Food and drink in 1859

This is the last of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

They were about to be food hogs as well, going on a later account in Scientific American which said customers at the Handel Festival ate 1600 dozen sandwiches, 1200 dozen pork pies, 400 dozen Sydenham pastries, 800 veal and ham pies, 480 hams, 3509 chickens, 120 galantines of lamb, 240 forequarters of lamb, 150 galantines of chicken, 60 raised game pies, 3022 lobster salads, 2325 dishes of salmon mayonnaise, 300 score of lettuce, 41,000 buns at a penny each, 52,000 twopenny buns, 32,249 ices, 2419 dozen ‘beverages’, 1150 dozen ale and stout, 403 Crystal Palace puddings, 400 jellies, nine tuns of roast and boiled beef, 400 creams, 350 fruit tarts, 3500 quarts of tea, coffee and chocolate and 485 tongues. 

“The consumption of wines, which was enormous, had not been ascertained when our account was made up”, it concluded.

In some parts of the world, people may have been starving, but London was not the only major city that did very nicely. In 1858, New York city’s inhabitants accounted for 191,374 beeves, 10,128 cows, 36,675 veals, 551,479 swine. Each week, a thousand beeves came to New York from Illinois alone. Lake Superior farms exported 7 million tons of corn and oats and more than 3 million bushels of wheat in 1859. Ten years earlier, it had been a mere 1400 bushels of wheat, said Archer B. Hulbert, who had looked into the matter.

Feeding habits changed quickly. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, London had only half a dozen restaurants listed in a guide for visitors, all of them pricey. By 1859, restaurants were becoming common around Soho, where many of them were opened by foreign immigrants. Their leader, if they had one, must surely have been Alexis Soyer, who started out as the second cook to Prince de Polignac at the French Foreign Office. During the July revolution of 1830, he left Paris for London and took the post of chef at the Reform Club, where he cooked for a number of English aristocrats. On the morning of Queen Victoria’s coronation on June 28, 1838, he served breakfast for 2000 guests.

Soyer was a Victorian celebrity chef. In 1847, he wrote to the press about the famine in Ireland, and went to Dublin at the government’s request to set up kitchens to serve soup and meat at low cost. He also wrote a sixpenny book, Soyer’s Charitable Cookery, and gave the profits to charity. He resigned his Reform Club position in 1850 to open his Great Exhibition restaurant, but took a loss of £7000. 

He spent the next four years promoting his various books and also his “magic stove”, a spirit burner which could be used at the table.

In 1855, he wrote to The Times, proposing to go to the Crimea at his own expense to advise on feeding an army. While Florence Nightingale changed the way the sick were treated at Scutari, Soyer changed the way soldiers were fed, beginning with the hospital diet sheets. For the healthy soldiers, he designed an ingenious field stove which the British army only stopped using recently.

When he died in 1858, times had changed. If Soyer had opened a restaurant then, he probably would have had more luck than he did in 1851. He was famous enough after his death for his name to be evoked across the Atlantic by Scientific American in an engineering context:

Soyer always maintained that there could be no good cooking where the scales, the watch and the thermometer were not in constant reference. These instruments are as essential to steam-engineering as to cookery.

Isabella Beeton was another celebrity of her age. Mrs Beeton, as we recall her today, died of puerperal fever in 1865, having made herself famous with her books on household management, which appeared in print when she was barely 22. Her recipes appeared first in her husband’s magazine, The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine, which ran for the three years from 1859 to 1861, then her book Household Management followed in 1861.

Like the magazine, it marks an era when women who could read, still had to manage their households: literacy was filtering down the social ladder. Contrary to folklore, she offered no recipe for cooking rabbit beginning “First, catch your rabbit . . .”, but the format she adopted for her recipes is still used today.

In fairness, Mrs Beeton was not the first, just the most successful of her kind. Elizabeth Ellet produced The Practical Housekeeper; A Cyclopaedia of Domestic Economy in 1857 (a man of his times, her husband, William Ellet spent his final years as a chemical consultant for the Manhattan Gas Company until he died in 1859). Eliza Acton wrote a number of recipe books, including Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845 and The English Bread Book in 1857 before she also died in 1859, the year in which Mrs. M. H. Cornelius published her The Young Housekeeper’s Friend in Boston.

“Poverty and oysters always seem to go together” said Sam Weller. “ ...the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters.” By the 1850s, natural oyster beds were almost depleted in many places. Notwithstanding Sam’s view, a meal of fried Olympia oysters and eggs was usually the most expensive on the menu in California, making it the meal lucky miners would order when they struck gold. The dish gained the nickname “Hangtown Fry” after a condemned man asked for the dish as his last meal — or so the legend runs.

There was a new condiment for the daring to try: in 1859, a Colonel White made his first batch of hot sauce from “Tobasco” chillies and offered bottles of it for sale. A slightly different formulation was patented in 1870 as “Tabasco”, benefiting those who think wasabi tastes bland on its own.

The demand for oysters, with or without sauce, was such that the oyster beds near Ceduna in South Australia, an area only settled and exploited after 1836, were already under threat from over-harvesting. Around the Bassin d’Arcachon on the coast of France, southwest of Bordeaux, a place where wild oysters had been taken since Roman times, the locals were forced to start farming oysters in 1859.

At the end of the year, a plan was announced to use a diving bell to harvest oysters from the bottom of Long Island Sound, and it was suggested that parties would be able to go down in the bell, collect their own oysters, and consume them at a depth of 6 fathoms. Scientific American offered an explanation for not eating oysters when there was no R in the month. English oysters, said the reporter, spawn for about six weeks, starting around June!

“Refrigerators” were on sale in 1859 but these were just ice boxes, used to make drinks cooler. Francis Bacon had died in 1626 of a chill, said to have been triggered by experimenting with a chicken stuffed with snow to see if it would keep longer, but refrigerators were rarely used to stop food going off. All the same, ice was a useful commodity in the mid–1850s. Ice ships loaded up in Massachusetts and rounded Cape Horn to make sales in Australia.

James Pimm was the landlord of an oyster bar in London’s financial district. He sold his gin-based Pimm’s No 1 Cup from the 1840s. With backing from some of his customers, he began bottling and selling it in 1859. Beer and ale were still preferred as safer than water, with coffee and tea, even later in the century when water supplies improved. Water was feared as tainted and impure, and in most cases, rightly so.

Even supposedly safe alcoholic drinks carried risks, and Scientific American listed tests for adulterants. Copper in beer could be detected by evaporating the beer down to “the consistency of an extract” and then burning it, treating the ash and looking for a blue trace that became darker when ammonia was added. Lead in beer could be detected by adding sodium sulfate and looking for a white precipitate, and the article went on to explain how a large variety of other adulterants could also be detected by chemical tests on beer extracts.

The water was full of germs and no good, the food was full of adulterants and no good, the air was full of poisons and noxious: it was enough to make you sick. Then again, in 1859, there ever so many ways to make people sick.