Food inflation is something that's in the news today and it affects everyone. It's not something
new, we've had to deal with it in the past but it's been several decades and it's certainly a
problem in the 18th century. Food inflation and food problems in the 18th century come up a couple
of times. There are crop failures specifically wheat. Bread is what feeds the populace and if
there's a problem with wheat then a lot of people go hungry. So what do you do about that in 1750
William Ellis writes a book called The Country Housewife's Family Companion and in that book
he has advice for the small farmer in England. And there are lots of different parts of that
book instruction almost recipes and anecdotes. And there was this one particular anecdote that
caught my eye specifically in that relating to food inflation and how do you feed yourself.
So the title of this little section it's just a paragraph it says "barley meal and turnips
boiled in times of famine a poor woman that lived a mile from my house in a time of famine having
no vittles made her eldest daughter follow the man that shoveled away the snow in a sort of a
path for the sheep to come at the turnips here she pulled some up and boiled them to a mash with some
barley meal which she and her several children eat as pap with only salt and it sustained them much".
So there's a bit to this story here that here in the 21st century we may not quite understand but
this the idea that someone would go out and shovel the snow away from turnips in a field. So farmers
would sow barley and turnips together they'd harvest the barley the turnips would continue to
grow and mostly they were grown there as a green manure crop and as something to feed livestock.
And what's happening here is the the turnips would have a lot of greenery but very very small turnips
underneath. They were really just meant to feed that livestock after this has been harvested so
they could kind of get two crops out of the field. And the turnips were just left in the ground
even after the greens were eaten they'd just sit there and rot they would be a
manure crop in the ground. But there would be turnips they would be small little turnips.
And even the barley in this context is really a second or third tier grain it's
not necessarily used for making bread although sometimes they would make a poor version or an
inexpensive version of bread with lots of different grains, barley included.
But what we see here is a poor man's crop on both sides both the barley and the turnips.
So when there was a crop failure in the wheat crop then some of these other grains rye, barley,
buckwheat they would become more popular just because there was not wheat available.
I think we need to try out a recipe like this it it's so simple and it's so intriguing this
is what they're eating in times of famine this is what he says is the lowest of the low food
let's find out what it tastes like.
Turnips in our book here might not mean exactly what we think about turnips it
could be that they mean the standard kind of white purple turnip that we are used to
today there are other references in the 18th century when they talk about turnips and they
actually mean rutabagas uh they would even call them swedes in our time period in Great
Britain and in other places like that. In this field setting with the uh with the barley they
might even be radishes in the field and you could see this kind of thing happening with
basically any kind of root vegetable they might even do this exact same thing with potatoes.
Now this anecdote
in this 18th
century book is really meant to be kind of shocking. This is people eating food that's
meant for animals they're grubbing in the ground for something where you know you expect sheep to
just go out and eat the greens and you know that was it that's all that was intended here
and the people are going out and harvesting kind of the leftover. And this reminds me of
stories of people here in the 20th century in North America and and when when food is
expensive or scarce they'd go out and they'd harvest field corn. And we grow field corn by
the you know millions of acres here Indiana is a great producer of field corn and we
never think of it as something that we would necessarily go out and eat that's intended for
cows or you know whatever to be processed into some kind of industrial foodstuffs.
But in hard times people would go out and harvest field corn and figure out how to eat it.
Our famine food is done. He describes it as a pap which
something like mashed potato consistency and this is just our mashed turnips and some some
barley there I put in after the facts kind of mash those barley or that those turnips
first and then put in the barley along with water and cooked it back over again to sort
of beef it back up and then add a little bit of salt and that's it no butter nothing fancy like
that you know if you don't have anything you can get this just out of the field.
And it's actually very good, he describes it as it sustains them
much there's uh you know this might not be the best meal you've ever had this
is not an expensive uh restaurant meal. But will it feed the family?
Will it keep people alive until spring? Yeah it will. This is good, this is really good. I talk a
lot about stepping out in the shoes of people two and three hundred years ago. Living life exactly
like they lived it even to the point of eating, tasting exactly what they tasted and sometimes
it's not a fancy meal, it's not a banquet, it's not something amazing. It's something plain it's
something simple it's something so inexpensive that you just got it out of the field for free.
This is experiencing the 18th century, this is understanding what history is really like.