Food History

Mrs Eaton doesn’t just give recipes in her book. She is full of useful advice on how to take 2 oz glass phials of cream with you when travelling and how it can be kept fresh and on how to prevent chimneys from smoking. Her advice on eating salad is particularly interesting from a food history point of view, because her strong views sing forth on why certain foods are better and why certain times of year produce more potent greens.

It’s fascinating to see world views colliding in this period and people sorting it out their way. It’s almost as if our modern culture could have gone in quite different directions with the whiff of the right egg recipe or a sip of tea or a bite of salad.

One of the interesting things to emerge in some of Mrs Eaton’s views is the remnants of the Ptolemaic universe. It’s easy to think that modern views and modern science go back earlier than the nineteenth century, but the more I read the more I realise that we don’t fully follow modern scientific views even now and in the early nineteenth century (and right through until after the 1860s) the four humours played their part in regulating the human body (even if it wasn’t admitted openly or often).

Society was on the crux of several choices in the early nineteenth century and it all comes out in the advice given in popular cookbooks and household guides. To put it in modern parlance, this stuff is why culinary history rocks. The great thinkers are very seldom as useful on everyday life and thought as a good cookbook or guide to housekeeping.

I’m having a cup of hot tea to celebrate, even though it’s quite bad for me.

TEA. The habit of drinking tea frequently, and in large quantities, cannot fail to be injurious, as it greatly weakens and relaxes the tone of the stomach. This produces indigestion, nervous trembling and weakness, attended with a pale, wan complexion. When tea is taken only at intervals, and after solid food, it is salutary and refreshing; but when
used as a substitute for plain nourishing diet, as is too commonly the case amongst the lower classes, it is highly pernicious, especially as large quantities of a spurious description are too frequently imposed upon the public. The policy which compels a very numerous class to purchase
this foreign article, for procuring which immense sums are sent out of the country, while the produce of our own soil is comparatively withheld by an exorbitant system of taxation,
cannot be too severely condemned, as alike injurious to health, to the interests of agriculture, and to the comfort and industry of ‘the people’. The duty on foreign tea has indeed been greatly encreased, but at the same time, so has the duty on malt and beer ; no encouragement therefore is
given to the home consumption, but the money which ought to be paid for the production of barley and malt is given to the foreigner, while by the enormous price of the article, a powerful stimulus is furnished for attempting an illicit importation, and for the pernicious adulteration of what is now esteemed almost a common necessary of life. It is desirable to lessen the injurious effects of tea as much as possible by mixing it with milk, which will render it softer and
more nutritious. With the addition of sugar it may be made to form a wholesome breakfast for those who are strong and live freely, operating as a diluent for cleansing the bladder
and kidnies, and the alimentary passages. Persons of weak nerves ought however to abstain from tea, as they would from drams and cordials, as it causes the same kind of irritation on the delicate fibres of the stomach, which ends in lowness, trembling, and vapours. Tea should never be drunk
hot at any time, as it tends still more to produce that relaxation which ought to be carefully avoided. Green
tea is less wholesome than black or bohea.