1834 Workhouse Diet Reality Check

Feeling exhausted, tongue tied and with burning bowels after three days on the 1834 diet, I had to admit defeat. Here's how events unfolded this week.

Picture the scene: It's the end of Day Three on the 1834 diet. I've eaten only gruel, bread and cheese for three days- with the exception of one meal of boiled meat and veg- and I'm doing a talk on Queen Elizabeth 1st for Thorpe WI.

It's been a busy week so far at work; two days playing an environmentalist for the benefit of Year Eight geography students, a day of WW2 for Year Five and Six kids, an evening of Marie Lloyd for Drayton WI and -oh yes, the small business of being a mum and 'other half'. For the purposes of The Workhouse Diet I've spent a lot of time and effort keeping up with Twitter, Facebook and this blog- all done at home because the wifi at Gressenhall is imaginary. 

Due to the diet, my bowels have turned into something engineers at KitchenAid's liquidising department would be proud of. Ahead of me at this point is another day of WW2, a supportive visit to a theatrical production lots of friends are in, 3 educational sessions about gruel at my son's school and two evenings performing in Gressenhall's Museums At Night murder-mystery. 

I've spent the journey to Thorpe panicking that a) I've somehow brought the wrong costume and they actually wanted Queen Victoria and b) the petrol gauge has been flashing since Dereham and I'm crawling along in first gear due to roadworks. I think I'm running on fumes. Me AND the car, that is. 

By some miracle I arrive on time, with the correct kit, at Thorpe Adult Ed centre to do the talk. Not able to begin until after the allotted time, I wig-up and wait in an entrance hall avoiding curious/disdainful glances of other hall users (and dashing to the loo every so often), for 40 minutes.  

The talk begins. It's going ok, but I just can't seem to find the right words. My usual patter isn't flowing, and I can't instantly recall the usual dates, names and references. I've been doing this talk for six or seven years, so it's not as if I don't know the material intimately. I apologise, gulp down some water and explain about the workhouse diet. Some ladies had seen the EDP article.

We laugh about it and I continue.  I realise the room is beginning to sway a little. I slurp some more water down and carry on, feeling increasingly lightheaded. Somehow or other I lurch to the end of the talk without fainting, but feeling absolutely awful. I nobly refuse tea and biscuits as per The Diet, pack the car (my treasure chest of equipment feeling about twice its normal weight), buy petrol and head home.

On the way I came to the decision that Enough was, on this occasion, Enough. I got home, ate four eccles cakes straight down, and went to bed.

On Thursday I think I became the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I tucked into smoothies, vitamin pills, and masses of dried fruit and nuts. We had pasta bake for tea, and I shared my son's ice-cream at the theatre. On Friday, after force-feeding gruel to ten year-olds I ate through a huge plate of cheesy chips.

Today is Saturday. I've had a lay-in, marmalade on toast, a photo session and a leisurely stroll around my local farm shop to buy lots of fruit and vegetables for the week ahead. I'm about to drive to Gressenhall for the last performance of the murder-mystery and I've pre-ordered a large portion of quiche from the cafe for before the show.

I will eat normally for next week and then it's time for the third and final phase of the project, the 1901 diet. 

In conclusion, I am astonished at how bad I felt on the gruel diet, and how quickly I went downhill. The inmates of Victorian workhouses have my sincerest sympathies. I am so lucky to have never before felt what it is to be malnourished, and so grateful I was able to call an immediate halt to it when it became unbearable. This week has made me painfully aware of the suffering of people in past times and made me think seriously of those who still suffer in the same way today. 

I repeat what said at the end of the 1797 diet:  I'm so lucky to be me, here, now.  

1834 Days 1&2: Interview with A Dietician

Wind, bloating, hunger and a REALLY bad mood- the 1834 diet has made me feel terrible after only two days. The gruel is thinner, there is less cheese to eat, and I'm drinking only water. Worse than all of this, I am sooooo unbelievably tired. Bring back 1797!!

Lucy (pictured coyly, left), has kindly agreed to act as dietician for the project, and she explains ...

1)  Thank you so much for agreeing to share your expertise for the Living The Workhouse Diet project. Could you tell readers a little about yourself and give a brief summary of your work?

Thanks for asking me Rachel – it’s proving a very interesting project. I am a dietitian, registered with the Health and Care Professions Council. I qualified a long time ago before our current intake of students were born. Most of the time I work in the NHS and I also do some freelance work.

2) What has interested or surprised you most about the project so far?

I’ve really enjoyed trying to translate the old recipes into something I can analyse. The hardest was trying to think of an equivalent to “hull’d and boiled wheat”. I was quite surprised by the generosity of the 1747 diet – I hope it was true that “cabbages, carrots, turnips, potatoes, beans, etc are served in great plenty during the season”. They didn’t have the Care Quality Commission in those days!

3) People have been astonished that I didn't lose any weight on the first (1797) diet. What was the main reason for this?

You were only on the diet for a week – people are not machines and all sorts of regulatory mechanisms endeavour to prevent weight loss. And you were pretty constipated. Sorry to be crude...

4) Do you predict that I will lose weight on the 1834 or 1901 diets?

I think you could lose weight on the 1834 diet – it is much lower in energy – but it would only be 1-2 lb. I would not recommend it as a healthy weight reducing diet as it is totally inadequate in protein and many vitamins and minerals, especially vitamin C and riboflavin. I haven’t seen the 1901 diet yet.

5) I stopped drinking tea two weeks before the 1797 diet, so I blamed lack of sugar, not lack of caffeine, for my headaches on the first three days. Was this really the reason?

I’m not sure why you had a headache. Constipation (again) could be one – it does cause one to feel pretty lousy. Alcohol would be another. It acts as a diuretic (makes you pee) so would leave you mildly dehydrated. Dehydration causes headaches and is the main cause of a hangover headache. I think you did very well to wean yourself off caffeine 2 weeks prior to the diet as the headache from suddenly withdrawing caffeine is awful. You did make a sudden and significant dietary change so some sort of symptom would be expected but I’m not sure that it was anything to do with lack of sugar. I am happy to be corrected on this.

6) You correctly predicted that I would suffer constipation and have no energy, whilst on the 1797 diet. The 1834 diet is more harsh; what symptoms can I expect?

On the 1834 diet I predict major wheat bloat, maybe tummy cramps, hunger, light-headedness and dizzyness. Please keep your fluid intake up.

7) Since finishing the diet I have not craved biscuits, snacks between meals or cups of my beloved tea. What has happened to me?!

You have adapted! Your body was habituated (not addicted). If things are routinely eaten your body will expect to keep getting them.

High sugar foods have what is known as a high glycaemic index, which means they make your blood sugar levels rise quickly. Insulin is rapidly produced in response to this which causes blood sugar levels to rapidly fall again. This rapid fall in blood glucose makes us feel hungry again, so we have another snack and so it can go on. The food in the 1797 diet had little sugar in it, and what there was was mixed into starchy foods. So the 1797 diet had a very low glycaemic index. It was very slowly digested and absorbed, put blood glucose levels up very slowly and they would never have risen to high levels. A steady trickle of insulin would have kept the cells supplied with glucose and there would be no sudden decrease in blood sugar levels. Our bodies like it this way and once adapted to this would not crave to go back to high sugar foods such as biscuits. That’s not to say that a liking for sweet foods goes entirely!

Caffeine, from tea and coffee for example, is not addictive in the clinical sense. It’s not like, say, heroin. But we do get habituated to it which means we don’t get addicted to the high it gives us but we really miss it when it is taken away. Humans are however highly adaptable creatures and we can, given time, lose our habituation to all sorts of things including caffeine.

 

Thank you to Lucy for sharing her time and expertise so generously for this project.

Please click on the links below to share the blog on social media if you so desire, wish or want...

1834 Workhouse Diet Begins

Here's a picture of some chocolate cake I won't be eating this week- because tomorrow I embark on Phase Two of this project, the 1834 diet.  

In 1834 we leave Georgian frumenty and pottage behind to enter into the realm of Oliver Twist- the Victorian literary creation of Charles Dickens, embedded forever in the popular imagination with the plaintive cry, "please Sir, I want some more'.

Of course, we all know, possibly via Lionel Bart's musical version, that food-wise, all they ever got was gru-el.
Bart, and even Dickens, got a few of the workhouse details wrong, but they were right about the gruel.

Here's my menu for this week.

For a transcript, you can click to the 1834 diet page of this blog. It's pretty repetitive. 

• ALL suppers are bread and cheese. 
• For dinner, once a week, I get meat pudding and veg, and once a week, suet pudding and veg. 
• For women, two dinners are bread with 1oz cheese, two dinners are bread with 3/4 oz butter, and one is bread with broth. 
• Men get larger dinner and supper portions than women but ALL the breakfasts are a pint and half of of gruel- with a side order of more bread. 
• I'll be chomping through a total of 18oz of heavy rye bread a day.

That's about a small loaf per day. The amount of cheese pictured will last me the week (not sure if the workhouse cooks got theirs from Waitrose)!  

Drinks, again, are not specified, but at least it's not beer this time! I may have to pretend to be elderly or infirm to get a cup of tea...

Interestingly, at this time in the workhouses food (and beer and tobacco) was sometimes used to reward good behaviour and hard work. Inmates were also put on a bread-and-water diet for punishment. 


Here's a bit of history about why it all changed for the poor in 1834.

During the first two decades of the 19th Century the workhouses became full to bursting. A report by the Royal Commission reviewed existing workhouses and found that- 

"poverty was essentially caused by the indigence of individuals rather than economic and social conditions. Thus, the pauper claimed relief regardless of his merits: large families got most, which encouraged improvident marriages; women claimed relief for bastards, which encouraged immorality; labourers had no incentive to work; employers kept wages artificially low as workers subsidized from the poor rate."*

(Higginbotham,P., www.workhouses.org)

In answer to this report, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced to toughen up conditions inside workhouses, actively discouraging new entrants. 

After 1834, families, previously able to stay together, were now separated; men from women, adults from children. All inmates were judged and segregated: the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor were treated differently. For example, the undeserving, such as single mothers and tramps, were given isolated accommodation and distinguishing uniforms. On the other hand, the virtuous widows, children, orphans, and sick or disabled paupers received much more consideration, including education and medical care.

Classification continued into the diet of the inmates. In other words, different people got different food, according to which category they fell into. Below is a list of categories from the www.workhouse.org website. As a general rule, children, the elderly and the infirm got more meat, and were given tea and sugar too. Tramps and single mothers were given their food last. Cold gruel- yum yum!

Class 1	Men not employed in work
Class 1A	Men employed in work (as 1 but with an additional meal on weekdays)
Class 2	Infirm men not employed in work
Class 2A	Infirm men employed in work (as 1 but with an additional meal on weekdays)
Class 2B	Feeble infirm men (as 1 but with an additional meal on weekdays)
Class 3	Women not employed in work
Class 3A	Women employed in work (as 1 but with an additional meal on weekdays)
Class 4	Infirm women not employed in work
Class 4A	Infirm men employed in work (as 1 but with an additional meal on weekdays)
Class 4B	Feeble infirm men (as 1 but with an additional meal on weekdays)
Class 5	Children aged from 3 to 8
Class 6	Children aged from 8 to 15
Class 7	Children under 3
Class 8	Sick diets

You can click on the links below to follow my progress on FB or Twitter. Wish me luck!

*I guess the same opinion these days is summed up by the media in two words: "Benefit Scroungers"

More Gruel -With a Dash of Mustard

Last Friday I had great fun filming an interview about the workhouse diet on my local tv channel, Mustard TV. 

It will be available on catch up here for the next few days, but if you've missed it here's couple of pictures!

...and here's the gruel I took with me!

1797 Workhouse Diet Day 1: Beer, Gruel, and Radios.

Day One's Stodge-ometer Rating: 6/10. 

It has begun! Yesterday's sumptuous 1797 workhouse menu:

Breakfast:

1pt beer, 6oz rye bread, 2oz Edam cheese.

Dinner:

1pt onion gruel.

Supper:

1pt beer, 6oz rye bread, 2oz cheese, 
a choice of treacle or butter.

A couple of 'firsts' for me yesterday. I ate my breakfast under media scrutiny, which is not something I've done before. I started eating it on 'Wake Up with Whiteley', the breakfast show on our local BBC radio station. The host, David Whiteley, was genuine charm personified, and asked all the right questions. You can hear the interview for the next seven days. Click here and fwd to 2:20 to listen. 

The other 'first' was, of course, consuming beer at breakfast. It was very low alcohol, and drinking it at 8am was not as bad as I anticipated, but it did make me feel a bit giddy (and caused lots of burps, if the truth be known).

Then another radio interview: North Norfolk Radio's Dick Hutcheson and I had a quick phone chat on air and made a date to do the same next week. Following this modest media frenzy, I gained some extra Twitter and Facebook followers- hurrah!

I found the breakfast filling, but then again I didn't do much physical activity in the morning. The rye bread is extremely chewy and tough. Click here to each a YouTube film showing the ingredients.

My intention was to have milk pottage at lunch time, but I still haven't managed to find a definitive 1797 recipe, so I went for the gruel, adding onions for a bit of flavour. It was joyless gloop, as expected. It took half an hour to eat and made me very bloated, on top of the breakfast beer. 

To prove that I ate it all up, here's a my empty bowl:

I had to eat supper after performing in a concert. My fellow singers were all tucking into a beautiful buffet as I gnawed at my dry rye bread. 

Bread in the workhouse was very low quality, solid, cheap stuff. Rye bread was a particular Norfolk favourite and mine was made for me (watch it being made on YouTube here). It turned out to be a good replica! I was almost tempted to dip it in the beer to make it easier to chew. 

It made me wonder: How did toothless workhouse inmates manage? It was very slow-going, and the added flavour from the small amount of cheese was most welcome. The diet allows an extra treat of a bit of treacle in the evening; a sugary tonic in an otherwise savoury day.

As Day 1 draws to a close, my bloating has diminished and I am already craving fruit, but feeling ok, and not hungry. Interestingly, the worst thing for me about missing out on the buffet was not the food, but the shared experience. 

As always, easy links to all the social media platforms are just below. Feel free to comment or ask questions, too.

Gruel: Is It REALLY That Bad?*

Say the word 'gruel' and many people will immediately think of workhouses and Dicken's hungry orphan Oliver Twist. Not many would think of award-winning Norfolk chef Richard Hughes. But this week, Richard, Chef and Proprietor of The Lavender House Restaurant in Brundall, swapped from garnish to gruel-making for the Norfolk Museums Living The Workhouse Diet Project. I also had a go!  

If you click on this link to YouTube you'll see me tasting my version of it. It was yukky: tasteless, sloppy porridge.  

Richard's professional version was altogether more revolting. I suppose it's because he's a proper chef: he'd made a better job of it, so it was more authentic and therefore, worse. Filmed in glorious sunshine at Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse, you'll be able to see me tasting Michelin Star quality gruel on the EDP24 website from Monday 28th April onwards. Just one spoiler alert: MUCUS.

And so, to history. It seems that gruel has long since been a cheap source of food. It was so cheap that even the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, another Dickensian character, didn't mind eating it.

How many of us knew, though, that gruel was eaten by the ancient Greeks and Romans, or that Mediaeval peasants made it from acorns in hard times?

Gruel can be made from any type of grain, ground up and simmered with water or even milk. The first recorded mention of it in relation to workhouses was in 1742, and a recipe for Water Gruel (here) was published by Hannah Glasse in 1747.

Before the Poor Law Act of 1834, at Gressenhall House of Industry the diet was generally varied with seasonal vegetables, and the gruel, obligatory only two or three times a week, was pimped up with onions for added flavour. After 1834 it's an entirely different story; workhouse inmates were served one and a half pints of plain gruel for breakfast every single day, and low-grade bread made up 86% of the remaining meals. 

So Dickens used literary licence; little Oliver and his chums certainly ate a gruel-dominated diet, but they weren't starving- imagine eating one and a half pints of the stuff!

Here are some photos of the making of my substandard -yet more palatable- gruel. Do have a look at the YouTube link above, and don't forget to look out for the fabulous EDP coverage over the next week too!

*Yes, it really is.

If you wish to, you can share this post and follow me on Twitter, Facebook or other social meedja using the handy buttons below...

The Beer Necessities

With three weeks to go before I embark on this insane dietary odyssey I have had a thorough look at the first diet. This is the one from 1797. Here's a reminder:

Some surprises. Of twenty one meals, 12 are bread, with either cheese, butter or treacle, but only four are Oliver Twist's favourite, gruel. And here's the real jaw-dropper: BEER FOR BREAKFAST? I had a count-up, and twelve of the twenty one meals I'll be eating include beer. Mostly at breakfast time. Now, I am no stranger to the tankard, but beer for breakfast is definitely not what I expected.

I realised I had a few other questions, too. For instance, I haven't a clue what the following meals are:

Milk-broth. Frumenty. Pease-pottage. Milk-pottage.  

I like the sound of Frumenty. It feels as though it should be a bit naughty, and perhaps taking place behind a haystack.

Pease-pottage? I recognise that from nursery rhyme days and can hazard a guess it's made of- well, peas. Let's hope it's not hot, cold or in the pot nine days old.

Milk-pottage sounds disgusting, and I'd like to direct that dairy-based bowl of wickedness to take a long walk off a short cliff. It can take its shameless little sister Milk-broth with it, for that matter.

Other questions popped up: what sort of boiled meat- and how much of it? What type and quantity of bread? And what sort of cheese (please let it be bacon sarnies and Dairylea triangles)?

I've scanned my copies of Delia and Jamie but funnily enough, they don't seem to give cooking instructions for any of these carbohydrate-rich curiosities, or suet pudding, or gruel. But I bet Nigella's got a good recipe for dumplins.

Luckily, I have a team of experts on hand: Megan Dennis, curator at Gressenhall, Steve Pope, researcher and workhouse expert extraordinaire, and Lucy Child, dietician and general all-round Good Egg (Lucy is, incidentally, probably the only egg of any type to feature in this diet).

Steve says the cheese would be made backwards*, and the bread would be more or less the sweepings off the mill floor. He says the main beverage would be beer due to necessity, the low alcohol content being enough to kill the bugs dwelling in the 18th century water supply.

Megan says that the vegetables 'served in great plenty' would be just that, but none of us really know what sort of size the portions were. Our educated guesses tell us that if there were less people in the workhouse, there would be more food per person.

Lucy reckons the bread would be similar to rye bread, and the diet won't kill me.

Steve has recommended a book of recipes and suggested I get on with it.


Living The Workhouse Diet:1797 begins on April 26th 2014. Follow Rachel on Twitter @workhousediet or on her Facebook page 

*Edam. It's the cheesiest joke in the world.