Eating Like a Victorian Workhouse Inmate - Scouse & Suet Dumplings

[00:00] and while novels like 'Oliver Twist' might have you think that all they ever ate was watery gruel, and they did eat gruel mostly for breakfast, for dinner  you might get something a little bit more interesting

[00:12] like this dish of scouse and suet dumplings. as we examine just exactly how terrible the food in a Victorian workhouse really was this time on Tasting History.

[00:31] During the Victorian era, workhouses in Britain  were nothing new, they had been around for a couple centuries. Something called the new poor law as opposed to the old poor law transitioned these institutions

[00:45] from a place of charity to a place of, if not exactly punishment, to a place of last resort for relief. It was believed that if the workhouse was too comfortable, it would actually entice people to

[00:58] become poor or stay poor just for the free handout. Not that it was exactly free, seeing as you were doing backbreaking work for 10 to 12 hours a day, But even in the Victorian era, there were still guidelines of what kind of food to feed the inmates,

[01:16] It was often gruel and a bit of bread and beer for breakfast. Then bread and cheese for supper. And in the middle of the day for dinner, a person could expect a little meat and potato  

[01:28] So I found two recipes meant to be made at workhouses of the Victorian era. One is for a stew, a meat stew called scouse, and the other is for suet dumplings.

[01:43] So, the first for the scouse, it comes from the 'Manual for Workhouse Cookery' from 1901. And it provides a detailed list of the exact ingredients and quantities to make it, so I'm going to use those, but it only makes one  serving, so I'm going to triple it, but the ratios will all be the same.

[02:00] So for the scouse what you'll need is 1 pounds or 450 grams of beef, 3/4 of a cup or 90 grams of flour, 3 tablespoons or 42 grams of butter or other fat, 340 grams or about four small potatoes, 255 grams or two large carrots,

[02:15] 85 grams or about a half of a small turnip and 45 grams or a 1/2 cup of diced onion.   Then the recipe says to "Cut up the meat and vegetables.

[02:27] Fry the flour in the fat till brown, stir in the water. Add pepper and salt; then put in the meat and vegetables. Simmer gently for two hours. To make 1 pint of stew." Simple and very easy to follow, just like the recipes from today's sponsor, Hungryroot.

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[03:42] Now let's make some workhouse scouse. So start by chopping up the meat and vegetables.  Also, as the workhouse was all about economy,   you don't want to peel the potatoes, carrots, and turnips. You just want them to be washed and chopped up.

[03:58] Then we move on to making the soup's thickener by melting the butter in a large pot, then adding in the flour and mixing it together. 1:1 ratio of flour to fat, this one has more of a 2:1 ratio,

[04:15] twice as much flour than fat, and that means it can be rather dry. And so really, you need to keep stirring it around so it doesn't burn. So keep it moving over a medium heat for about 5 minutes And then you can pour in a little more than seven cups of water.  

[04:32] The exact recipe would call for three imperial  pints or 1,700 ml. Then give it a good stir and let that come to a simmer at which point the thickener should dissolve fairly well. Then add in the pepper and the salt, followed by the meat and the vegetables.

[04:47] And give it another good stir and let it return to a simmer and then place the lid on the pot and let it cook for 2 hours.   And every once in a while, give it a good stir and kind of scrape the bottom to make sure nothing is burning to the bottom of the pot.  

[05:00] And then really it's actually ready to eat as is, but if you want some extra energy, you know if you're breaking up stones into gravel to pave the roads of Britain in a workhouse then I suggest making some suet dumplings. And so for that

[05:15] we look to a Scottish book on the management of poor houses of all sorts "6 ounces of flour, 2 ounces chopped suet,  1/16th ounce baking powder,

[05:29] Mix all the dry things, rubbing the sew it through the flour; make into a firm paste with the cold water; divide into ten or twelve small pieces, which roll up into balls having the outsides well floured.

[05:43] Drop the balls into the stew and cook for half an hour longer; then serve." And to make these, what you'll need is just under  1 and 1/2 cups or 170 grams of flour. And then a heaping 1/3 cup or 55 grams of beef suet. And if you can't find beef suet that you can get it online,  

[06:00] you can use really cold butter. Then a 1/2 teaspoon  baking powder, 1 teaspoon of salt, a 1/2 teaspoon of pepper, and 21 grams of chopped parsley. That is a lot of parsley. It's actually like an entire bunch of parsley if you're just using the leaves.

[06:15] And then when they're chopped really really fine, it's about a cup of parsley. So mix the salt, pepper, and baking powder into the flour. And then add the parsley and mix. Once well distributed, you can add the suet. And you want to work that in by rubbing it into the flour with your fingers.

[06:31] And once it is well incorporated, you can add some cold water. I would start with about a 1/4 cup of  water and only add more if you need it. You want it to be just enough that the dough comes together and can be formed into balls.

[06:44] You're going to make about 10 to 12 dumplings. Once you've rolled your  dumplings, you can coat them in a layer of flour.   And then 30 minutes before your scouse is done,  or about an hour and a half into the cooking,   you can add your dumplings into the stew.  Gently stir them in so you don't break them up,  

[06:59] but you get them nice and coated with the liquid.  And then return the lid to the pot and cook for another 30 minutes. Hit the LIKE button, it really does help out the channel. And we can take a closer look at the food of a Victorian workhouse,

[07:14] and decide if it really was as bad as 'Oliver Twist' would have us believe. It is called The Workhouse Cookbook by Peter Higginbotham.

[07:29] It is a super deep dive into into this topic and it is absolutely worth a read. Now to discuss Victorian workhouses, we really need to go back and see why workhouses existed in the first place.

[07:42] And to answer that, we have to go back to one of the most important years in all of British history, 1536. This was the beginning of what was known as the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.

[07:55] Now poverty had of course always existed in Britain, but for centuries,   the degree of homelessness was actually kept at  bay because there was a system of charity set up  

[08:07] through the monasteries. People could go for alms  or sometimes even a bed. But when in just a few years those monasteries disappeared, that safety net went with them. Over the next few decades, the amount of beggars on the streets of Britain skyrocketed. And to combat that,  

[08:23] the government did things like ban giving alms  directly to them. And instead, all alms or help for the poor had to go through the church common box. And as it happened, a lot of that money never actually made it to the people that it was supposed to be helping.

[08:37] So there was a new system, at least in some cities like Colchester, York, and  London, that was set up that was essentially a tax   And again, it wasn't meant to go directly to people, but rather to prop up institutions that would help people.

[08:56] See, new vagrancy laws like the Vagabonds Act of 1572 and later the Poor Relief Act of 1601 effectively made it illegal to be homeless.   And so, you would be taken in by one of a series of  new establishments.

[09:10] If you were mentally ill, this meant you would go to a hospital or asylum. The most famous being the Bethlehem or Bethlehem hospital, also known as Bedlam. Then there were poor houses for those who were too old to work or jail or prison for those who refused to work,

[09:26] And for those who could and were willing to work, the  able-bodied poor, there was the workhouse. Now the workhouse was not meant to be a punishment, but rather an act of charity

[09:40] that would help lift you out of poverty until you can move along your way. It wasn't exactly anyone's first choice, but it wasn't the worst option out there. In 1732, it was written, "It is remarkable, that all the parishes in Southwark, except St. Thomas's,

[09:55] have set up large workhouses, for the reception of their numerous poor, which are so well regulated, that as fast as there is any vacancy, interest is made by the poor themselves to be admitted."

[10:07] In those years, the work tended to be that of spinning flax, hemp, and wool, and the food was simple, but not far off from what the majority of the population was eating with plenty of porridge, bread, cheese, and beer along with some roast or boiled meat,

[10:21] And if you should fall sick while in the house, you'd actually be given claret or wine, fish, oysters, Of course, just like with any institution, the quality varied depending on where you were and who was running it.

[10:38] In the early 1700s, there was a man named Matthew Marryott who ran a few of these workhouses, and he kept gathering more and more and eventually had basically a monopoly on an entire area of the country

[10:51] quality went down as is often the case, and a lot of issues ended up happening. There were incidents of torture and starvation and all of those kinds of things.

[11:04] And it culminated in a famous ballad, a song written   about a woman who actually died in one of the workhouses. The song which came out in 1731, was called 'The Workhouse Cruelty'. And it was about a woman named Mary Whistle

[11:20] who was a housekeeper who lost her position and eventually found herself having to enter the workhouse. And there she did something to offend the governor who was in charge of the workhouse, it's not specific what she did or what he did but they threw her down into the basement.

[11:37] "There for eleven weeks poor soul she lay, half starved, ate up, with vermin (as they say) holes in her legs, her arms, her hips, and thighs the vermin eat and in her head likewise."

[11:49] So essentially she died and was eaten by rats. It's really quite sad and it became an incredible hit throughout Britain and it actually had consequences for Matthew Marryott

[12:02] who was stripped of his power over all these workhouses and ended up dying the next year. Now it is during this period the 18th century that many people's perception of the poor  

[12:15] starts to change and it is best exemplified by the  perception of two drinks of the period. Beer, typically low alcoholic small beer, was the drink of choice for most of society.

[12:29] And in workhouses, men got two pints a day and women and children got one. Though if you were engaged in hard labor, you would actually receive more. At one workhouse in Suffolk, the washer women received eight pints a day.

[12:42] Beer was a wholesome drink and is depicted in William Hogarth's 1751 print 'Beer Street', which shows prosperous and productive members of society all drinking beer. But gin a new and obviously much stronger drink, had recently come on the scene.  

[12:58] And I actually did an entire video all about  the London gin craze. So I'll put a link to that in the description, but essentially, it was very quickly seen as a drink for the poor And it is shown in Hogarth's other print, 'Gin Lane', where London's poor live in squalor.

[13:18] They're fighting dogs for bones, neglecting their children, and then just dying in poverty. And one account from 1725 says that many of the poor "chose to struggle with their necessities, and to continue in a starving condition,

[13:34] with the liberty of haunting the brandy shops and such-like houses, rather than submit to live regularly in plenty." In that quote it was brandy, but very soon it would be gin that would become the leading culprit.

[13:47] They chose to drink gin. They chose to live like this. They chose to be poor, that became the thought.   Before this very often the poor were called unfortunates meaning that they were poor yes

[14:02] but it wasn't anything that they did. It was fortune literally just circumstance that made them poor but as the 18th century came to a close it began to be seen that it was not fortune that did this

[14:17] but rather their own iniquity that made them poor. This led to a change in how the poor were treated, especially in these institutions. It went from being charity to being more of a punishment,

[14:31] to trying to change their behavior by making things  so uncomfortable in the workhouses that they would simply choose not to be in them, choose not to be poor anymore.

[14:44] It was very much the mindset of Ebenezer Scrooge in 'A Christmas Carol', but that comes because that was very much the mindset of much of Victorian society. And this view was essentially written into law in 1834 with what was known as the 'New Poor Law'.

[15:02] Here the work in the workhouses really changed. While some people still did laundry and tailoring, shoe making, basket weaving, there were a lot more harsher forms of work like brick laying, chopping wood, or even stone breaking became common.

[15:16] There was even the literal bone crushing work of crushing bones to be made into fertilizer. This period also saw a standardization in the served to the inmates in poor houses

[15:32] because at some of the poor houses, namely rural locations, it was seen that they were eating too well. These new laws enshrined something called the principle of less eligibility,

[15:46] which basically dictated that no aspect of life in the workhouse, including the food should be "superior or equal to the ordinary mode of subsistence of the laboring classes of the neighborhood."

[15:58] it will entice people to want to become poor  or stay poor and live in these workhouses.   And so in 1835, the Poor Law commissioner Charles  Mott

[16:13] laid out daily diets for men, women, children under 9, and those people over 60. He just wanted it to be standardized and to make sure that people had just enough calories

[16:29] that would allow them to do the work that they were supposed to do in the workhouse.   The new system gave able-bodied men 6 ounces of  bread and 1 and a 1/2 pints of gruel for breakfast,   5 ounces of meat and a half pound of potatoes  or one and a half pints of soup for dinner,  

[16:45] Then for supper, it was 6 ounces of bread and either some broth or 2 ounces of cheese. Then women received roughly the same thing, though only 5 ounces of bread instead of six.

[16:58] Now in the face of it, this lineup of meals really seems quite nutritious and more or as much as most people in Britain were getting. But while the quantity might have been there, the quality, it turns out, was absolutely not.

[17:13] When Charles Shaw wrote about his childhood in a workhouse in Staffordshire in the 1840s, he described his first encounter with workhouse skill, the local term for gruel. "I had heard of workhouse skill, but had never before seen it. I had had poor food before this,

[17:29] but never any so offensively poor as this. By what rare culinary making nausea and bottomless fatuitousness, it could be made so sickening I never could make out.

[17:41] Simple meal and water, however small the amount of meal, honestly boiled, would be palatable. But this decoction of meal and water and mustiness and fustiness, was most revolting to any healthy state.

[17:54] It might have been boiled in old clothes which had been worn upon sweating bodies for three score years and ten." That workhouse skilly was the vilest compound I ever tasted, unutterably insipid, 

[18:07] and it might never have been made in a country where either sugar or salt was known." "I was invited to taste the dinner of the day, which happened to be soup. I was rash enough to take a breakfast cupful,

[18:23] with a piece of their excellent bread, and I paid the penalty of a severe attack of indigestion... Black beetles... are a great nuisance, and occasionally get into the food, but vigorous steps are being taken to decimate them."

[18:38] Now workhouse officials, called guardians, tried to make it so that the public didn't really know about how horrible the conditions could be. They would do things like invite newspaper men in to view the workhouse  

[18:51] and give them food, but they would do so only in  the best fashion and they would clean everything   just like I do when I have company over so nobody  can see how I actually live. This of course would lead to writeups in newspapers like in 1841 that said,

[19:05] "The inmates have recently dined. We taste the food which has constituted their meal; and we acknowledge that the suet pudding, the bread, and the cheese are, in quality, equal to what may be found in the larders of the wealthiest."

[19:19] But the public was of course not fooled because  too many real people were going in and out of the workhouses to keep that kind of thing under wraps, and so you get novels like 'Oliver Twist'.  

[19:31] Though one of my favorite chastisements of the food in the workhouse was actually printed in 1838 in newspapers across the country and it is absolutely brilliant. It is a rewarding of act four, scene one of the play Macbeth, one of my favorite plays.

[19:48] It's the scene where the three witches are over the cauldron brewing something Instead of three witches though, it's three guardians of the workhouse making food for the inmates.

[20:02] "Thrice hath the dying popper groaned, and once his starving child hath moaned, rot gut cries, his time, "Tis time, tis time." Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.

[20:15] Shell of oyster, chickens claw, ducklings and trails, turkeys maw, measled pork and moldy meal, claws and stickings, greasy heel. Here I have a strangled mole lately taken from his hole;

[20:29] add thereto the back of ferret; round about the cauldron stir it. Black gruel and white, green gruel and gray, mingle, mingle, mingle. They that eat it may. Now for water; make it thin. Put of that a plenty in. That will make the paupers grin."

[20:47] I obviously didn't read the whole thing. It's really quite long, but all quite brilliant so I'll actually include that in the next Tasting History newsletter, which you can sign up for at tastinghistory.com. Now this and other public works like 'Oliver Twist' actually did lead to public outcries,

[21:03] and there were occasional attempts at reforming the workhouses, but they never really stuck because even as late as the 1890s,   when a British politician named George Lansbury  visited a workhouse in an official capacity,  

[21:20] sort of an inspector, a post known as a guardian  of the poor, he wrote that the "Food was mainly skilly, bread, margarine, cheese, and hard, tough meat and vegetables, and occasionally doses of salted, dried fish... On one visit, I inspected the supper of oatmeal porridge.

[21:37] On this occasion, the food was served up with pieces of black stuff floating around. On examination, we discovered it to be rat and mice manure. I called for the chief officer, who immediately argued against me, saying the porridge was good and wholesome. 

[21:51] 'here you are, eat one mouthful and I will acknowledge I am wrong.' 'Oh dear, no," said the fine lady. "The food is not for me,  and is good and wholesome enough for those who want it.'

[22:05] I stamped and shouted around till both doctor and master arrived, both of whom pleaded it was all a mistake, and promptly served cocoa and bread and margarine." There was one scandal which really raised a collective eyebrow that took place in March of 1897

[22:23] when a Mr. John Lobb or Lobe, I'm not sure how he pronounced it, who was a- on the board of governors for one of the workhouses,   decided that they should not probably after every  single weekly meeting have an entire dinner  

[22:39] within feet of the very poorly fed paupers who were  living in the workhouse. He felt that the "business occupying an hour and a half does not justify a dinner consisting of

[22:54] fish of three kinds, joints of mutton or beef, poultry, a variety of puddings and sweets, cheese, butter, biscuits and celery, with a selection of hawk, claret, champagne and whiskey. Neither does he think that a dessert of pineapples, almonds, and raisins is warranted by the proceedings.

[23:10] The knowledge that the guardian's table groans under plenty, whilst the inmates   have to content themselves with the fair of the  workhouse, he says, accentuates discontent, envy, and hatred, and is subversive of the discipline of the institution.

[23:25] Mr. Lobb has no objection to the light lunchon, but he thinks that the dinners at the house should be stopped." A vote was taken, and of course, Mr. Lobb's proposal was very soundly defeated, and the grand dinners continued.

[23:39] It wasn't until 1929 that the workhouses began to close and new forms of public assistance began to replace them in British society. But before we hurrah the closure of the workhouse, let us try to eat one of the meals that those inside would have eaten

[23:55] So after that half hour of cooking, the dumplings should have  puffed up nicely and the stew is ready to serve.   And here we are. Scouse and sew it dumplings from  a Victorian workhouse.

[24:07] So is it the prettiest dish you ever done seen? Absolutely not. It really doesn't look super appetizing. But it doesn't smell bad. In fact, it smells quite good. I mean, it's just meat and vegetables, right? This a lot thicker than I thought it would be.

[24:23] [chomp] Hm! It's actually quite good. I mean it's really thick stew with vegetables

[24:36] meat stew. I don't know what I was expecting, but uh it's very good. Let me try one of the dumplings here. A little fluffy, but also kind of dense. Here we go.

[24:53] [chomp] Delicious. Doesn't taste of parsley at all, which is surprising, so much parsley.

[25:06] Not going to lie, this is actually really good. Now, this experiment does not mean to say that the food at the workhouse was good because

[25:22] or rather the dish itself is good, it really depends on the quality of the ingredients. And there are records of pieces of meat being so tough that they were inedible and instead that they would use them

[25:38] outside basically like you would a tennis ball kind of throwing it around.   Often the flour had bugs and weevils in  it or rat droppings. It could

[25:50] be you know semi-rotten vegetables. A lot of times they would have a lot more water in it. So it wouldn't be really thick, it would just be watery and and you're barely getting anything. So,   depends on where you are, when you are, who's  in charge. And yeah,

[26:07] it's a nice thing that the workhouses don't exist anymore. So, as I mentioned, I did do a video on gin a while back   and is actually one of my favorite videos.  I also did a wonderful video on gruel,  

[26:19] So I'll put links to both gruel and gin videos down in the description, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.