1901 Workhouse Diet Survival Strategy

I had a really bad time on the gruel-and-bread 1834 diet. To be brutally honest, the gruel was as bad on the way out as it was on the way in. And now, starting tomorrow, I have to do it all again for the 1901 diet.

So, during this 'break' week, I’ve eaten loads (and I sincerely mean LOADS) of fruit and vegetables while I’ve been planning what to do about the oncoming gruel-tanker that is the 1901 diet. I really don’t fancy another experience like last time. 

I asked myself if food in the workhouse could really still be as bad as all that in 1901? I mean, that’s only just over 100 years ago, and most of my life has so far been lived in that same century. Surely we had moved on from gruel by 1901? 

Happily, my research has revealed that workhouse food did improve in the 1900s -but there was still gruel on the menu.

And so to the history bit: Records show there were increasing complaints and concerns about the quality and quantity of workhouse food during the last few decades of the 1800s. Finally in 1901 the Local Government Board decreed that standards must be raised, and produced a manual and a training program for workhouse cooks.

I have a copy of the manual. We know that cheap, but now thicker, gruel still featured, and it was probably eaten for breakfast. Other than that, the newly trained Edwardian cooks could choose whichever meal combinations they thought best. Norfolk workhouse cooks didn’t seem to write any of their choices down (or if they did, they’re now long lost), so I have no option but to make up my own meal plans. 

I’ve done gruel, and it was disgusting. In 1901 they doubled the amount of oatmeal back to two ounces per pint of water, exactly like the older 1797 diet. So I have tasted it (YouTube video here) and I’ve run out of expletives, so I’ve decided to give gruel a miss this time.

I've opted to eat normally for the week, with one daily exception: my main evening meal. That’s when I’ll be trying out the 1901 workhouse meal recipes. My family will be joining me on this venture (they don’t know about it yet, but I’m the one who cooks tea in our house, so they really have no choice)!

George tucks into Hog Roast at GFW

Luckily they won't have too bad a time, because the 1901 diet includes pasties, shepherd's pie, roly poly pudding and all sorts of other relatively normal sounding meals. 

From a cookery perspective, it will be interesting for me to put away all my shop-prepared 'essentials' like frozen pastry and to make meals entirely from scratch. I'm no Delia, but I'm not a terrible cook -and lets be clear, no ready-meals ever darken my doorstep- but I do like the convenience of bottled sauces with pasta, and I admit I am no stranger to the pre-washed potato. 

The first day of the 1901 diet coincides with a super event at Gressenhall, 'The Workhouse Experience'. Do come!

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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.  

1797 Workhouse Diet Day 7: Food for Thought

Day 7 Stodge-ometer rating: 5/10

I got very excited on the last day of the diet. I'm not talking a little bit jittery, I'm talking sweaty-palms-and-butterflies-in-the-tummy levels. You know, like when you hear the sound of a cheering audience or glimpse a new sparkly dress. Or is that just me?

Obviously the day's food was not the cause of my excitement. It was merely a repeat of a previous day; gruel for breakfast, stew for lunch and broth & bread for supper.

Here's a YouTube clip of me getting excited at breakfast time. I was so excited I accidentally called it video No.7 instead of No.8.

My great excitement was, of course, because I'd successfully completed the first of the diets. I didn't have to go without tea or biscuits any longer! 

However, 24 hours later I've only had one cup of 'real' tea, and no biscuits other than medicinal fig rolls -and I need not expand any further on those. 

In spite of all predictions, all I wanted when I got to the end was oranges, orange juice, and dried fruit and nuts. And I had a green smoothie too, to pack in a bit of goodness. To be honest, I haven't fancied anything REALLY sugary, like biscuits, in the slightest (not even Lemon Puffs). 

Has this diet made me lose my incredibly 'sweet tooth'? Maybe it has. This shocking revelation made me ponder about various other surprises the 1797 diet had to offer.

Here are some things I noticed while on the 1797 diet: 

• I had blinding headaches for the first two and a half days.
• I suffered painful bloating on the first day.
• Beer for breakfast made me sluggish and woozy.
• My -ahem- 'digestive transit' slowed right down.
• The meals took a lot of eating! Much more chewing required.
• I got big dark circles around my eyes.
• People kept telling me I looked pale.
• I was physically incapable of remaining awake beyond 9.30pm.
• I felt increasingly lethargic and sluggish through the week. 
• I was psychotically looking forward to oranges by the end of the week.

On the bright side, I was never, ever hungry- not even once. 

Would the inmates of 1797 have felt hungry on the same rations? The simple answer is, we can't tell. This experiment has, so far, raised more questions than it has answered. Dietician Lucy's prognosis was gloomy, but historians at Gressenhall wondered whether inmates really did work that hard every single day and burn off all those calories? We'll never know. We haven't found records to back up the nutritional deficit we now know would have caused inmates dental problems and hair-loss; but if it happened, it was probably as unremarkable then as it is startling now, so its reasonable to assume that nobody would have bothered to write it down. 

How did the diet in the workhouse compare to that of people in the surrounding villages? Was it better, or worse?

If Gressenhall Workhouse was known as  "The Paupers' Palace", the implication is that conditions were better inside than outside those daunting gates. The tough 1834 legislation to deter entrance into the place indicates the same thing.

We can theoretically try to compare 1797 diets inside and outside the Workhouse, but realistically I can only compare it to my own, modern eating. I'm interested in the   tangible, burpy, bloaty, sleepy, human experience, which is, after all, why I'm doing it. The 'Voices from the Workhouse' were probably muted by flatulence and muffled by toothless yawning. The 1797 diet yet was tricky for me; I think the 1834 diet will be considerably worse. In the meantime, I shall enjoy the wide variety of delicious fruits and vegetables freely available in 2014 and feel lucky to be me, now.

The next part of this project is the 1834 diet which begins on Monday 12th May.

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1797 Workhouse Diet Days 3 & 4: Pease Porridge Hot

Day 3 Stodge-ometer rating: 7/10

Day 4 Stodge-ometer rating: 3/10

Day three fell on a Monday. My breakfast was this again:

I was delivering training to volunteers at the Ancient House Museum in Thetford, and I had to drive there, so I decided to save my beer until later.

My ten-year old son was concerned at this change to the diet. 
"Will you get told off?" he whispered. 
Well, of course, I won't, but the inmates would definitely have been reprimanded for any such behaviour.

Lunch was Pease Pottage. My second attempt was more edible than my first. There's a video on The Workhouse Diet YouTube channel here of me eating it. It looks (and tasted) like something paleolithic from the ocean floor.

Supper was, inevitably, more of this:

Day Three also brought some more publicity. Here's a link to EDP24 online coverage of the project, and as a taster, here's what appeared in the EDP paper itself:

Whoops, I got it confused with this...

I had more headaches on Day Three. I wondered if they were caused by the effort of digesting such a lot of stodge; my belly is, after all, more used to softer, modern foods, and fruit and vegetables.

I haven't felt hungry at all. But I have no doubt that if I were doing the same amount of physical labour as 'Betty Workhouse', I would have felt fairly peckish as the next mealtime approached .

Day Four's diet will be the same as Day Two's, except for supper, which is 'broth and bread' (i.e. the water the meat was cooked in on Sunday). The broth was reasonably tasty, and it was a nice change to have something lighter.

And then there was the inevitable rye bread. Variety is not, it seems, the spice of workhouse life!

1797 Workhouse Diet Day 2: Withdrawal Symptoms

Day Two's Stodge-ometer Rating: 4/10. 

Day Two of the diet dawned upon me playing hostess to a blinding headache. I am assuming this is due to the sharp drop in my sugar intake yesterday.

Having realised in advance about the lack of tea on this diet, I had smugly thought I had done enough to  stave off the worst of the caffeine withdrawal. Before the diet began, I had gradually weaned myself off ordinary tea and on to green tea (less caffeine), with only a couple of mild headaches to show for it. 

But alas and alack! I didn't do any 'weaning-off' when it came to the sugary treats and biscuits I so love. Only last Tuesday night, I shamelessly wolfed down half a packet of Lemon Puffs, heedless of the consequences!  

Casting my mind back, I consumed a heck of a lot of sugar

last week. After all it was chocolate-laden Easter only last weekend, and a Lindt Bunny won't eat itself, you know. I had also visited the Easter market in Norwich and returned with an irresistible trio of sticky delights; Turkish delight, apple tarts and amaretto fudge. 

And it was my birthday last week, too, so I shared a Toblerone cake with friends. Then somebody at work inconsiderately brought in a homemade cheesecake, and it would have been churlish not to have tried a bit.

Finally, we had a delicious 'Last Supper' the night before the Workhouse Diet began at Chez Denis, in which I lustily consumed a Caribbean Creole extravaganza of monkfish deglazed in Malibu rum, and King Scallops in honey and ginger.

Oh dear. Perhaps I deserve a headache for being such a greedy-guts.

By stark contrast, here's a picture of this morning's 1797 workhouse breakfast of 1 pint of milk broth. I was, again, unable to find a definitive recipe so I kind of guessed, and made vegetable broth in the normal way, replacing the water with milk. It was surprisingly tasty, and a massive improvement on gruel- but a bit weird having vegetables for breakfast. 

Here's my lunch of boiled meat with vegetables and dumplings, and beer.

Lucy, the project dietician, suggested I take full advantage of any available vegetables on the menu. The suet dumplings were pretty nice, the veg authentically overdone and the boiled meat became hard squares of grey beef. 

Here are some of the cooking stages:

"vegetables in great plenty"



                                              
"dumplins"

1797 cooking methods are simple: everything is just boiled for ages, so it's all very simple. I made two extra portions of this meal for later in the week, and the "broth" (aka the water it was cooked in) will be eaten for tomorrow's lunch.

Today's supper is this again:

There's not much more to say about bread and cheese! 

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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.

Lights, Cameras, Action! The First Ever Workhouse Diet Video is available!

If you were to be so bold as to click on this link to YouTube  you would find me in my kitchen rabbitting on about Pease Pottage.This link shows a second video in which, having tasted the Pease Pottage, I nearly vomit.

I have finally successfully filmed and published the first of many videos for this project. My ten year old son George is my cameraman, and I predict that the viewer may well feel George's presence quite definitely during the videos.

But never, no never (well, hardly ever*) in my wildest dreams did I imagine that going back 200 years to try living as a workhouse inmate would involve learning about many futuristic new technologies. 

I already knew how to 'blog' (my other life as a 'Royal' freelance speaker and singer is well-documented in my blog, What Queenie Did Next), but now, I also know how to sync my iPad, auto-update my Google Plus, create and manage a You Tube account, Twitter with two different personalities, Tweet, Retweet, and Follow others. In return, I now have over 100 people Following me. 

I am truly grateful for their interest and I feel as though I should at least offer them all a cup of tea- but I'm not allowed any on this 1797 diet.

Do check out and 'like' my Workhouse Diet Facebook page by clicking here, and consider becoming my disciple- er, follower-  on Twitter (@workhousediet).

Checkout Gressenhall's website to see what's happening there and in other Norfolk Museums- and look out for a big feature on this project in the EDP in the next couple of weeks! The Workhouse Diet itself begins on 29th April...

*Gilbert & Sullivan. Sorry. Quoting from old songs is like a nervous tic for me.

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.