Today, I would like to return to the Heilig-Geist-Spital in Hamburg whose sixteenth-century kitchen and inmate diet was the subject of previous posts. Along with extensive documents from earlier days, Gaedechens’ 1889 article also preserves pieces of later information, including a week’s food from November of 1827. It looks more modern than the rations provided in the 1547 list, but less generous:
Food recorded 19-25 November 1827:
Sunday: Meat soup with rice, fresh beef, white cabbage
Monday: Potato soup and carrots
Tuesday: Oatmeal porridge with milk and boiled potatoes
Wednesday: Meat soup with white bread, beef and boiled white beans.
Thursday: oatmeal porridge and flour dumplings with syrup (sugar) sauce
Friday: Buckwheat porridge with milk, boiled potatoes and salt herring
Saturday: Barley groats with milk and breadrolls
Evening meals were rye bread soaked in beer (Warmbier), rice, rice flour or oatmeal porridge, or sago cooked in beer
These meals were based on a dietary established in 1826 by the manager (earlier called Hofmeister, now titled Ökonom) charged with updating the processes, and the notes he left were fortunately preserved and published in the 750th anniversary Festschrift of the Heilig-Geist-Spital (Kai-Robert Möller/Werner Dutz: 750 Jahre Hospital zum Heiligen Geist mit Oberalten-Stift und Marien-Magdalenen-Kloster, Hamburg 1977). He recorded:
The daily meals of the Hospital in winter consist of alternately fresh and smoked oxmeat on Sundays, served in meat soup with rice and vegetables. On the weekends, inmates receive only starters (Vorspeisen) and vegetables, except on Wednesdays when meat soup with white bread, fresh oxmeat, and vegetables are served.
Twice a week, the Vorspeise consist of short green cabbage as long as this can be had, oat and buckwheat porridge in milk, potato soup, barley soup, and yellow and green pea soup.
The vegetables consist of grey peas, white beans, lentils, green cabbage, flour dumplings with plums or syrup sauce, and twice a week potatoes, white cabbage, and carrots. Every Saturday, alternating, rice or barley in milk and one Schillings-Rundstück (white breadroll) each and no vegetables. In the evening from Michaelmas to Easter, rye bread Warmbier.
In summer, inmates receive alternatingly fresh oxmeat or smoked ham or bacon on Sundays – ¼ pound each – and of vegetables, May beets, shelled peas with carrots, broad beans and carrots, Turkish beans, or Turkish peas.
On weekdays, aside from short brown cabbage, they receive the same Vorspeise as in winter, but also once or twice a summer cherry soup, blueberry soup with white bread, buttermilk with rusks (Zwieback), Sternkringel (a baked confection), and beer, and Kalte Schale (a sweetened beer or wine porridge) with Zwieback as a Vorspeise.
The vegetables are also the same as in winter, except that they receive the above summer vegetables on Sundays and once a week.
Once a year, they are also served fish such as cod, haddock, soles, or whitebait as well as, as of recent years, each inmate being given 1 pound of strawberries with milk and sugar once or twice every summer.
(…)
Weekly issues at the Hospital
Bread issue
Weekly, on Tuesdays, rye bread is baked of the grain the peasants (Landleute) of the Hospital’s lands are obligated to provide as land rents and tax (Grund- und Landhauer). But if the Gentlemen Supervisors (Herren Oberalten) have determined the rent to be paid in money, the grain is purchased by the senior Gentleman Supervisor. The house servant prepares the dough and weighs it out, and women inmates determined by rota shape the loaves which are marked with the sign of the Hospital and carried to the baker living nearby by four men who pick them up again in the afternoon. They are distributed to the inmates the following morning. Each baking requires c. 5 Scheffel of flour, with the baker to recieve wages of 1 Mark 8 Schilling per Scheffel. Each loaf weighs seven pounds. Those inmates who do not wish to receive a loaf of this weight will receive a smaller one of three and a half pounds and a Klöben of white bread worth two Schilling.
Note: One of the men inmates is to assist in preparing the dough, for which he receives 4 Schilling from the Hospital. But now that the bakery is farther away, 8 Schilling.
Butter issue
Every 14 days, each inmate is to receive 1 pound of butter. The reader (Vorleser) and the senior house servant receive 2 pounds and every women caring for the sick (Krankenfrauen) 1 ½ pounds each. All house servants also receive 2 pounds.
Cheese issue
Every 14 days, on Fridays, each hospital inmate as well as the reader and the women caring for the sick are to receive ½ pound of cheese while the house servants receive 1 pound.
Beer issue
Every day after the main meal, a Maß of good beer bough at ten Mark per tun is issued …. In addition, a tun of thin beer is kept in the cellar which is bought at 6 Mark per tun. Of this, anyone may drink to sufficiency all days.
(…)
We can see here that though the diet has become modernised, it is not appreciably more generous than it the 1547 ordinance stipulated. As ever, we need to keep in mind that what was written down and what was served could well be different things, but I think we can meaningfully compare lists to lists as statements of intent.
1826 was not a good time for Hamburg. The city was still recovering from the damage the Napoleonic Wars had inflicted. In recent memory, it had been conquered, its treasury confiscated, its independence ended, had gone through siege and starvation, the complete collapse of its maritime trade, the famine of 1816/17, and the antisemitic Hep-Hep riots. It is not surprise that provision for charitable causes was limited. Still, this dietary is not unreasonably stingy and a good deal better than what, by contemporary evidence, many working-class families ate.
Nonetheless, it represents marked step down from the issue in 1547 in many respects, and this highlights an important, though often overlooked historical development: The diet of working-class Europeans got progressively worse through the Early Modern period especially with regard to their access to animal protein. We can trace this in the written record, but also in historical measures of physical size which reaches its lowest point at the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
We see the impact of this clearly. While the 1547 ordinance provides for meat on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, fish on Wednesdays and Fridays, and cheese on Mondays and Saturdays, the 1826 issue is limited to meat on Sunday and Wednesday and fish on Friday while cheese is issued only once every fortnight. The variety also seems reduced, with the dried cod (rotschaer) off the menu and only herring left. We cannot make the same comparison for meat since the 1547 list does not specify much, but it seems more than likely it was at least not improved. The alternating use of fresh and preserved meat stipulated in 1826 was likely similar in 1547, but there is no more mention of sausages, or tripe. We do not know how frequently bacon or ham were issued in 1547. Neither can we compare portion sizes with the documents that survive. The meat dishes in 1547 were probably not as opulent as the plan conjures up – it lists alternatives, not foods served together – but we know from other records that meat portions at the time were often substantial, up to 400 grammes per person. The few instances we have from the Heilig-Geist-Spital do not differ from what we find elsewhere. The quarter pound given in 1826 is at the very low end of these datasets, though it is possible this figure refers to muscle meat only while earlier portions included bone and sinew in the equation.
What has not changed is the great reliance on porridgelike dishes, Brei or Mus and Warmbier. The latter, a dish of bread soaked or cooked in hot beer, remained a common breakfast or supper dish in North Germany into the twentieth century and is still met in its more refined form of Bierkaltschale in a number of midcentury cookbooks. Among the cereals, oatmeal and buckwheat remain staples, though they are joined by rice and sago. Both would have been available in Hamburg, a major port city, relatively inexpensively, so they are not indulgences. By contrast, in the 1547 dietary, rice represented a festive luxury. The same is true for the ‘syrup’ sauce made with a byproduct of sugar refining. The syrup referred to here is a kind of light molasses that could be bought cheaply in Hamburg since the city still had a large sugar refining industry. This, too, marks a change in dietary habits, the rise of affordable sugar as a mass-market item which has now reached even the poor.
The most salient innovation is potatoes. They are served on three days; as potato soup on Monday, and as boiled potatoes on Tuesday and Friday, interestingly in both cases along with porridge. By early nineteenth-century lights, boiled potatoes constituted a meal in themselves, ideally served with some kind of seasoning. The record does not show whether weekly rations of salt, butter, or bacon were given out, but these along with a bread issue were customary in similar institutions and could have accompanied the potatoes and porridge.
A second notable development is the prevalence of soup. This is served on three days; meat soup on Sunday and Wednesday, and presumably meatless potato soup on Monday. This again suggests that there was a regular bread issue since soup on its own would not have made a sufficient meal by contemporary standards.
The record of the vegetables served with the meals is far more detailed in 1826 than in 1547. The dishes served in November of 1827, a time of little fresh produce and no holidays brightening up the weeks with occasions for extra rations, are in keeping with the plan. Things became more varied and appetising in summer. We should keep in mind, though, that the issues of fresh vegetables and fruit recorded meticulously need not have been a new thing. We may be looking at the upper-class fashion for horticulture filtering down to the lower classes by the 19th century. Hamburg, surrounded by some of the most productive market gardening landscapes in Europe, would be well placed for this. Alternatively, fresh produce may always have been appreciated, but not written down.
A notable luxury is white bread on Wednesday and the breadrolls on Saturday. This was not the only bread issued – inmates received seven pounds of rye bread weekly – but an especially fine type different from the usual coarser kind. This, too, is a tradition continued from 1547, though the issue has moved from Friday to Saturday.
On the whole, the food provided at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution is somewhat reduced from what the same institution provided at the time of the Reformation. This is something we see in other places as well, and it is related to a number of developments coming together.
First, there was economic pressure; The European population kept growing and their food supply did not keep pace. Importing foods from other parts of the world was difficult and expensive. At the same time, the number of poor people grew faster than the resources of what social safety net there was, meaning less relief could be provided as more people needed it. Thomas Malthus provided the most popular explanation for this quandary. He argued that populations always grew faster than the available food supply, making pauperisation inevitable unless the number of poor people was artificially reduced. Many charity schemes at the time thus tried to discourage the poor from having children.
Secondly, there was a change in attitudes towards poverty. The poor were increasingly less seen as unfortunate and deserving of charity. As the traditional Christian view of poverty as the inescapable fate of most of humanity and a challenge to the faithful diminished, new economic theories suggested that it was, in fact, the result of an improvident lifestyle, laziness, indiscipline, or some other defect of character. Charitable institutions were accordingly designed to incentivise the poor to work by making relief as unpleasant as possible. The Heilig-Geist-Spital primarily catered to the elderly who were not expected to work, so these were by contemporary standards “deserving poor”, which explains why, despite every constraint, these meal plans speak of care for the inmates’ comfort and pleasure.
The records of 1826 also include a calendar of festive occasions with specific meals which I hope to present in the next post. Some of the dishes can be reconstructed with greater confidence using one of my favourite resources, the 1830 Hamburgisches Koch-Buch, and perhaps one day I will find some people interested in reproducing such a meal. But for today, this must be it.