If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (41 page)

Medieval bread came in a variety of forms, from the desirable, refined ‘manchet’, or white rolls, to the rough, coarse ‘cheat’, or brown bread. A ‘white baker’ and a ‘brown baker’ carried out different tasks, and a brown baker was not allowed – by a regulation of 1440 – to possess a sieve. Why ‘manchet’? Possibly from ‘mayne’, the name for the best quality of flour; maybe from
manger
, French for ‘to eat’; or perhaps from
main
, French for ‘hand’, because manchet rolls were about the size of a fist.

The various soupy dishes called ‘pottages’ and ‘slops’ were Tudor mainstays. Andrew Boorde defines pottage as ‘liquor in which flesh is sodden in, with putting-to of chopped herbs, and oatmeal and salt’. Alternatively, you might make ‘pease pottage’ from dried peas. You could keep your pottage on the go for months, topping it up each day, hence the nursery rhyme:

Pease pudding hot

Pease pudding cold

Pease pudding in the pot

Nine days old.

Vegetables were cooked so severely for fear of indigestion, and if they were found in grander dishes at all, they were hidden away as part of a meat hash or in a sauce. The inappropriate fart was a mainstay of medieval humour, and sometimes fart jokes were taken so seriously that they passed into legal documents. A thirteenth-century gentleman called Roland the Farter was forced to pay for his tenure of Hemingston in Suffolk by performing ‘every year on the birthday of our Lord before his master the king, one jump, and a whistle, and one fart’.

Even the humble potato, upon its arrival from America, needed an image makeover before it was welcome because people thought it flatulent. As John Forster, potato promoter, wrote in 1664: ‘If any shall Object; That this Bread is windy, I answer;
That it cannot be, for the Roots being first boiled … and afterwards baked, it is impossible they should be windy.’

The aristocracy preferred their food well-cooked partly to avoid wind, but also to dodge the danger of disease present in poorly washed greens. ‘Beware of green salads & raw fruits for they will make your sovereign sick,’ warned a cookbook in 1500. Surviving medieval recipes often involve cooking food twice. In microbiological terms these multiple and prolonged heatings made food safer to eat, something to which great importance was rightly attached. The late Stuart journalist, Ned Ward, described the horrors of tapeworm:

Want of digestion, craving Drowth,

Dull Eyes, dry lips, and feav’rish Mouth,

Unsav’ry Belches after Drinking,

Foul Stomach, and a Breath that’s stinking,

All these Symptoms, that will tell ye

You’ve crawling Insects in your Belly.

Georgian sufferers from tapeworm could have tried medicines such as ‘Dr Walldron’s Worm destroying Cake’. One satisfied user (from Leeds) found that Dr Walldron’s cure caused him to excrete ‘upwards of three hundred worms, some of them of Uncommon Thickness’.

In fact, it’s difficult to identify raw, as opposed to cooked, greens in people’s diets until around 1600. From then on, though, we can begin to identify vegetables on upper-class British dinner tables. Surviving lists or inventories of silverware start to include containers for oil and vinegar intended for ‘sallets’. Gervase Markham, writing around the turn of the seventeenth century, describes a sallet, or salad, of ‘chives, scallions, Radish-roots … young Lettice, Cabbage-lettice, pursalane and divers other herbs’. Carrots, though, were still to be ‘boiled’. On the whole he recommends ‘boiled sallets’, or else vegetables pickled in vinegar, as more easily digestible.

Fruit was treated with similar disdain. In the medieval forest
peasants could also forage for apples, hazelnuts, wild strawberries and even wild honey, and also fruits less familiar to modern ears such as crab apples, sloes and bilberries, ‘wont to be an extraordinary great profit and pleasure to poor people’. Medieval paupers ate a good deal more fruit than their lords and masters, who again feared disease and had no need to scavenge.

Diarrhoea was much more of a menace in an age before clean water. This explains the long-held fear of fruit in particular, which was considered a powerful and dangerous laxative (although Henry VIII was partial to strawberries). Fruits ‘engender ill humours’, warns a health manual of 1541. The medieval apples with their beautiful names (Costard, Pippin, Blanderelle) were therefore often stewed; likewise the apples mentioned by Shakespeare in the sixteenth century: Leather Coats (we’d call them russets), Apple-Johns, Bitter-Sweets. Lady Burlington in 1735 boasted that ‘almost the whole house is ill of a looseness [of the bowels] excepting myself which I take to be owing to my not eating much fruit & that only what is good’. One feels almost sorry (a rare occurrence) for the bumptious Jonathan Swift, obliged to watch a friend gobbling the most ‘delicious peaches, and he was champing and champing, but I durst not eat one’. Fruit makes rare appearances on Victorian menus, usually still stewed or made into a pie. The harmless grape, for Mrs Beeton, was an effective cure for even ‘the most obstinate cases of constipation’.

Victorian menus intended for women and children still reveal a surprising absence of vegetables, and cookery books recommend some seemingly interminable cooking times. You should boil carrots for more than two hours, claims one, for ease of digestion, and even macaroni should have ninety minutes. The 1909 edition of Mrs Beeton’s cookbook is quite explicit that the cook’s goal is ‘to facilitate and hasten digestion’. Her Digestive Time Table shows that pickled cabbage takes a regrettable four and a half hours to digest; much better to boil, as it then leaves the stomach after only three and a half hours.

There’s a fascinating theory that Charles Darwin’s well-known health problems were due to the worries he had (as a man of his time) about his digestion. Suffering from dyspepsia, he was prescribed ‘Fowler’s solution’, a medicine containing arsenic. The nausea and tingling he experienced in his toes were taken as positive signs that the drug was working. Darwin did in fact exhibit twenty-one of the twenty-six possible symptoms of someone suffering from arsenic poisoning.

Only more recently, with the advent of almost instantly digestible types of convenience food, has this search for quicker digestion lost pace. After industrialisation, threats to health came not from dirty water and inadequately washed raw produce, but from processed, pre-packaged goods containing attractive-looking, quickly absorbed calories which were nevertheless devoid of any lasting nutritional benefit. Canned meat with preservatives is worse for you than fresh; biscuits are less nutritious than fresh bread.

Baking standards had been a matter of concern since the
Assisa Panis
, or Assize of Bread, of 1266, which first attempted to set standard sizes for loaves in response to short-selling. A pamphlet published in the 1750s with the title of
Poison Detected
exposed the tricks of unscrupulous bakers, who’d use lime, chalk and even alum to make their loaves bigger and whiter. According to the pamphleteer, they’d even employ the powdered bones of dead bodies to eke out their flour.

Parliamentary reports throughout the Victorian age revealed how much skulduggery still went on in this important industry. A report of 1862 described how in numerous bakeries ‘masses’ of cobwebs could be seen ‘frequently falling into the dough’. But the greatest scam perpetrated upon poor housewives was the replacement of stone-grinding flour mills with roller mills. The new technique reduced the amount of vitamin B1 and iron in flour, and therefore bread. From about 1890 to the 1930s a generation of poorer children were anaemic as a result.

Tinned food had first appeared for army use in the Napoleonic wars, and ‘desiccated’ or instant soup was available from the 1840s. The makers of processed food encountered various problems. The canning concern of Stephen Goldner, for example, enthusiastically produced bigger and bigger containers of beef. Once their tins reached a colossal 2.7 kg in weight, though, the beef at the centre could not fail to be improperly cooked, and the tins would either explode or give people food poisoning. Other well-known wheezes perpetrated upon the city consumer included watercress grown in beds of horrible human sewage, or else a mendacious butcher who might ‘wash your old meat that hath hung weltering in the shop with new blood’ to make it look fresh.

Yet many people found processed food convenient and delicious, and ignored health concerns. It’s been argued that Britain’s early industrialisation, and its accompanying need for convenience food, explains the peculiarly British fondness for crisps, chips and sandwiches, which contrasts sharply with the Mediterranean tradition. When Crosse and Blackwell in 1855 introduced brown pickles to the British public, made without the poisonous green food colouring of their predecessors, sales collapsed. One disgruntled pickle-lover felt that he ‘ought to be very much obliged, of course, to those disinterested medical gentlemen’ who campaigned for purer food, but for his own part he really liked ‘anchovies to be red and pickles green’.

And so the twentieth century saw processing of food taken to new heights. The advent of TV dinners, microwave meals and hydrogenated fats were all intended to increase ease for the eater and profit for the manufacturer rather than provide nutrition. Only with the 1980s rise of the ‘foodie’, the 1990s fondness for raw fish and sushi, and the 2000s craze for the organic vegetable box has there been an alternative impulse towards unprocessed food. For the very first time in history, simple, raw and seasonal has now become the food of fashion.

42 – Raising Your Elbow

I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human skull filled with burgundy.

C. S. Matthews visits Lord Byron
at Newstead Abbey, 1809

‘Raising your elbow’ is an Italian expression for taking a drink, because the elbow is elevated every time food or drink travels from table to mouth. It’s time to explore the way people have raised their elbows throughout the centuries – in other words, to examine table etiquette.

Today, people reading about grand meals in the past are often simply amazed that our ancestors managed to eat so much food. For any period before 1830, though, this is based on a misunderstanding of how food was served. A well-dressed table would contain numerous dishes, like a modern buffet. The diners were not expected to eat it all, but rather to browse among the dishes until they found something they liked. Superfluity was standard for the rich. Indeed, some people’s remuneration packages included the ‘reversion’, or remains, of the meals of more important members of the same household. In the fifteenth-century establishment of the Earl of Northumberland, the earl’s two sons must have been watched, hawk-like, as they ate by
the five servants who were counting upon the leftovers for their own meal.

Medieval and Tudor people had spoons for their soup, knives for cutting their meat, but no forks. Each possessed his or her own knife. After eating, it was wiped clean on bread and then put away in a tie-on pocket or sheaf hung from the belt. The fingers were equally important eating utensils, so washing them beforehand in a bowl of water was a vital ritual.