Don't take that tea! Drinks in 1700s Marlow

 This is a companion piece to my Food in 1700s Marlow

The fact that a Marlow house had a well of its own was a fact worth advertising to potential buyers and tenants as the norm for Marlovian households was to share wells with multiple others. They would continue to do so even in the 1800s. The Thames was the only water access option for some. While their friends would sympathise with anyone in this situation this wasn't because they had to use river water as such- for some recipes it was thought superior- but because fetching it involved more of an effort. Rainwater was gathered but not thought suitable for all purposes.

A thirsty traveller might take a few gulps of cool water from a stream (such as those at nearby Bisham) to slake their thirst but plain water was otherwise far from bring a normal drink in the 1700s. What Marlovians wanted their water for, apart from the obvious washing and cooking usages, was for the making of either hot drinks or alcohol. 

Tea came exclusively from China at the time. It was drunk from a dish early in the century and from a cup later on. It could be bought either from the shops of specialist tea dealers, of which we have found none recorded in 1700s Marlow, or from grocers of which there were definitely plenty in the town.

Green tea including the worryingly named "gunpowder tree" was drunk as well as black tea.

Brass "kettles' were being manufactured at Temple by 1725. The term referred to multiple articles however not just the one we think of as for boiling water. Covered vessels for cooking certain foods such as fish were also "kettles" so it is not certain that tea kettles specifically were being produced there. Most middle income houses had multiple kettles for boiling water as well as cooking kettles. All of these were expensive items so could be left as individual gifts in wills. John Plater of Marlow in his 1737 will left his best kettle to his wife amongst other items. John Duck specifies the tea kettle that he wants to leave his servant is a tea kettle in the 1780s.

The increased use of tea improved recipe books (which you could have sourced from John Howe in Marlow High Street in the 1780s to name one known bookseller of the time). Writers could direct the home cook to add a teaspoon of this or a tea cup of that knowing that most households had those items to hand. Recipe instructions could still be bewilderingly imprecise to modern eyes however with plenty of recipes still containing directions to add simply "not too much" of one ingredient or "a good amount" of another one.

Brian Cowan in his book the Social Life Of Coffee writes that at the start of the century coffee sales far outstripped those of tea but increasingly lower prices for the latter saw it soon overtake it's rival. He also says that by the end of the century many working class families found themselves also able to afford some coffee as well as tea. No coffee house is known in Marlow before the 1800s though it would not be a tremendous suprise to find that there was one here. We know that Marlow men often visited London in the course of their business and there they could not have escaped the pull of the coffee house. The famous Garraways coffee tavern in London hosted the auction of a farm and property in Medmenham owned by William Clayton of Harleyford in 1786.

Green tea including the worryingly named "gunpowder tree" was drunk as well as black tea.

Brass kettles were being manufactured at Temple by 1725. The term referred to multiple articles however not just the one we think of as for boiling water. Covered vessels for cooking certain foods such as fish were also "kettles". Most middle income houses had multiple kettles for boiling water as well as cooking kettles. All of these were expensive items so could be left as individual gifts in wills. John Plater of Marlow in his 1737 will left his best kettle to his wife amongst other items. John Duck specifies the tea kettle that he wants to leave his servant is a tea kettle in the 1780s.

The increased use of tea improved recipe books (which you could have sourced from John Howe in Marlow High Street in the 1780s to name one known bookseller of the time). Writers could direct the home cook to add a teaspoon of this or a tea cup of that knowing that most households had those items to hand. Recipe instructions could still be bewilderingly imprecise to modern eyes however with plenty of recipes still containing directions to add simply "not too much" of one ingredient or "a good amount" of another one.

Coffee served in such premises is thought to have been made to a much lower strength than coffee today. The titles "coffee shop" or "coffee tavern" are a bit misleading. Other hot drinks and sometimes alcohol were also on the menu.

For those who found even weak coffee too much for their constitution a herbal equivalent marketed as "English Coffee" made from an unspecified mix of native plant leaves, bark and roots (probably including chicory and dandelion) could be procured for home use by the late 1700s. This was advertised in the 1780s in the Oxford Journal newspaper which was one of the only Marlow-covering newspapers available at the time and widely read in this town. Supporters of English Coffee had something of an evangelical zeal when promoting its properties. Mr J Lee of London published a treatise extolling it's virtues and trashing its rival beverages. Lee tells us that the regular drinking of foreign, as in true, coffee, rendered many Turks blind and paralyzed by the age of 40 and destroyed the stomachs of the French so that they became unable to gain nourishment from their food. One French nobleman was allegedly so enfeebled by drinking coffee he could no longer walk across a room before his wise physician banned him from coffee and thus reinvigorated him. Tea was singled out for even harsher criticism with Mr Lee quoting from the Commons speech of William Young in which it was  stated that "if the poorer sort of people made tea their constant food, there would be but few poor in the land in a very short time as nothing could so effectively shorten their days as that perniciously deadly herb tea". Young thought drinking tea as dangerous as drinking gin, which given the moral panic over gin drinking in the 1700s was saying quite something. Nervous disorders were quite unknown in England prior to the introduction of tea the pamphlet thundered. Now thanks to it people were becoming so enfeebled and nervous they could not work and were slowly dying from this slow acting poison. To buy English Coffee you had to visit a single supplier near St Paul's in London but the long term advertisement of the product in the Oxford local press suggests that this was a worthwhile expense for the manufacturer and that people were being drawn in by these ads and coming to London from the local area to buy it. The stagecoach from Marlow's Crown dropped you in Fleet Street within walking distance (providing you were not incapable of walking thanks to your coffee drinking that is) of St Paul's so if any of our townsfolk felt the urge to buy English Coffee, they could.

Hot chocolate was a luxury drink. It was rather different from our modern hot chocolates as it was usually made with the addition of beaten eggs. Often other thickeners such as ground almonds or pistachios were also included. These thickeners were added in such quantities that their hot chocolate sounds more like a thick sludge than a drink. You wonder how many supposedly dainty 1700s ladies accidently greeted their visitors with a "chocolate moustache"! And it was ladies that were characterized as particularly fond of the beverage. It was always drank spiced. Pepper and cinnamon formed the most common spice combination but some recipes added cardamon or ginger instead of the pepper.

The rich might drink chocolate at any time of day, including at breakfast. It was drunk from special chocolate cups and prepared in a dedicated chocolate pot. Before pouring out the mixture was whipped up in a chocolate mill. 

Home cooks usually prepared the drinks from "cocoa nuts" but ground cocoa was also available.

Hannah Glasse in her 1748 best selling cookbook offered a recipe for fake hot chocolate which I suspect fooled nobody. It was made from sweetened milk thickened with beaten eggs and flavoured with cinnamon. Probably quite nice but I don't think she and I would have been friends for very long if she served that up to me when I was expecting chocolate.

The desire to fake it came from the high cost of the product. A pound in weight of ground cocoa cost more than an agricultural labourers weekly wage. That was before you added the necessary expensive spices to it. 

Chocolate could be bought in the early 1790s from grocer come soap boiler Mr Rackshaw in Henley Market Place and no doubt from several retailers in Marlow itself too. Marlovians could also write directly to London cocoa suppliers to have the nuts sent directly to their homes.

Cow's milk as a stand alone beverage was seen as suitable for infants and invalids only. Almond milk was made in the 1700s as a beverage for the delicately stomached and was also used in cooking. The most common drink recommended for the sick was "beef tea" which was the strained water that beef had been boiled in. It's use as a home remedy for the weak would remain almost universal for more than a century after this era.

Lemonade was a still drink rather than a fizzy one in the 1700s. Charlotte Mason in her The Ladies Companion of 1777 offers up two recipes for it. Both included oranges as well as lemons. I've tried one of the recipes and it is delicious! 

The lemonade recipes contain sugar but hot drinks by no means necessarily did in the 1700s. The poor could not have afforded to use it and guides to hot beverage preparation, especially hot chocolate, aimed at the wealthier do not always suggest sweetening them. All sugar in this period came from the West Indies and was produced by slave labour.

For those that wished for a stronger beverage, larger Marlow houses were sometimes advertised as having their own detached brew houses. Borlase school trustees decided to build a "new" brewhouse to provide for the pupils at the northern end of the West Street schoolhouse in 1735. It was also still common for public houses and inns to brew ale and beer on their premises rather than to buy from a brewery. Mary Phillips later called Mary Dark through her second marriage, landlady at the Lower Crown in the High Street, was one such independent brewer. Her brewhouse was to the rear of inn.

Traces of the pubs and inns that existed in early 1700s Marlow are thin on the ground and you have to be vary wary of making the mistake of presuming that any pub is an old just because it occupies an old building. The conversion of an older house into a pub occurred all the time historically. We know that a the Crown in Market Square, existed from the dawn of the 1700s as did the Lower Crown aka Crown and Broad Arrow in the High Street, the Black Boy in the former Church Passage and the Three Tuns also in the High Street. An early pub called the Bear in the High Street is not recorded after 1735. Much later a pub of this name was re-established elsewhere in the town.

By the later 1700s much more information is available and we can say that the Ship and the Coach and Horses by those names were then trading in West Street. The Two Brewers in St Peter Street was well established as was the still very small Compleat Angler across the river. The little remembered Bowl and Pin nestled by the river. In Spittal Street the Greyhound existed under it's earlier name of the White Horse by the end of the 1700s. There was  earlier in the 1700s a pub of the same name in West Street. In Chapel Street sat the White Hart (landlords here). It is reasonably probable, though not certain, that the Jolly Maltsters in Dean Street, the Chequers in the High Street and a inn of an unknown name in Chapel Street were all already in existence by the end of the 1700s. 

Pubs in Marlow, especially the two Crowns were used for auctions of both residential and business properties as well as for the meetings of those organising the local road tolls. Tenants often met their landlords or their agents in pubs in order to pay over their rent. The Upper Crown was also the place to pick up sale particulars for any property being sold at auction elsewhere in the area.

Marlow had a brandy merchant in 1781, Henry Crockford, who was also a tallow chandler. Charlotte Mason advised her readers how to flavour purchased brandy with cherries, or more exotically, pineapples. At around the same time as Henry Crockford traded in Marlow, so too did Benjamin Moore as a wine and spirit merchant.

Housewives routinely made up their own wines from elderflowers, raspberries, currants, raisins, gooseberries, cherries, oranges, cowslips and, more unusually, birch sap. If supplies of all of the above failed one recipe book had a recipe for wine of .....turnips.

At well-to-do dinners the ladies remained for 15 minutes with the gentleman before withdrawing to take tea, coffee or chocolate. The men remained together consuming alcohol for a period before joining the ladies. If any 1780s Marlovians were stuck for a toast High Street bookseller John Howe sold a guide to them plus "bacchanalian" songs for rowdier gatherings. You can read more about what John Howe sold in Kathryn's post.

Wethered's Brewery started in the later 1700s (using water from the Thames!). At Little Marlow / Well End there were numerous Roses involved in brewing. When Ralph Rose junior retired from that business in 1773 all of his equipment was sold off. It included a horse powered wheel which would have been used either for grinding malt or pumping liquids. Usually this would be housed in a separate building within the brewing premises.

As well as drinking their beer 1700s people sometimes used a mixture of it and water to stew or boil meat, especially beef. Presumably this was for flavour's sake but it is hard to tell as cookery writers of the era rarely explain their recipes.

Researched and written by Charlotte Day. 

Related posts: Food in Victorian Marlow. More general Marlow history posts can be found listed in this Index. Posts specifically about 1700s people and places in Marlow are indexed here.

©Marlow Ancestors. You are very welcome to use this research for family or local history purposes with credit to this blog.

Some Sources:

London Metropolitan Archives, Record= CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/296/452209LevelItemDate1781 Nov 29 From collection ROYAL AND SUN ALLIANCE INSURANCE GROUP.

Oxford Journal March 1778. British Library Archives via the BNA. Reading Mer ury 26th November 1786 as previous.

Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. Germany: Yale University Press, 2008.

Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy: Which Far Exceeds Any Thing of the Kind Yet Published, Containing ... to which are Added, One Hundred and Fifty New and Useful Receipts, and Also Fifty Receipts for Different Articles of Perfumery, with a Copious Index. United Kingdom: W. Strahan [and 25 others], First published 1748. I used the 1784 edition.

Roe, J. Lee. A Treatise on the English Coffee: With Catalogue of Cures Annexed. By J. Lee Roe. United Kingdom: Printed and published for the proprietor, no. 9, Silver-Street, Fleet-Street., 1778.

Will of John Plater, PCC, proved 1738. Transcribed by me from a copy held at the National Archives, Kew. Will of John Duck 1785, ditto.

The Lady's Companion: Or, an Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex. Containing, Observations for Their Conduct Thro'all Ages and Circumstances of Life: in which are Comprised All Parts of Good Housewifry, Particularly Rules, and Above Two Thousand Different Receipts in Every Kind of Cookery .. The Fourth Edition, with Large Additions. United Kingdom: T. Read, 1743.