Marlow Ancestors: Death By Eel- Food in 1700s Marlow

Breakfast for people of all classes seems to have been light in the 1700s, consisting largely of a hot drink and some form of bread or muffin. For agricultural labourers work might start well before breakfast but a break to eat it later on was included in their working day. Bread would be consumed at all other meals by poorer Marlovians, sometimes being in fact the only food that passed their lips all day. Even in the 1800s reports occur of our poorest townspeople dying of what was described delicately as "want", malnutrition in other words.

Lunch was usually a cold dish and fairly simple for those from all backgrounds. Wealthier ladies who were going to sit down to a formal dinner in the evening quietly filled themselves up at lunch so as to display a fashionably dainty appetite later in the day. They would often take no more than a few mouthfuls of each dish offered at their dinner.

Impressive silver tableware was a must have status symbol on the dinner table in the 1700s. The less well off might have a single silver spoon or a few of them bought primarily as investment pieces and brought out only to impress certain guests or for special family occasions. Interestingly though, and for unknown reasons, Marlow people of the era don't single out cutlery as gifts in their wills nearly as often as do their contemporaries in Kent, East Sussex or London whose wills I have read in great numbers for my own family history research.

Two examples of Marlovians who did leave cutlery gifts are Elizabeth Lambe who left a silver spoon to her brother in law when she wrote her will in 1728 (proved 1731. Available on the blog here) and Ann Wankford who left six crested spoons each to her sons upon her death in 1787 (will here) to remind them that "they once had two friends and a deserted mother". There is obviously an interesting untold story there!

John Plater in his 1737 will did not mention cutlery but left his "beloved wife" their best kettle, and two porridge pots as well as pewter items.

Inns in Marlow as elsewhere would have offered meals to their guests. Letters and memoirs of 1700s traveller's in England as a whole suggest significant differences in quality between establishments and in general a limited number of available dishes at inns. However if you gave the landlord fish you had caught (perhaps in Marlow in the Thames) or meat you had bought they would generally be willing to cook it for you and would sometimes consent to cook other particular dishes upon request if the necessary ingredients could be procured locally. Inns were some of the most common places for cock fights to take place. The Three Tuns and the Lower Crown both in Marlow High Street were two places known to have hosted this "sport" in the 1700s. Birds killed in such fights were often sold to the meat trade -fighting birds were large- but may also have found their way onto the table at the inn. The combs on top of the cockerel's heads were eaten as well as the rest of the flesh in the 1700s.

In 1766 a diner at a public house in Marlow died in agony after attempting to consume five pounds in weight of eels along with five pounds in weight of bread and five quarts of beer in one meal. Presumably this was for a wager. Eels at the time were plentiful in the Thames at Marlow as were lampreys though the latter were mostly collected for export to the lamprey loving Dutch.

I have found reference to only one fishmonger in 1700s Marlow. These never seem abundant amongst any town's traders. But the hapless diner of 1766 could have bought his mammoth dinner of eels straight from the man who trapped them just as easily.

Eighteen butchers have been identified by us by name in Great Marlow and two in Little Marlow. Of the Great Marlow ones where a location is known for their shop all are in the High Street or Market Square but it would be surprising if there were not any in either Spittal Street, Chapel Street or West Street given that just after our era there were multiple butchers in these streets and butchers' shops are the sort of premises that often display a long continuity of use. The English were of course renowned for their love of beef. No poulterers have been identified by me as operating in 1700s Marlow. Some poultry would have been bought directly from the farms in which it was raised. Hannah Glasse in her popular book (pub.1748, with later updated editions) as well as other cookbooks from that century contain recipes using larks and snipes as well as more familiar birds such as turkeys, geese and chickens. Any type of meat or poultry in the 1700s was typically either roasted (often on a spit), boiled or baked in a pie or "pudding" though some recipes for frying, stewing and grilling meats do exist from this period. Lamb, chickens or beef and a few other meats might be stuffed before cooking. Most meats were served with a sauce. Poultry sauces tended to be mushroom or celery based. Nothing was wasted from an animal which leads to many a modern reading going green at the gills when they read the cooking literature of the day. It is interesting to note that it couldn't only be for reasons of economy that Hannah Glasse's readers tucked into stuffed cow udders or boiled lamb heads. She was writing specifically for families who employed servants to prepare their meals, not the poorest families where every penny spent counted. If Hannah's Marlow readers went and ordered an udder from their butcher it was because they saw it as a tasty treat, not because that was all they could afford.

The 1700s hundreds trade directory (here) which I have compiled lists fourteen bakers for Marlow and one for Little Marlow across the century. This is likely that this is fact just the top of the iceberg. It needs to be remembered that many people had no oven in their home in this time period. It was normal practice for bakers to allow people to bring in pies and other foods to be baked in their bread ovens once the day's bread baking was over. There was a small fee for this. Larger homes might still have separate bakehouses on their property for the family baking. Wheat for bread was grown locally and reaped in July and August.

Richard Aveling was a grocer with a shop in Marlow by 1790, most likely in the High Street where his descendants had a similar shop (see my post here). George Hood was also almost certainly in the High Street and William Ells definitely was. William Baker occupied in 1797 a grocery shop in Chapel Street that had at that date been used in that line for a hundred years. Those that came before William in those premises are as yet uncertain. Richard Oxlade was probably in St Peter's Street as other Oxlades had a grocer's business there a little after this era. There are about another half dozen Marlow grocers present at some point in the 1700s whose precise location isn't known. In Little Marlow a Christopher Clifft had a grocery shop from at least 1787 to at least 1792. No doubt there were many other similar premises in Marlow but we just don't know the names of their proprietors.

The trade directory has three Marlow cheesemongers, one of whom was also a grocer as would become the norm in the 1800s. English Heritage reports that the most popular cheese in the 1700s was Cheshire cheese with Stilton being on the rise and Cheddar also quite widely available.

There are at least 12 men known to have maintained market gardens in Marlow. Some, even much, of their produce may have gone to the lucrative London market as well as serving the locals here. The West Street area of Marlow was clearly the epicentre of these growers. I have found four fruiterers. In this era and for quite some time later fruit sellers were usually businesses distinct from greengrocers. The latter quite often seem to have had no shop but sold from barrows, baskets and stalls. It is also by no means certain that the 1700s fruiterers mentioned maintained actual shop premises. There was a commetcial cherry orchard off Oxford Road for at least a while in the early 1700s and one behind some properties at the town end of Dean Street. It is highly probable that there were more around Little Marlow. Orchards of an unspecified nature, probably mixed, went with houses in Chapel Street and the High Street. Free fruit could be gathered in the form of wild blackberries, plums, strawberries and apples. Wild mushrooms, sweet violets, nettle tops, dandelions (which were commonly grown in gardens too) garlic mustard, watercress from local streams and young hawthorn leaves were other food sources from the countryside. The last time I have heard of Marlow people snacking on hawthorn leaves in spring was just before World War Two. My mother in Kent ate them on the way to school later still! The common name for these leaves was "bread and cheese", a name that goes back to at least Tudor times. Hawthorn was planted in most hedgerows historically because it's thorns helped deter both trespassers and straying animals. Elder trees spread themselves readily but farmers uprooted them assiduously from hedgerows as they were considered to make weak, gappy barriers. Therefore the availability of elderflowers and elderberries was likely actually less in the 1700s countryside than today.

Nettles in the 1700s were often used in home remedies for urinary tract or feverish ailments. The edible seeds and roots as well as the leaves were used. The stinging hairs are not a problem when the leaves are cooked.

While the abundant local beechnuts have kernels which are edible when cooked I have not come across any reference to Marlovians making use of them. There were abundant walnut trees in and around the town in the 1800s but whether that was largely the result of planting to feed the Victorian obsession with pickled walnuts, walnut ketchup and the like isn't known to me. No doubt there were at least some walnuts plus some hazels for 1700s foragers.

Foraging could, as now, be a risky business The Royal Society of the era recorded numerous instances of the accidental poisoning of people in England and Wales after toxic plants were mistaken for edible ones. It is interesting to note that numerous of the victims were those gathering plants in an unfamiliar place. Inherited local knowledge was key to keeping safe. If any Marlovians did consume something they shouldn't have done they would have been fed large quantities of oil on its own or mixed with other liquids to make them vomit and if they could afford to pay someone to do it, have been bled too.

If you could you of course grew your own produce. A home orchard was a status symbol. When Marlow Place was up to let in 1773 it was apparently deemed more important for the agents advertising the property to tell prospective tenants that the house came with gardens planted with choice fruit trees than tell them how many bedrooms that it had. Many other descriptions of upmarket houses for sale or rent in 1700s Marlow stressed how desirable the property was because of the choice fruit trees that came with it.

Larger houses in Marlow had walled kitchen gardens for tender fruits as well as vegetables and herbs. Covered "hot beds" for growing fruits such as melons that could not otherwise survive in England (the heat coming from rotting manure) were a must in the kitchen garden if space allowed. Building and maintaining these along with the use of the similar early ripening beds or greenhouses was highly skilled. If your gardener had mastered the art, you kept him.

Produce seeds were purchased from seedsman. Early in the 1700s if not later too various London publicans were agents for major seedsman such as Edward Fuller as a sideline to their brewing. Bringing home to Marlow some seeds purchased from them while in the city on a business or social trip would have been easy. Edward Fuller's seed catalogue for 1700 includes some unexpected choices- kohl rabi as "Coli Rapi", "prickly spinage", "Arabian lettuce" and both red and orange carrots.

Plant foods whether homegrown or wild gathered were not necessarily used in ways we would recognize today. Lettuce and cucumber often pop up in cooked dishes. Candied cucumber went into cakes. Hops might be grown so that their tops could be gathered and eaten not just because the householder wanted to brew their own beer. A "salad" consisted sometimes of raw ingredients and at other times boiled leaves and stalks. Turnip stalks and leaves were both esteemed salad ingredients. The difficulty of ripening apricots meant they were often used in pies while still green.

Overall the most popular vegetables seemed to have been peas and onions. Amongst fruit apples reigned supreme in 1700s English home cooking.

International recipes were already making their presence felt in cookbooks. Hannah Glasse gives a recipe for Indian Curry and for a "Pellow", or a pilau as we would call it. Other recipes in her book claimed to be French, Italian or Dutch.

Desserts were not a common indulgence for the poor but wealthier people had them as a matter of routine. Hannah Glasse has 12 recipes for sweet fritters in her cookery book, as well as instructions on how to make pies, pancakes, rice puddings, custards, flummeries and other treats. A boiled cowslip pudding using this lovely scented wildflower was one of her more unusual suggestions. Making cowslip wine was traditional in the spring wherever they grew. Marlow does not seem to have been a place where cowslips grew in very significant numbers but some plants will have existed locally.

The great Victorian favourites seed cake (made with caraway seeds) and gingerbread were every bit as popular back in the 1700s.

Cooks in the 1700s pickled many foods as a means of preservation - fish /other seafood, fruit, vegetables, nasturtium buds (as a caper substitute) and green walnuts. Some vegetables such as parsnips were left in the ground during the winter as the best way of keeping them and as a way of improving flavour. Otherwise placing vegetables in boxes of sand kept them through to January or February in many cases. Onions and garlic bulbs were tied up and hung from roof beams. Herbs were dried in dark places for use all year round. For the rich with sufficient growing space there was no difficulty in providing fresh vegetables, salad leaves and herbs for themselves even in the depths of winter. Poorer Marlovians may have had no garden at all so could only forage as described above. One of the reasons kitchen gardens were walled was to keep out the hungry. With far fewer sugary treats available ripe summer fruits were looked forward to by children with huge relish. Fruit stealing by them if crops were abundant might be tolerated but not necessarily so.

The flavours of fruit were preserved for the winter by making fruit into syrups. Scottish cook Hannah MacIver's book published in the 1780s contains a rather strange syrup selection to modern eyes. Syrup of turnips anyone? No? How about syrup of maidenhair fern?

Utensils and vessels for cooking up these delights and more would have been largely manufactured locally by the town's ironmongers. Brass kettles (expensive and not sometimes refereeing to a lidded cooking vessel for say fish rather than a water boiling device) and pans were made at the brass mills at Temple by 1725 according to Daniel Defoe. Should you accidentally drop an iron cooking pot on the floor your local blacksmith could do the repair as well as your ironmonger. Poorer people probably whittled their own spoons and carved their own bowls from local wood if needed.

John Duck in 1785 will left his loyal maidservant Mary much of his kitchen equipment giving us a glimpse into the set up of a reasonably well to do Marlow home late in the 1700s- two different tables, a "matted" (rush seated?) chair, a stove, a trivet, the colander, 2 copper saucepans and a tin one, a porridge pot, a tea chest and tea kettle, 6 tea spoons and two tablespoons (not mentioned as being silver), 5 cups and saucers, all his earthenware plates, and a pot kept in the kitchen cupboard. You and I might scratch our head at being left a trivet or a colander but with all kitchen items being hand made they were proportionately much more expensive than they are today and likely a genuinely appreciated part of her inheritance.

By the way porridge was not by any means primarily a breakfast dish in this era. In fact is was often a dinner and sometimes even a dessert such as in the earlier 1700s "plum porridge" served at Christmas.

Researched and written by Charlotte Day.

Marlow Ancestors

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Monday, July 21, 2025

Death By Eel- Food in 1700s Marlow

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