What would Jane Austen eat for breakfast?

The answer, tea and toast, is not very interesting I grant you, but the rise of the tea and toast breakfast, at least in my opinion, is.

You see, not long before her time, the usual breakfast of English champions was the famous Beef and Ale breakfast. Yes, that's right, beef and ale for breakfast. Appetising right?

In my post about death by teeth, we learned about how the English loved their sweets, but they also were renowned for their love of meat. The French called them a country of flesh eaters. They mostly lived off meat and cake.

As for the ale, well, it was weaker than the beer we drink now, quite watery in fact. Until they started drinking tea, the English pretty much didn't drink anything that wasn't at least a little bit alcoholic. This is because alcohol cleans the water, so adding a little makes things safe to drink. Water was not considered safe to drink on its own, and it probably really wasn't. I have heard a theory, which makes a good deal of sense to me, that the real reason Bath was so effectual at curing certain illnesses is because people "took the waters" there, from the spring. It was reputed that it contained healing properties. Perhaps it did. But it was also the only water they drank. And they were often prescribed it in rather large dosages. For a people who lived on meat, sugar and alcohol, this alone was probably sufficient to address many of their ailments.

You will recall Mr. Woodhouse, in Emma, drinking wine and water, which was considered a very mild drink. Ale was particularly popular because you could grow grain in England, and therefore it was in ample supply. But tea was another story.

We think of tea as quintessentially and eternally English, but if you think about it, that can't possibly be true. As you might guess, tea doesn't grow in England. There is a woman in Victoria, Canada, who is starting to grow tea, but it is very weak and will take generations to develop into something drinkable, and may never be any good because,although Victoria is the warmest part of Canada, it is still really too cold for tea.

In England, I am not aware of anyone even attempting it. But those cheeky colonials got away with claiming for England lots of other countries, and with them all their resources. As the British Empire expanded into the East, the English were introduced to tea. In later years, they would go to great lengths, including devastating wars, to keep their tea supply flowing.

The excellent benefit of tea was that it required the water to be boiled, making it safely drinkable. It was VERY expensive and consequently became very fashionable. By Jane Austen's time, it was indispensable. See my post about tea, to read about just how valuable it was.

There were, however, those who did not think tea was right for England, crotchety old men who thought beef and ale was perfectly good for their ancestors and should be perfectly good for everyone else - none of this foreign, new-fangled tea business coming in and taking over the good, old-fashioned English ale. Some said tea was bad for the health, citing the change in the complexion of young ladies as evidence. Tea has taken the blush right out of their cheeks, they said. Never mind that it was not the tea taking it out so much as that the young ladies were no longer in a constant flush from being ever so slightly drunk.

Having abandoned their beef at breakfast time, the English clung to their cake. With their tea and toast they also ate pound cake, and lemon drizzle and various other sweet baked goods. They also drank cocoa. This was probably the healthiest thing they ate. Cocoa at least has some antioxidants. And they didn't at first take it sweet like we do. Cocoa was initially a watery, spicy drink, not at all the sweet, creamy thing we have with marshmallows around the fire. They may also have eaten chocolate, but I cannot confirm that. And I very much doubt Mr. Woodhouse would approve if they did.

Melanie Kerr is the author of Follies Past: a Prequel to Pride and Prejudice

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Jane Austen thought strawberries were poisonous

I was once asked how I knew so much about strawberries (this was after giving a brief elucidation on their origins and significance). I answered that I was quite avidly interested in Jane Austen. The person I was speaking to looked quite confused and actually said, "what do strawberries have to do with Jane Austen?"

I was stunned. What have they to do with Jane Austen? What has tea to do with China?

I must tell you that I learned everything I know about strawberries from a lecture at the Edmonton Library held by the Jane Austen Society - the same lady in fact from whom I learned about renting pineapples. I don't remember every detail, so if I miss anything, feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments section.

Strawberries are one of the most international plants. I do not say fruits, or berries, because they are neither. They are the inside part of a flower. They seem to have evolved independently on both sides of the Atlantic, and grow in almost every climate.

At some point, I think it might have been the 1700s, the English sent a spy to South America to spy on some colonies there under the very clever disguise of being a botanist. In keeping with his disguise, he brought back some strawberry plants that he found growing on the beach. However, he only brought back the ones with strawberries growing on them, assuming the others were no good. He did not realize there are male and female plants. So the ones he carefully brought to England did not get fertilized and stopped producing - that is until they were planted near some other strawberry plants of different varieties. One such variety had the same number of chromosomes and the two cross-pollinated, producing a whole new breed of strawberry.
Strawberries are called that because they grow in the late summer, and to keep them alive and producing into the cooler fall months, you can pack them with straw for insulation. This was common practice, and gave rise to their name. (I have heard competing theories, but I am going with this one. Please feel free to convince me of others in the comments section.)

In Jane Austen's time, England was coming out of a mini ice age. As the weather warmed, more produce became readily available, and strawberries were a part of that. You will recall the strawberry-picking day in Emma and Mrs. Elton's pontification on the virtues of the various types of strawberry available at the time. They would have made them into jams and pies and other treats, but they would not have eaten them as they picked them, because they believed all raw fruits and vegetables to be poisonous.

Now, it is my experience that often misconceptions like this do have their roots in something true, and since I don't know precisely what they used for fertilizers or pesticides in those days, perhaps it was unsafe to eat them without cooking them.This may be why English cooks are so renowned for boiling their vegetables to death.

I also learned at this lecture that strawberries are a symbol of humility, because they bow themselves to the ground. So, if you see old paintings of people surrounded by strawberry plants, you know that this is meant to show the humility of the subject. I believe the Virgin Mary is sometimes depicted in this way.

This is all I remember from the talk, but I know there was much more. If you know anything else interesting about strawberries, please share. I will only add that I love strawberries. They look so pretty, and when you cut them in half, they look like a heart. How charming.



Melanie Kerr is the author of Follies Past: a Prequel to Pride and Prejudice.

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Jane Austen locked her tea up and hid the key

Tea box, with key hole

Tea was so valuable once upon a time that the servants were not permitted access to it. They could get to the silver, to the jewels, to the wine, but not the tea. It fell to the family to make the tea themselves, the youngest daughter in general, and in Jane Austen's case, she was the one. She made the tea in the mornings for breakfast, and kept the key herself.

Tea was so valuable that it was used and re-used by the family, then when it was done, it was given to the servants, who used it until it was really done, and THEN, the servants mixed it with sawdust and went to peddle it to the servants of lesser households.

I was told at an event at the Jane Austen festival that it is this practice which gave rise to the use of the phrase "char lady" to refer to the cleaning lady. "Cha" is Chinese for tea. I have also considered the alternative explanation for this term, which is that old tea leaves were used in cleaning floors. If you have read Longbourn by Jo Baker, you might recall her description of this activity.

Georgian Tea Set
Note the large slop bowl at top right, and the handleless cups

Initially, tea cups did not have handles, but were more like Chinese tea cups. Handles were around in Jane Austen's time, but there were plenty of tea sets at her time that had handle-free cups. Tea sets also included, in addition to very large sugar bowls, another large bowl called a slop bowl, for sloshing the last few drops of tea and little bits of tea leaves at the end of a cuppa. Then, when you poured a fresh cup, it did not mix with the cold drops of the previous cup.

As I have said before, tea was not always synonymous with British life. I read one story in Bill Bryson's book "At Home" (an excellent read, which I thoroughly recommend) about the early days of tea in England. He shared a letter from one society lady to another thanking her for sending the tea, saying that she wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to do with it, so she boiled it up and spread it on toast, but found that it wasn't really to her taste. Thanks anyway.

 Melanie Kerr is the author of Follies Past: a Prequel to Pride and Prejudice

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Would Jane Austen eat Christmas pudding or Christmas porridge?

Most people don't like Christmas cake, but many enjoy a nice Christmas pudding. I prefer sticky toffee pudding myself, but I doubt that is as traditional.
The molded, steamed pudding that we are familiar with, with a sprinkling of icing sugar and a sprig of holly on top is, like so many Christmas traditions, a Victorian invention. Christmas was not such a big deal in Jane Austen's time. But there were still some traditions, like Christmas porridge.
Autumn was slaughtering time, and there were not so many ways to preserve meat then as there are now. Obviously there were no freezers, and although it gets cold in England, it is not cold enough to keep meat from going off. So what did they do? They couldn't let all that meat go to waste.
Quite early on, people figured out that fruit would act as a preservative, because of the sugar content, though I doubt they knew that was the reason. Therefore, the common practice was to prepare meat with dried fruit to keep it throughout the winter. There were various ways of doing this. One was to pack the meat and fruit together wrapped in pastry like a giant mince pie. Another, the one that probably led to Christmas pudding, was a stew of meat and fruit with vegetables. There were particular days of Advent on which you had to do things to it, like stir it.  It was cooked very slowly.Traditionally, every member of the family would stir the porridge, from east to west The porridge was made in huge batches and poured into smaller earthenware pots and stored in the cellar to be re-heated later as needed. The fat from the meat would rise to the top and form a seal, which helped to keep it from spoiling, kind of like duck confit. It also contained a healthy dose of wine, which would also act as a guard against bacteria. It probably still killed some of the people some of the time, but you know, they did what they could.
It was originally more of a savoury dish, and was always eaten in celebration, but used to be made and served at harvest time. That's why I am writing about Christmas pudding in September, because it is more traditional. By Jane Austen's time, however, it would have been associated with Christmas. As they got better at preserving meat, the purpose of the porridge got lost and the meat was no longer part of it. Sugar and flour and eggs started to go into it, and by about 1830, it appeared as we know it today.
You might think meat and fruit cooked together sounds nasty, but what about mince pies? They used to be made with minced beef. My grandmother says her mother always made them with beef, and that there was nothing so delicious.
Maybe I will find a recipe for the old Christmas porridge and serve it at my book launch. That's going to be at harvest time. What do you think?

(Follies Past: A Prequel to Pride and Prejudice, is a novel by Melanie Kerr. Expected publication date is October 31, 2013. Until then, I will be posting things I learned in the course of my research and of my life so far as a geek. Sharing always welcome and encouraged. Follow me on twitter @FolliesPast and on facebook..)

Jane Austen did not approve of taking tea with milk

Yesterday's post kind of went off the rails and ended up in Chinese grammar. It was not really connected to Jane Austen in the first place, and I should say that not all my posts will be. They are just sort of interesting things I have learned in my research and my geek life. But still,what has Chinese to do with the English Regency? .... how about - TEA!
But wait, you might say, although, like so many things, tea came from China, their tea is very different from English tea. They drink mostly green tea, or oolong, etc. We drink mostly black teas. This is true, but what you may not know is that in Jane Austen's time, their tea was much more Chinese. They drank green tea, or oolong, or a blend of the two. There was probably some black tea around, but it was not as ubiquitous as in the Victorian era and beyond. 
Jane Austen wrote in a letter of a new acquaintance, "There are two traits in her character which are pleasing -- namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea." Now, I have said in my heading, that she didn't approve of putting milk in tea, not cream, but these were interchangeable in this context. As my great-grandmother would tell you, "if it comes in a cream pitcher, we call it cream." It was not at all cooth to imply that what was in the cream pitcher was in fact milk. I like to put actual cream in my tea, and people are often horrified at this and think it quite unprecedented. I always tell them, people in the past always put cream in their tea when they could afford to. For further, direct evidence of this, I must again direct you to Elizabeth Gaskell and her delightful book, Cranford. In it, the ladies go for tea at a posh lady's house and she serves tea with a very small pitcher of cream and a larger pitcher of milk. The pitcher of cream, she gives to the dog, with the excuse that he has very delicate taste. The ladies are all rather put out that their tastes are valued less than that of her dog.
In any case, you might share Jane Austen's opinion on the matter when you consider that it was green tea that they were drinking. I can't imagine taking that with milk or cream. Where we part ways is with respect to sugar. The Georgians put ghastly amounts of sugar in their tea. They drank it like green tea syrup. If you ever chance to see a Georgian tea set, you will notice the size of the sugar bowl is enormous relative to what we expect in modern times. You may also notice that there is an additional bowl, which would be a slop bow, where you tossed the last drops of tea and leaves from your cup before re-filling. And the sugar spoon might be in the shape of a shell. Some were actually shells, though I don't remember learning why. Anyone know?  


(Follies Past: a Prequel to Pride and Prejudice, the novel, comes out October 31, 2013. Until then, I am posting things I learned in the course of my research, and of being a geek. Sharing always welcome. Follow me on twitter @FolliesPast)