In the Kitchen
Adulterated Food and Other Dangers
'Wilful Waste Makes Woeful Want'
Cruelty in the Kitchen
Cooks, Training, and Foreign Influences on
Irish Menus
Menus were drawn
up by the cook at the beginning of each week, in close consultation with the
master or mistress. The best cooks were well-trained in the culinary arts, and
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the finest
houses all had French cooks. Letters between the 1st Earl of
Portarlington and his wife mention French cooks at
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Ladies often exchanged recipes to give to the cook, and handwritten books of recipes were used alongside popular printed recipe books. In the Georgian period, one of the most successful cookbooks was Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Easy, which was reprinted in 17 editions between 1747 and 1803. In the Victorian period, however, no decent kitchen was complete without a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. First published in 1861, it contains not only recipes but also tips on food storage, choosing and buying provisions, household service and labour saving in the home. |
Adulterated Food and Other
Dangers
Victorian food was
notoriously adulterated by unscrupulous vendors eager for profit. Bread was
particularly susceptible. As flour was expensive, potato flour or alum were
sometimes used instead, while chalk was added to bread to whiten it. Other commonly
adulterated products were tea, coffee, sugar and pepper. Tea leaves, for
example, were sometimes sold by dishonest cooks to dealers who re-coloured them,
often with poisonous dyes, and passed them off as genuine. The practice of
using copper as a dye was particularly widespread. In 1877 in
Death from copper
poisoning was not unknown, as cooking was done in copper pans, which if used
with acidic food could create verdigris. As a
safeguard, pans were lined on the inside with tin, but over time the lining
wore off, and poorer folk who could not afford to have them relined suffered
serious poisoning or even death as a result. It was also common practice to
deliberately cook vegetables in unlined copper pans to give them a bright green
colour! Dangerous dyes were still being used at the turn of the 20th
century – one newspaper article from 1903 reported the death of a young boy
from the coloured dye in sweets (Leinster Express,
Aug. 29th, 1903).
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Given
these dangers, it is not surprising that some Victorian recipe books included
lengthy advice on how to choose the best market produce, avoiding adulterated
food or rancid meat. The same books, however, often included dangerous
recipes for how to ‘rescue’ bad meat. Mrs Beeton,
for example, advised on how to ‘remove the taint’ from game, suggesting
that tainted birds should be repeatedly washed in water with added salt
and vinegar. (She also notes that in bad cases, some powdered charcoal
placed in the oven helps remove the tainted flavour). |
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‘Wilful Waste Makes Woeful
Want’
Nothing went to
waste in the country kitchen: animal heads, brains, tripe, and pig’s trotters
were all happily consumed, water used to boil meat was made into broth or
stock, while dripping made its way into pies and was used to baste meat. One
book recommended that even the heads, necks, gizzards and feet of fowls could
be used to enrich soup.
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As Victorian
meals were large they naturally resulted in a lot of leftover food,
as the family and their guests picked delicately at each course. Not
surprisingly, Victorian housekeeping manuals advocated the reuse of
such leftovers. Scraps of meat left on dinner plates were reused in
soup (if not eaten as the servants’ supper). Even pieces covered in
sauce or gravy were kept, the meat wiped clean and then placed in a
common dish for reuse. Leftover gravy was saved while half-eaten bowls
of soup were strained to remove pieces of bread which would not keep.
Unfinished desserts of jelly and blancmange were melted down, remoulded
and made to do again. The phrase ‘wilful waste makes woeful want’ was
one adhered to by every decent cook. |
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Victorian housekeeping
manuals also advised cooks against unnecessary cruelty, renouncing some of
the crueller practices of their Georgian fore-bearers. These included skinning
eels alive, baiting bulls before slaughter and crimping live fish (slashing
their flesh to make it contract), a practice believed to keep fish fresh for
longer. Mrs Beeton, for example, argued that crimping
fish immediately after death was just as effective.