1797 Workhouse Diet Day 5: Frumenty

Day Five Stodge-ometer Rating: 7/10 (but in a good way)

Again, for breakfast, it is this: 

I have to admit to becoming a little tired of Edam cheese now, and VERY tired of beer. I drank the beer at breakfast time on days one and two to see what it was like, but haven't done so since, because it made me feel drowsy and sick to drink so early in the day. I am catching up on all required beer later each day, when all the driving's been done. At least I am assured of a good night's sleep that way!

For dinner, Day Five brings a sweet treat: FRUMENTY. this is a gorgeous eggy, creamy mixture of pearl barley, sugar and raisins. It's been around for hundreds of years and has various names; firmety, frumety and fimety being just a few. Here's a link to a YouTube video I made showing it.

It is indescribably lovely to eat something sweet and soft after the pottage, gruel and endless rye bread. It tasted like the unashamed love-child of a bread-and-butter pudding, and rice pudding. Utterly glorious, gloopy, glumptiousness.

The recipe I used is shown on the '1797 Diet and Recipes' page of this blog. 

Then it's back to this for supper:

My headaches have gone now- possibly because I ate some sugar today, but also, I hope, because my digestive system has acclimatised to the changes. Considering there's been no fruit and very little veg for four days, I'm doing ok. 

Good work, Rachel's intestines!

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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.

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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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.