How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-To-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life by Ruth Goodman

Author:Ruth Goodman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Modern, 19th Century, History
ISBN: 9780871408532
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2014-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

9. The Midday Meal

Taken at noon, the midday meal was known as ‘lunch’ or ‘dinner’. The name largely depended upon social background, but it was also dictated by the function of the repast. In a working-class family, the meal was referred to as ‘dinner’ and, in cases where a man could return home from work at this hour, it was the family’s main meal of the day, consisting mostly of suet pudding or potatoes, gravy and a small portion of meat (at least for the wage-earning man of the house). However, as the Victorian period continued, this scenario applied to an ever-shrinking number of the population.

Most men and boys found themselves working too far away from home to come back at noon, which meant that their meal usually consisted only of items they could carry with them to work. For the majority, this meant a piece of bread, but, when times were more prosperous, there was a range of traditional, local, packed meals. In Bedfordshire, farm labourers could expect their dinner to be delivered to them in the fields by their children. A ‘clanger’ was made of flour, suet and water formed into a roll and then filled with a few rashers of bacon in one end and a spread of jam in the other. According to family legend, my own great-grandfather would walk across the fields of Hertfordshire daily to reach the new development of Letchworth Garden City with his father’s dinner in an enamel pail. Lined with insulative straw, the pail contained a pudding basin full of steak and kidney pudding, or stew and dumplings, and was covered by a tightly fixed cloth lid so that his bricklaying dad could have a hot meal in the middle of the day. Cornish tin-miners famously took pasties to work when they could afford to. Simply wrapped in a handkerchief, pasties, like clangers, could be easily transported and eaten without any call for crockery or cutlery. Such food was filling and nutritious, as well as practical.

With so many men eating away at work, a sit-down working-class dinner was increasingly taken only by women and children. Here, meat was in far less evidence, and dinner consisted of boiled potatoes or plain suet pastry served with a spare helping of sauce or gravy. From the middle of the century onwards, shop-bought sauces such as Worcestershire, HP and various mushroom ketchups provided some flavour to these stodgy dishes.

Sundays, of course, were the exception. For one day of the week, the whole family could eat together at the traditional, midday dinner time. The best provisions were bought and prepared, and centred, wherever possible, on a joint of meat. Mrs Widger’s signature dish was ‘baked dinner’. She mixed breadcrumbs, parsley and a chopped onion together with a slither of scraped fat from the frying pan. This went into a saucer that was laid in the centre of a large baking tin. Whole peeled potatoes were then placed around the saucer in a thick layer, and a small joint of meat (generally beef) was rested on top.

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