One other aspect of the pastor’s account is of interest, in those passages where he remarks upon the fact that Londoners require their food and drink to be vivid in colour. The brandy and wine must be “deeply coloured,” the vegetables as bright and as green “as when gathered”; cabbage and peas, for example, are not boiled “for fear they should lose their colour.” It is, perhaps, an intimation of the unnaturalness of the London palate; in a city of spectacle, even the food must be completely seen before being understood. But it may also be a symptom of a certain craving after effect which may itself be unhealthy. He observes the whiteness of the veal and mentions that the calves are made to lick chalk in order to procure that colour. He also notices that the poorer Londoners “are much prejudiced in respect of the colour … the whiter the bread is, the better they think it to be.” One of Smollett’s characters considered the white bread to be nothing more than “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes.” So Londoners mistake the nature of things by judging upon appearances alone. This, of course, was also the criticism of social moralists who saw villains and parvenus accepted as gentlemen because of their dress and manners.
Yet there are also intimations of a revulsion against so much greedy consumption. “What should they do,” as the poet John Lewkenor put it, “with all this greasie Meat?” Another of Smollett’s heroes enters a cook-shop filled “with steams of boiled beef” where the sight of “skin-of-beef, tripe, cow-heel or sausages … turned my stomach.” In this same period the Worshipful Company of Butchers, in debt and pestered by competition in the suburbs, proved wholly incapable of enforcing regulations on the sale of meat. Every kind of shoddy or mouldy flesh could be purchased. Once more the unchecked reign of commerce becomes a symbol of city life.
So it was that in the early part of the nineteenth century “food processing” took its place beside the manufactories along the Thames; essences of meat and meat sauces came from London Bridge, while tinned meat or “patent beef” came from Bermondsey. This was the century of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, of clarified butter and tinned pâté de foie gras. There were also more familiar items. Accounts describe nineteenth-century travellers breakfasting off ham, tongue and “a devil” (kidney), or dining off mutton chop, rump steak and a “weal cutlet,” while in less splendid establishments the fare included “hams, and sirloins, the remnants of geese and turkeys, codfish reduced to the gills, fins and tail.”
But the overwhelming mass of evidence still concerns food provided by the street-sellers of the period. With a restless, large and rapidly moving population the equivalent of fast-food was the most characteristic and appropriate form of sustenance. Whether they bought fried fish sold in oily paper, or boiled puddings in cotton bags, it was the custom of the poorer citizens to eat “upon the stones.” New-laid eggs were for sale on Holborn Hill and pork in Broad St. Giles. There was also the ubiquitous baked-potato stall, as well as the shops plying roly poly or plum duff. One trader in Whitechapel informed Henry Mayhew that “he sold 300 pennyworths of pudding in a day. Two thirds of this quantity he sold to juveniles under fifteen years of age … The boys are often tiresome: ‘Mister,’ they’ll say, ‘can’t you give us a plummier bit than this?’ or ’Is it just up? I likes it ’ot, all ‘ot.’” In competition with these hot delicacies came sandwiches, hailed as “one of our greatest institutions” by Charles Dickens, who saw them, in an image of perpetual activity and perpetual consumption, being engorged by the shelf-load at the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton.
The times of that consumption have changed, both in the commercial and the fashionable areas of the city. An entire history of social manners might be constructed from the essential fact that, over the last five centuries, the time for eating dinner, or the main meal of the day, has advanced by approximately ten hours. In the late fifteenth century, many Londoners dined “at ten o’clock in the forenoon,” although others delayed for a further hour; in the sixteenth century, the hour for meat varied between eleven and twelve but no later. In the seventeenth century, the hours of twelve and one became common. But then in the early decades of the eighteenth century there was a rapid acceleration of mealtime. By 1740 two o’clock was the appropriate hour, and by 1770 three was considered the vital moment. In the last decades of the eighteenth, and the first of the nineteenth, the dinner hour slid to five or six. Then Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing about London life in the 1850s, noted that dinner at eight or even nine o’clock in the evening was considered appropriate at “aristocratic” tables.
The reason for this postponement of the main meal was credited by eighteenth-century moralists to the decline of moral fibre and the rise of social decadence, as if it were important to devour food before successfully devouring the day. But a more specific circumstance may have assisted the process, particularly in the early decades of the eighteenth century when, according to Grosley, “the hour of going to Change interfered with dinner time, so that the merchants thought it most advisable, not to dine till their return from Change.” Once more commercial imperatives play their part within the intimate texture of London life.
CHAPTER 34
Eat In or Take Away
Eating-houses, or restaurants, have for many centuries been an intricate part of that texture. In the twelfth century one monk describes a great “public place of cookery” by the Thames where ordinary flesh and fish could be purchased-roasted, fried or boiled-while the more dainty could order venison, no doubt with ale or wine for refreshment. It may lay claim to being the first London restaurant, except that one historian of London believes that this place of city refreshment was in fact a survival of a Roman public kitchen. In that case the tradition of London hospitality is ancient indeed. The twelfth-century version included, for example, “a dining room for the rich man, an eating-house for the poor man” with a version of “take-away” in the event of friends calling unexpectedly. Certainly it was a large operation, perhaps equivalent to Terence Conran’s vast eateries in Soho and the West End, since according to William Fitz-Stephen “whatsoever multitude of soldiers or other strangers enter into the city at any hour of the day or night, or else are about to depart, they may turn in.”
The number of these eating-houses multiplied as the population increased, so that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were many cook-shops clustered in Bread Street and East Cheap. These thoroughfares were known as the quarters for eating-houses where, under the supervision of the civic authorities, the price of meals was strictly controlled. Sometimes the customers would bring their own food with them, to be cooked in ovens on the spot, with the price varying from a penny to twopence for the cost of fire and labour.
The “ordinaries” were a sixteenth-century variation upon the cook-shop. There were twelve-penny ordinaries as well as three-penny ordinaries, the price varying according to style and comfort as well as the cost of the main meal. Wooden benches and trestle tables stood on a rush-strewn floor and the tapster or his boy wandered among the customers crying out, “What do you lack?” or “What is it that you would have brought?” Meat, poultry, game and pastry were served in succeeding order; “to be at your woodcocks” meant that you had almost finished eating. The citizens arrived about eleven thirty, and wandered about singly or in groups waiting for their meat to be served while some “published their clothes, and talked as loud as they could in order to feel at ease.” It was indeed an easy environment, and it became the pattern of the London eating-house, continuing well into the succeeding century.