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.

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No Cuppa With Me Supper

Tea is definitely my favourite hot beverage. 

For me, tea is so much more than just a pleasant way to rehydrate: it wakes me up in the mornings, gets me through a busy day at work, and helps me relax in the evenings. I'm not the only one- like many other British folk, I have an automatic 'make tea' stress response. I turn to the teapot for solace, distraction, procrastination, and warmth. In truth, I actually love the stuff.


In 17 days, on the 29th April 2014, I will be embarking on the first week of my Workhouse Diet, which will follow the 1797 inmates' diet. 

SPOILER ALERT: IT DOESN'T CONTAIN ANY TEA!

Astonishingly, even whilst reading that I would be drinking beer at breakfast time on this diet, the penny didn't drop that the beer would be replacing my usual double dose of tea.

Maybe it was a classic case of denial, but I had possession of that diet sheet for two whole weeks before the enormity and horror of the lack of tea situation truly struck me. 

When it did strike, it was like a terrible caffeine-free thunderbolt. I was thinking about how I'd miss biscuits, and dunking them, while on the diet (I love a dunked ginger knob:don't judge me). Then I suddenly gasped as I realised that there would be No Tea in which to dunk my No Biscuits.*

The reason is simple. In 1797, 'my' workhouse at Gressenhall near Dereham (link here) was known as a House of Industry. There, as in many other Parish Houses, they drank beer because the water wasn't safe. The teeny amount of alcohol in the 'small beer' or 'table beer' drunk twelve times a week by inmates was enough to kill the bugs. 

So why not drink tea? The boiling would, after all, also sterilise the water. The assumption is that tea was too expensive, but Peter Higginbotham's 'Workhouse Cookbook' (buy it here) tells us that in the 1790s, tea and sugar were regularly bought by labourers, so we can conclude that money was not the issue preventing workhouses serving tea to inmates. 

No, according to Higginbotham's research, the decision to restrict tea consumption was a moral judgement call. He says 'tea was often still viewed as a luxury the poor should do without'. He tells us that in some workhouses tea was only for the sick or elderly, and as late as 1899 a Scottish Board Official deemed that 'excessive tea-drinking by women accounts largely for the number of pauper lunatics'. 

There you have it: tea makes you go mad. It explains a lot. 

However, caffeine-withdrawal aside, I think I may just go mad without it. 

Sympathy now please.

*I've started weaning myself onto the low-caffeine green tea, which I find surprisingly acceptable, although it is no good for dunking. But then again, I thought I'd better wean myself off biscuits as well, so it's probably for the best.

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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.