At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Sweet tea became a national indulgence. By 1770, per capita consumption of sugar was running at 20 pounds a head, and most of that, it seems, was spooned into tea. (That sounds like quite a lot until you realize that Britons today eat 80 pounds of sugar per person annually, while Americans pack away a decidedly robust 126 pounds of sugar per head.) As with coffee, tea was held to confer health benefits; among much else, it was said that it “assuageth the pains of the Bowels.” A Dutch doctor, Cornelius Bontekoe, recommended drinking fifty cups of tea a day—and in extreme cases as many as two hundred—in order to keep oneself sufficiently primed.

  Sugar also played a big role in a less commendable development: the slave trade. Nearly all the sugar Britons consumed was grown on West Indian estates worked by slaves. We have a narrow tendency to associate slavery exclusively with the plantation economy of the southern United States, but in fact plenty of other people got rich from slavery, not least the traders who shipped 3.1 million Africans across the ocean before the United Kingdom abolished the trade in humans in 1807.

  Tea was adored and esteemed not just in Great Britain but also in her overseas dominions. Tea was taxed in America as part of the hated Townshend duties. In 1770, these duties were repealed on everything but tea in what proved to be a fatal misjudgment. They were kept on tea partly to remind colonists of their subjugation to the crown and partly to help the East India Company out of a deep and sudden hole. The company had become hopelessly overextended. It had accumulated seventeen million pounds of tea—a huge amount of a perishable product—and, perversely, had tried to create an air of well-being by paying out more in dividends than it could really afford. Bankruptcy loomed unless it could reduce its stockpiles. Hoping to ease it through the crisis, the British government gave the company an effective monopoly on tea sales in America. Every American knows what happened next.

  On December 16, 1773, a group of eighty or so colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships in Boston Harbor, broke open 342 tea chests, and dumped the contents overboard. That sounds like a fairly moderate act of vandalism. In fact, it was a year’s supply of tea for Boston, with a value of £18,000, and so it was a grave and capital offense, and everyone involved knew so. Nobody at the time, incidentally, called it the Boston Tea Party; that name wasn’t first used until 1834.

  Nor could the behavior of the crowds be characterized as one of good-natured high spirits, as we Americans rather like to think. The mood was murderously ugly. The unluckiest person in all this was a British customs agent named John Malcolm. Malcolm had recently been hauled from a house in Maine and tarred and feathered, a blisteringly painful punishment that involved the application of hot tar to bare skin. Usually, the tar was applied with stiff brushes, which were painful enough in themselves, though in at least one instance the victim was simply held by his ankles and dunked headfirst into a barrel of tar. To the coating of tar was added handfuls of feathers before the victim was paraded through the streets; often victims were beaten or even hanged.

  So there was nothing at all jovial about tarring and feathering, and we can only imagine Malcolm’s dismay that December day as he was hauled wriggling from his house a second time and given another “Yankee jacket,” as it was also known. Once the tar dried, it took days of delicate picking and scrubbing to remove it. Malcolm sent a square of charred and blackened epidermis back to England with a note asking if he could please come home. His wish was granted. Meanwhile, however, America and Britain were implacably on the road to war. The first shots were fired fifteen months later. As a versifier of the day noted:

  What discontents, what dire events,

  From trifling things proceed?

  A little Tea, thrown in the Sea,

  Has thousands caused to bleed.

  At the same time that Britain was losing its American colonies, it was facing serious problems connected to tea from the other direction as well. By 1800, tea was embedded in the British psyche as the national beverage, and imports were running at twenty-three million pounds a year. Virtually all that tea came from China. This caused a large and chronic trade imbalance. The British resolved this problem in part by selling opium produced in India to the Chinese. Opium was a very considerable business in the nineteenth century, and not just in China. British and American citizens—women in particular—took a lot of opium, too, mostly in the form of medicinal paregoric and laudanum. Imports of opium to the United States went from 24,000 pounds in 1840 to no less than 400,000 pounds in 1872, and it was women who mostly sucked it down, though quite a lot was given to children, too, as a treatment for croup. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

  To the unending exasperation of the Chinese authorities, Britain became particularly skilled at persuading Chinese citizens to become opium addicts—university courses in the history of marketing really ought to begin with British opium sales—so much so that by 1838 Britain was selling almost five million pounds of opium to China every year. Unfortunately, this still wasn’t enough to offset the huge costs of importing tea from China. An obvious solution was to grow tea in some warm part of the expanding British Empire. The problem was that the Chinese had always been secretive about the complicated processes of turning tea leaves into a refreshing beverage, and no one outside China knew how to get an industry going. Enter a remarkable Scotsman named Robert Fortune.

  For three years in the 1840s, Fortune traveled all around China, disguised as a native, collecting information on how tea was grown and processed. It was risky work: had he been caught, he would certainly have been imprisoned and could well have been executed. Although Fortune spoke none of the languages of China, he got around that problem by pretending always to come from a distant province where another dialect prevailed. In the course of his travels, he not only learned the secrets of tea production but also introduced to the West many valuable plants, among them the fan palm, the kumquat, and several varieties of azaleas and chrysanthemums.

  Under Fortune’s guidance, tea cultivation was introduced to India in that curiously inevitable year 1851 with the planting of some twenty thousand seedlings and cuttings. In half a century, from a base of nothing in 1850, tea production in India rose to 140 million pounds a year.

  As for the East India Company, however, its period of glory came to an abrupt and unhappy conclusion. The precipitating event, unexpectedly enough, was the introduction of a new kind of rifle, the Enfield P53, at just about the time that tea cultivation was starting. The rifle was an old-fashioned type loaded by tipping powder down the barrel. The powder came in grease-coated paper cartridges that had to be bitten open. A rumor spread among the native sepoys, as the soldiers were known, that the grease used was made from the fat of pigs and cows—a matter of profoundest horror for Muslim and Hindu soldiers alike, since the consumption of such fats, even unwittingly, would condemn them to eternal damnation.

  The East India Company’s British officers handled the matter with stunning insensitivity. They court-martialed several Indian soldiers who refused to handle the new cartridges, and threatened to punish any others who didn’t fall into line. Many sepoys became convinced that it was all part of a plot to replace their own faiths with Christianity. By unfortunate coincidence, Christian missionaries had recently become active in India, fanning suspicions further. The upshot was the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, in which the native soldiers turned on their British masters, whom they very much outnumbered. At Cawnpore, the rebels herded two hundred women and children into a hall, then hacked them to pieces. Other innocent victims, it was reported, were thrown into wells and left to drown.

  When news of these cruelties reached British ears, retribution was swift and unforgiving. Rebellious Indians were tracked down and executed in ways calculated to instill terror and regret. One or two were even fired from cannons, or so it is often recorded. Untold numbers were shot or summarily hanged
. The whole episode left Britain profoundly shaken. More than five hundred books appeared on the uprising in its immediate aftermath. India, it was commonly agreed, was too big a country and too big a problem to leave in the hands of a business. Control of India passed to the British crown, and the East India Company was wound up.

  III

  All these discoveries and all of this endless fighting made its way back to England in the form of the food that ended up on dinner tables, and in a new kind of room: the dining room. Dining room didn’t acquire its modern meaning until the late seventeenth century and didn’t become general in houses until even later. In fact, it only just made it into Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755. When Thomas Jefferson put a dining room in Monticello, it was quite a dashing thing to do. Previously, meals had been served at little tables in any convenient room.

  What caused dining rooms to come into being wasn’t a sudden universal urge to dine in a space exclusively dedicated to the purpose, but rather, by and large, a simple desire on the part of the mistress of the house to save her lovely new upholstered furniture from greasy desecration. Upholstered furniture, as we have lately seen, was expensive, and the last thing a proud owner wanted was to have anyone wiping fingers on it.

  The arrival of the dining room marked a change not only in where the food was served but also in how it was eaten and when. For one thing, forks were now suddenly becoming common. Forks had been around for a long time but took forever to gain acceptance. Fork originally signified an agricultural implement and nothing more; it didn’t take on a food sense until the mid-fifteenth century, and then it described a large implement used to pin down a bird or joint for carving. The person credited with introducing the eating fork to England was Thomas Coryate, an author and traveler from the time of Shakespeare who was famous for walking huge distances—including once to India. In 1611, he produced his magnum opus, Coryate’s Crudities, in which he gave much praise to the dinner fork, which he had first encountered in Italy. The same book was also notable for introducing English readers to the Swiss folk hero William Tell and to a new device called the umbrella.

  Eating forks were thought comically dainty and unmanly—and dangerous, too, come to that. Since they had only two sharp tines, the scope for spearing one’s lip or tongue was great, particularly if one’s aim was impaired by wine and jollity. Manufacturers experimented with additional numbers of tines—sometimes as many as six—before settling, late in the nineteenth century, on four as the number that people seemed to be most comfortable with. Why four should induce the optimum sense of security isn’t easy to say, but it does seem to be a fundamental fact of flatware psychology.

  The nineteenth century also marked a time of change for the way food was served. Before the 1850s, nearly all the dishes of the meal were placed on the table at the outset. Guests would arrive to find the food waiting. They would help themselves to whatever was nearby and ask for other dishes to be passed or call a servant over to fetch one for them. This style of dining was known as service à la française, but now a new practice came in known as service à la russe in which food was delivered to the table in courses. A lot of people hated the new practice because it meant everyone had to eat everything in the same order and at the same pace. If one person was slow, it held up the next course for everyone else, and meant that food lost heat. Dinners now sometimes dragged on for hours, putting a severe strain on many people’s sobriety and nearly everyone’s bladders.

  The nineteenth century also became the age of the overdressed dining table. A diner at a formal gathering might sit down to as many as nine wineglasses just for the main courses—more were brought for dessert—and a blinding array of silverware with which to conduct an assault on the many dishes put before him. The types of specialized eating implements for cutting, serving, probing, winkling, and otherwise getting viands from serving dish to plate and from plate to mouth became almost numberless. As well as a generous array of more or less conventional knives, forks, and spoons, the diner needed also to know how to recognize and manipulate specialized cheese scoops, olive spoons, terrapin forks, oyster prongs, chocolate muddlers, gelatin knives, tomato servers, and tongs of every size and degree of springiness. At one point, a single manufacturer offered no fewer than 146 different types of flatware for the table. Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn’t a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does.

  Dining was, as one book of the period phrased it, “the great trial,” with rules “so numerous and so minute in respect of detail that they require the most careful study; and the worst of it is that none of them can be violated without exposing the offender to instant detection.” Protocol ruled every action. If you wished to take a sip of wine, you needed to find someone to drink with you. As one foreign visitor explained it in a letter home: “A messenger is often sent from one end of the table to the other to announce to Mr B——that Mr A——wishes to take wine with him; whereupon each, sometimes with considerable trouble, catches the other’s eye.… When you raise your glass, you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with great gravity.”

  The overdressed dining table: table glass, including decanters, claret jugs, and a carafe, from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (photo credit 8.1)

  Some people needed more help with the rules of table behavior than others. John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men in America but not evidently the most cultivated, astounded his hosts at one dinner party by leaning over and wiping his hands on the dress of the lady sitting next to him. One popular American guidebook, The Laws of Etiquette; or, Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society, informed readers that they “may wipe their lips on the table cloth, but not blow their noses with it.” Another solemnly reminded readers that it was not polite in refined circles to smell a piece of meat while it was on one’s fork. It also explained, “The ordinary custom among well-bred persons is as follows: soup is taken with a spoon.”

  Mealtimes moved around, too, until there was scarcely an hour of the day that wasn’t an important time to eat for somebody. Dining hours were dictated to some extent by the onerous and often preposterous obligations of making and returning social calls. The convention was to drop in on others between twelve and three each day. If someone called and left a card while you were out, etiquette dictated that you must return the call the next day. Not to do so was the gravest affront. What this meant in practice was that most people spent their afternoons dashing around trying to catch up with people who were dashing around in a similarly unproductive manner trying to catch up with them.

  Partly for this reason the dinner hour moved later and later—from midday to midafternoon to early evening—though the new conventions were by no means taken up uniformly. One visitor to London in 1773 noted that in a single week he was invited to dinners that started successively at one, five, three, and “half after six, dinner on table at seven.” Eighty years later, when the art critic and writer John Ruskin informed his parents that it had become his habit to dine at six in the evening, they received the news as if it marked the most dissolute recklessness. Eating so late, his mother told him, was dangerously unhealthy.

  Another factor that materially influenced dining times was theater hours. In Shakespeare’s day performances began about two o’clock, which kept them conveniently out of the way of mealtimes, but that was dictated largely by the need for daylight in open-air arenas like the Globe. Once plays moved indoors, starting times tended to get later and later and theatergoers found it necessary to adjust their dining times accordingly—though this was done with a certain reluctance and even resentment. Eventually, unable or unwilling to modify
their personal habits any further, the beau monde stopped trying to get to the theater for the first act and took to sending a servant to hold their seats for them till they had finished dining. Generally they would show up—noisy, drunk, and disinclined to focus—for the later acts. For a generation or so it was usual for a theatrical company to perform the first half of a play to an auditorium full of dozing servants who had no attachment to the proceedings and to perform the second half to a crowd of ill-mannered inebriates who had no idea what was going on.

  Dinner finally became an evening meal in the 1850s, influenced by Queen Victoria. As the distance between breakfast and dinner widened, it became necessary to create a smaller meal around the middle of the day, for which the word luncheon was appropriated. Luncheon originally signified a lump or portion (as in “a luncheon of cheese”). In that sense it was first recorded in English in 1580. In 1755, Samuel Johnson was still defining it as a quantity of food—“as much food as one’s hand can hold.” Only slowly over the next century did luncheon come to signify, in refined circles at least, the middle meal of the day.

  One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only a small evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk—a sadly appropriate word here—of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn’t do us any good at all. The Ruskins, it turns out, were right.

  * The Naval Board also used lime juice rather than lemon juice because it was cheaper, which is why British sailors became known as limeys. Lime juice wasn’t nearly as effective as lemon juice. Incidentally, it was Americans, not Australians, who first applied the term limey to British sailors.