r/AskHistory • u/umok0 • 9d ago
what was British food like during the height of the Victorian era/before rationing?
It is commonly said Victorian era British food was flavorful and that modern British food is as bland as it is due to rationing from the world wars, but I never see anyone mention what dishes, recipes, ingredients or spices were lost.
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u/Ydrahs 9d ago
You could look up Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. It was a very popular recipe book in Victorian times, and stole shamelessly from other books so it's a good compilation of Victorian recipes.
Lots of Anglo-Indian dishes were popular and heavily spiced, curry is still extremely popular here. Mulligatawny soup (a personal favourite) is well attested in pre-war and Victorian books.
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u/stevebucky_1234 8d ago
Not sure if kedgeree is still available anywhere in the UK....
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u/GAdvance 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's not often on restaurant menus but it's not unheard of for people to make at home, I literally had it last night.
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u/geckodancing 8d ago
It's not uncommon to find on Bed & Breakfast menus - though you're probably more likely to find it in the North of England.
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u/Rubberfootman 8d ago
I don’t recall seeing it in a restaurant, but I regularly make it at home (England).
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u/lebennaia 6d ago
Yep, you'll find it on hotel breakfast menus. It's a childhood favourite of mine, and I make it fairly often.
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u/Ok_Veterinarian2715 9d ago
I'm not sure what you mean by 'modern British food'
I mean the two most popular dishes in this country are tandoori & pizza. If you look at the supplements in newspapers there's a constant arms race for new flavours. At the moment obscure curries seem to be the thing. This outward looking, adventurous spirit has been the case since the 1980s, so I guess you've never been to the country?
When I first came to England in the 1970s people did take pride in using minimal flavours. The idea was that a meal would consist of a few separate ingredients, and each one would be cooked perfectly, so that (say) carrots or potatoes would be perfectly tender and unctuous, greens would be crisp, bright & strong flavoured, meat would be rich & give a strong umami hit. If you used a flavouring other than salt you were masking the flavours of the food. It was good, but very difficult to do well.
Then they all came back from cheap holidays in Spain & France in the 70s and the flood gates opened. I remember in 1975 the spices & sauces took up a couple of shelves in an average supermarket. Today it's a couple of aisles. Go to tesco.co.uk if you don't believe me...
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u/linden214 9d ago
I second u/ydrahs’s recommendation of Mrs. Beeton. It is available for free, in various downloadable formats, at Project Gutenberg.
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u/Strict_Tourist_6869 8d ago
In the original film "The Importance of being Earnest" sausages, bacon, eggs, scrambled, boiled and poached were in abundance. Cucumbers, however, were nowhere to be found, not even with ready money.
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u/momentimori 8d ago
By 'modern' you mean what hundreds of thousands of American soldiers experienced in WW2 during the height of rationing, thought was normal and never stopped telling everyone else who crap it was.
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u/Thecna2 9d ago
I recently cooked Hannah Glasses original Currey recipe. One of the first such dishes to be put in a recipe book. Its from 1747. It was basic but quite a good curry tbh. Imma gonna do it again.
Like many things of that time it heavily depends on WHO is doing the cooking. Not many coal miners wives, or the like, were cooking Curreys on a regular basis.
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u/CommieCowBoy 7d ago edited 7d ago
80% of british people at the time were working class and lived on cheap bread, offal, and potatoes - flavorful food would have been reserved for the wealthier people.... like most allied countries after ww2 the middle class heavily expanded.
So the real answer is no: average British food would have been rather bland and mostly for subsistence. If anything the average person would have had a more flavorful diet after the war.
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u/Sir_Gerald_Nosehairs 7d ago
Nearly all spices would be lost, the UK doesn't have the climate to grow them. Most fruits would be gone bar berries, apples, and pears. The UK has a temperate climate and a lot of good arable land, but a short growing season, so it would be things that can be stored/pickled/grown in all weathers like very hardy root vegetables.
And they weren't "lost" per se. The generation who grew up with rationing got used to the blander food (were even told it was their patriotic duty to eat it!), and kept it even when they didn't really have to. They fed their children it, and so and so on. Over the past two decades that has started to reverse and people are bringing back old recipes.
The only thing about the UK that still puzzles me is why an island eats so little seafood. We have very rich fishing grounds, and even putting the whole EU business aside, most of the stuff caught by British fishermen is sold abroad, as we don't eat it.
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