It is thanks to Charles Dickens that when we think of gruel, we picture an almost comically horrible dish: thin and meagre, only a miser like Ebenezer Scrooge would keep a small pan of it warming on his hob at Christmas time, and only a starving child like Oliver Twist would ever long for more of it. But it wasn’t necessarily so. The rich gruel – “a wholesome spoon-meat” – for which there is a recipe in Mary Kettilby’s vividly titled Collection Of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery of 1714 sounds delicious, made as it is from slowly simmered pearl barley, currants, egg yolks, sherry, cream and lemon rind. Can’t you just see it chalked up on some modish restaurant blackboard? Punters! Forget snail porridge. Gruel is where it’s at now.
I got to thinking about gruel one freezing afternoon earlier this month, when I called in at the Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury. Feeding the 400, its latest exhibition, looks at how children in the care of the Foundling Hospital (which stood on the site of the museum) were fed from 1740, a year after Thomas Coram established it, until 1954, when the last pupils were placed in foster care – and yes, it is a chastening experience, especially when we are all about to eat even more than usual. In the end, though, the visitor is moved (almost to tears, in my case) not by how badly the children were fed, but by how well. Although Mary Kettilby’s gruel, the recipe for which I found in the exhibition guide, would have been strictly the province of the hospital’s governors, this isn’t to say that its pupils went without. At their long dining tables, where (put all thoughts of wooden trenchers from your mind) the food was served only on china plates, frugality meant simplicity, not deprivation.
In perfect copperplate – everything was obsessively documented at the Foundling Hospital – there it all is: not only the variety of the foods the children were given, but the fervent desire of its stewards that these things might do them good. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the foundlings were indeed unfailingly fed gruel for breakfast every day. But it was always made with full-fat milk from the dairy cows of Hackney, Islington and Mile End, and served with hunks of bread, which on Sundays came with 15g of butter per child. Breakfast, like every meal, was a serious business, and not only because it began with grace and was taken in silence. In 1811, when it was discovered that, thanks to some fraud carried out by a member of staff, the children had been consuming skimmed milk, it was considered a scandal. Heads had to roll.
My favourite parts of the exhibition belonged to the 20th century, when the suet pies and boiled brisket served in Victorian times began to be replaced with roast veal and cold gammon – and when treats started coming the children’s way: cakes to mark royal weddings, jelly and ice cream for those whose tonsils had been removed. At one point, a Miss B J Anderson left a legacy to the hospital specifically so that each child would find a half pound of chocolates in their stockings come Christmas. A letter of 1936 from the hospital steward to Harrod’s complained that the bread the store had provided – 707 brown loaves over five days – was too “wet and sticky”. An offer of broken biscuits from another shop was declined on the grounds that it was difficult to give so many children an equal portion.
The exhibition takes its title from Received: A Blank Child, an essay by Dickens, published in his magazine Household Words in 1853, which describes the spectacle of the foundlings eating their Sunday dinner under the gaze of a middle-class audience, for whom the hospital was a favoured post-church outing (Dickens lived nearby, and was a regular visitor himself). Looking at an engraving by Joseph Swain of this weekly event, bonnets and top hats bobbing just beyond the regimented rows of girls in white aprons, a wave of revulsion crept over me. But then I wondered: were these genteel crowds gawping idly, as if at zoo animals, or were they, like me, busy counting their blessings? Forgive me if I sound, at this point, like some wizened Methodist minister, but I must commend Feeding the 400 to you this holiday season. Make a detour. Break off, temporarily, from your ceaseless shopping. It can be seen in its entirety in less time than it takes to stuff a turkey, and its beneficent effects will see you right through to New Year’s Day at least.
rachel.cooke@observer.co.uk
