, holding a tankard. Mezzotint by Ryley, printed in colours for John Bowles in London Feb. 1st, 1768
The “adulteration” of food and drink became increasingly commonplace. Producers, importers, merchants and sellers were all adding ingredients to increase bulk or “improve” appearance. The making of beer had more to do with chemistry than the brewing process. As Dr Richard Wetherby says, in my novel, Avon Street,
Have you any idea of how they adulterate the beer in the ale houses around Avon Street? It is full of foxglove, henbane, opium and God knows what other concoctions. They use chemicals so that they can water down the beer, keep its taste and appearance, but make it stronger, and still sell it cheaply.”
Cow Keeper’s Shop in London, 1825, George Scharf
Milk too, was often watered down, sometimes by as much as 50%. So common did the adulteration of food become that books on housekeeping routinely carried warnings and tests for detecting added chemicals like plaster of Paris. Mrs Beeton in prefacing a recipe for a popular anchovy paste warned against shop-bought pastes,
In six cases out of ten, the only portion of those preserved delicacies, that contains anything indicative of anchovies, is the paper label pasted on the bottle or pot, on which the word itself is printed.”
Typical coffee house, late 18th century
In 1851 The Lancet, medical journal, commissioned a doctor from the London Royal Free Hospital to examine the adulteration of thirty common foods. The study revealed that China tea contained 45% sand and dirt together with traces of sulphate of iron; lard contained carbonate of soda and caustic lime; coffee included chicory, mangel wurzel (root vegetable) sawdust, and acorns; cocoa and chocolate were coloured with earth and included arrowroot and Venetian lead; sweets (candy) were found to contain chromate of lead, sulphate of mercury and various other noxious flavourings and colourings. Red lead and other chemical colourings were found to be routinely used in foodstuffs such as “Red Leicester Cheese.”
Six pence a pound, fair cherryes
Even after the study was published the merchants, tradespeople and government were slow to respond. It was not until 1860 that the Adulteration Act was passed. Thankfully, technology and innovation helped in the interim. In 1857 a process for the mass production of ice was patented allowing foods to be better preserved and transported. The availability of canned goods also increased. The army had been supplied with canned foods since 1820, but the cans had to be opened with a chisel or a bayonet, until the can-opener was invented in 1858. As technology improved, mass-produced processed foods like soups, sauces, biscuits, chocolate, pickles and egg-powder became more popular and were prepared to more rigorous standards. And though the Adulteration Act was still largely resisted, in 1872 official inspectors were created with the power to test food and impose substantial fines. Quality and safety of food gradually improved, which I am sure would have pleased the fictional Mr Woodhouse.
Old Covent Garden market, 1825, Scharf
More on the topic:
Refrigerated milk cart, 19th c. This design, from the USA, used ice to keep the air temperature cool for the transport of milk. Holes in the compartments allowed air to circulate from where the ice compartments to the milk compartments.
Jane Austen's World 
Thank you for this interesting post. After reading more about the life in the Regency era I am very interested in their food, cooking and baking. This post I really enjoyed to read.
I read “Tea with Jane Austen” from Kim Wilson. In this book it is also described about adding earth to the coffee or dried leaves from the trees to the tea. It makes me shiver … and thought how luck we are today.
I also have “The Jane Austen Cookbook” written by Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye. I still haven’t read and hope to find time in my holidays.
In both books are some receipts and I really want to try some of the baking …
The Apple Puffs in the JA Cookbook are excellent! I use a very simple recipe for the puff pastry I found online. It uses sour cream; I think it would be pretty easy to find on a site like allrecipes.
Very interesting and excellent post. I enjoyed reading it. I am going to try and make something following the food preparation recipes of that time.
You might be interested in these recipes from the Jane Austen Centre’s online magazine! http://www.janeausten.co.uk/online-magazine/regency-recipes/
The pictures are lovely. Even today, one can shop at markets in Europe and find fresh, cured and smoked hanging meets, though they are not out long. I wouldn’t be too sanguine about food today, particularly in the US. Fillers, pesticides, herbicides and other, not good for you ingredients, abound in all sorts of food, especially in ground beef.
What a wonderful read! Sadly, in India, many poor people still have to eat adulterated and often poisonous food.
Nice post!
Butter was one item that was commonly adulterated right thru the early 1900’s. Abuses in the US eventually brought about laws and national standards.
Vic and Paul, since food is my “thing” I really enjoyed this post. We think the additives in our food today are bad (and they ARE), but it sounds like they had some pretty dangerous ones in earlier times, times I tend to idealise far too much. I cook with nearly all organic ingredients. My custard sauce, for example, is made with organic eggs and milk, so no hormones, etc.
Yikes! It sounds dangerous to eat. I think it would have been healthiest to live on a country estate, where the servants made the butter and cheese, fish came from the estate’s own lake, and meat and poultry and eggs came from the home farm. I wonder if these practices contributed to the high mortality rate for children.
Think of how much the wealthy people had to trust others with their food production — that if something dismal wound up on their plate in the dining room table they had to eat it, or go without, or fire the cook without knowing if they’d get a better one. I can imagine how possessive they would become of their cooks if they had a good one. I also could see why people would retreat to the country to eat a lot more vegetables and stuff from their own estates in the summer–it would be a health restorative from all the other stuff they were eating.
Reblogged this on Murosymuebles's Blog and commented:
que buenos grabados!
Fascinating, thank you!
Thank you, Vic for hosting this piece and supplying such brilliant illustrations.
And many thanks to the commenters above.
The Industrial Revolution is still happening around the world and has echoes in the current Technological Revolution.
By being aware of the past we can hopefully avoid some of the mistakes and learn lessons for the future.
As the old saying goes, “We are what we eat.”
Vic,
Another great article. I love reading about the history of food.
Suzi Love
Wonderful info! In Jane Austen and the Archangel, just out last month http://tinyurl.com/7c2nsm3 Jane attempts to make a late supper for Michael. The scene where he magically lights the stove for her shows her sense of humor!
I have been experimenting by using recipes from period cookbooks such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (first published 1861) and Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifery (published 1764). The recipes are wonderful and the results delicious. A stewed rump roast from Mrs Beeton’s book placed 3rd in a cooking contest (out of four), and a recent batch of pickles from Mrs Moxon’s book came out extremely well.Since we’ve been trying to cut down on the amount of processed food we buy from the store, these old methods of cooking and preserving have been serving us well (though some interpretation for the modern kitchen must be employed).
They say that we are all the progeny of the survivors, and this was just one aspect of life that our ancestors had to survive. It frequently used to be impossible to trust drinking water too, and my understanding of the widespread consumption of “small beer” is that it tended to be safer – because the water used in the brewing was boiled.
I must expand on ellaquinnauthor’s post. I remember that sides of beef and mutton regularly hung in butcher shops on England when I grew up (1940s and 50s) as did links of sausage and game birds. Cut meat was displayed on marble slabs in the shop window—no doubt very unhealthy to modern minds, but we developed a natural immunity that was preferable to the chemical products of the pharmaceutical industry.
Supermarkets today are not paragons of the supply of quality food either…witness the poor quality of fruits from factory farms, varieties that have been grown and developed only for appearance and ability to travel long distances. As for meat—I have to laugh at the city folk who boast of ‘Alberta beef’ when they know nothing but the tough product from the Industrial packing plants where the prime quality is sent only to organisation with rich customers with deep pockets. One has to live in the country even today to have access to the best quality.
i remember a teacher reading us from upton sinclair’s the jungle about the meat packing industry in grade school. it lead me to read the whole book as an adult. it makes me thankful that i grew up on a farm, gardening, butchering our own animals. the next door neighbor had a dairy. we could see the cows, watch the milking and purchase it cheaply. we did purchase some things.
i remember in the last 10 yrs of a bread that advertized that it contained wood shavings. stupid me, i even purchased a loaf. does anyone else remember that bread?
[…] before about the City of Bath as a Character and Law & Order and Jane Austen’s Aunt, and Food – To Die For: Food Preparation in the Georgian Era. He has graciously sent in an article about crime and an incident involving Jane Austen’s […]
[…] & Order and Jane Austen’s Aunt, Walking in Austen’s Footsteps, and Food – To Die For: Food Preparation in the Georgian Era. He has graciously sent in an article about crime and an incident involving Jane Austen’s aunt, […]