18th and 19th century foodways in the UK, Australia and New Zealand
Pomona Britannica: No. 64 – Scarlet Flesh Romana Melon 1812. Source: Cleveland Museum of Art (public domain)
BY B.J. SEDLOCK
I did a related article on 18th-19th century foodways in the U.S. and Canada in the past and am fulfilling my promise, made then, to cover foodways in the U.K. and Australia/New Zealand for the same time period. Authors writing about a particular location will need to know something about its foodways, even if that isn’t the emphasis of the story.
My apologies to researchers of New Zealand history: I could not find any print books in the resources I had access to, but two websites listed below should help.
PRINT BOOKS
Title page of 1861 edition of Mrs. Beeton’s book, which influenced British foodways. Source: Wikimedia Commons
BRITISH FOOD: AN EXTRAORDINARY THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY, by Colin Spencer. Columbia University Press, 2003? 0231131100 (also UK edition by Grub Street Press, 2002)
A survey of UK foodways, chapters 8-10 are relevant to our period. One emphasis is on the influence of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management on British cooking, and another the effect of the Empire on foodways.
TASTE: THE STORY OF BRITAIN THROUGH ITS COOKING, by Kate Colquhoun. Bloomsbury, 2007. 9781596914100
As you can tell from the subtitle, it’s a survey of British foodways throughout history. Chapters 15-21 cover the 18th-19th centuries. One of the sections talks about how technology changed foodways, another on how the poor ate in the time period. Includes historical menus and illustrations.
A TASTE OF HISTORY: 10,000 YEARS OF FOOD IN BRITAIN, by Peter Brears, Maggie Black, Gill Corbishley, Jane Renfrew, and Jennifer Stead. English Heritage/British Museum Press, 1993. 0714117323
The chapters on Georgian and Victorian Britain will be the most useful for our period. Both cover tools and cooking methods of the respective periods, and include recipes for foods eaten by various classes.
AT THE KING’S TABLE: ROYAL DINING THROUGH THE AGES, by Susanne Groom. Merrell/Historic Royal Palaces, 2013. 9781858946139
The author was a curator at Historic Royal Palaces, and three chapters cover our time period. Color illustrations and menus are included.
LONDONERS’ LARDER: ENGLISH CUISINE FROM CHAUCER TO THE PRESENT, by Annette Hope. Mainstream Publishing, 1990. 185158286x
The author uses the frame device of London authors such as Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde to describe the foodways of Londoners in the eras those authors were writing. Menus and recipes are included.
EATING WITH THE VICTORIANS, edited by Anne Wilson. Sutton Publishing, 2004. 0750935510 (originally published in 1994 as Luncheon, Nuncheon and Other Meals)
Contains information on the shifts of mealtimes over the decades, the evolution of the British breakfast and tea meals, and something period novels made me wonder about, the difference between dinner service à La Française and à la Russe.
FOOD AND COOKING IN 19TH CENTURY BRITAIN: HISTORY AND RECIPES, by Maggie Black. English Heritage, 1985. 1850740852 (republished as VICTORIAN COOKERY: RECIPES & HISTORY, English Heritage, 2004, 185074873x)
These two books contain largely the same content, but the 2004 edition has different (and color vs. b&w) illustrations. Both cover manners, napkin folding, period methods and tools, and quite a few period recipes.
Brighton Royal kitchen Nash’s Views edited, 1826. Source: Wikimedia Commons
THE COUNTRY HOUSE KITCHEN 1650-1900: SKILLS AND EQUIPMENT FOR FOOD PROVISIONING, edited by Pamela A. Sambrook and Peter Brears. Alan Sutton Publishing/National Trust, 1996. 075090884x
The first two chapters have examples of kitchen layouts and equipment. There’s a chapter on kitchen maids and other helpers, inventories of kitchen equipment that include 1764 and 1869, and another chapter discusses how country houses acquired supplies. This would be especially useful for authors writing about a cook or kitchen maid protagonist.
THE DOMESTIC REVOLUTION: HOW THE INTRODUCTION OF COAL INTO VICTORIAN HOMES CHANGED EVERYTHING, by Ruth Goodman. Liveright Publishing, 2020. 9781631497636 (also published in the UK as The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Our Homes Changed Everything)
The subtitle is rather self-explanatory; discusses the intricacies of cooking with coal vs. wood, and how coal changed the British diet. I was a bit surprised to find a section on clean-up that includes historical ways to scrub food off of dishes: besides sand, wood ash and various bristly plants were also used.
MARY CANNON’S COMMONPLACE BOOK: AN IRISH KITCHEN IN THE 1700S, by Marjorie Quarton. Lilliput Press, 2010. 9781843511854
Contains 18th century recipes written down in a book by an ancestor of the author, which was passed down through the family. Includes meat, fish, baked goods, ale and spirits, puddings, preserves, and a section on cooking for the sick.
ONE CONTINUOUS PICNIC: A GASTRONOMIC HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA, 2nd edition, by Michael Symons. Melbourne University Press, 2007. 9780522853230
Parts one and a section of part two cover our 18-19th century period. The author says Australian foodways are different in that “Our history is without peasants. We’ve had hunter-gatherers and then industrial civilization…Our eating shows us to be a singularly working-class society, whose food had to be portable and profitable”—preface.
MUTTON AND OYSTERS: THE VICTORIANS AND THEIR FOOD, by Sarah Freeman. Victor Gollancz, 1989. 0575031514
Chapters discuss how Victorians in the UK shopped, managing cooking fires, how cooks functioned as domestic servants, and the vegetarian movement.
Tea caddy (one of a pair), early 19th century. Source:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, open access via Wikimedia Commons
THE RAJ AT TABLE: A CULINARY HISTORY OF THE BRITISH IN INDIA, BY David Burton. Faber and Faber, 1995. 057114389x
The subtitle is pretty descriptive. Contains chapters on breakfast, soups, fish and seafood, chutneys, etc., and includes recipes.
DINING WITH THE GEORGIANS: A DELICIOUS HISTORY, by Emma Kay. Amberley Publishing, 2014. 9781445636283
The author’s collection of 18th century kitchen objects inspired this book, with chapters on how overseas trade affected diets, the influence of French émigrés on food, the rise of celebrity chefs, the growth of cookery books, etc. With color illustrations, some of period kitchen utensils.
TRUE TO THE LAND: A HISTORY OF FOOD IN AUSTRALIA, by Paul van Reyk. Reaktion Books, 2021. 9781789144062
Encompasses the 60,000-year history of foodways in Australia; the first four chapters cover our time period. Production, collection, distribution and consumption are all included.
The Apple Seller, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, ca.1890. Source:
Cleveland Museum of Art (public domain)
TO FEED A NATION: A HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, by Keith Farrer. CSIRO Publishing, 2005. 0643091548
Covers Australian foodways history with the emphasis on technology. After the first three chapters on early history, the others cover commodities like dairy, meat, sugar, fruit, etc.
SELECTED WEBSITES
A BBC article from 2016 on Victorians and their food.
FROM SHEEP’S HEAD TO PHEASANT: FOOD IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Article from 2019 by Daniel Hautzinger from a Chicago PBS station website, apparently written to accompany the airing of the Victoria TV program.
THE TEA-RIFFIC HISTORY OF VICTORIAN AFTERNOON TEA
A blog post from 2020 from the British Museum’s site, written by a food historian, with illustrations.
A blog post by the staff of a stately home in Yorkshire, Kiplin Hall, on the foods eaten during the period.
Transcript from 2008 of an audio recording of Dr. Adele Wessell on food history in Australia.
A 2020 blog post by Ann Copeland (State Library Victoria), on the foodways in the Australian state of Victoria in the early days.
WHAT DID SYDNEY’S EARLY SETTLERS EAT?
Cattle Drovers and horses at Anthony’s Lagoon – Northern Territory, Australia, ca.1894. Source:
Wikimedia Commons
A page from 2018 hosted by ABC News, which interviews a staffer at Sydney Living Museums about what early Australian settlers ate. I was surprised to learn that winter ice harvested from lakes in the northeast U.S. was shipped to Sydney.
PARROT PIE & POSSUM CURRY: HOW COLONIAL AUSTRALIANS EMBRACED NATIVE FOOD
A 2018 article from Australian Geographic magazine by Blake Singley about the early settlers learning to accept some indigenous foodways.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY EXPERIMENTATION AND THE ROLE OF INDIGENOUS FOODS IN AUSTRALIAN FOOD CULTURE
An academic journal article published in 2011 in Australian Humanities Review by Barbara Santich. It ”examines nineteenth-century experimentation with indigenous foods and argues that it offers a model for the incorporation of indigenous foods into contemporary Australian food culture.”
Robert Atkinson – A Settler’s Kitchen, Opua Whanga, New Zealand 1886. Source: Auckland Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons
This is the landing page for the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Look in the bar across the top and click on “topics.” Then scroll down and click on “food and food production,” and then you can explore subtopics such as “Maori food,” “sheep farming,” “Viticulture,” etc. A lot of the ones I spot checked had more to do with 20th century and later, but there is some 19th century content.
OPOSSUM HOT POT: COOKING AT THE MARGINS IN COLONIAL NEW ZEALAND
Lydia Wevers wrote this scholarly article hosted by the University of Sydney, answering questions such as “How did the New Woman interface with colonial conditions? How does the provision and consumption of food continue to police class and polite behaviour? How is Britishness maintained when resources are limited or food sources unfamiliar?”
About the contributor: B.J. Sedlock recently stepped down from full-time librarianship to part-time archivist at Defiance College in Defiance, Ohio. She writes book reviews and articles for The Historical Novels Review, judges the First Chapters contest, and has contributed to The Sondheim Review.
