Pie and mash
Eating out in the East End these days is likely to mean pizza, a kebab, a Chinese or – most likely of all – a curry.
It’s long been a fact of London cuisine that the more far-flung its origins, the more likely we are to swallow it. But a few hundred years ago, cockneys were more likely to be eating stewed pears, curds and whey, and even swans or turtles.
A fascinating exhibition at the Museum of London, called London Eats Out, focuses on 500 years of eating out in the capital. And the East End – the gateway through which the new foods first hit the country – plays a major role.
Back in 1544, sugar was still a novel and prized deli-cacy. It was imported from Morocco but, largely, prepared in the sugar refineries just to the east of the City in Spitalfields. Banqueting tables would be decorated with sugar sculptures.
Troops of turkeys
The 1600s saw the rise in popularity of that Christmas staple, the turkey. They were walked in their thousands
from Norfolk to the East End, where they were slaughtered.
Forward to the 1680s, and Spitalfields began to be
populated by the Huguenots, bringing French cuisine and Dutch biscuits among other delicacies.
A stranger import was turtle. East End taverns would keep them alive in tanks in the
cellar, before the unfortunate creatures became that great delicacy – turtle soup. And, on ‘Fish Days’ in the 16th century, East Enders would feast on porpoise, dolphin and seal.
In 1815, the first restaurant guide to London appeared, with 464 entries. Interestingly, although Southwark had as long a history as a City overspill as the East End, there was barely a south London entry
in Epicure’s Almanac. The East End, though, boasted dozens, sprinkled along the Thames from Wapping, through Limehouse and all the way to Blackwall.
And if you thought the Indian restaurant only made an appearance in the 1960s, think again. The first Indian-run eating place in London opened in 1809, at 34 George Street. The Hindostanee Coffee-House was set up by ex-Indian Army man, Dean Mahomet. Today, there are more than 600 Indian restaurants in the capital.
Convenience food made a surprisingly early debut. The first mechanical vending machine, ‘the curious mathematical fountain’, was set up in the Black Horse Tavern, Smithfield at the end of the 17th century. It dispensed tea, coffee, whisky, raspberry and cherry brandy, and punch.
Another lunchtime snack, the sandwich, was just as popular in the 1800s as it is today. Back then, though, rather than a Tupperware box, workers would pick up their sarnie wrapped in a cabbage leaf to keep it fresh.
And it was in 1842 that
East Enders got their first
taste of a new delicacy,
pineapple, sold in slices on the streets of Spitalfields for a penny a time.
Poor man’s oyster
For hundreds of years, East Enders would buy much of their food on the streets, not being able to afford a stove of their own. Hot puddings and pies were popular in the 1700s, and jellied eels, raw and boiled oysters began to make an appearance – oysters then being poor man’s food. By the 20th century, eels had moved indoors, and by World War II there were 100 eel-and-pie shops in London.
Fish and chip shops have been around for hundreds of years, but reached their peak in the early 19th century, and in 1840 Bishopsgate had more than any other area of London.
Food mixed with politics
in the early 1900s, with the East London Federation of Suffragettes’ Cost Price Restaurant at 440 Old Ford Road, allowing poor mothers with young children a cooked meal at lunchtime and hot soup in the evening. And in 1917, Lady Rhondda opened the first Communal Kitchen in Poplar, serving 600 diners a day.
The early 1900s were, of course, the heyday of the Jewish East End. As well as Blooms, there was the prestigious Stern’s Hotel in Aldgate, run by the famed Sam Stern. A menu from the 1940s makes fascinating reading, with pickled herring for 6d (2.5p), beer for the same and a mixed grill for 2/3 (13p).
And the exhibition features a poignant image of a lost aspect of Limehouse – the old Chinatown swept away in the 1920s amid hysteria about the ‘Yellow Peril’. Waiters stand, in a fading photograph, at the door of Old Friends Rest-aurant, in the aptly named Mandarin Street, E14. The Chinese restaurants did a roaring trade to the sailors coming off Limehouse ships, the locals were enticed in with the promise of ‘knives and forks instead of chopsticks’.
London Eats Out is at the Museum of London, London Wall, EC2, until 27 February.