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"

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.