London: The Biography полностью

Yet there are also intimations of a revulsion against so much greedy consumption. “What should they do,” as the poet John Lewkenor put it, “with all this greasie Meat?” Another of Smollett’s heroes enters a cook-shop filled “with steams of boiled beef” where the sight of “skin-of-beef, tripe, cow-heel or sausages … turned my stomach.” In this same period the Worshipful Company of Butchers, in debt and pestered by competition in the suburbs, proved wholly incapable of enforcing regulations on the sale of meat. Every kind of shoddy or mouldy flesh could be purchased. Once more the unchecked reign of commerce becomes a symbol of city life.

So it was that in the early part of the nineteenth century “food processing” took its place beside the manufactories along the Thames; essences of meat and meat sauces came from London Bridge, while tinned meat or “patent beef” came from Bermondsey. This was the century of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, of clarified butter and tinned pâté de foie gras. There were also more familiar items. Accounts describe nineteenth-century travellers breakfasting off ham, tongue and “a devil” (kidney), or dining off mutton chop, rump steak and a “weal cutlet,” while in less splendid establishments the fare included “hams, and sirloins, the remnants of geese and turkeys, codfish reduced to the gills, fins and tail.”

But the overwhelming mass of evidence still concerns food provided by the street-sellers of the period. With a restless, large and rapidly moving population the equivalent of fast-food was the most characteristic and appropriate form of sustenance. Whether they bought fried fish sold in oily paper, or boiled puddings in cotton bags, it was the custom of the poorer citizens to eat “upon the stones.” New-laid eggs were for sale on Holborn Hill and pork in Broad St. Giles. There was also the ubiquitous baked-potato stall, as well as the shops plying roly poly or plum duff. One trader in Whitechapel informed Henry Mayhew that “he sold 300 pennyworths of pudding in a day. Two thirds of this quantity he sold to juveniles under fifteen years of age … The boys are often tiresome: ‘Mister,’ they’ll say, ‘can’t you give us a plummier bit than this?’ or ’Is it just up? I likes it ’ot, all ‘ot.’” In competition with these hot delicacies came sandwiches, hailed as “one of our greatest institutions” by Charles Dickens, who saw them, in an image of perpetual activity and perpetual consumption, being engorged by the shelf-load at the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton.

The times of that consumption have changed, both in the commercial and the fashionable areas of the city. An entire history of social manners might be constructed from the essential fact that, over the last five centuries, the time for eating dinner, or the main meal of the day, has advanced by approximately ten hours. In the late fifteenth century, many Londoners dined “at ten o’clock in the forenoon,” although others delayed for a further hour; in the sixteenth century, the hour for meat varied between eleven and twelve but no later. In the seventeenth century, the hours of twelve and one became common. But then in the early decades of the eighteenth century there was a rapid acceleration of mealtime. By 1740 two o’clock was the appropriate hour, and by 1770 three was considered the vital moment. In the last decades of the eighteenth, and the first of the nineteenth, the dinner hour slid to five or six. Then Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing about London life in the 1850s, noted that dinner at eight or even nine o’clock in the evening was considered appropriate at “aristocratic” tables.

The reason for this postponement of the main meal was credited by eighteenth-century moralists to the decline of moral fibre and the rise of social decadence, as if it were important to devour food before successfully devouring the day. But a more specific circumstance may have assisted the process, particularly in the early decades of the eighteenth century when, according to Grosley, “the hour of going to Change interfered with dinner time, so that the merchants thought it most advisable, not to dine till their return from Change.” Once more commercial imperatives play their part within the intimate texture of London life.

CHAPTER 34

Eat In or Take Away