London: The Biography полностью

There were other places for a meagre breakfast. “Early breakfast houses” were essentially coffee shops by another name, “stiflingly hot,” with the flavour of coffee mingling with the “odours of fried rashers of bacon, and others not by any means so agreeable.” Ever since the eighteenth century there had also been “early breakfast stalls,” which were essentially kitchen tables set up at the corner of a street or the foot of a bridge, purveying halfpenny slabs of bread and butter together with large pots of tea or coffee heated over charcoal fires. These in turn were succeeded by more elaborate coffee stalls, which were constructed on the pattern of a medieval London shop with a wooden interior and shutters. They were generally painted red, ran on wheels, and were led by a horse to familiar locations at Charing Cross, at the foot of Savoy Street, on Westminster Bridge, below Waterloo Bridge, by Hyde Park Corner, and by West India Dock gates. They sold everything from saveloys to hard-boiled eggs, as well as coffee and “woods” (Woodbine cigarettes).

There is an animated painting, dated 1881, which depicts a variety of Londoners congregating around a “day stall” set up outside the gates of a park or square. The female proprietor is washing up a cup-most of the stalls were indeed run by women on the principle, maintained by many public houses of the present day, that aggressive customers were less likely to cause trouble and offence if a female was present. There is bread on the table, but no sign of the ham sandwiches and “water cresses” which were also part of the daily menu. A boy in a red jacket, bearing the livery of the City of London, sits in a wheelbarrow and blows upon his saucer of liquid; he was one of those employed by the City to run after horses in the street and scoop up their manure. A female crossing-sweeper and a female vendor, both with expressions of sorrow or perplexity, seem to be looking on at the feast. A well-dressed young lady, with umbrella and band-box, sips delicately from her cup on the other side of the stall. It is a suggestive picture of late Victorian London. In competition with such a stall was the baked-potato van, a portable oven wheeled around the streets. There were also oyster stalls where Londoners, as the saying goes, ate “on their thumbs.”

The ordinaries and the eating-houses continued well into the nineteenth century as chop-houses or ham-and-beef shops or à-la-mode beef-houses. There were also taverns or public houses where it was customary for the client to bring in his own piece of meat which was then dressed and cooked upon a gridiron by a waiter, who charged a penny for the service. The origin of twentieth-century pub food lies in these nineteenth-century establishments where “fine old cheese” and mutton pies and baked potatoes were generally on sale by the counter.

The old chop-houses and beef-houses were not necessarily of good reputation. Nathaniel Hawthorne described one such establishment, in The English Notebooks (1853-8), with “a filthy table-cloth, covered with other people’s crumbs; iron forks, a leaden salt cellar, the commonest earthen plates; a little dark stall, to sit and eat in.” He noticed that the conditions of this place, the Albert Dining-Rooms, were not uncommon. It was a measure of the discomfort and dirtiness to which Londoners, historically, have accommodated themselves. There were gradations in service and comfort, however. In the more formal dining-house a waiter, with napkin over his left arm, would announce to the client what was “just ready”; in a “rapid but monotonous tone” he would go through the list of “Roast beef, boiled beef, roast haunch of mutton, boiled pork, roast veal and ham, salmon and shrimp sauce, pigeon-pie, rump-steak pudding.” In the à-la-mode beef-houses there was a sixpenny plate and a fourpenny plate-“Two sixes and a four” the waiter would call out to the cook in a nearby kitchen.