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.
"You must be mad" is what most people have said when I've told them I'm soon going to be eating workhouse food for three weeks, "nothing but gruel?!"
"Ugh!" they exclaim, "disgusting!" And then they finish off with a shrug and a withering "rather you than me" look.
Well, they're possibly right. It does seem to be a bit of a nutty idea; to find three diets from three distinctly different periods in the workhouse's history, and to eat only what the inmates ate.
And of course, there is a lot of potential for gruel.
But it seems a little less bonkers if you think of all the faddy diets most of us have tried at one time or another. The high-protein, halitosis-inducing, constipation-invoking Atkins diet is the first to spring to mind. I did a diet once which promised a flat stomach but delivered only acid reflux. Then there's the F-plan, the Cambridge diet, slimming milkshakes, grapefruit-before-each-meal...the list is endless.
The food I'll be consuming as part of this project is no more weird than any 'Oh my goodness I must get into that dress before the weekend' diet I've embarked on in the past.*
The workhouse diets were about feeding as many people as possible as cheaply as possible. The food given to inmates was intended to keep them alive - but not to encourage them to stay.
Hence the gruel. Boring, but cheap.
There are other reasons why this diet isn't as bonkers as it sounds.
Firstly, it's me doing it. I work at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, and as Live Interpretation Officer I can often be found dressed as a workhouse inmate for our excellent learning event days for schools (click here for info on schools events). Why not take it a stage further from looking like an inmate, to eating like an inmate?!
Secondly, there is a massive redisplay of the museum happening soon, all about Voices from the Workhouse. In this blog I'll be reflecting on some of the archive material from the museum in relation to the living conditions and diet of the inmates. For more information on that aspect, click on the HLF page at the top.
I'll also be reflecting on my experiences while on these diets, and posting lots of pictures and videos of the gloop I imagine I'll be eating. And probably I'll be mentioning bowels quite a bit. Mine, or other people's- I'm not fussy.
You can follow my bowels, if you wish, on Twitter: @workhousediet, or on Facebook- look for (and 'like' and 'share', please!) a page titled, astonishingly, 'The Workhouse Diet'.
Diet number 1, the 1797 diet, begins on 26th April 2014.
*I should make it clear that the workhouse diets were not designed for weight loss. Let's face it, in a pre-junkfood, non-automated world, unhealthy weight gain wasn't an issue many people had to think about. I should also make it clear that I am at a healthy weight and I have a completely healthy relationship with food - so don't start fretting!!
