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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