A "Got-Milk" Ad, Circa 1800

"The House Committee do hereby give Notice that they are willing to receive proposals for supplying this hospital with Milk..."  

Milk Advertising Copy: 1800

Could this be the first ever "Got Milk" ad?  This little excerpt also turned up in the Foundlings Sub-Committee Minutes.  The many daily and weekly newspapers that sprung up throughout the 18th century spawned zillions of advertisements, but I was particularly amused by this one.

Why so amusing?  Well, mostly the fact that it is so forthright in its demands.  The milk must be delivered "free of every expense" and "in such quantities as may be wanted daily." 

I guess that in 1800, the mantra of 'the customer was always right' was as alive as ever.  Or was it?  This particular committee was particularly persnickety when it came to the weekly inspections of hospital staples ––meat, beer, bread and cheese –– and would often send things back if the butter was found too "indifferent" or the beer too "new."   

Sweet Charity and Pease Puddings

I can't really decide what to make of the Foundling Hospital.  Founded in 1741, it was the first real organization designed for housing abandoned children (providing a venue for babies to be abandoned other than the church doorsteps).  There have been quite a few books published on it during the last hundred years or so, but I haven't run across anything that takes the food eaten there into account in any detail.  So what was the story?

In browsing the minute books, which I've been doing over the last couple of weeks, I often run across little details (food related or otherwise) that warm my heart, such as:

-- "The School Master requested the usual allowance of one guinea for children's toys" (1800)

-- "On the 17th of October yearly [the children] have a holliday of roast beef and plumb pudding for dinner" (1758)

-- "Ordered that the children have a holliday on the first fine day of next week" (1797)

The consensus among historians is that the diet here was generally better than that of the parish workhouses, but, obviously, the provisions seem a lot more meagre than a lot of the material I've looked at.  The first Sub-committee minute book stipulates that "the diet allowed ... be plain and simple, a small broth pottage and milk, meat and vegetables alternately, their bread coarse and their drink water."  


Sounds pretty bare-bones.  But check out this diet table; I found it in a book of miscellaneous documents dated between 1755 and 1762.

Notice how "dinner" was constantly subject to revision

Of course, then as now, there was no free lunch,  and the children did everything from making clothing and nets to working in the kitchen or garden be rendered, as the minute books put it, "more useful to the Publick" the goal ultimately being to apprentice them out somewhere.  There were also dire consequences for misbehaving; I've run across several occasions where children were locked up for a week and fed only bread and water.

Most distressing, however, is to find that the minute books are punctuated by things like this:  

Bill of Fare for The Trustees Anniversary Dinner: May, 1787
On the menu: "Tonderoons de Veau" "Duckling Roast" and "Mock Turtle" 

Very suspicious.  Very suspicious indeed.  But can we blame these guys?  The minute books seem to indicate that the hospital relied on these kinds of charity dinners to solicit funding, not unlike the celebrity-studded fundraisers we have today.  (Handel's orotorios were also apparently big money-makers for the hospital.)

Dietaries and Bills of Fare are very good at showing what people were eating.  But how were they eating?  What did dining mean in this institution?  That's up next.

Please Sir, I want some more Boil'd Beef and Greens

It's been a long day, dear readers.  As the authoress pours her way through minute book upon minute book of the Foundling Hospital Sub-Committee  –– reading about bread inspections, frugal dinners of boiled mutton and cabbage, and the occasional "bundle of dead children" –– it is difficult to keep the imagination from wandering over to the festivities happening on the other side of the pond.  

I can't help thinking that these poor foundlings could really use a bite of Americana: a burger.  

But long before the burger had assumed its place in the American culinary lexicon, the beef-steak had already been fashioned into a quintessential symbol of Englishness.  Unlike French fricassees and raggoos, drowned in sauces to the point where you couldn't be sure what you were eating (which patriots were quick to claim was rancid meat) English beef, for the most part, came to the table roasted and unadorned.  What you see was what you got.  Check out the piece of meat roasting over the spit in the bottom left corner below, in plain view of the company.     

"A Dog Turn-spit in a Kitchen" by Thomas Rowlandson
Note the dog –– hard at work –– at the top center: 

I think I mentioned its special status within the Thursday's Club before, but the fashionable and cosmopolitan Royal Society wasn't the only place where beef was treated as something beyond simply a a tasty treat.  In 1761, the Lord Mayors Banquet planning committee passed a resolution that “... two chines of roast beef be provided for sideboard in the hall with two flags, one the Standard of England and the other the City Army."   

We don't really know if these chines on display were meant to be eaten or simply displayed, and we obviously can't use the Lord Mayor's Feast as an indicator of the typical English diet.  Odes to beef are all over the place in 18th century English history, but it's worthwhile to compare all this jingoistic hyperbole to the actual records of what people are eating.  So I was pretty excited to find, going through these Foundlings' Dietaries, a stipulation (given in 1758) that the children should get a dinner of roast beef and plumb pudding for dinner every 17th of October (that being the date of the Hospital's Charter).  

Seems like beef –– unlike venison and turtle soup –– was deemed a morally acceptable treat for even the poorest of the poor.  For most people, beef was deemed to be every Englishman's bread and butter, but for the poor foundlings, it was synonymous with celebration.  But the beef consumed by the poor foundlings didn't exactly fall into the same category as the delectable prime, tender, dry aged cuts enjoyed at steak-houses today.  The Hospital's butchers' bills indicate that, most of the time, the children were dining on cheap shoulder clods, "veiny pieces" and cuts "with gristle, for roasting."  In fact, a hospital physician complained in 1776 about children having to swallow large pieces of meat whole, as the quality of the meat was so poor (and the knives so bad) that they weren't even able to cut it.   

No, my gentle readers, it seems like not every foundling had a Squire Allworthy to help him out of some pretty dire situations.  Perhaps the symbolic weight accorded to English beef could come into conflict with an enjoyable meal.  But Burger Monday awaits, so I wearily lay down my pen, confesses, 

Your ever obliging and affectionate,

L.Q.