Dan Snow's History Hit - Victoria: A Greedy Queen

Episode Date: April 21, 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.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It gives me great pleasure today, great pleasure to announce that we're launching a new podcast. You know the best thing about this history adventure that I've been on, that you've all been a critical part of, is that as we gain momentum, as we get more successful, we're able to employ brilliant people and make more and better history. And it's a great example of that. We've got a wonderful new team working history at now. And we've got this podcast presented by Kate Lister. She's been on my podcast several times. She is an absolute legend. She's a sex historian. She has written a couple of wonderful books. I'm looking at one on my shelf right now. I absolutely could not put

them down. She is in charge of the whores of your social media feed with nearly a million followers. She's a bit of a phenomenon and she is a brilliant, brilliant historian and communicator. Since I met her, I was like, we need her on Team History. She has got to a pod and this is the pod. We're launching it right now. It's called Betwixt the Sheets and she unashamedly roots around the topics that were probably skipped in history class. We got scandal. We got medieval cures for impotence. We got the etymology of swear words. We got gender bias in medicine, voodoo, satanic panic. I like that. And LGBTQ plus court cases and the history of those campaigns for equality.

You know what? You're going to listen to this. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to laugh. You're going to wince once or twice. You're going to check to see if the kids are in listening distance. And you're going to realize how, although things around us have changed, us humans, us mickey humans, we haven't changed so much.

You're going to love it. A huge thank you to kate list for joining the team but also to charlotte long sophie g and shea adobe for being so brilliant and making this podcast happen the whole team has been working on this for ages they've been super excited a lot more excited if you don't mind me saying than they are when they get to work on my podcast anyway they've been super excited and so it's a big week for them the launch team to have gone really well so congratulations to everyone involved in this episode kate talks to another friend of the podcast ellen yanagy who's currently storming the chart separate history at tv her new

series on medieval sex is breaking all the records over there which is great you'll have heard on the podcast many times so it's kind of a dream team please after you've listened to this go and subscribe go and like go and do all those other things like review it, for example, send it to your mates, all that fun stuff. And let's see if we can get Kate Lister top of the charts. If you want to watch Eleni Yanager on History Hit TV, our new documentary, just follow the link in the description of this podcast. Just click on that link. You'll get over there and you'll have two weeks free if you sign up today. It's like Netflix for history. You're gonna love it folks you'll love that as well so much lovely stuff coming at you in the meantime though here is dr kate lister and her new show

betwixt the sheets 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 snag 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, but because you are today more secure on your throne than any ruler in the world.

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 5am 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 penchant for mutton curries and loved fresh fruit. My producers have been back out in the street to find out what people think the Victorians, specifically the rich Victorians, were eating. That's a good question.

I don't know. Birds, maybe? What's that bird called? Pheasant. Maybe a pheasant. Other than that, I don't know. God knows. Pigs.

Roast pork. The form 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 Sheets. I am beyond excited to have you here. Well, thank you very much for joining me today, Annie Gray, Patwicks 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 to spin class, you just sit and you go and read a book. And that was the first time I saw your book and they got it on display.

And I was like, oh, 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 a 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 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 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 Audley End House in Essex where we were kitchen maids and dairy maids 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 oh it's just like Downton Abbey and we'd go well yes except accurate or words to that effect you know we 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 butler 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 Osborne House where there's a kind of ongoing project or desire I should say to restore the kitchens at Osborne

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 polarizing 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. And one 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 it looks like that came out of her childhood, which she had very little control over. 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 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. 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 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 learned 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 sinister, probably not lover, but certainly very close friend

who held a lot of sway over her called John Conroy. Really, 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 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 likely at the time because everyone around her was ill or hideous and, you know, 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

Svengali 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 your eating do you know who I thought of when

I was reading about this Kensington system Britney Spears yeah and because it was like it's like a conservatorship wasn 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 she's you know all of the gender stereotypes come into play so she went on

these enormous royal progresses 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 and you 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 sort of 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 i know well it's so many of us it's the woes of the modern world isn't it you know you eat a chili once when you're kind of six and that's it all you want to do is masturbate um but wash your hands immediately afterwards otherwise that's that's just a bad bad piece of advice i thought you learned that one quite quickly you do you never do that one twice so presumably victoria wasn't masturbating with chilies at this point

so we're keeping it bland this is not when she's in her mother's room, no. So, no, very 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 kind 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 was 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 tater baloney. But you do see this reflected in the diet of children as they grow up. And you see it reflected, 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 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? Yeah, 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 after 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 her 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 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 it's 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'd 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 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. And I have to say it was some of the best meat I've 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 lost 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 the queen's favorite 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 brains i know and it's a real shame because a lot of the stuff that and 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 prefix it with that. But, you know, we say things like 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 as somehow disgusting but I think offal's like I mean it's like broccoli you 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 cooked by an amazing cook 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 spangali 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, 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 this is 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 basically she was fat like i can't get my head imagine like your uncle just writing you out the blue and going oh yeah i really you might be getting a bit chubby now so if you could bring 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 fat, you're going to be queen. And 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 her 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 ark I think what is this so uncle Leopold writes to 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 okay actually i'm not going to put up with it from my relatives so once she hits 18 she goes mad she piles on the pounds because quite frankly she's going 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 a 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 par excellence. 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 probably bought a nice comfortable pair of tracky bums thanks yeah and that i mean i had spanks when i was a teenager god who didn't i used to go out and you're like but then you realize of course that if you do wear kind of holding pants all that happens is the flab goes elsewhere it just relocates yeah you've got a great great flat stomach but somehow you've got a roll under 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. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

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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 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 in her claret well that you know that crops up there's one reference to it and i thought how interesting and everybody 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 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 but if you use the right whiskey and a friend of mine sent me a loch nagar whiskey which is distilled on the balmoral estate very nice very fr fruity not peated 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 like a really fruity kind of fruit pastely and it does raise the alcohol of the wine I would say it probably takes 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 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 alcohol it's whiskey and we'll put some wine in it or it's whiskey uh it's vodka as we put some vodka in this and it's yeah and they're drinking it all day long as well which is yeah and at this point wine probably was slightly less alcoholic today a lot of wines are reaching 14 15 percent and that's a relatively modern phenomenon but if you go back to sort of the 12 wines that

we were used to growing up wine was probably slightly less than that at that point might have been 10 11 percent 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 and these are the people that are running the country ladies and gentlemen oh yeah but then they still are let's face it. I mean, can you get more useless than today's lot? If they all got absolutely rat-wrongly 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. Rats, of course. Judging by the stuff coming out of Downing Street during lockdown, they actually were. They were, yeah. They were absolutely rat-arsed, yeah. But,, yeah. They were absolutely rat-assed, yeah.

But, I mean, they were certainly rat-assed in the Victorian period. But, yeah, so Victoria would try everything. So when she first tried whisky, it was once she'd got married to Albert and they'd bought Balmoral and Albert, there's this whisky 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 amok and Victoria's just slowly getting sozzled in the corner.

And after that, Begg's Best best which was what the whiskey was was you know 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 out there sort of generally beating up natives and behaving excruciatingly 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 her 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 up 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 were the 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 have them 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 pigtails 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 fruitini wasn't she she loved that kitchen gardens were like her poison she you know if it 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 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. 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 loves sex can't get pregnant hates it whenever she gets pregnant kind of inevitable fallout of the fact that she really really likes sex but once she discovers sex that's it the diary entry so 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 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 has 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 chamomile tea. And he did disappear 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 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 on a lot of weight fine whatever do you know what husband's dead her 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? 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 i 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 are 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 so bereft 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 it's really uneasy to read this idea of this absolute control and the only reason I was able to kind of cope with it was because I knew 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, she'd only met him twice before they got engaged, should 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? 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 à la Française to à la Rousse.

À la Française 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 on to 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 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 ala ruse 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 or 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 of the sideboard was the food on it would feed the footman and people would complain if there

weren't leftovers 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 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 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 with. 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 chicken, which she didn't even eat. Eatin' mess. Isn't that what you call the government? Ha, ba-bum-ch. Oh, yeah. of Queen Elizabeth II is probably coronation chicken, which she didn't even eat. Eatin' mess. Isn't that what you call the government? Ha ha! Oh yeah. But you know, it does not... We don't know what the Queen eats. And most people...

Might be fish finger sandwiches. We've absolutely no idea. Well, I kind of think... Wasn't there something about Tupperwares at the breakfast table? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval,

we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. 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 gargantuan 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 have 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 with the duchess of bedford invented afternoon tea no she didn't but by the time you give it sort of aristocratic origins everyone's sitting down think 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 publicized 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 publicize but then there's loads of other things that kind of

got associated with her later so victoria sponge i like it named for her lovely thing very much named for her possibly named for her by mrs beaton but the bait's 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's sponge yet victoria'swich rather so sponge cakes had existed again for hundreds of years but clearly the Victoria sponge Victoria's 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 70s this idea of brown winter soup was this ongoing kind of sort of crappy holiday food so if you went away to blackpool or you went away to bognor regis or whatever and you stayed

in a sort of shabby boarding house the joke was you'd have brown winter 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 white soups, and they were very beautiful and stuff. But there's never a brown Windsor soup. There was a brown Windsor soap. So I, the kind of current thinking, 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 but 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 for 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 bovril 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 beauty 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 put on a lot of weight because a lot of puddings don't regret it brilliant I would say lots of fruit very much like fruit well 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 historian, I do love a milky starchy pudding. Whether it's rice pudding, macaroni pudding, tapioca pudding, sago pudding. Ah, tapioca pudding, I love that.

Butter 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 buy all of them because it's

just absolutely amazing you