If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (40 page)

It was often an innovation in ship technology that brought new foods and drinks to the English table, including citrus fruit. The sixteenth-century sailor John Hawkins made his men eat lemons to stave off scurvy, and oranges were well known to the Tudors. Cardinal Wolsey would go forth into early-Tudor London carrying one, its flesh removed and replaced with a sponge soaked in vinegar ‘and other confections against pestilent airs’. Father John Gerard, a Jesuit priest kept prisoner in the Tower of London in the 1590s, used orange juice as an invisible ink to write letters to the friends who helped him escape. (A letter written in orange juice is illegible until it is heated in an oven.)

Limes and grapefruits began to appear from the West Indies in the 1680s. But the banana, first seen in London in 1633, was not regularly available in London’s markets until the fast steamships of the nineteenth century were able to bring supplies over from the Indies before they rotted. In the late Georgian age, it was discovered that green turtles from the West Indies could be kept alive in tanks of fresh water long enough to make the journey to England, so turtle soup cooked ‘in West Indian fashion’ began to appear on fashionable tables. Mr Howse, the cook at Saltram House in Devon, was described as ‘one of the most accomplished Turtle dressers of the Age’.

And the turtle remained the reptile of choice for aristocrats. ‘Heat up some of the turtle soup’, commanded the fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey on his wedding night, in a novel published in 1937, ‘and give us the
foie gras
, the quails in aspic, and a bottle of hock.’ James Bond had a similar penchant for
pâté de foie gras when he made his first appearance in 1953, and also for another exotic fruit: upon ordering ‘half an avocado pear with a little French dressing’, he is complimented by a maître d’hotel upon the excellence of his taste.

But even with novelties like gin, bananas, foie gras and avocado pears making their debuts, English taste remained resolutely retrograde. Part of the reason was religious. Since the Reformation, Protestant priests had condemned luxurious clothes, houses and food alike. The ‘art of cookery, originated not in Luxury; but in Necessity’, wrote Richard Warner in 1791. He, and many other British food writers, thought that cooks should confine themselves merely to ‘rendering any food more digestible than it would be, in its natural, or simple state’. So the English stuck with their stolid tradition: a wedding feast at Charlecote House near Warwick in 1845 still saw ‘every cottage on the estate … regaled with beef, plum pudding and good ale’.

Although British mainstream taste remained conservative, it was gradually but inevitably inched forwards by improvements in the technology of food production. Even the ‘roast beef of old England’ had once been a novelty. The ending of the Wars of the Roses and the peace imposed by the Tudors allowed herds of cows to be kept alive and fed throughout the winter for the first time. The Tudors evolved a system whereby cows made a one-way journey from their birthplaces in the high pastures of Wales and the north of England, down to the Home Counties for fattening, and then on to Smithfield in London for slaughter and sale. By 1539, Sir Thomas Elyot could write that ‘Beef of England to Englishmen which are in health, bringeth strong nourishing’, and, to the French, eating cow became symbolic of
les rosbifs
across the Channel.

In the seventeenth century, the growing dairy industry replaced curds with cheese as the most common form of preserved milk. The Stuart period was also notable for its use of butter, so much so that a visiting Frenchman thought English food ‘swimming’ in
the stuff, practically every dish being ‘well moistened with butter’. While everybody had always longed for fresh meat, it was only in the eighteenth century that it began for the first time to become available to the lower ranks in society. A revolution in farming saw turnips, swedes and clover introduced as fodder to keep even more cattle alive throughout the winter. More cattle led in turn to more manure to enrich the soil. In 1710, the average ox sold at Smithfield Market weighed 370 pounds, but by 1795 creatures of 800 pounds were standard. It was in Georgian times that the English confirmed their lasting reputation as carnivores. A Swiss traveller wrote that he’d ‘always heard’ the British ‘were great flesh-eaters and I found it true. I have known people in England that never eat any bread.’ Indeed, people said that the Duke of Grafton, ‘who eats an ox a day’, was planning a trip to the spa at Bath, ‘to enable himself to eat two’.

In the eighteenth century, arable farmers became capable of producing the fodder to keep animals alive all winter. Cows became much bigger, and the golden age of roast meat dawned

Until the nineteenth century, dishes tasted only roughly
similar each time they were made. About 1800, the modern idea of a standardised recipe appeared. Until then, recipes had been somewhat vague on quantities, length of cooking and temperature. They commonly began with instructions such as ‘take four tame Pigeons’ or ‘take a swan’; nature, not a shop, was providing the ingredients. The quantities were usually described as ‘proportionable’ or ‘meet’, and cooking times were often along the lines of ‘until well boiled’.

Eliza Acton is widely recognised as the inventor of the modern recipe book. Her innovation was to list measured ingredients at the start of each recipe before embarking on the instructions. So life was becoming better ordered and time divided into units that everyone could measure and recognise. Instinct was subordinated to experience; tastes were becoming more firmly fixed. But maybe, ultimately, food was becoming sterile.

The twentieth century has seen the world grow smaller and the cuisines of every region appear in our kitchens: French, Italian, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Japanese and Californian. Ironically, though, the simultaneous removal of food production from the domestic to the industrial sphere has also tended to iron out regional and local quirks in cookery. There’s certainly an argument that national television and magazine advertising, once it appeared in the 1950s, flattened out the individuality of what had previously been a set of lively local traditional cuisines in America.

Salt and sugar, the cheapest flavourings, still predominate. Ostensibly we have many more flavours than ever before, but many of them seem practically identical. So much so, in fact, that since transport is now good enough for anyone anywhere to eat anything in any season, some rich westerners are rejecting air freight in order to remain loyal to the local. Tudor and Georgian aristocrats, desperate for novelty, would have found this unimaginable, but the labourers upon their lands would have wholly understood.

41 – Chewing, Swallowing, Burping and Farting

We have brought chemistry into our kitchens, not as a handmaid but as a poisoner … we have let the beer of the people disappear, and have grown ashamed of roast beef.

Mary Ellen Meredith, 1851

The history of chewing and digestion tells the story of the rise and rise of processed food. Until very recently, with our postindustrial desire to return to a more ‘natural’ way of living, raw food, roughage and vegetables were far from desirable.

Medieval people particularly prized food that they didn’t have to chew. Tender young kid goats, lambs or birds were all delightful. Doves were reserved for the lord of the manor, thereby raising the status of small birds. The Tudor favourite was the melting meat of a young kid, ‘praised above all other flesh’, and devoured to celebrate the end of the gruelling Lenten fast.

But most of the population, if they ate meat at all, had to make do with tough, smoked or salted flesh. Medieval peasants were forbidden by law from hunting the deer and other tasty animals that were reserved for their betters. In 1066, the Normans introduced Forest Law to protect the areas where deer were husbanded for hunting. A forest was therefore defined by
its legal status, not by its trees. Forest Law limited the hunting of deer to landowners only, and the punishments for breaking it were horrific: ‘whosoever slew a hart, or a hind, should be deprived of his eyesight’.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
tells us that William the Conqueror himself was personally concerned with the matter. He

forbade men to kill the harts, so also the boars; and he loved the tall deer as if he were their father. Likewise he declared respecting the hares that they should go free. His rich bemoaned it, and the poor men shuddered at it.

The character of Robin Hood, the outlaw, became so popular with the common people because he ignored the hated Forest Law. But unlike Robin, who took what he wanted from the forest, peasants never tasted venison unless they ran the high risks associated with poaching. If a peasant was lucky enough to own a cow, sheep or chicken, he would have valued it far too highly to eat it. Farm animals were for transport, milk, wool or eggs, not food. So the peasant’s meat intake was largely limited to small and nasty creatures: squirrels, wild birds, hedgehogs (‘hogs’ or ‘pigs’ of the hedges). To cook a hedgehog you wrap it in clay and put the clay ball into the fire. A couple of hours later, you smash the clay, which pulls the prickles off the meat. Should a pig or sheep be slaughtered, every single scrap would be eaten, including snout, trotters and internal organs. Hams would be sewn up in hessian and hoisted into the smoky rafters above the fire for preservation.

Yet meat was readily available for those lucky enough to have a job at the royal court. Peasants could only dream of the pleasure courtiers and servants took in nibbling the finest juicy flesh, cooked for hours on a slow-turning spit. The concept of the desirability of soft ‘roast’ meat was incredibly powerful, so much so that we still use the word ‘roast’ to describe a joint that’s merely been ‘baked’, in the technical sense, ever since the oven replaced the spit.

The fourteenth-century ploughman Piers described in
Vision of Piers the Plowman
did not set his sights as high as red meat. Instead, his fantasy foods included chicken, goose, salt bacon and eggs. He had to make do instead with lumpy green cheeses, loaves of beans and bran, ‘parsley, leeks and many cabbages’. In fact, 76 per cent of the calories in the diet of a medieval peasant would come from bread and pottage. The shepherds in the fourteenth-century play that forms part of the ‘Chester Mystery Cycle’ likewise eat bread, bacon, onions, garlic, leeks, butter, green cheeses, oatcakes and a rather nasty-sounding dish of sheep’s heads soused in ale and sour milk.

In hard times Piers or the shepherds might also have eaten indigestible crops really intended for animals. These included ‘berevechicorn’, a mixture of barley, oats and vetch, or ‘bollymong’ (oats, peas, vetch and buckwheat). People often sowed fields with a mixture of seeds – rye and wheat together, for example – so that even if one crop failed the other would provide at least something to eat. These crops produced the very roughest ‘brown bread … having much bran’, which ‘filleth the belly with excrements and shortly descendeth from the stomach’. Root vegetables also kept the belly feeling full: carrots and parsnips were ‘common meat among the common people, all the time of autumn’, wrote Thomas Cogan in 1584.

That was the diet of shepherds and ploughmen, but town-dwellers obtained similar foods from markets. Town authorities made great efforts to have bread and ale, the staple foods for everyone, sold at reasonable prices. They faced perennial problems, though, through the antics of the ‘forestallers’, unscrupulous dealers who bought up food before it reached the market stalls. They passed it on to private clients, literally ‘forestalling’ the general public.

One thing remained standard throughout the whole history of Britain: people ate lots of grain, whether in the form of pottage, ale or bread. A breakfast served to the Earl and Countess
of Northumberland in the fifteenth century consisted of a two-pound ‘manchet’, or best-quality loaf,
each
, plus another ‘trencher’ loaf, pre-sliced, for use as their plates.