The records of the fourteenth century are less descriptive, but Stow denotes 1392 and 1393 as years of want, when a diet of “apples and nuts” was forced upon the poor. It is an open question whether the poor ever lived well, even in years of prosperity. The average wage of a London labourer was sixpence a day, while a capon pasty cost eightpence and a hen pasty fivepence. A roast goose could be purchased for sevenpence, while ten finches cost one penny. Ten cooked eggs also cost a penny, and a leg of pork threepence. Oysters and other shellfish were cheap, as were thrushes and larks. Here, then, is evidence of a strangely assorted diet, complemented by rich delicacies-“gruel of almondes … a potage of whelks … Blancmaung of fysshe … Gruel of porke … Pigges in sawce.” In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) the Cook is employed “To boil the chicken and the marrow bones … maken mortrewes and well bake a pie”-a mortrewe being a soup whose ingredients included fish, pork, chicken, eggs, bread, pepper and ale. One must also imagine the hasty Londoner picking up a roasted lark or thrush from a cook’s stall and eating it as he makes his way along the thoroughfare, perhaps picking his teeth with the bones before discarding the remains by the side of the road.
In the fifteenth century the main dish remained that of meat-“swan, roasted capons … venison in broth, coney, partridges and roasted cocks”- together with very sweet compound desserts such as Leche Lombarde, which was “a kind of jelly made of cream, isinglass, sugar, almonds, salt, eggs, raisins, dates, pepper and spices.” All dishes seem to have been highly spiced, with herbs for meat in particular demand. The author of London Lickpenny is assailed by merchants of Newgate-“Comes me one, cryd hot shepes feete/One cryd mackerel”-and as he wanders down into East Cheap “One Crys rybbs of befe, and many a pye.” The evidence of fifteenth-century kitchens and monastic gardens, given by an authority known simply as “Mayster Ion Gardener,” is of sage, chickweed, borage, rosemary, fennel and thyme as the staple “vegetable” diet. The other favoured vegetables were “garlike, onions and lekes,” which does not suggest much taste for green vegetables.
A change in that diet is marked by the Tudor chronicler, Harrison, who notes that “in old days”-by which he means the thirteenth century-herbs and roots were in great demand, but that they became less frequently used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet “in my time their use is not only resumed among the poore comons-I mean of melons, pompines, gourds, cucumbers, radishes … carrots, marrowes, turnips, and all kind of salad herbes-but they are also looked upon as deintie dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen.” At times of commercial success and plenty, however, meat is often required to maintain the animal spirits of Londoners. That is perhaps why there is so much emphasis in the contemporary chronicles on feasting, as a way of exemplifying the power and wealth of the city. Stow writes of one such occasion that “it would be tedious to set down all the preparation of fish, flesh and other victuals spent in this feast” but then goes on to enumerate the twenty-four oxen, the hundred sheep, the fifty-one deer, the thirty-four boars, the ninety-one pigs …
There were variations in diet according to the season, with fresh herrings at Michaelmas, pork and sprats at All Saints, veal and bacon at Easter. In the summer of 1562, a Venetian observer noticed that the native population enjoyed raw oysters with barley bread.
Other dietary habits were changed by law. After the partial relaxation of the intricate fast laws, for example, cheap meat was often substituted for fish. Alterations were also fostered by voyages of discovery; yams or sweet potatoes from Virginia and rhubarb from China became sixteenth-century commodities in a city which plucked its fruits from every known country.
In the early seventeenth century we read of the almost emblematic significance of roast beef, as well as fresh oysters, as a token of civic existence. These were invariably followed by a dessert of milk puddings or “apple pippin”; “To come in pudding time is as much as to say, to come in the most lucky moment in the world,” according to Misson de Valbourg in the early years of the century. In the houses of the more affluent citizens roast beef and pudding were sometimes exchanged for “a Piece of boil’d Beeff, and then they salt it some Days beforehand, and besiege it with five or six Heaps of Cabbage, Carrots, Turnips, or some other Herbs or Roots, well pepper’d and salted and swimming in Butter.” For more delicate fare, the London household would sit around a gridiron “roasting slices of buttered bread … This is call’d ‘toast.’”
From the seventeenth century, too, comes evidence of the food available from the hawkers of London. The illustrator Marcellus Laroon places the costermonger or “regrater” crying out “Buy my fat chicken!” next to the female huckster selling “ripe speragas,” because chicken and asparagus together were considered by Londoners to be a dainty dish. Chicken was cheap, too; that, and rabbit, seem to have been the only meats on sale in the streets. The rabbit-seller, shouting “Buy a rabbet a rabbet,” was likely to have been an Irishman who came to London in the autumn with his wares. Those sent out to buy from him were advised that “For being new killed, you must judge by the Scent.” Milk and water were carried through the streets in vessels, but not wine. Cherries were available in early summer, followed by strawberries later in the season, and apples in the autumn. From autumn to winter the costermonger sold her pears or “wardens” baking hot from a pot she balanced upon her head. The countryman’s attitude to these city fruits is perhaps best exemplified by Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), who declared that “I need not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash which they call strawberries, soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt.” Here the emphasis is upon dirt, of course, but also the endemic overpopulation of London wherein every item is passed through a selection of anonymous “paws.” Eels were a cheap element of the Londoner’s diet; sold alive, generally by female vendors, they were skinned on the spot before being used in pies or pastries. They were not the only fish hawked about the main thoroughfare; crabs were cheap, as were mackerel and flounders, while oysters were purchased for “twelve pence a peck” or approximately two gallons.
From the countryside came the young man trading “Lilly white Vinegar, three pence a quart!” Made from cider or white wine, vinegar was employed as a sauce and as a preventive against disease; but its main use was as a preservative. Almost anything could be pickled, including walnuts, cauliflowers, peaches, onions, lemons, oysters and asparagus.
By the eighteenth century roast beef was described as being of “Old England,” although in fact it had been only one of many meats burdening the tables of earlier centuries. As a token of national character the myth of roast beef may owe more to the observations of foreign visitors that Londoners were “entirely carnivorous,” with the prevailing assumption of voraciousness. In May 1718 a great meat pudding, eighteen feet two inches in length and four feet in diameter, was dragged by six asses to the Swan Tavern in Fish Street Hill but apparently “its smell was too much for the gluttony of the Londoners. The escort was routed, the pudding taken and devoured.” “A foreigner,” wrote a German pastor visiting London in 1767, “will be surprised to see what flesh-eaters the English are. He will be struck with the sight of an enormous piece of beef such, perhaps, as he never saw in his life, placed before him upon the table.” The same observer also noted that “the common people in London” insisted upon “daily beef or mutton” together with white bread and strong beer. The meat may not necessarily have taken the form of rib or haunch, however, since in the 1750s beef sausages became the culinary fashion.