P. 42 A poem of 1635 celebrated the longevity of Thomas Parr of Shropshire, aged over one hundred, who ate nothing but “coarse maslin bread”. In Cornwall, rye was grown only on ground too infertile for whieat and the poor in 1602 also used barley “grown into great use of late years” and in the dear [famine] season past…. existence of two bakers’ guilds in medieval London, the white bakers and the torte bakers…The latter are usually equated with brown bread bakers by historians, but the 1440 Bread Assize Ordinance says “the white shall bake all manner of breed that they can make of wheat”…torte bakers were not allowed to own a sieve, but they may have been defined less by this than by the ability to bake with grains other than wheat. Rye, for example, and barley, are exacting and difficult because they lack gluten, and to this day German rye bakers are specialists and often bake nothing else.”
P. 32 “with their wheaten bread, the Romans came the first (of very many) immigrant groups to attempt, with mixed success, to reproduce a food from the parent culture… installed their preference for white wheat bread, and installed it as a status symbol. In West Yorkshire, sites with more wheat remains also had posher pottery fineware. But the problem for the Romans, and for Roman wannabes, was that their wheat did not grow as well in the damp British Isles as it did in the North African grain basket of the Empire…. saw barley as fit only for horses, but it was still popular in some places, partly because Roman garrisons were themselves diverse – the Catterick garrison from the Danube brought a taste for barley and barley bread with them. The South and Midlands also rejected wheat for spelt. But the heard-to-get wheaten loaf left its mark. Even long after the legions had withdrawn, golden-crusted white bread was still an object of desire .. into the Anglo-Saxon era.”
P. 33 Archaeology shows that the Anglo-Saxon bread often included ground and kneaded barley, rye, oats, buckwheat, dried beans, acorns, hazel and alder seeds, and in particularly lean times, even weed seeds and tree bark, which would have added layers of taste and nutritional value…tenderising or scenting role. The idea that impurities in bread helped health had not been unknown to the Romans, whose dieticians supported the consumption of brown bread, and they are also shown to be effective by evidence provided by skeletal remains from the time of the Domesday Book, showing no signs of the scurvy and rickets that bedevilled later populations. But this might have been because porridge had ousted head … bread ovens became rarer in new houses.”
P. 46 “average male height, having risen from 165cm to 172cm between the Mesolithic and the early medieval period, fell to 171cm; Britons had become taller under Roman occupation, their average height increasing from 167-170cm. This coincided with the Roman’s improved water and sanitation systems and a more varied diet. Height decreased from 600AD and then began to climb again, increasing to 173cm in the 1100s, very close to average heights in the 20th century. But after 1200 men became shorter in stature … there were shortages of crop seeds as temperatures turned colder over the century, with weather becoming far more changeable until the early 1300s. Heigh decreased again after 1650, reaching just 169cm in the late 1600s – a decline that continued until the early 1800s. Average life expectancy declined too, as infant mortality soared; people born between 1650 and 1750 could expect to live just 35 years – down from 40 years in the late 1500s.
P. 63 The failure of the Irish potato crop and the mass starvation that followed forced Sir Robert Peel and his Conservative government to reconsider the wisdom of the Corn Laws. In January 1846 a new Corn Law was passed that reduced the duty on oats, barley and wheat to the insidnificant sum of one shilling per quarter. Aware of the recent crisis, the food advice experts stepped up to the plate. Unfamiliar grains and pulses were imported, and recipes for rice bread circulated, while ladies wondered why the cook couldn’t make a decent loaf from rice … all parochial relief after 1799 was to be via rice, potatoes and soup. Rice was cheap, still cheaper from India via the East India Company than from the recently independent American Carolina’s. Rice, said nutritionists prompted (as they so often are) by the food industry, was just as good as bread … the poor were advised to mix ‘a little morsel of Cheshire cheese’ with rice to ‘greatly improve the flavour”. Rice could be cooked over a very low fire, the experts said, during the working day, but the Manchester cotton workers were unconvinced. The experts felt that drinking too much tea made them demand bread and butter, a convenience food for the idle. Bread, it was opined, was a lazy substitute for cooking, and since the poor could boil a kettle for tea they could have made a pudding with the fuel instead. So in the guide of helping the poor, experts were able to explain that the fault lay with the poor and not with the law. Even after they had been repealed, the Corn Laws’ effect lingered; they had helped to undermine rural self-sufficiency, and as households ceased to be self-sufficient, they had become more subject to the whims of the marketplace. Provincial authorities had no respect and bakers and great, even inordinate respect for the free market – as “little skill and no capital are required in the trade of baking, competition will prevent inordinate profit”.
P. 64 London in 1822 the Assize of Bread and Ale was abolished as archaic … transformed baking into an even more precarious trade. Freed from the old guild structure, thousands of new bakers set up shop, and all of them tried to undercut one another. Elsa Acton noted that in 1851 the number of bakers in Paris was limited to 601, which meant that they were all sure to sell plenty of bread, whereas Britain’s free trade had pushed the official number of London bakers to 2,286 (the unofficial number may have been as high as 50,000) These bakers may have had commercial liberty but they had no peace of mind. To make a loaf they could sell at a price at which they could find buyers, they were forced to reduce the quality of ingredients to a minimum. A witness to the Committee on Journeymen Bakers commented that “They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of the men for the next 12 hours.”
P. 86 In Maldon, in 1629, a hundred or so women and children, led by one ‘Captain’ Ann Carter, the wife of a butcher, boarded a Flemish grain ship and removed some grain in their caps and gowns. A local court lowered corn prices, and Captain Ann toured the area drumming up support among clothing workers. A further riot took place on 22 May, which was taken more seriously by the authorities, and Captain Ann was handed. The style of Captain was adopted ny a number of other activists during the 17th century: there was ‘Captain’ Dorothy Dawson, who who organised a protest at Thorpe Moor and ‘Captain’ Kate who was recorded at an election meeting in Coventry.”
P. 13 The tea the Austen family drank would almost certainly have been China tea. Tea was a Chinese monopoly. But the British were not content with being middlemen. Tea cultivation in British India and other colonies exemplifies the way in which cash-cropping fuels capitalism, and capitalism fuels empire. Tea was not grown in India until the British introduced it – because they ruled India but not China. An Andean strain of tea was discovered growing wild in Assam; it was used by local tribesmen and given to Major Robert Bruce as a drink sometime in 1823.. The tea workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, and all the profits went back to England – and to Scotland, since the majority of Indian tea planters were Scots. The Indians themselves did not start drinking tea widely until the 1930s.”
P. 174 From 1889, the mass deployment of bottom trawlers led to ever-increasing catches – in that year more than twice as many bottom-feeding fish such as cod, haddock and plaice were caught in British waters as we catch today. The peak came in 1938, when the fishing fleet landed over five times more fish than we do tnow. For every hour spent fishing today in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishermen land just 6 per cent of what they did 120 years ago. He reason for this is the effect of fishing on fish size… when you exploit a population, the average size of the animals get smaller. Most fishing methods are size selective … fishing alters the balance between large and small, lung and old, in a population. This was always the case. In the ancient shell midden of California, were mussels were found to have decreased in size by over 40 per cent during a period of more than 9,000 years, we see the same picture.”
P. 305 “When John Betjeman wrote that “life was luncheons, luncheons all the way” – equating the midday meal with elegance and sophistication, he was making a distinction between post-war Oxford and the Victorian era that in other ways he so revered. ‘Open, swing doors, upon the lighted ‘George’\And whiff of vol-au-vent!’ Like the crisp layers of puff pastry, the Betjeman lunch was a sign of freedom, sitting lightly to life, having time to spare, and avoiding a solidly understood as old-fashioned, rural, even backward. The hourly to a life of lunches was a long and halting one, and only the top 10 per cent ever reached Betjeman’s destination.@
P. 210 “One difference between French and English cooks after the war can be exemplified by Michel Roux’s mother. When eggs were scarce, she made crepes that were mostly flour and water, it as eggs became more readily available and milk cheaper, she increased the quantity of these ingredients until the crepes were light and lace like. For this to happen, she must have retained a memory of what good crepes were like. Her English couterpartys might have struggled to do so precisely because the Depression was so very bad for the English urban poor, associated with a hunger assuaged only by potatoes and rice pudding, soaked bread and the occasional piece of cheese. .. interwar English cuisine could not survive wartime rationing as French cuisine did. It had nothing to do with the sunshine – and everything to do with class…. Betjeman … never took his Oxford degree, even after he had downgraded it from an honours degree to a pass degree. As he heads off to another lunch at the Liberal Club, women students pass him, their bicycle baskets heavy with books on Middle English. Betjeman runs away.”
P. 329 The first English cheese factory began operation in 1870. … Factory cheeses were correctly seen as inferior, but nevertheless, their low price, and the arrival of french imports from Canada and New Zealand, meant that by the mid-1920s more than 70% of the cheese consumed in England was imported – although at the same date, of the cheese consumed that was still made in England, farmhouse cheese accounted for an impressive 75%…. unfortunately the crisis of the Great Depression and then the Second World War put an end… by the late 1950s around 95% of total domestic production consisted of factory-made cheese.”
P. 384 Beef was once so foundational to national identity that it had a political face. The beefsteak clubs exemplified English conceptions of lively – male, red-blooded, jolly, given to jokes and japes. The first was founded early in the 18th-century to be a meeting place for actors and politicians. When it failed, it was replaced by the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, established in 1735, which was to number Samuel Johnson and the Prince of Wales among its members. Members wore bright blue coats and buff waistcoats with brass buttons, sporting a gridiron motif and the words ‘Beef and liberty’. They celebrated the beefsteak as a symbol of liberty and prosperity. A ‘Rump-Steak or Liberty Club’ (also called The Patriots Club) of London was in existence in 1733-4. It was revived in 1966 and meets annually at White’s Club in St James’s, where its members are able to fine at the earlier society’s 19th-century table and where it also keeps the original ‘resident’s Chair’, which Queen Elizabeth II gave to the current society in 1966.
P. 428 By 1955 with rationing over, the English were eating four eggs a day, rising to five in 1970… consumption dropped to two by 2000.
P. 457 IT is not coincidence that tinned food arose as European empires expanded. Imperialism meant tins could be a staple of expatriate communities, and meant new markets for Western staples. Canned and powdered milk made its way to the farthest tip of south-east Asia, while in Belize, British settlers could eat what they were used to. … (Indians in London meanwhile struggled to find vegetarian fare; the young Mohammad’s K Gandhi was driven to write a guide book to vegetarian London for students like himself.) Just as the Famous Five ransacked shops for prepared food while at large in alien lands. English memsahibs patronised the Army and Navy stores in Bombay for mail-order tinned foods. From Victorian times, ‘native’ food had been seen as inadequate and even unhealthy. Adventurousness was halted by the easy familiarity of tinned foods.”
P. 459 Coloniser could also learn preservation methods – gingerly, often desperately, hungrily – from the foods of those they colonised, and one such learned food was pemmican. Pemmican is what the children in the Swallows and Amazon books call tinned corned beef….learned by European fur traders from the Native Americans who’s sold it to them. Pemmican devices from a word in the Cree Indian language, pimithkdn, or fat. To make pemmican, native Americans began by cutting meat into thin slices or strips and drying it either in the sun or over a fire. After the meat was dried, it was spread out on stone-headed implements and then pounded…. then mixed with melted fat and marrow; this was crucial to the preservation. Sometimes a paste made of fruits or berries was added… stored in folded rawhide containers called parfleches, greased along their seams to keep out air and moisture. In this way, it could be kept fresh for years. Three quarters of a point (340g) was a sufficient ration, although a hard-working traveller might well eat more.”
P. 465 The Woshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London … responsible for introducing strangeness to the British palate. Originally it was known as the Guild of Pepperer, whose earliest records date from 1180. The company was formed as a religious and social fraternity of merchants tradining in spices, fold and other luxury good from Byzantium and the Mediterranean
Notes from English Food: A People’s History
P. 42 Apoem of 1635 celebrated the longevity of Thomas Parr of Shropshire, and over one hundred, who ate nothing but “coarse marlin bread”. In Cornwall, rye was grown only on ground too infertile or white and the poor in 1602 also used barley @grown into great use of late years@ and in the dear [famine] season past…. existence of two bakers’ guilds in medieval London, the white bakers and the torte bakers…The latter are usually equated with brown bread bakers by historians, but the 1440 Bread Assize Ordinance says @the white shall bake all manner of breed that they can make of wheat”…toasted bakers were not allowed to own a sieve, but they may have been defined less by this than by the ability to bake with grains other than wheat. Rye, for example, and barley, are exacting and difficult because they lack gluten, and to this day German rye bakers are specialists and often bake nothing else.”
P. 32 “with their wheaten bread, the Romans came the first (of very many) immigrant groups to attempt, with mixed success, to reproduce a food from the parent culture… installed their preference for white wheat bread, and installed it as a status symbol. In West Yorkshire, sites with more wheat remains also had posher pottery fineware. But the problem for the Tomans, and for Roman wannabes, was that their wheat did not grow as well in the damp British Isles as it did in the North African grain basket of the Empire…. saw barley as fit only for horses, but it was still popular in some places, partly cause Roman garrisons were themselves diverse – the Catterick garrison from the Danube brought a taste for barley and barley bread with them. The South and Midlands also rejected wheat for spelt. But the heard-to-get wheaten loaf left its mark. Even long after the legions had withdrawn, golden-crusted white bread was still an object of desire .. into the Anglo-Saxon era.”
P. 33 Archaeology shows that the Anglo-Saxon bread often included ground and kneaded barley, rye, oats, buckwheat, dried beans, acorns, hazel and alder seeds, and in particularly lean times, even weed seeds and tree bark, which would have added layers of taste and nutritional value…tenderising or scenting role. The idea that impurities in bread helped health had not been unknown to the Romans, whose dieticians supported the consumption of brown bread, and they are also shown to be effective by evidence provided by skeletal remains from the time of the Domesday Boo, showing no signs of the scurvy and rickets that devilled later populations. But this might have been because porridge had ousted head … bread ovens became rarer in new houses.@
P. 46 “average male height, having risen from 165cm to 172cm between the Mesolithic and the early medieval period, fell to 171cm; Britons had become taller under Roman occupation, their average height increasing from 167-170cm. This coincided with the Roman’s improved water and sanitation systems and a more varied diet. Height decreased from 600AD and then began to climb again, increasing to 173cm in the 1100s, very close to average heights in the 20th century. Bu after 1200 men became shorter in stature … there were shortages of crop seeds as temperatures turned colder over the century, with weather becoming far more changeable until the early 1300s. Heigh decreased again after 1650, reaching just 169cm in the ate 1600s – a decline that continued until the early 1800s. Average life expectancy declined too, as infant mortality soared; people born between 1650 and 1750 could expect to live just 35 years – down from 40 years in the late 1500s.
P. 63 The failure of the Irish potato crop and the mass starvation that followed forced Sir Robert Peel and his Conservative government to reconsider the wisdom of the Corn Laws. IN January 1846 a new Corn Law was passed that reduced the duty on oats, barley and wheat to the insidnificant sum of one shilling per quarter. Aware of the recent crisis, the food advice experts stepped up to the plate. Unfamiliar grains and pulses were imported, and recipes for rice bread circulated, while ladies wondered why the cook couldn’t make a decent loaf from rice … all parochial relief after 1799 was to be via rice, potatoes and soup. Rice was cheap, still cheaper from India via the East India Company than from the recently independent American Carolina’s. Rice, said nutritionists prompted (as they so often are) by the food industry, was just as good as bread … the poor were advised o mix ‘a little morsel of Cheshire chees’ with rice to ‘greatly improve the flavour”. Rice could be cooked over a very low fire, the experts said, during the working day, but the Manchester cotton workers were unconvinced. The experts felt that drinking too much tea made them demand bread and butter, a convenience food for the idle. Bread, it was opined, was a lazy substitute for cooking, and since the poor could boil a kettle for tea they could have made a pudding with the fuel instead. Do in the guide of helping the poor, experts were able to explain that the fault lay with the poor and not with the law. Even after they had been repealed, the Corn Laws’ effect lingered; they had helped to undermine rural self-sufficiency, and as households ceased to be self-sufficient, they had become more subject to the whims of the marketplace. Provincial authorities had no respect and bakers and great, even inordinate respect for the free market – as @little skill and no capital are required in the trade of baking, competition will prevent inordinate profit@”.
P. 64 London in 1822 the Assize of Bread and Ale was abolished as archaic … transform baking into an even more precarious trade. Freed from the old yield structure, thousands of new bakers set up shop, and all of them tried to undercut one another. Elsa Acton noted that in 1851 the number of bakers in Paris was limited to 601, which meant that they were all sure to sell plenty of bread, whereas Britain’s free trade had pushed the official number of London bakers to 2,286 (the unofficial number may have been as high as 50,000) These bakers may have had commercial liberty but they had no peace of mind. To make a loaf they could sell at a price at which they could find buyers, they were forced to reduce the quality of ingredients to a minimum. A witness to the Committee on Journeymen Bakers commented that @They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of the men for the next 12 hours.”
P. 86 IN Maldon, in 1629, a hundred or so women and children, led by one ‘Captain’ Ann Carter, the wife of a butcher, boarded a Flemish grain ship and removed some grain in their caps and gowns. A local court lowered corn prices, and Captain Ann toured the area drumming up support among clothing workers. A further riot took place on 22 May, which was taken more seriously by the authorities, and Captain Ann was handed. The style of Captain was adopted ny a number of other activists during the 17th century: there was Captain Dorothy Dawson, who who organised a protest at Thorpe Moor and ‘Captain’ Kate who was recorded at an election meeting in Coventry.”
P. 13 The tea the Austen family drank would almost certainly have been China tea. Tea was a Chinese monopoly. But the British were not content with being middlemen. Tea cultivation in British India and other colonies exemplifies the way in which cash-cropping fuels capitalism, and capitalism fuels empire. Tea was not grown in India until the British introduced it – because they ruled India but not China. An Andean strain of tea was discovered growing wild in Assam; it was used by local tribesmen and given to Major Robert Bruce as a drink sometime in 1823.. The tea workers laboured in appalling conditions for a pittance, and all the profits went back to England – and to Scotland, since the majority of Indian tea planters were Scots. The Indians themselves did not start drinking tea widely until the 1930s.”
P. 174 From 1889, the mass deployment of bottom trawlers led to ever-increasing catches – in that year more than twice as many bottom-feeding fish such as cod, haddock and plaice were caught in British waters as we catch today. The peak came in 1938, when the fishing fleet landed over five times more fish than we do tnow. For every hour spent fishing today in boats bristling with the latest fish-finding electronics, fishermen land just 6 per cent of what they did 120 years ago. He reason for this is the effect of fishing on fish size… when you exploit a population, the average size of the animals get smaller. Most fishing methods are size selective … fishing alters the balance between large and small, lung and old, in a population. This was always the case. In the ancient shell midden of California, were mussels were found to have decreased in size by over 40 per cent during a period of more than 9,000 years, we see the same picture.”
P. 305 “When John Betjeman wrote that “life was luncheons, luncheons all the way” – equating the midday meal with elegance and sophistication, he was making a distinction between post-war Oxford and the Victorian era that in other ways he so revered. ‘Open, swing doors, upon the lighted ‘George’\And whiff of col-au-vent!’ Like the crisp layers of puff pastry, the Betjeman lunch was a sign of freedom, sitting lightly to life, having time to spare, and avoiding a solidly understood as old-fashioned, rural, even backward. The hourly to a life of lunches was a long and halting one, and only the top 10 per cent ever reached Betjeman’s destination.@
P. 210 “One difference between french and English cooks after the war can be exemplified by Michel Roux’s mother. When eggs were scarce, she made crepes that were mostly flour and water, it as eggs became more readily available and milk cheaper, she increased the quantity of these ingredients until the crepes were light and lace like. For this to happen, she must have retained a memory of what good crepes were like. Her English couterpartys might have struggled to do so precisely because the Depression was so very bad for the English urban poor, associated with a hunger assuaged only by potatoes and rice pudding, soaked bread and the occasional piece of cheese. .. interwar English cuisine could not survive wartime rationing as French cuisine did. It had nothing to do with the sunshine – and everything to do with class…. Betjeman … never took his Oxford degree, even after he had downgraded it from an honours degree to a pass degree. As he heads off to another lunch at the Liberal Club, women students pass him, their bicycle baskets heavy with books on Middle English. Betjeman runs away.”
P. 329 The first English cheese factory began operation in 1870. … Factory cheese were correctly seen as inferior, but nevertheless, their low price, and the arrival of french imports from Canada and New Zealand, meant that by the mid-1920s more than 70% of the cheese consumed in England was imported – although at the same date, of the cheese consumed that was still made in England, farmhouse cheese accounted for an impressive 75%…. unfortunately the crisis of the Great Depression and then the Second World War put an end… by the late 1950s around 95% of total domestic production consisted of factory-made cheese.”
P. 384 Beef was once so foundational to national identit that it had a political face. The beefsteak clubs exemplified English conceptions of lively – male, red-blooded, jolly, given to jokes and japes. The first was founded early in the 18th-century to be a meeting place for actors and politicians. When it failed, it was replaced by the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, established in 1735, which was to number Samuel Johnson and the Prince of Wales among its members. Members wore bright blue coats and buff waistcoats with brass buttons, sporting a gridiron motif and the words ‘Beef and liberty’. They celebrated the beefsteak as a symbol of liberty and prosperity. A ‘Rump-Steak or Liberty Club’ (also called The Patriots Club) of London was in existence in 1733-4. It was revived in 1966 and meets annually at White’s Club in St James’s, where its members are able to fine at the earlier society’s 19thcentury stable and where it also keeps the original ‘resident’s Chair’, high Queen Elizabeth II gave o the current society in 1966.
P. 428 By 1955 with rationing over, the English were eating four eggs a day, rising to five in 1970… consumption dropped to two by 2000.
P. 457 IT is not coincidence that tinned for arose as European empires expanded. Imperialism meant tins could be a staple of expatriate communities, and meant new markets for Western staples. Canned and powdered milk made its way to the farthest tip of south-east Asia, while in Belize, British settlers could eat what they were used to. … (Indians in London meanwhile struggled to find vegetarian fare; the young Mohammad’s K Gandhi was driven to write a guide book to vegetarian London for students like himself.) Just as the Famous Five ransacked shops for prepared food while at large in alien lands. English memsahibs patronised the Army and Navy stores in Bombay for mail-order tinned foods. From Victorian times, ‘native’ food had been seen as inadequate and even unhealthy. Adventurousness was halted by the easy familiarity of tinned foods.”
P. 459 Coloniser could also learn preservation methods – gingerly, often desperately, hungrily – from the foods of those they colonised, and one such learned food was pemmican. Pemmican is what the children in the Swallows and Amazon books call tinned corned beef….learned by European fur traders from the Native Americans who’s sold it to them. Pemmican devices from a word in the Cree Indian language, pimithkdn, or fat. To make pemmican, native Americans began by cutting meat into thin slices or strips and drying it either in the sun or over a fire. After the meat was dried, it was spread out on stone-headed implements and then pounded…. then mixed with melted fat and marrow; this was crucial to the preservation. Sometimes a paste made of fruits or berries was added… stored in folded rawhide containers called parfleches, greased along their seams to keep out air and moisture. In this way, it could be kept fresh for years. Three quarters of a point (340g) was a sufficient ration, although a hard-workingtrveller might well eat more.”
P. 465 The Woshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London … responsible for introducing strangeness to the British palate. Originally it was known as the Guild of Pepperer, whose earliest records date from 1180. The company was formed as a religious and social fraternity of merchants tradining in spices, fold and other luxury good from Byzantium and the Mediterranean
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