If you’d been around in England sometime between 1837 and 1901 and you didn’t have a lot of money, what would you have been eating, and what appliances/utensils would you have kept around to cook it with? I’ve been trying to research this, but I haven’t been able to get very far–surely there must be some information out there, even if less of it made it into the historical record?
More specific things I’m curious about if the information’s out there:
*How would diets have differed between urban and rural areas?
*How did family size and/or marital status affect people’s diets? (My assumption is that a single man would eat pretty differently from someone with a spouse and kids, but I’m not sure whether that’s true or how big the difference would be.)
I read a lot of Victorian novels and they always seem to be eating wild birds and hares that they’ve caught themselves or poached from some rich landowner. The middle class and poor would buy their ale by the bucket and take it home. I don’t know if this would apply to the poor, but the middle class in that time seemed to be quite fond of meat pies which I think they called pasties, not sure, maybe pasties are something else.
There should also be some info in the “Food and Drink” section of the Victorian Dictionary (which isn’t really a dictionary so much as a compendium of excerpts from period sources).
No we don’t. A pie is a pie and a pasty is a pasty. What people call them when they’re selling them in the States is another matter. I’ve never heard the terms used interchangeably, and I’ve been British all my life so far.
I read a Victorian novel where the mean dressmaker provided the poor slavey-apprentices with starchy food, and they all got fat from carbohydrate overload. The dressmaker could say “of course I feed them well, look how fat they all are!”
Several years back, PBS was doing some reality series, one of which was called “The 1900 House.” They chose a modern family to live as a middle-class family would in 1900. One of the more interesting aspects of this experiment was that the family was not allowed to eat or purchase anything that was produced after 1900 – the era in which they were supposed to be living. There was a lot of discussion about food & drink, as well as hygiene products and, of course, the chores were heinous with very little technology to make things go more easily. Laundry stands out in my mind as a 2-day backbreaking process.
I don’t know if you can still see this series on Netflix or wherever, but you may find answers to your questions here.
(I have no idea what the shiny metal thing with spikes is in the second photograph, but such tools are never involved in the consumption of pasties in the real world.)
