eastlondonhistory.com

These days, keeping your fruit, veg and meat fresh is easy – you just pop it in the fridge or freezer.
As a result, the time-honoured culinary arts of bottling, curing, pickling and salting are performed mainly as a treat for the tastebuds, rather than from hygienic – or economic – necessity.
Go back 400 years though, and things were very different. Keeping the abundant spring and autumn harvests fresh to see people through the long, cold months of winter was a matter of life and death, and throwing food away was a costly luxury.
It was to these problems that wealthy Bethnal Green landowner Sir Hugh Platt turned his considerable intellect in the late 1500s.
The son of a successful Hertfordshire brewer, Hugh was also a bright lad, and studied at Cambridge University before coming down to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Blessed with an inventive and eccentric streak, Hugh never came to the bar. Instead, he bought a fine country house, Bishops Hall in Bethnal Green, and set about his studies of the cultivation of new and unusual plant varieties.
It was the time of Elizabeth I and England’s emergence as a naval and imperial power. Adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake were coming back from the new colonies with exotic crops such as tobacco and potatoes and Sir Hugh eagerly set about raising these from his East End soil. He also made wine grown from his own vineyards.
But if the new foods the Navy was bringing back were a source of excitement to Sir Hugh, the problem of keeping that same Navy fed sparked his scientific imagination to life.
The problem was that ships had never before sailed so far from land, fresh food and clean water. Scurvy and rotten grub were an intractable problem.
In the course of his experiments, Hugh discovered that keeping freshly picked fruit in a vacuum would prolong its life – and so was born the bottling of fruit. He also found that boiling beef in brine would stop the process of decay.

One of his recipes read as follows: “To preserve cowcumbers all the yeere: Take a gallon of faire water and a bottle of verjuice, and a pint of bay salt, and a handful of greene fennel or Dill; boile it a little, and when it is cold put it into a barrel, and then put your cowcumbers into that pickle, and you shall keep all the yeere.”
Drake’s saviour
Sir Francis Drake, busy with the fitting out of his ship, the Defiance, broke off from his work at Wapping to see Sir Hugh’s work at Bethnal Green.
The adventurer was so impressed that he took quantities of Platt’s salted meats and bottled fruits on his voyage. He also took Sir Hugh’s advice on keeping water fresh – though the addition of powdered brimstone, or sulphur – might not be swallowed quite so easily by today’s sailors.
Platt also addressed the health problems that the new foodstuffs were causing. Rich Londoners of the late 1500s were already developing smoker’s coughs and rotten teeth from eating too much sugar – Queen Elizabeth’s teeth were black from advanced decay according to contemporary reports.
Common remedies included rubbing ashes of rosemary or powdered alabaster over the teeth. More drastically, a barber would scrape the teeth, then apply aqua fortis (nitric acid) to bleach them white.
Sir Hugh, who had now also produced his beauty book, Delights for Ladies (1602), warned that after a few of these treatments “a lady may be forced to borrow a ranke of teeth to eate her dinner, unless her gums do help her the better”. The book became a 17th century best-seller.
He was also ahead of his time in developing an early turkish bath. In his “delicate stove to sweat in”, a gentlewoman could “sit or stand in the steam for two hours or more, her head helde above the tubbe”.
Sir Hugh’s authority and knowledge was growing. He drew up plans for English agriculture, advocating crop rotation and the use of artificial fertilisers.
For his pains, he was knighted in 1605, by James I, for his services as an inventor.