Near a Thousand Tables (38 page)

I was now beset with cattle and stench on both sides, having no other but a thin deal partition full of chinks between me and them. The room offered me by Captain Cook, and which the Master's obstinacy deprived me of, was now given to very peaceably bleating creatures, who on a stage raised up as high as my bed, shit and pissed on one side, whilst five goats did the same afore on the
other side
.

The expedition succeeded in a series of introductions:

We have imported goats into Tahiti and laid the foundations of a numerous breed of animals most excellently calculated for the hills occupying the inland parts of this isle. We have left goats, hogs and fowls in various parts of New Zealand, and geese in its southern part…. And in all the isles we made presents of garden seeds and planted potatoes in Queen Charlotte's Sound with a good quantity of garlic: so that future navigators may be refreshed in these seas more than
they would expect
.

The Maori, however, killed the goats Reinhold sent ashore, “which was very
provoking to us
.” During his visit to New Zealand in 1820, Richard Cruise encountered “potatoes and pork,
pork and potatoes
wherever we went. I began to get tired of pork and potatoes.” Eventually, however, in the 18305, sheep were introduced from Australia for the benefit of New Zealand's white settlers. The land proved ideal for them: the climate favored their fleeces, the salt grazing flavored their flesh. In the 18505, according to an Otago newspaper, sheep farming presented “visions of quite dazzling wealth.” There were eight and a half million of the creatures by 1867.

New Zealand was an outstanding example of what Al Crosby called “New Europes”: lands in other hemispheres where the environment resembled Europe's enough for European migrants to thrive, European biota to take root and a European way of life to get transplanted. Even with help from the climate, however, it was not easy to catch reflections of home in such distant mirrors. The strenuous efforts that had to be applied in New South Wales are vividly documented. Take, for instance, the case of James Ruse. He was a pardoned convict who had been a husbandman in Cornwall. In 1789 he received a grant of a farm of thirty acres at Parramata. The “middling soil,” it seemed to him, was bound to fail for want of manure. He burned timber, dug in ash, hoed, clod-molded the earth, dug in grass and weeds and left it exposed to sun for sowing. He planted turnip seed “which will mellow and prepare it for next year” and mulched it with his own compost, made from straw rotted in pits. His own labor and his wife's
performed the entire job
. Success with such untried soils depended on experimentation with varied planting strategies. Early Australia was a strange sort of new Europe at first—made with yams, pumpkins and maize. On the warm coastal lowlands where the first settlers set up, maize did better than the rye, barley and wheat that the founding fleet shipped from England. Firs and oaks were planted but the food trees were more exotic: oranges, lemons and limes grew alongside indigo, coffee, ginger, castor nut. On the outward voyage the fleet acquired tropical specimens, including bananas, cocoa, guava, ipecacuanha, jalap, sugarcane and tamarind. In 1802 “the bamboo of Asia” could be admired in the garden of Government House. The most successful early livestock were introduced from Calcutta and the Cape of Good Hope, which also supplied acclimated fruit trees.

In the long run a European model did prevail but it was primarily a Mediterranean one. Sir Joseph Banks, who equipped the founding expedition, believed that over most of its extent the Southern Hemisphere was about ten degrees cooler at any given latitude than the Northern. He therefore expected Botany Bay to resemble Toulouse and sent over citrus fruits, pomegranates, apricots,
nectarines and peaches. “All the vegetables of Europe” fed the convicts in the 1790s but Mediterranean colors predominated in visitors' descriptions. The first governor had oranges in his garden and “as many fine figs as ever I tasted in Spain or Portugal” and “a thousand vines yielding three hundredweight of grapes.” Watkin Tench, whose study of the soils was vital to the colony's success—his samples can still be seen, dried to powder, in a Sydney museum—commended the performance of “vines of every sort…. That their juice will probably hereafter furnish an indispensable article of luxury at European tables has already been predicted in the vehemence of speculation.” He also spotted the potential of oranges, lemons and figs. By the time of a French visit in 1802, peaches were so plentiful that they were used to fatten the hogs. The French commander saw, in the garden at Government House, “the Portugal orange and the Canary fig ripening beneath the shade of the
French apple tree
.” The Mediterranean world also provided the colony with an exportable staple. The first consignment of merino sheep left for New South Wales in 1804. Only five rams and one old ewe survived the journey but these were enough to begin the stocking of the country.

This Australian experience set the pattern for the colonial New Europes of the nineteenth century: “dumb continents” where “the roots are European but the tree grows to a different pattern and design.” The North American West, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, the “Cone” of South America were all settled, displacing the indigenous cultures with dynamic, outward-going and relatively populous economies. All defied their original projectors and developed unpredicted characters of their own—tricks worked by the alchemy of settlement in the crucible of
unexperienced environments
.

EIGHT
 
Feeding the Giants

There is no feast which does not come
to an end
.

—CHINESE PROVERB

Food, glorious food,
Canned, packaged and frozen,
Food, glorious food,
Which ones have you chosen?
Soups powdered in plastic bags,
Steaks polished and wooden,
Fish cutlets like Arctic crags,
Air-tight pudden?
Food, glorious food,
Pre-cooked and pre-grated,
Food, glorious food,
De-bloody hydrated …

—J. B. BOOTHROYD,
OLYMPIA NOW

W
hen Charles Elmé Francatelli, former maître d'hotel and chief cook to Queen Victoria, published
A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes
in 1852, he included some dishes of truly revolting economy. To save money on tea, which he detested anyway, he suggested boiling milk with a spoonful of flour for breakfast: “season it with a little salt and eat it with
bread or a potato
.” He recommended stewed sheeps' trotters for a treat and toast infused in hot water for convalescence.
An hour's slow cooking sufficed for cabbage. Tripe he considered “not exactly a cheap commodity for food, yet, as you may feel occasionally inclined to indulge in a treat of this kind, I will give you instructions to cook it in the most economical manner” (In brief, the instructions were: boil in milk for an hour and
eat with mustard
.) These dishes might have been accessible to the newly emerging urban masses of industrializing Britain and, occasionally, Francatelli mentioned items which, he claimed, could be purchased cheaply in cities. In general, however, the maître's attention was focused on a bygone era of rural aristocracies and peasant dependents. Many of his recipes belonged in an uneasy idyll, spattered by blood from red teeth and claws. “Industrious and intelligent boys,” for instance,

who live in the country, are mostly well up in the cunning art of catching small birds at odd times during the winter months. So, my young friends, when you have been so fortunate as to succeed in making a good catch of a couple of dozen of birds, you must first pluck them free from feathers, cut off their heads and claws, and pick out their gizzards from their sides with the point of a small knife, and then hand the birds over to your mother, who … will prepare a famous pudding
for your supper
.

His idea of “economical and substantial soup for distribution to the poor” was remembered from his days as a country house chef, where he got used to “the charitable custom of distributing wholesome and nutritious soup to poor families living in the neighborhood of noblemen and gentlemen's mansions.” The recipe was reminiscent of the old fairy tale of the “stone soup”: the cook started with a few old bones, to which vast quantities of meat scraps and vegetables were slowly added.

Even in Francatelli's world, however, the Industrial Revolution was beginning to intrude. He expected at least some of his readers to acquire the kitchen ranges and pots and pans which industrial production was cheapening. These were strictly urban commodities. In the countryside, the hearth was still poor cooks' source of heat, even a couple of generations later, when Flora Thompson described the life of her Oxfordshire village. Nor did the villagers buy meat, like Francatelli's presumed readers. For in Lark Rise, every family kept a pig—acquired as a shoat and anxiously observed for signs of fattening, since a “poor doer” would waste a family's scraps—and each household got a big joint of beef as a gift from the “big house” at Christmas. Back in the city, Francatelli's concern for the economy of his recipes reflected one of the great economic problems of the Industrial Revolution: the hidden costs of concentrating labor, which drove up food prices by increasing
demand and making supply more difficult. So leftover pot liquor should be eked out with oatmeal; children would “not require much meat when they have pudding”; fresh bones and ox cheeks figured largely; and “I hope,” said Francatelli to his readers, “that at some odd times you may afford yourselves an old hen or cock.” Finally, he displayed one of the most insidious signs of industrialization: the rise of the giant food firm. Many of his recipes explicitly boosted the products of Brown and Poison, whose “prepared Indian corn is a most excellent and economical article of food, equal to arrow-root, and will prove, on trial, to be both substantial and nutritive, and also easy of digestion to the most delicate stomachs.” This was typical copywriters' language of the time.

The book's endpapers carried advertising that proclaimed the merits of other businesses of the same kind. Colman's mustard was the product of “known skill and improved machinery.” In editions printed after 1858, the advertisements stressed medical evidence of the “purity” of the products concerned. This reflected growing public anxiety over an increasingly obvious effect of industrialization: adulteration
in patent foods
. The new health problems of industrial cities, where infectious disease incubated in the overcrowded, undersanitized environment, were legible between the advertisers' lines. “Be Careful What You Eat” in large letters was the slogan which introduced Berwick's Baking Powder. Robinson's patent groats formed “a popular recipe for colds and influenza.” Patent brands of cod liver oil promised to convey “artificially to the lungs of the Consumptive … the vital properties of Oxygen without the effort of inhalation.” Advertisers also evinced pride in the fact that progress in transport technology made their products widely available. Epps's cocoa was sold not only in London but also by “Grocers, Confectioners, and Druggists in the Country.” Colman's mustards “may be obtained of any Grocer, Chemist, or Italian Warehouseman
in the kingdom
.” Francatelli's book, in short, captured the industrialization of food at a transitional moment, where every aspect of the context was being transformed.

For the nature of the market was changing, undergoing what might be called “massification”: a vast increase in volume combined with new patterns of concentration which defied existing structures of production and supply. The population of the world, especially the developing world, under the impact of industrialization, was experiencing the early stages of an unprecedented and sustained expansion, demanding equally unprecedented levels of production. In the early nineteenth century, the population of the world probably reached a billion. It rose to 1.6 billion in the course of the century. The birth of the world's six billionth baby was announced in the year 2000. The growth of huge, industrialized and industrializing cities had to be fed by new methods.