Eat like a Victorian
Bread, dripping, beer... yet in many ways 1800s food was healthier than ours. A new TV series by the 5:2 Diet guru reveals how to...
VICTORIANS are all the rage – the brilliant series about Queen Victoria has just finished on ITV and my five-part living history series The Victorian Slum has just started on BBC2.
Before I made this series, I thought our modern diet, with all its variety, had to be superior to a Victorian one. Now I’m not so sure. It’s certainly true that, for many people, life in 19th Century Britain would have been extremely harsh. Average life expectancy was just 43 years, and if you were from a poor working-class background it was more like 29. But that didn’t mean poor people dropped dead before they hit 30.
The reason life expectancy was so low is that in a time before clean water and effective sewers, many died in infancy from infectious diseases. If they did survive the first five years of life, most could expect to live well into their 70s.
In fact, some nutritionists argue that Victorians were in many ways healthier than their modern-day counterparts. They ate much less processed food and sugar. Foods such as tinned corned beef didn’t arrive in British shops until the 1880s and consumption of sugar only really took off a few years earlier, when the removal of taxes brought the price of sugar crashing down.
Since the early Victorian years, sugar consumption has soared, up from about 19lb a year in 1850 to 77lb today. We are, on average, eating the weight of a small child in sugar every year.
So the Victorians certainly had a more nutrient-rich diet than we have and did far more physical activity than we do.
Here’s a snapshot of what the different classes ate. Perhaps adopting some of their dietary habits might do you good too (though I wouldn’t recommend the menu for a slum-dweller)…
THE WORKING MAN’S DIET
WITH trains bringing food in from the countryside, by the mid-1800s there was plenty of cheap fruit and vegetables to be had in the big cities. As long as you were in work, you could eat reasonably well.
Bread, a staple, was stoneground and often eaten smeared with dripping or lard (rich in heart-friendly monounsaturated fats). It would frequently be accompanied by a large bunch of watercress – rich in vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients.
There were plenty of seasonal vegetables to be found in the markets, including onions, cabbage, leeks, carrots and turnips. These foods were, of course, organic. The main fruits were apples in the winter and cherries in the summer.
The working man also ate lots of nuts, such as chestnuts and hazelnuts, which were often roasted and bought from street-corner sellers
Meat was relatively expensive. Instead, they ate plenty of omega-3rich oily fish and seafood. Herrings, sprats, eels, oysters, mussels, cockles and whelks were all popular, as were cod and haddock. Unlike us, the Victorians ate the whole fish, head, roes and all.
Bar the olive oil, the diet eaten in the 1850s had a lot in common with the ‘Mediterranean diet’, now seen as one of the healthiest.
According to Dr Paul Clayton, author of How The Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate And Died, this made them ‘90 per cent less likely to develop cancer, dementia and coronary artery disease than we are today’. It certainly meant that diseases such as type 2 diabetes, which plague modern society, were rare.
THE LOW-CARB DIET OF THE RICH
ALONG with the full fried breakfast, the Sunday roast and the threecourse dinner, the Victorian Brits also invented dieting – those who could afford to, that is.
If you were an affluent Victorian you generally ate a rich and varied diet, and although they were rare, the obese Victorians were there – particularly among the upper classes. They needed a diet guru, and they got one, in the rotund form of undertaker William Banting.
In 1863, Banting wrote a booklet called Letter On Corpulence, Addressed To The Public. It was to become the first popular guide to low-carb dieting.
A year before he self-published his booklet, Banting weighed in at a dispiriting 14½st. Since he was only 5ft 5in tall, that meant he was seriously obese. In fact he was so fat he couldn’t tie his shoelaces, and he had to go down the stairs backwards to ‘save the jar of increased weight upon my ancle and knee-joints’.
He was horribly embarrassed about being overweight and tried everything from Turkish baths to vigorous rowing on the local lake to try to shift the weight. Nothing worked, until he went to see a doctor who suggested he try cutting out sugary, carby foods and drinks. Banting cut out bread, sugar, beer and potatoes. Instead, for breakfast he had ‘four or five ounces of beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish, bacon, or cold meat, and a large cup of tea (without milk or sugar)’. For lunch he had fish, ‘any vegetable except potato, any kind of poultry or game, and two or three glasses of claret, sherry, or champagne’. Port and beer, he noted, ‘are forbidden’.
Then there was a mid-afternoon snack of fruit, finishing off with an early supper ‘of meat or fish with a glass or two of claret’. Finally, as a nightcap, ‘a tumbler of gin, whisky or brandy’, which in turn would lead to ‘an excellent night’s rest, with from six to eight hours’ sound sleep’.
Banting lost 3st in a few months, weight he kept off until his death at the age of 82. ‘To Bant’ become a slang term meaning to lose weight.
. . . AND THAT DIET FROM THE SLUMS
IF YOU were out of work, living in the poor house or a hungry orphan, things were very different. Few poor people had ovens or cooking utensils. They often had only one pot, which was for everything from cooking their food over an open fire to washing the baby. The rural poor ate birds, when they could catch them, while those living in cities dined on tripe, rotting vegetables, slink (prematurely born calves), or broxy (sheep that died from illness). By today’s standards, the children of the slums were undernourished, anaemic, rickety and very short.
We know that the average 16-yearold recruit to Sandhurst (from a middle- or upper-class background) was a full 9in taller than his slum contemporary pressganged into the Royal Navy.
The Victorian Slum is on BBC2 on Mondays at 9pm and is available on BBC iPlayer.