Victorian England was a strange, strange place. It was the center of the largest and most evil
empire to ever exist. The British, in theory, could have plundered its colonies for nothing
but the most delicious foods. Instead, they ate some horrifying things and plenty more bland
things. And if today’s diet supplement offerings seem crazy, just wait until you hear what the
Victorians ate to aid weight loss. If you’re eating food right now, then you need to stop.
Welcome to Nutty History, here are some foods you could expect to encounter in Victorian Britain.
Imagine craving a nice meat dish in Victorian England, but work has been hard to come by,
meaning that you have to cut costs. There’s good news. Your local butcher has a huge cut of meat
for a super low price. But there is a catch. The meat comes from an animal that died of a disease,
like ringworm or tetanus. Do you risk eating this meat called broxy? This was the choice
that many poor people in Britain had to face. As it was a time long before food safety standards,
farmers and butchers were free to sell broxy meat from an animal that had died of something nasty
and contagious. In the present day, thankfully, we can only imagine how this diseased meat tasted.
There was probably a lot of variance. After all, ringworm and tetanus are very different kinds of
diseases. Some of it probably tasted very similar to normal meat if it was cooked well. But can you
really cook away the thought that your meat comes from a filthy, unhealthy source? And let’s face
it, would the meat have been cooked well? Even today, the British barely season their food.
Technically, Broxy was any meat that came from a diseased animal, but the most likely source
of Broxy was sheep, as sheep were especially vulnerable to disease in Victorian England.
You might be wondering how the Victorians could risk eating something that had a high
likelihood of containing parasites. But it’s not that surprising when you consider what the
Victorians ate to help their diet. Fad diets are nothing new. You might think that keto or 5:2 is
a crazy way to try and lose weight. Well, these diets were nothing compared to the tapeworm diet.
This diet was just as disgusting as the name sounds. To be fair to the Victorians,
it was pretty easy to follow the tapeworm diet. You didn’t have to eat tapeworms three
times a day or anything like that. Instead, you took a pill that contained a fertilized
tapeworm egg. Then you waited for it to hatch in your stomach and hoped that your new belly
buddy would eat up much of the food you ate before your body could digest it. Then when
a dieter had reached their target weight, all that needed to be done was to get rid of the tapeworm.
Some people took more pills to do this. But others tried to lure the tapeworm out of the body,
such as by placing a pint of milk nearby each orifice, waiting for the worm to inspect the drink
and yanking the worm out. What in the entire! And while this diet started in Victorian England,
it still exists in some form today. In fact, the website Healthline has a medically peer-reviewed
article that warns people that ingesting tapeworms could cause considerably more harm than good.
Please, listen to this 21st-century advice if you’re considering giving the tapeworm diet a try.
In modern times, some people refuse to eat veal because of what the calf has to go through before
it’s slaughtered. Well, in the Victorian era, an entirely different kind of calf
dish divided people: boiled calf’s head. This dish would often serve as the centerpiece of
large feasts in Victorian England. Because what could be more appetizing than having
a baby cow staring at you from the dinner table? There were also a number of popular
ways to make boiled calf’s head. For example, one method involved boiling the whole head,
then taking out all of the bones and then baking it. Another method specifically instructs people
to leave the skin on but to scrape the hair off after four minutes of boiling. Many recipes
also call for removing the calf’s brain and using that meat to create another tasty dish.
It’s also absolutely possible to make this dish today, if you know where to look. After all,
to make veal, you have to kill a calf, meaning that there are calf heads laying around. on offer.
Sure, they aren’’t sold in supermarkets, and butchers won’t be publicly displaying calf heads.
But if you ask them, they’ll probably sell you a calf head at a reasonable price.
Ok, this is definitely the least disgusting food on this list. In fact, if you were served this
dish in the present day, your biggest complaint would be that it was bland. There weren’t many
vegetarians in the Victorian era, which might be surprising to you, considering you just learned
about boiled Calf’s head. But there were some, and they had very little to work with. Most of
the time, they just had to make vegetables that were available as the centerpiece of their meal.
Cabbage Pie perfectly highlights this. There are no prizes for guessing the main ingredient in
cabbage pie. But many recipes show that a little more flavor was added to the dish by including
onion, leek, potatoes and cheese. These ingredients would have been boiled and
then mashed together before going in the pie, meaning that the final pie would have
tasted like it had been filled with baby food. The big downside of this dish is that it was
mocked among Victorian meat-eaters. In fact, the author of one British newspaper article,
dating to 1893, pondered if there could be such a thing as a cabbage pie-eating prizefighter. If
it’s a choice between a slice of cabbage pie or a slice of diseased broxy meat, what would you pick?
A couple who married in the 1860s could expect to have an average of six children over the course
of their marriage. To make so many babies, these couples likely needed some kind of aphrodisiac.
Oysters have been considered an aphrodisiac since the time of the ancient greeks.
So the wannabe horny Victorian couples just chowed down on oysters to get busy, right? Not quite.
Without fridges, oysters tended to go bad quickly. The only way to preserve them was to pickle them.
Luckily for poor Victorian couples who wanted to make babies, these pickled oysters were cheap.
Sources from the time say one penny could buy you four oysters. One British penny in 1901,
the last year of the Victorian era, is about the equivalent of $1.85 today. That means that one
individual pickled oyster cost 45 cents in today’s money. That’s a better deal than
oysters in today’s restaurants. Many restaurants offer special deals for one oyster for one dollar.
But then again, those oysters are fresh. So for the guys who are trying to get lucky on a budget,
why don’t you just whip out a plate of pickled oysters and wait for the magic to happen?
We know what you’re thinking. How can anything with a name like “gruel” be anything other than
incredibly delicious? Despite the incredibly tasty name, gruel was one of the most basic meals of all
time. It’s basically oatmeal but thinned out with water until it’s turned into something
with the texture of slop. Gruel was basically the go-to food for Victorian workhouses. These
workhouses were originally meant to be a solution for people who would otherwise be homeless. They
would receive food, shelter and basic comforts in exchange for labor. In reality, the workhouses
provided the bare minimum they could while working its residents for as many hours as physically
possible. Gruel’s association with the workhouse has been immortalized thanks to Charles Dickens.
In the book Oliver Twist, the title character is famous for requesting more gruel and being denied.
Yes, when Oliver says, “Please, sir, can I have some more?” He’s asking for sloppy
gloopy watered-down oatmeal. And scenes like the one where Oliver asks for food must have
played out all over British workhouses. That’s because many parishes that owned the workhouses,
made it illegal for their residents to have second helpings of food. The great news is that this meal
is the easiest to replicate on the list, if you’re looking to indulge in some Victorian
poverty roleplay. To make the dish, simply make 16 ounces of oatmeal and water it down
with eight pints of water. Keep on boiling this until it has the sloppiness level that you want.
All that’s left is to serve it to your family or whoever you think would enjoy the meal.
And yes, some people suggest adding treacle or allspice to make it more palatable.
But this really goes against the Victorian workhouse principle of less is more.
When British explorers returned from voyages, they were keen to share the incredible new discoveries
that they had made. Food was no exception. And one of the most prized meats to come from this time
was turtle. Turtle meat was considered to be especially delicious in soups. But for most people
in the Victorian era, there was a huge problem. Demand far outpaced supply. So chefs had to get
inventive and make something that would taste just enough like turtle soup to satisfy the masses.
The ingredients in mock turtle soup often varied, and they were usually dictated by whatever the
chefs could use at the time, including beef, oysters and ham. But almost all mock turtle dishes
involve one ingredient that this video has already encountered: calf’s head. These recipes generally
revolve around boiling the calf’s head, but for longer than if it was being used as a centerpiece.
Then chefs would use the water as a broth. They’d then cut off as much meat from the calf head
as they could and add that back to the water. Sometimes, they’d add the brain at this point,
which would have been removed from the head before cooking. Hmm.
Did any of these mock turtle soup dishes really taste anything like turtle? Probably not. But the
people were told that it did, and that appears to have been enough for them. Who knows what they’d
make of Linda McCartney or Morningstar foods? So, what do you think? Does Victorian era cuisine
increase your appetite? Tell us in the comments and as always thanks for watching Nutty History.