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"

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.