Tea Kettle Broth
My mother grew up in straightened circumstances in Wiltshire, England. Her father died when she was two, a victim of the post World War I flu epidemic, and her mother (my grandmother) got by with a tiny pension, taking in lodgers, and help from her brother and sisters since it was not respectable for widows to work.
Even so, my mother told us time and again, they never felt they lacked for anything. In particular, she said, they always had proper meals, bread and a bit of meat every day.
She contrasted her situation to that of other children in the same local school who had to make do with tea kettle broth. As my mother explained it, tea kettle broth, the sign of real poverty, was made by toasting bits of bread until they almost charred, then pouring water over them. The charring turned the water brown, like tea or broth.
I’d never heard anyone else talk about tea kettle broth until I saw the Old Foodie’s recent post, Tea Soup. As she says, the “tea” part of the name came from the kettle in which water was boiled, the soup from the older “sops” or pieces of bread. A quick google shows that tea kettle broth was consumed across the British Isles.
My mother never mentioned adding milk, let alone butter which was sometimes added. I assume it was just too expensive to do so. Wiltshire, which for centuries had prospered on the wool trade, suffered very hard times in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Those who ate tea kettle broth might have welcomed a few empty calories.
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Grim, and a long way from the idea that rural England was a land of abundant natural foods compared to the modern diet.
From the 19th century:
” In Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wilts, the breakfast commonly consists of tea-kettle broth, a milk broth or sop, or bread broth (consisting of bread, hot water, salt, pepper, and a little milk or a little fat of some kind, boiled together), or broth from bacon liquor with condiments, eaten with or followed by bread and treacle, and with or without tea or coffee. Sometimes the children, have the broth only, and the wife ‘has tea, bread, and fish, or the husband has bacon, bread, and tea, the wife dry bread and tea, and the children milk, or all have porridge, or the husband alone has it, and the wife and children, tea, bread, and dripping; or the husband and children have it, and the wife has tea, bread, and butter; or fried bacon and cabbage is provided ; or the husband takes bread and butter only with him ; or they all have broth, bread, bacon, and butter ; or the husband alone has broth, bread, and a rasher of bacon, or all have tea and bread only; or husband has bread and cheese, the family dry bread, and the infant sop : or all have bread and cheese.”
Grim indeed. And thanks for typing out that long piece that I was too lazy to add. For those reading this, bacon here was used in Wiltshire to refer to any cured pork that was not ham, ham being restricted to the leg. Bacon liquor therefore means the broth from boiling a piece of bacon. If it is a thin slice for frying then a rasher is specified as in the quotation.
Your post evokes for me atole de pinole. Ground, parched corn cooked with water into a slightly thickened beverage. I have had it both sweet and salty, and prefer the latter.
Saludos,
Don Cuevas
Yes, indeed. I think every society has some version of the basic staple and water, used by travelers (pinole), by the very poor, as a punishment, or as the ultimate fall back. What it is tells you a lot about the society.
I thought I remembered seeing references to this in 19th century novels as an invalid food – ‘toast water’. This link has a recipe for it from Mrs Black’s ‘Household Cookery and Laundry Work’ from the late 1880s:
http://thefrugalcook.blogspot.com/2008/06/toast-water-new-green-tea.html
Of course, your post reminds me that one middle class person’s occasional invalid food is another person’s staple.
Thanks for the link, Sheila. I’ll be posting about this. And you are so right about invalid food often having parallels with poor food because it was so simple. In the case of tea kettle broth, white bread was becoming available to all in the nineteenth century making the crossover easy.
Just came across another reference to this in Harry Hopkins’ The Long Affray: the poaching wars in Britain, a fascinating history of England’s game laws, the rise of game preserving and improved gun technology as a rich man’s hobby/obsession, and the impact of this on the lives of the poor. It’s only incidentally about food, but it’s clear that most poaching was done as an essential supplement to poor people’s diet and income. It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):
“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”
Thanks so much. Really sad, really frightening in fact. From poaching to man traps, something I could not believe growing up.
The book sounds very interesting. I’ve added it to my wish list.
It’s a really interesting book, definitely worth a look. The brutality with which those convicted of poaching was treated is astonishing – up to the death penalty and transportation. Also from a food history point of view interesting on how game became an aspirational food in the 18th century, eaten not just by the upper classes – who under the game laws were the only people entitled to shoot their own, on their own land – but also by the middle classes, who didn’t.
He cites Mrs Beeton’s game recipes as an example of this use of it as a social marker. The main suppliers of the game butchers, by a variety of indirect means (intermediaries were needed to get the meat from the country to the city), were poachers. He compares it to bootlegging under prohibition, and cites examples of rural hawkers in London in the 1820s offering ‘lion’ for sale as code for hare, or selling as ‘chickens’ birds which were clearly pheasant. Fashionable dinner parties served ‘Perigord pie’ to suggest that the partridges in them had come from France.
Sheila, I can feel a blog brewing on foraging/poaching. Brings back so many issues that I ran up against in my youth. Does he say anything about firewood?
Haven’t finished the book, but a quick skim suggests no. However Cobbett is one of the book’s major sources: I’ve only read excerpts from him, but I understand he was a defender of labourers’ right to graze and gather firewood on common land, as well as a critic of the game laws, so there’s probably more on the subject in Rural Rides etc.
A post on foraging would be great – maybe also taking in its current extreme fashionability? (at least in the UK/Europe).
Well, may be I will make that the central topic for next week.