At Home - Bill Bryson [37]
Humphry Clinker, a sprawling novel written in the form of a series of letters, paints such a vivid picture of life in eighteenth-century England that it is much quoted even now and almost certainly therefore has a lot to answer for. In one of its more colorful passages Smollett describes how milk was carried through the streets of London in open pails, into which plopped “spittle, snot and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, over-flowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s-sake, the spewings of infants … and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture.” What is easily overlooked is that the book was intended as satire, not as documentary. Smollett wasn’t even in England when he wrote it; he was slowly dying in Italy. (He died three months after its publication.)
All this isn’t to say that there wasn’t bad food about. There most certainly was. Infected and rotten meat was a particular problem. The filth of London’s Smithfield Market, the city’s principal meat exchange, was celebrated. One witness to a parliamentary investigation of 1828 said he saw “a cow’s carcass that was so rancid, the fat was no more than dripping yellow slime.” Animals driven in on the hoof from distant parts often arrived exhausted and sick, and didn’t get any better while there. Sheep reportedly were sometimes skinned while still alive. Many animals were covered with sores. Smithfield vendors, in fact, had a private name for bad meat: cag-mag, an abbreviation of two slang words, meaning “cheap crap.”
Even when the producers’ intentions were pure, the food itself wasn’t always. Getting food to distant markets in an edible condition was a constant challenge. People dreamed of being able to eat foods from far away or out of season. In January 1859, much of America followed eagerly as a ship laden with three hundred thousand juicy oranges raced under full sail from Puerto Rico to New England to show that it could be done. By the time it arrived, however, more than two-thirds of the cargo had rotted to a fragrant mush. Producers in more distant lands could not hope to achieve even that much. Argentinians raised massive herds of cattle on their endless and accommodating pampas, but they had no way to ship the meat. Most of their cows were therefore boiled down for their bones and tallow, and the meat was simply wasted. Seeking ways to help them, the German chemist Justus von Liebig devised a formula for a meat extract, which came to be known as Oxo, but clearly that could never make more than a marginal difference.
What was desperately needed was a way of keeping foods safe and fresh for longer periods than nature allowed. In the late eighteenth century, a Frenchman named Nicolas-François Appert produced a book called The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, which represented a real breakthrough. Appert’s system consisted essentially of sealing food in glass jars and then heating the jars slowly. The method generally worked pretty well, but the seals were not entirely foolproof and sometimes air and contaminants got in, to the gastrointestinal distress of those who partook of the contents. Since it wasn’t possible to have total confidence in Appert’s jars, no one did.
In short, a lot of things could go wrong with food on its way to the table. So when in the early 1840s a miracle product came along that promised to transform matters, there was a great deal of excitement.