Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Victoria: A Greedy Queen

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Warning: There are adult themes, explicit language and references of disordered eating and diets in this episode.Did you know that before Queen Victoria married Albert she was a well-known party-animal, who could easily stay up until 5am, drunk on a concoction of red wine and whiskey?Or that she was notorious for being able to eat seven or eight courses in half an hour, and had a penchant for mutton curries and the freshest fruit?Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets by food historian Dr Annie Gray to discuss Victoria’s very indulgent habits which spilled out into all areas of her life…including the bedroom.You can find Annie’s incredible book, The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria, here.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Annie Coloe.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds and archive clips from Sixty Glorious Years, 1938. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hi, I'm Kate Lister, and I'm just jumping in here to let you know that this episode does feature reference to disordered eating and diets. Potatoes and dumplings are all right, but not too many, and she could do with some good green vegetables too. But even there, there's a smag, as vegetables can so easily be ruined by overcooking.

In the name of this great concourse of your subjects, who are gathered together solely to do honour to their beloved queen. May I congratulate you, not only because you have reigned over us for 60 glorious years, that because you are today more secure on your throne than any ruler in the world. One of the best things about being royalty has got to be the food. And if I was to ask you to think, who was the greediest monarch? Who was a real foodie? You'd be forgiven for thinking of Henry VIII

gnawing on a leg of meat somewhere, but I would take a punt on Queen Victoria who had very, very indulgent tastes which seeped into all parts of her life, including the bedroom. I'm Kate Lister, join me today betwixt the sheets to find out all about Queen Victoria

and her eating habits. What do you look for a man? Oh, money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence. happens of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the budget. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry.

Hi there, I'm Kate Lister and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society. Before we get going, I need to give you a little heads up. There are some adult themes in this episode, so steady yourself. Leave now if you're of a weak disposition. We're going in. Did you know that before Queen Victoria, who stood at just five foot tall, by the way, married Prince Albert, she was a well-known party animal, who would stay up past 5 a.m. regularly drunk on a concoction of red wine and whiskey. Or that she was notorious for being able to eat seven, even eight courses in half an hour. She had a ponchant for mutton curries and loved fresh fruit.

My producers have been back out on the street to find out what people think the Victorians, specifically the rich Victorians were eating. It's a good question. I don't know. Birds, maybe? What's that bird called? A pheasant. Maybe a pheasant.

Other than that, I don't know. God knows. Pigs. Roast pork. The fulm pig with the heads. Potatoes. Okay. So a lot of meat.

But for a bit more clarity on what the Victorians were actually chomping on, I'm joined by food historian Dr Annie Gray, who quite literally wrote the book on Queen Victoria's eating habits, The Greedy Queen Eating with Victoria. Annie takes her work very seriously and tries to only eat the food from the era that she's currently writing about, so she knows Victoria's eating habits inside out, quite literally. Find out how Victoria's suffocatingly strict childhood

impacted her eating when she grew up. And what legacy she's left on our plates today? Thank you so much for joining me today, Annie Gray betwixt the sheet. I am beyond excited to have you here. Well, thank you very much for having me. Do you know, the first time I saw your book, a very greedy queen, was I joined the local leisure centre, the little council run one, and it's got a strange quirk, the one near me,

which is that there's the gym, but it's also the library for the local area. Do you know what? That actually sounds perfect. It does because if you can't be asked to go at spin class, you're just sitting... You go and read a book. And that was the first time I saw your book and they'd got it on display. And I was like, no, that sounds really good. And I didn't get to the spin class because I sat there and I read your book. But do you know what?

There's spin class, which is good for your physical health and bit your mental health. And there's a library, which is just brilliant for your mental health. So to be honest... Absolutely. What's not to love? And I did. I loved it so much. I gave it to my mum, who then...

proceeded to go, oh my God, I know all of her stuff, and she's a massive fan, and she asked me to say hello to you from her. So there you go. So my mum, my mum was ridiculously excited that I was talking to you today. So there we go. Hello back to your mum. Hello to mum. But what I really loved about it, and I know that you've written other stuff, you've done other work, but it was the idea of looking at Queen Victoria through her food, but it wasn't just she ate this, but her relationship to food. So I suppose my first question, is why Queen Victoria and where did that idea originate from? Why Queen Victoria is partly because I was working at the time a lot with Victorian food

and the more I read about it and the more I saw in terms of what was out there in public history world, the more I thought this is just such baloney. I'd led, for a long time I'd led a project in costume, at Aldly End House in Essex where we were kitchen maids and dairy maids and laundry maids, that kind of thing, all the kind of below-stairs people. And we were there paid costume interpreters and the public would come in and they'd talk to us about what we were doing.

And of course, all of them at that point in time came in. And the first thing they'd say was, it's just like Downton Abbey. And we'd go, well, yes, except accurate. Or words to that effect. You know, we'd point out that actually we were 40 years further back in the past, that there were enough servants. And kind of unpacking that, I thought, really,

even if you did want to be informed on Victorian food and dining, it would be quite difficult to do because a lot of the books out there are these kind of, you know, what the butlers saw things. So I wanted to write a book about Victorian food, but people don't tend to buy books on food history. And I'm sure some of the people listening are going, oh, I would, but not enough people buy books on food history. So I sort of thought, well, what's the hook here? How can I get people interested in Victorian food and realise that it's a much more interesting story than just lists of menus or this is what people ate or whatever? And I'd done work on Queen Victoria before.

I'd worked on Osbourne House where there's a kind of ongoing project or desire, I should say, to restore the kitchens at Osbourne House. So I'd looked into those. So I knew what was there in terms of sources. I knew there was this huge, untapped resource in terms of Queen Victoria's menu books and the lists of food that were brought into the kitchen. And I thought, I can do something with those lists. I can bring those alive. And I can also give a new perspective on this woman who tends to be very polarising. People either see her as this kind of old, cantankerous character who hated her children and just wasn't amused all the time, or because of the young Victoria series and film, they see her as this kind of young, romantic heroine who didn't really

know what she was doing and was sort of, you know, and actually she's neither, she's very human and I thought food was a really good way to get under her skin and show her in a slightly new light. And you absolutely do. It was fascinating to sort of explore this whole new dimension to her character that I hadn't been properly aware of and you do it so well. of the things that comes out really strongly in the book is that food was a way of controlling both herself and the people around her. And that's, it looks like that came out of her childhood, which she had very little control over. Is that would, what would you say about that? Yeah, I would say that's absolutely right. It's one of those, I suppose it's a truism, isn't it,

that eating disorders, and it's, I don't want to diagnose Queen Victoria with an eating disorder from the point of view of the 21st century, it's not fair on her, and it's not fair on what we know now about eating disorders versus what was known then. But she certainly had a troubled relationship with food. Disordered eating. Yes.

And she used it as many people with eating disorders do as a means of exerting control. So the kind of classic, I suppose, stereotype of somebody who has an eating disorder is often somebody who feels out of control in their life or who is very, very academic or very, very, controlled in their everyday life and extends that over to food. And it's that way of exerting control over something when everything else seems out of control. And as a child, Victoria had no

control over her life whatsoever. She learnt very early on that she was going to be Queen one day. She was the heir to the throne from a very young age. And it became increasingly obvious there weren't going to be any others. There was no good boy going to be born to usurp her role. And her mother, who was German and was not well liked at court and struggled, I think, in the atmosphere she was plunged into, and also had this sort of kind of sinister, probably not lover, but certainly very close friend who held a lot of sway over her called John Conroy. Really, you know, it's hard to make him to not the villain of the piece. No, you could just boo his name, couldn't you?

It's just... Yeah, I mean, yeah, a lot of people in the past, you can reassess and go, oh, well, yeah, but, you know, they had their reasons. No, no, no, he's just a git. So he and Victoria's mother implemented this system called the Kensington system, which was intended to shape Victoria and mould her into a few. future queen, but in doing so make her so reliant on those two that if she came to the throne before she was 18, which looked very lightly at the time because everyone around her was ill

or hideous and they were all going to die. Obviously, her mother would be regent and then Victoria would be under the control of these two kind of Sengali types. It didn't turn out like that actually, but that system was there. I mean, you know, things like the fact that she shared a room with her mother until she was 18, that she wasn't allowed to walk downstairs unaided and she was controlled all the time. So you can see why as a very young girl, she very quickly turned to food as the one thing which she had control over. And of course, food is something we take into our bodies. It's not just a little bit of control. It's not say, you know, oh, I've got control over this puppy or I've got control whether I walk or run. You are taking it into yourself, making it part of

yourself. So it's a hugely symbolic thing to control your food and you're eating. Do you know who I thought of when I was reading about this Kensington system, Britney Spears? Yeah. Because it was It's like a conservatorship, wasn't it, before the word was there? I mean, they controlled everything, what she wore, where she went, she was paraded around in front of people. Yeah, she was like a sort of chihuahua or something in many ways, being dressed up, told what to do. And when you read the letters, she went on a series of kind of royal progresses

from when she was 13. And this was all intended to whip up the love of the country for this sweet young child because her immediate predecessors were Georgian men, which with everything that goes with that. So pretty appalling individuals, frankly. So the country was kind of raring for a change. And this idea of this sweet young thing, oh, well, she's going to be a breath of fresh air, obviously.

She's got all these feminine virtues. She's not going to be shagging everything that moves like all of her uncles is. She's not going to be hideously in debt. All of the gender stereotypes come into place. So she went on these enormous royal progressors. And a lot of letters went back and forth between the people that would host her and John Conroy, and Victoria's mother.

And they're incredibly prescriptive. would imagine. I mean, today if you hosted a royal visit, I'm sure you get a massive long list of things. It's a bit like, I don't know, a rider from someone incredibly famous who says, right, I'm only going to have brown M&Ms or whatever. But it's, these are her meal times. This is what she will eat. This is what she will probably do. She probably wants to be in her room. She will almost certainly do this. We do not want to have anything other than this to eat. And a lot of it is about food. And it's quite clear that even at 13, food was becoming a kind of bone of contention, which is quite a good pun, I suppose.

What was she eating at this time? What was being prescribed to her as a princess in training? Well, a lot of it is children's food, kind of fairly standard Victorian thinking, really. So the big thing is, especially if you're a girl, you don't want to excite your sexual appetite too young. So absolutely, bland food, because if you grow up eating spices and loads of red meat,

you're just going to be a nymphomaniac. That's quite clear. Absolutely. That happened to me. That's... Well, it's so many of us, it's the woes of the modern world, isn't it? You eat a chili once when you're kind of six and that's it. All you want to do is masturbate. But wash your hands immediately afterwards.

Otherwise, that's just a bad, bad piece of advice. I see. You learn that one quite quickly. You never do that one twice. So presumably Victoria wasn't masturbating with chilies at this point. So we're keeping it bland. Not when she's in a mother's room, no. No.

So, no, blurry bland food, lots of, I suppose, what we would call kind of pappy food, the kind of things that invalids are fed. So that's really up to the age of eight or nine. So it's things like barley soup and rice. And also there's this idea of, and it's still there in the early Victorian period, I suppose late Georgian as Victoria is growing up in, this idea of kind of gendered food.

You see this reflected on table layouts quite a lot. So if you think of the kind of grand, wealthy Georgian meal where all the food's on the table at once and everyone's sitting around the table, you clearly see a lot of the time a gendered table. So the men will have red meat, hunted meat. wild things that say masculinity, I killed this. And the women will have farmed meats and light meat such as chicken and white things to reflect their essential gentility and purity. And all,

this is just tato bologna, but you do see this reflected in the diet of children as they grow up and you see it reflected. Not, I mean, you can overplay it, but it is reflected very much in that idea. So she's growing up on quite bland, quite boring nursery food. She talked about having her bowl of milk and she occasionally had some tea and porridge and that kind of thing. And she seems to have been kept on that quite kind of awful, monotonous childhood diet longer than most children would be. So most children would start to be introduced to more adult food from about eight, nine onwards. That's the kind of age of reason. And most children would then be brought and they would

start to eat with their parents from say 11 or 12 onwards so that they would get used to this very, very complicated way of dining at that point. And Victoria was certainly being introduced to that in that we know that when she went on Royal Progresses from 13, 14 onwards, she was able to sit and eat with adults and cope with that level of food. But then she'd be put back in the nursery and fed on bland and stuff. So it's this incredibly schizophrenic diet where she's expected to go out and be on show for two hours eating this sort of parade of food. You know, this is an a la Francaise dining style, so it tends to be two to four courses with loads of dishes on the table at once. And everyone is helping themselves and helping others. So,

there's a gargantuan amount of food on offer. The idea is you control yourself and you only have genteel portions. But obviously there is the scope to go large. And when you're kind of, you've got that on one day and then the next day you're having a mutton chop and a glass of milk in your room. It's this sort of weird kind of upbringing where she's ricocheting from kind of foie gras and caviar to milk.

And all of that is being dictated to her. It's not like she can say actually tonight. I fancy a beef stew followed by chocolate mousse. It is just, well, tonight this is what you're having. There's a lot of mutton, a lot of mutton. Yeah, I've got that out of the book. And she likes mutton as well, doesn't she? She really likes mutton.

Although my favourite quote from the book, and I think this just made me just, Queen Victoria, I stand. It said, Her Majesty is confessed to a great love of potatoes, which she has served in every conceivable way. Yes, Vicky. She's a woman off my own heart. I have to say, I started off.

writing the book thinking, well, Victoria, I don't, I got this vague impression that she's all right, but, you know, I don't know much about it. Politically, she's a bit weird. And I finished it, and I was like, do you know what, if you set aside the politics, which I very deliberately didn't consider in the book, because then it would have been 10,000 pages long. I really quite like her. She's a woman who loved food. And mutton and potatoes, you can go a lot wrong with other stuff, but with those two, really good. And she liked really old mutton, too. And after I've written the book, I was doing an episode of the kitchen cabinet, and I mentioned old mutton and Queen Victoria.

And somebody tweeted me actually and said, would you like to try some really old mutton? Because most of the mutton you buy in the UK is sort of two, three, four years old. So this is the age of the, this is not like how long I've been left out for. Right, okay, I came with you, yes. So they had a 10-year-old sheep. And it's a small holding down in Devon, actually, and what they've got sheep, and when they get to sort of eight or nine,

they put them out to pasture. Because apparently most sheep die, because basically their teeth fall out and they can't feed anymore. So it's pretty awful. Did not know that. No, I didn't know that either. But this is what they told me. So they said they put them out to pasture

and they let them have a nice old age of kind of a year, 16 months, 18 months, whatever it is. And then they are slaughtered humanely and chopped up a mutton. So very kind of cyclical process. Great idea. Would I like some of this 10-year-old mutton? Obviously. And I have to say, it was some of the best meat I have ever tasted. Really?

Absolutely amazing. Because, you know, going through the book again, I was struck by the fact that I think that we've loved. so much of the nuance and the context of the time and our own diet is so, in many ways it's the same, but in lots of ways it's radically different and our relationship to food is so different, we lose the nuance. For example, we don't eat old mutton anymore and then it was the Queen's favourite thing. And when I was going through the list of foods that were being brought into the palace, there's things like offals, big, brains are big. And like, we would read that now just be like, ugh, brains.

I know, and it's a real shame because a lot of the stuff that, and one of the reasons I wanted to write about Victorian cuisine is we talk a lot about sustainable eating now and we talk a lot about wanting to cut down the level of meat that we're eating. I mean, this is obviously the bourgeois talk about this and those who are environmentally conscious talk about this and those who can afford to have those choices talk about that. So I'll just pre-fix it with that. But, you know, we say things like, oh, we want to eat less meat, we should do nose-to-tail eating. It's really important to value the animals. And yet, we have all these sheep because we're a big wool-producing country, and we don't eat them ourselves. We put them in dog food.

And we think of offal is somehow disgusting. But I think offals like, I mean, it's like broccoli. Broccoli cooked by a bad cook is revolting. It's yellow, it's stinky, it makes you fart, it's absolutely horrid. And kidneys cooked by a bad cook are horrible. They taste of wee, and they're really boingy, and they're a bit powdery at the same time. But kidneys kicked by an amazing kick are fabulous. And broccoli cooked by a really good cook is fabulous. Although to be honest, between the two I'd take the kidneys if they were sliced thinly and deviled.

Do you know, I could see what you're doing there. And if anyone had good cooks, it's the queen, isn't it? And so when she finally got let off the chain, as it were, her mother's plan did not quite go according the way she thought, would she? Because she didn't get this nice, controlled daughter that was horrendously grateful. she got a daughter that I'm a university lecturer

and I can see this in the 18 year old to come away for the first time and they just go up, whoa, I can order pizza whenever I want, I can drink whenever I want and Queen Victoria is, I saw a lot of that in her. Queen Victoria's a teenager. I mean, she's a teenager.

You can't, you know, there's no way of saying, it's just beyond that, you know. So yeah, her mother didn't manage to become regent because the king held on, very consciously held on for two months after Victoria. Judging, I'm not going, absolutely not going. I have to make sure that Victoria succeeds and doesn't put her mother into power. So the king kind of drags himself over the finish line. And Victoria exceeds the throne. She's 18. She's been controlled by her mother in this horrible

Spengali-like figure her whole life. She is full of hormones. I mean, she falls in love with every bloke she meets. Doesn't matter who, how old, whatever, she just, you know, there is a stirring in her loins. It doesn't matter. He's beautiful. Love him. Love him. And there's this sort of... She's been at the hot sauce. Oh my God, she is just... All of that kind of no spices didn't work. So she's basically hormones on legs.

And also, she's already got eating, massive eating problems. She had all through her childhood, she was constantly being told not to eat too fast. There were letters being sent to her from relatives about saying that she was... Oh, they were horrid. She was fat. Like, I can't get my head.

Imagine like your uncle, just writing you out the blue and going, I really... You might be getting a bit chubby now. so if she could rein it in a bit. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, you can see why she ended up with problems on food. Because if you've got relatives going, you're fat, you're going to be queen, so you're not very pretty.

So really, you need to be thin too. Yeah, other people are way prettier than you, and you're eating too much and you're eating too fast, and you've got this weird habit of, like, stirring your salt in with your gravy. And there's a whole series of letters between Uncle Leopold, who's a mother's brother and Victoria, where you can see her kind of flexing her writing muscles and her intellect as well. there's a brilliant, I mean, I was sitting in the Royal Archive, I think, what is this?

So Uncle Leopold writes through her and says something like he envies the seagulls because they get a really nice life. And she writes back and says, don't envy them too much, they shoot them around here. And it's a brilliant sort of response from this pert kind of 18-year-old, not quite 18 as she was then, kind of flexing herself. Actually, I'm not going to put up with this from my relatives. So once she hits 18, she goes mad. She piles on the pounds because quite frankly, she's going, do you know what? dude I'm 18. First thing she does is tell her mother to bog off.

And then she's told that she can't get rid of her completely until she gets married. So she does the next best thing and she puts her mother at one end of Buckingham Palace and herself at the other and refuses to talk to her. They have to communicate through letter. She of course falls madly in sort of vaguely platonic love with Lord Melbourne, who's her prime minister and a real charmer. And, you know, so she has this sort of

very intense friendship with him. He becomes like her advisor, part ex-senaissance. And the two of them have this very joking relationship where they're always telling each other that they're eating too much. And he tells her she's putting on weight and she rushes off to get weighed. And there's just these occasional bits from a point of view of seeing how her figure changes because not that many of her clothes survive from the early part of her reign. And it's very hard to estimate a woman's figure anyway because of the level of corsetry.

But she does weigh herself. And then she goes on these sort of fad diets where she basically starves herself into submission because she wants to be thin. And she's just, I mean, you look at her, you think she's a teenager. You know, we've all been there. We've all eaten far too much and got rat roaringly drunk and vowed. We're going to give up food for the next week.

And we've all, okay, we haven't necessarily let our stays out because we don't wear stays now. But we've probably bought a nice, comfortable pair of tracky bum. Thanks. Yeah, and that. I mean, I had Spanx when I was a teenager. God, who didn't? I used to go out and you're like,

but then you realise, of course, that if you do wear kind of holding pants, all that happens is the flab goes elsewhere. Yeah, it just relocates. Yeah, you've got great, great flat stomach, but somehow you've got a roll under your. your arm and you're like, what's going on there? Now my tits are on my back.

I'm not quite sure how that's happened. Completely. But it's all right because I've got a flat stomach. Yeah, absolutely. Just don't turn me around. You're listening to The Twixter Sheets. We'll have more Queen Victoria foodie chat for you after this short break. One of the things that I was really surprised about the book is because, again,

we've got this image of Victoria as like the Frump in full Frump mode. And we think of her, in some ways, as being quite boring. And if you think about Victorian food, even if you don't know anything, about it. Like your first thought wouldn't be, well, that's going to be exotic. No. But she was, I was really quite surprised by what she was eating because she was really experimental. Oh, God, yeah. She's having curry. She's having Chinese cuisine. She is eating, like, really exciting foods.

I would say if there is nothing she wouldn't have tried. If it was there, she'd eat it. And it's one of the really lovely things about it. Because when she was younger, she was a bit of a party animal. You know, she was at ball suppers standing up, stuffing her face as fast as possible. Putting whiskey in her wine. Is that one? Whiskey and her claret? Well, that, you know, that crops up. There's one reference to it and I thought, how interesting. And every body who writes about it, well, every man who writes about it, who fancies themselves a wine or whiskey person and there's quite a lot of them say, this must have been disgusting. Why did she do it? It must have been a mistake. And I thought it might have been a mistake, but it probably wasn't. You know,

I've read enough about her now to think she'll have a go at most things. So I tried it and it's amazing. You get really drunk. A really good. But if you use the right whiskey and a friend of mine sent me a loch-negall whiskey, which is distilled on the Balmoral Estate, very nice, very fruity, not petered. And you add that to a really full-bodied claret.

You don't need much, but it's like it almost comes out like gummy bears or a really fruity kind of fruit pastile. And it does raise the alcohol of the wine. I would say it probably takes it up to about 20%. And it also is a slightly gut punch, But when I did talks on this, I sometimes people sort of say, we should have themed drinks.

So I say, oh, well, let's do wine with whiskey in it. And then you look out at the audience and you think, nobody cares anymore. I used to be a bartender and we used to like go back over old cocktails. And again, they're so different. Because they don't really do mixes so much. They just... No, no, it's just alcohol. It's whiskey and we'll put some wine in it.

Or it's whiskey. It's vodka? We put some vodka in this. And it's... Yeah. And they're drinking it all day long as... world, which is... Yeah, and at this point,

wine probably was slightly as alcoholic. Today, a lot of wines are reaching 14, 15%, and that's a relatively modern phenomenon. But if you go back to the 12% wines that we were used to growing up, wine was probably slightly less than that at that point. It might have been 10, 11%. But even so, it's strong.

And of course, whiskey is distilled, so it's always going to be strong. But you'll get people drinking a pint of champagne and a pint of port. These are the people that are running the country, ladies and gentlemen. Oh yeah. But then they're still, oh, let's face it. I mean, can you get more useless than today's lot?

If they all got absolutely rat-orily drunk, could they do a worse job? If I found out that they were drinking pints of whiskey and claret, it would at least make sense of things. I'd at least get that then. But oh, they're pissed. Right. Judging by the stuff coming out of Down and straight during lockdown, they actually were. They were. Yeah, they were absolutely rat-a-assed, yeah.

But, I mean, there was certainly rat-hast in the Victorian period. But, yeah, so Victoria would try everything. So when she first tried whiskey, it was once she'd got married to Albert. and they bought Balmoral and Albert, there's this whiskey distillery, and they invited the couple to come and see it, and Albert's there being very scientific and talking about distillation, and the children are running a mark, and Victoria is just slowly getting sozzled in the corner.

And after that, Begg's Best, which was what the whiskey was, they had crates of it brought up to Balmoral and spread throughout all the palaces. And even, you sort of had this phase of her life, which is with Albert, where he isn't into eating at all. So their meals, when they have them together, are relatively muted. They're only sort of five courses. and then after his death...

Hardly worth showing up. Virtually nothing. After his death, she throws herself back into eating again, and it becomes a real pleasure for her. And I think at that point, and especially as she gets older and as a woman,

there's a kind of sense where she can't explore the stuff she wants to. If she was a bloke, she'd be sailing off to India and going off to Australia and, you know, wandering all across the British Empire with all the sort of good guys

of the British are out there sort of generally beating up natives and behaving extrusatingly badly. But she doesn't. Bertie goes instead. her eldest son. But what she does do is she eats the globe. So with the Indian food, curry was really well known in Britain by that point. But what she did was she decided she wanted to eat Indian curries. So when she had a group of Indian servants brought across to Act as

assistants and footmen for one of her jubilees in the 1880s, she got wind of the fact they were making their own food. So she said, well, I want to try it. So op it came and she really liked it. So she had it added to her menu. And the household complained because it wasn't the curries they were used to, which with a sort of Anglia Indian style. And likewise with the Chinese food, so there's a health exhibition in London in the 1880s. And she gets wind of this thing. She doesn't, she can't go to the exhibition. She's queen. It's not what she wants to do, but she's at Windsor. So she says, oh, you know, haven't brought to Windsor. So up come all these Chinese cooks and they cook her bird's nest soup. And she says, it's ever so curious because

they've all got pig tails. But she really likes the food. So it's all the way through this joy in eating huge apples. Fruit is a real passion of hers. Yeah, she was a proper fruit. She's out of she. She loved that. Kitchen gardens were like her poison. If there was a kitchen garden, she'd be out there visiting it and just eating whatever it was. Where's the queen gone? She's out in the peach garden, you know, eating all the grapes

as usual. Now, I am a sex historian, and you are a food historian, and I think that we cover a lot of the same ground here. We do, yeah. There's something about food and sex that is linked in the human psyche. I mean, some people actually literally do that. I think It's called Sploshing is the vernacular.

But there's something about, and I've got this theory that if you're a picky eater, you can't be good in bed. But that's just, that's based on no research whatsoever. But what you see in Victoria is she loves food. Yeah, and she loves sex. Yeah, really love sex. Can't get pregnant. Hates it whenever she gets pregnant.

Kind of inevitable fallout of the fact that she really, really like sex. But once she discovers sex, that's it. The diary entry, she kept a journal throughout her whole life. which is online, and if you're in the UK, you can get access to it very easily. But even if you're abroad, there are access points. But the morning after, when she wakes up after her wedding night, and she's just looking across at Albert, and the lust that is coming through,

looked across at his neck and his throat and his shirt. And you just think, oh, yes, you've discovered sex. Well done. And I can't imagine Albert was very good, to be honest, because he was a picky eater, and he was... But, you know... Perhaps he had Crohn's disease was something that I... Yeah.

He had a lot of stomach. complaints. A lot of stomach complaints. Definitely, IBS. Almost certainly, Crohn's, Helen Rappaport's done a very good book on him and his death and what caused it. And so, you know, he can't have been in a great way most of the time. He's going on these sort of fasts with lemon water and camille tea. And he'd have disappeared off to Germany with a kind of sigh of relief because he didn't have to eat the kind of food that Victoria was eating. Or have sex as much. Or have sex as much. And there's someone as well that you see in their son, Bertie, Dirty Bertie, who... Well, the thing is, he's a man.

Man. So, of course, he can openly enjoy sex and food and no one's going to tell him he's too fat. Because she gets it throughout and she really gets it in the neck. As an older lady, she puts her on a lot of weight. Fine. Whatever. Do you know what? Husband's dead. A children are a disappointment. Country's slipping away from her. Nobody likes her. There's a sign on the gate to Buckingham Palace saying, you know, for rent because she's been absent for so long. So what is there to do apart from eat and possibly masturbate? I have cake. And I hope she did. It's easy to read Victoria's life in kind of stages, isn't there? there was the conservatorship, Kensington system, awful.

And then there's the bit where she's kind of off the hook, enjoying life with Albert. And then they do this kind of like domesticated bliss thing. Yeah. Although they argue like crazy all the time. I know. That was a surprise because the image of them is just this real like, oh my God, it's like so perfect.

We are just... Well, she was very good at cultivating an image. Very good. I mean, during her childhood, it was very, very managed. So there would be sort of a bit like the little baby, whatever they asked today, William and Kate's children. You get the sort of the Christmas photograph and it's always top of the list on the BBC most read articles. And so, you know, little images of Victoria would escape. So, oh, we saw her through the gates and she was watering

the flowers. So all of that also happens throughout her later life. And certainly once Albert dies, she is like, right, I need to memorialise this man. Oh, life was amazing. And there's this awful bit where she says later in life, she said that she was sober effed when he died because she couldn't make decisions without him. She couldn't even choose a hat without him. And I read that and I thought, A, that's not true. That doesn't strike me as true. Because they were yelling at each other all the time and, you know, it was quite tempestuous. And B, if it was true, that's domestic coercion. And actually is really uneasy to read this idea of this absolute control. And the only reason I was able to kind of cape with it was because I know it wasn't true. Yeah, yeah. But he did, she talked about him

taming her, which I also, from a modern perspective, found really uncomfortable. because she was 18, 19, 20 when she went. She'd only met him twice before they got engaged, could they say. She didn't need taming. She needed to be handed a massive glass of wine and told to go out and enjoy herself. Yeah.

And a curry. That's what she... After Albert ups and dies, her relationship with food, like you said that she does put on a lot of weight, which is the woman's had nine kids and, you know, none of us. Oh, god, yeah. And also, the female silhouette was changing by that point as well.

So the level of corsetry and the level of boning, she was using to change her shape was changing as well. But how does her food change after Albert dies? Does it become more experimental? Does it... It sort of changes in line with what's going on, actually. As she ages, she's just become slightly more stuck in the mud. So the big change within Victorian dining at this point

is a change in service style from Alain Frances to Al-Aroos. Aller Frances is everything on the table at once. People pick and choose. Tapas style. Yeah, pretty much. But served in two courses and there's a kind of cadence to it, a dance, if you like, where you start with the soup and you go onto the fish

and you go on to fancy dishes and then the table's cleared and you go on to your roast meats and your game and your vegetables and your sweet dishes and then the table's cleared and you go on to your desserts. So there's quite a lot of food. And the big change at this point is this more sequential style is starting to come in called Alarousse. And it's a very, very gradual process

takes place over really most of the 19th century. And she switches to that in 1874, which is relatively late. It's a much better style for cooks because you're turning out one dish 20 times rather than turning out 20 dishes. So it's much easier to manage for the kitchens. But her food does become a bit stuck in the past. And she always retains, for example, a sideboard.

So there's always, whenever you turn up to dine with the queen, there's a massive sideboard with like a huge chunk of beef and a chicken on there, all five, and some pies. And nobody ever touches the sideboard. Nobody actually is hungry enough to get to it, although given the pace at which she started eating, but as she got older, possibly people were driven to it. But the point at the sideboard was the food on it would feed the first,

Whitman, and people would complain if there weren't left abas from the royal table, because it filtered down through the household. So it was a kind of strange way of eating. She also introduced a lot more consciously introduced a lot more German dishes, I think partly as a kind of nod to her beautiful German husband. To beautiful Albert's beautiful. I've got two questions that I want to ask you before. Unfortunately, I have to wrap this up because I have to get to the supermarket now to buy whiskey and claret. What is Victoria's food legacy? And could, Could you talk a little bit about brown soup? What is...

Oh, God. Brown soup? Because that's like... Bloody brown. That's a weird thing to be associated. Well, yeah, but it's also not true. Ah, well, there we go. That's a good place to start.

So I would say her actual food legacy is relatively limited because it's a bit like the Queen today. Do we know what she eats every day? No. No. The actual food legacy of Queen Elizabeth II is probably coronation tricking which she didn't even eat. Eat in mess.

Isn't that what you call the government? Oh yeah But you know It does not We don't know what the Queen is And most people Might be fish finger sandwiches With absolutely no idea

What kind of thing Wasn't there something about Tupperware's at the breakfast table So Victoria's menus Some of them did get publicised The Illustrated London News Would publish menus From big banquets and things like that Largely what she was eating

Was the kind of stuff Everybody else of her class was eating So these gargantua menus Were nothing particularly special But there are two areas where I think she did have an impact One of those was afternoon tea, which people had been taking a cup of tea in the afternoon with a biscuit for donkey's years, you know, late 18th century. But the later Victorians codified it. They invented this whole idea of an invention.

The Duch of Bedford invented afternoon tea. No, she didn't. But by the time you give it sort of aristocratic origins, everyone sitting down thinks, oh, I'm just like the Duchess. And Victoria was really fond of afternoon tea because it was another excuse to eat a lot of food, so scones and toast and biscuits and cake. and that was publicised quite a lot. Again, illustrated London news and other places. So this idea of taking tea in the afternoon meant you're a bit like the Queen. So she did have an impact from that point of view. And I think the other thing she did a lot was this is a point where working class leisure is really taking off and paid holidays are just about beginning.

And Victoria was a really, really keen holiday goer. So she used to go off every year towards the end of her life to the Riviera. She started off with Switzerland. For sure, she started off saying, I'm not going anywhere that Albert hasn't gone because I don't want to see things he hasn't seen. And then she went, oh, it's a bit boring. I'm going to go to Switzerland. Oh, I really like these wild cranberries.

Oh, and what's this cheese? Oh, and I quite like these sandwiches. I'm going to go to France next year. So she went to the Riviera a lot. And this idea of going on holiday, taking a holiday and eating the foods that you find on holiday, I think was something that she sort of unconsciously helped to publicise. But then there's loads of other things that kind of got associated with her later.

So Victoria Sponge was clearly named for her. Lovely thing. very much named for her, possibly named for her by Mrs. Beaton, but the bait's aren't on that one, because Mrs. Beaton has never, there's nothing original in Beaton's book. It's just that I don't think we found the source for Victoria Sponged yet, Victoria Sandwich, rather. So SpongeCush had existed again for hundreds of years, but clearly the Victoria Sponge, Victoria Sandwich, was named for Victoria, if not invented for her. And then you've got this kind of Brown Windsor Soup thing, which is this kind of ongoing gag,

especially in the sort of 60s, this idea of Brown Windsor Soup was this ongoing, kind of crappy holiday food. So if you went away to Blackpool or you went away to Bogner Regis or whatever and you stayed in a sort of shabby boarding house, the joke was you'd have brown window soup. But the point was, it was always a joke. She never ate brown winter soup.

It's not on her menu books. I've been through them. She ate Windsor soup. She ate and there were white soups and they were very beautiful and stuff, but there's never a brown Windsor soup. There was a brown Windsor soap. So the kind of current thing

and I certainly think this sounds true, is that at some point, Brown Windsor soap and the idea of brown soup that was just made up of any old stuff sort of got conflated and it became this kind of joke and then how much funnier if we can associate this with Victoria. But she would never have eaten the soup just made of random leftovers. Most of hers are based on veal stock or chicken stock. Or really, I mean, you had loads of different grades of stock. The Royal Kitchens would have had six or seven grades of stock

and she would only have eaten the first three, which would all have been made with specific meat. So Brown wins a soup, not a thing. It's just a joke about how bad British cuisine... Yeah, and it's probably not undeserved in the 20s and 30s. A lot of people did eat back. I mean, there's some amazing food. Throughout history, there's always amazing food.

And there's always bad food. And it particularly reaches an idea, obviously, in the sort of 40s and 50s when you've got rationing and you've got nobody having learned to cook for 14 years and you've got no ingredients of 14 years. So it's not surprising that post-war period, British food gets a really awful reputation. because there's no ingredients.

So of course you're going to add bavril to your gravy because what else do you do to kind of pep it up? There's no ingredients. My final question to you is, we're 150 years in the future and someone wants to write a biography about you, about your food. What would be the key foods that they should look for

that would unlock something? Oh gosh. I tend to eat whatever I'm researching. So I ate a lot of Victorian food during Beardie Queen. And then I switched forward when I wrote a book about Churchill's cook and I ate a lot of 1930s food at that point. I put on a lot of weight because a lot of puddings. Don't regret it.

Brilliant. I would say lots of fruit, very much light fruit. For I like Queen Victoria. Also really like mutton. And I do think that high welfare meat and eating every bit of it is a really key thing. So old mutton, the older better. And also, I think partly because of my work as a food destroy.

And I do love a milky starchy pudding, whether it's rice pudding, macaroni pudding, tapioca pudding, Sago pudding. Hard tapioca pudding. Back to pudding. You know, I really am into milky puddings and suet puddings too. Puddings are a big theme. Annie Gray, a pudding history.

That sounds perfect. Thank you so much for talking to me today about Queen Victoria and her food. Please go and buy Annie's books. Go by all of them because it's just absolutely amazing. So there you have it. Thank you for making it to the end of this podcast. And thank you so much to Annie for sharing all of her incredible stories and research about Victoria. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to like, review and subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts.

We've got episodes on the history of shoes, vasectomies, Tudor Sex, and a special series on mental health all coming your way. So join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.