The Victorian Era

What Did Victorians Eat for Dinner?

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Dinner was the principal meal of the Victorian day. In middle-class and upper-class households it was served in the evening between seven and nine o’clock; in working-class homes it might be eaten at midday or in the early evening, after the day’s work was done. The Victorian period saw a revolution in the British diet, with new foods from the British Empire in the Victorian Era, new industrial food industries, and a slow improvement in the working-class diet. The dinner of the upper class, the dinner of the How did the middle class grow in the Victorian era?, and the dinner of the working class were very different affairs; the table divided the social classes as sharply as the parish church, the polling booth, or the public school. The Victorian meal is examined in detail in Victorian Food and Dining, and the room in which it was prepared in What was a Victorian kitchen like?.

The Dinner of the Upper Class

The dinner of the Who were the Victorian upper class? was an elaborate affair of many courses, served by a large staff of servants and accompanied by carefully chosen wines. A formal dinner would open with soup — a clear consommé, a thick purée, or a bisque — followed by fish such as turbot, salmon, or sole. The entrées (made dishes such as cutlets, croquettes, and vol-au-vents) preceded the remove, a substantial joint such as a saddle of mutton, a haunch of venison, a sirloin of beef, or a baron of beef. The roast course featured poultry or game — pheasant, partridge, grouse, snipe, woodcock, or guinea fowl in season — and the meal concluded with sweets (jellies, creams, ices, and trifles), a savoury (anchovies on toast, devilled bones, or Welsh rarebit), cheese (Stilton, Cheshire, Cheddar, or Double Gloucester), and a dessert of fresh and dried fruits and nuts.

The elaborate middle-class dinner of the 1840s typically had thirteen courses; the great state dinners of the 1880s and 1890s might have twenty or more. The menus of the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall, the Royal Academy dinners, and the dinners of the great livery companies were published in the Illustrated London News and the Morning Post, and they were the subject of considerable public interest.

The Dinner of the Middle Class

The middle-class dinner was a less elaborate affair, with fewer courses, fewer dishes, and fewer servants. The principal courses were the soup (typically a clear or thick soup such as mock turtle, oxtail, or mutton broth), the fish (typically boiled cod, haddock, or plaice with parsley sauce), the joint (typically a roast of beef or mutton, served on Sunday and reappearing cold or minced in the days that followed), the vegetables (potatoes, greens, peas, carrots, and turnips), the pudding (the great glory of the English table — suet pudding, rice pudding, fruit pie, roly-poly, sponge pudding, batter pudding, bread-and-butter pudding, or apple dumpling), and the cheese (typically a plain English variety).

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) was the standard reference of the period, and the middle-class dinner of the 1860s and 1870s was organised around its menus and recipes. The book is a vast compendium of Victorian domestic practice: it sets out the duties of the cook and the kitchen maid, the menus for every month of the year, the recipes for every course, the lists of the necessary equipment, the table of weights and measures, the table of carving, and the table of invalid cookery. It remains a primary source for the middle-class dinner of the period.

The Dinner of the Working Class

The working-class dinner was a much more modest affair. Its staples were bread, potatoes, bacon, cheese, onions, and herrings, washed down with tea or beer. Fresh meat appeared mainly as a small joint on Sunday, with bacon serving through the rest of the week. Bread and potatoes supplied the bulk of the diet, and in hard times the family might live on little else, with the best of the food customarily reserved for the wage-earning father. Bread-and-dripping — a slice of bread spread with the dripping from the Sunday joint, served with cheese, an onion, and a cup of tea — was the most characteristic dish.

The workhouse dinner was even more modest. The standard workhouse diet of the period consisted of bread, gruel (oatmeal and water), suet pudding, rice, and occasionally meat (typically beef or mutton twice a week, with bacon on Sundays). The bread was the cheapest, coarsest, and most adulterated in the country, and the gruel was thin and watery. The workhouse diet was a deliberate instrument of the less eligibility principle of the New Poor Law: the workhouse dinner of the 1840s was deliberately less palatable than the dinner of the independent labourer outside, so as to deter all but the truly desperate from claiming relief.

The New Foods of the Victorian Period

The Victorian period saw a revolution in the British diet. The fish and chip shop — the first is credited to Joseph Malin in London around 1860 and to John Lees in Mossley in 1863 — was one of the great new institutions; the fish was fried in beef dripping, the chips in beef dripping or vegetable oil, and the dish sold for a penny or twopence a portion.

New processed foods transformed the British larder. Tinned corned beef — the bully beef of the soldier — was produced in Australia, New Zealand, South America, and the United States. Condensed milk was produced by the Borden Milk Company from 1856 and by the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company from 1866. Tinned salmon, sardines, lobster, and fruit appeared on grocers’ shelves. Bovril, a concentrated beef extract, was invented by John Lawson Johnston in 1870. Tinned soups, tomatoes, peas, beans, and vegetables entered the working-class pantry.

The new industrial food industries produced a range of processed staples: cereals, biscuits, cakes, bread, jam, marmalade, pickles, sauces, vinegar, chutney, custard powder, baking powder, yeast, gelatine, cornflour, rice, sago, tapioca, macaroni, vermicelli, semolina, and pearl barley. Marmite (1902, just after the period), Bovril (1870), and the many brands of tinned and packaged food transformed the British diet.

The introduction of the Atlantic fruit trade brought the banana, the orange, the pineapple, the grape, the apple, the pear, the peach, the apricot, the plum, the cherry, the strawberry, the raspberry, the currant, the gooseberry, the melon, the fig, and the date to the British table. The new shipping — the refrigerated ship, the steamship, the clipper ship — made the new fruit trade possible, and the great port of London was the centre of the new wholesale fruit markets at Covent Garden and Spitalfields.