London: The Biography полностью

From the seventeenth century, too, comes evidence of the food available from the hawkers of London. The illustrator Marcellus Laroon places the costermonger or “regrater” crying out “Buy my fat chicken!” next to the female huckster selling “ripe speragas,” because chicken and asparagus together were considered by Londoners to be a dainty dish. Chicken was cheap, too; that, and rabbit, seem to have been the only meats on sale in the streets. The rabbit-seller, shouting “Buy a rabbet a rabbet,” was likely to have been an Irishman who came to London in the autumn with his wares. Those sent out to buy from him were advised that “For being new killed, you must judge by the Scent.” Milk and water were carried through the streets in vessels, but not wine. Cherries were available in early summer, followed by strawberries later in the season, and apples in the autumn. From autumn to winter the costermonger sold her pears or “wardens” baking hot from a pot she balanced upon her head. The countryman’s attitude to these city fruits is perhaps best exemplified by Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), who declared that “I need not dwell upon the pallid, contaminated mash which they call strawberries, soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt.” Here the emphasis is upon dirt, of course, but also the endemic overpopulation of London wherein every item is passed through a selection of anonymous “paws.” Eels were a cheap element of the Londoner’s diet; sold alive, generally by female vendors, they were skinned on the spot before being used in pies or pastries. They were not the only fish hawked about the main thoroughfare; crabs were cheap, as were mackerel and flounders, while oysters were purchased for “twelve pence a peck” or approximately two gallons.

From the countryside came the young man trading “Lilly white Vinegar, three pence a quart!” Made from cider or white wine, vinegar was employed as a sauce and as a preventive against disease; but its main use was as a preservative. Almost anything could be pickled, including walnuts, cauliflowers, peaches, onions, lemons, oysters and asparagus.

By the eighteenth century roast beef was described as being of “Old England,” although in fact it had been only one of many meats burdening the tables of earlier centuries. As a token of national character the myth of roast beef may owe more to the observations of foreign visitors that Londoners were “entirely carnivorous,” with the prevailing assumption of voraciousness. In May 1718 a great meat pudding, eighteen feet two inches in length and four feet in diameter, was dragged by six asses to the Swan Tavern in Fish Street Hill but apparently “its smell was too much for the gluttony of the Londoners. The escort was routed, the pudding taken and devoured.” “A foreigner,” wrote a German pastor visiting London in 1767, “will be surprised to see what flesh-eaters the English are. He will be struck with the sight of an enormous piece of beef such, perhaps, as he never saw in his life, placed before him upon the table.” The same observer also noted that “the common people in London” insisted upon “daily beef or mutton” together with white bread and strong beer. The meat may not necessarily have taken the form of rib or haunch, however, since in the 1750s beef sausages became the culinary fashion.

One other aspect of the pastor’s account is of interest, in those passages where he remarks upon the fact that Londoners require their food and drink to be vivid in colour. The brandy and wine must be “deeply coloured,” the vegetables as bright and as green “as when gathered”; cabbage and peas, for example, are not boiled “for fear they should lose their colour.” It is, perhaps, an intimation of the unnaturalness of the London palate; in a city of spectacle, even the food must be completely seen before being understood. But it may also be a symptom of a certain craving after effect which may itself be unhealthy. He observes the whiteness of the veal and mentions that the calves are made to lick chalk in order to procure that colour. He also notices that the poorer Londoners “are much prejudiced in respect of the colour … the whiter the bread is, the better they think it to be.” One of Smollett’s characters considered the white bread to be nothing more than “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone-ashes.” So Londoners mistake the nature of things by judging upon appearances alone. This, of course, was also the criticism of social moralists who saw villains and parvenus accepted as gentlemen because of their dress and manners.