Note 123 — Chapter III · AGRICULTURE
Reading edition
The dietary in charitable institutions gives an idea of what was considered bare necessity.
(Children’s Diet in Christ Church Hospital, 1704.)
For breakfast, Bread and Beer. For dinner, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, boiled beef and pottage. Monday, milk pottage, Wednesday, furmity. Friday old pease & pottage. Saturday water gruel. For supper bread and cheese or butter for those that cannot eat cheese. Sunday supper, legs of mutton. Wednesday and Friday, pudding pies.
(Stow, London, Book I, p. 182.)
Diet for Workhouse, Bishopsgate Street, London.
They have Breakfasts, dinners, and suppers every day in the week. For each meal 4 oz. bread, 1½ oz. cheese, 1 oz. butter, 1 pint of beer. Breakfast, four days, bread and cheese or butter and beer. Mondays a pint of Pease Pottage, with Bread and Beer. Tuesdays a Plumb Pudding Pye 9 oz. and beer. Wednesdays a pint of Furmity. On Friday a pint of Barley Broth and bread. On Saturdays, a plain Flower Sewet Dumpling with Beer. Their supper always the same, 4 oz. bread, 1½ of cheese or 1 oz. of butter, and beer sufficient. (Stow, London, Book I, p. 199).
Lady Grisell Baillie gives her servant’s diet:
Sunday they have boild beef and broth made in the great pot, and always the broth made to serve two days. Monday, broth made on Sunday, and a Herring. Tuesday, broth and beef. Wednesday, broth and two eggs each. Thursday, broth and beef. Friday, Broth and herring. Saturday, broth without meat, and cheese, or a pudden or blood-pudens, or a hagish, or what is most convenient. Breakfast and super, half an oat loaf or a proportion of broun bread, but better set down the loaf, and see non is taken or wasted, and a muchkin of beer or milk whenever there is any. At dinner a mutchkin of beer for each. Baillie (Lady Grisell). Household Book, pp. 277-8. 1743.