Lunch Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

Forget about the stories you've read in history books,

our food customs are our most direct connection to the world of the past.

This is history that you can touch, smell and above all, taste.

It's lovely.

The rituals of breakfast, lunch and dinner

are something I think we take for granted,

as if they have always existed as they are now.

I think I'd have preferred it fried.

You would have a heart attack by lunchtime!

But unpick the stories of our three main meals and you discover

gastronomic revolutions, technological leaps

and sometimes gruesome realities.

Decay is also going to cause really bad breath.

Yes, I think I've had boyfriends like that!

I never miss a good meal, but food is about more than just filling up.

There's a rich and complex history to our daily meal times

and that's what I'm setting out to explore.

Right, dig in!

I believe lunch is the most important meal of the day.

It's the work horse meal, the one we use to refuel.

But for most of us, it's just a quick pit stop

squeezed between two slices of our work day.

People eat it in a speedy average of 12 minutes, 49 seconds,

barely even noticing their food.

You certainly won't find me eating like that.

I believe passionately in proper cooking

and taking time over a decent meal.

We've lost our relationship to food

and the time it takes to prepare and eat it.

In the not-so-distant past, we respected lunch

as we had done for centuries.

In the 19th century, chop houses like this one

in the heart of the City of London

were where hungry urban workers came for refreshment.

This is one of the last remaining authentic chop houses,

still serving traditional Victorian food.

I've come to sample it with historian

and fellow lunch enthusiast, AN Wilson.

DINERS CHATTER

-Look at that.

-Oxtail.

-Fantastic.

-Red cabbage to share.

-Very nice, thank you.

And a chump chop.

-Oh, I say!

-This will keep us out of mischief, won't it? Well, me anyway.

You've got about four times what I've got.

Why did chop houses start emerging all over London?

In the 19th century,

London is becoming more and more the commercial centre of Britain.

-The Empire.

-And Britain is becoming the centre of

this enormous empire throughout the world, so there were more and more

people crowding into London just to work, who hadn't had breakfast

or hadn't had very much breakfast and it was a long time till dinner.

They were working in London for long hours, and by the middle of the day

your tummy was rumbling, so you wanted a chop, as I jolly well do

-today actually, I'm enjoying it.

-And it would have been a mutton chop

-rather than...

-It would have been mutton. This is a lamb chop,

but you can't have everything in this life, Clarissa.

I mean, a chump chop in mutton terms would be a much bigger...

It would have been a much bigger thing, both sides of the bone.

All the same, this is extremely good.

By the mid-19th century, the Industrial Revolution had triggered

a gigantic social upheaval. Suddenly the big city beckoned

with new kinds of labouring and clerical jobs.

People responded by adopting new living and working patterns.

Many of the people who worked in the City came here from the suburbs

or even out of London by train every day. They could come on the railway

-for the first time, commuting up and down.

-Of course.

The Victorian chop house lunch focused heavily

on generous portions, and quite right too. A belly full of protein

would get you through the afternoon.

Victorian office workers

were allocated a full hour for their lunch break.

I had the same when I worked at the Inns of Court

and provided the restaurants are efficient, it's enough time

for a relaxed meal, and far preferable to eating at one's desk.

-That sausage looks very magnificent.

-Would you like some?

-I'll take a little off.

-Have some.

Chop houses served an ordinary or fixed price menu,

with little or no choice.

Nose to tail eating - that's eating every part of the entire animal -

was very common for the cheaper dishes on offer.

What I'm having would have been probably one of the ordinaries

of the day in one day of the week, because oxtail and offal,

-you know, it's very cheap.

-And delicious.

-It is absolutely beautiful.

-I mean, the thing about these places is they

are for the middling sorts of folk, as Josiah Wedgwood called them,

and lower classes, lower middle classes really.

'The speciality of the house is a secret recipe of stewed cheese.'

Bring on the cheese!

-Oh, I say.

-There we go.

'This dish was a chop house staple and a version of what we now know

'as Welsh rabbit.'

I think this is a very, very old way of eating cheese,

I mean, they'd have mixed it up with a bit of beer and a bit of cream

or something, you know... Some mustard.

-Absolutely delicious.

-Very nice.

And of course, the funny thing is, here we are having a reconstruction

of a 19th century lunch, but one thing that

you probably wouldn't have had at a Victorian lunch would be a woman!

Wonderful as it is to be having lunch with you, I'm afraid if we

were having an authentic Victorian experience, Clarissa,

you wouldn't be here.

But I might have squeaked through

because I was a barrister, and barristers are gentlemen by statute.

You're a gentlemen in every sense of the word, if I may say so.

Ah, so kind!

The Victorian chop house was drawing on a long tradition of eating well

in the middle of the work day.

In medieval times, food was, by necessity, prepared and eaten

during daylight hours.

The main meal dividing the work day was then called dinner,

and was taken earlier - around 10:00am, after five hours of work,

followed by a light supper at 4:00pm.

The word "lunch" at that time didn't even exist.

Daily life revolved around the time-consuming demands of hunting,

growing and cooking food.

I've come to the Weald and Downland Museum in Sussex

to meet historical food specialist, Caroline Yeldham.

She's cooking me up a selection of dishes

from a typical medieval dinner menu.

-Hello, Caroline! How nice to see you, how are you?

-Lovely to see you.

-I love your set up.

-Thank you.

-Brilliant.

And what have we got cooking here?

We've got a pottage. Pottage just means something cooked in a pot,

and it's got onions and garlic and carrots, mustard seed and pepper

in there at the moment and also a ham hock.

Delicious. And they would have eaten pottage most days?

Yes, of all ranks of society. If you're poor and it's your main dish

of the day, then a very basic one, up to very refined, elegant pottages

made with wine and almond milk and saffron.

-And we've also got a joint of mutton.

-Oh, good.

Being poached or boiled as it was called.

Oh, look at that!

And of course it would have been mutton and not lamb, wouldn't it?

Absolutely, sheep were the wealth of this country

but you raised sheep primarily for wool,

that's a dominant clothing throughout Western Europe -

the wool churches of the Cotswolds and Suffolk show

just how much money was made from the wool -

so you didn't want to slaughter your animals too young.

It smells delicious.

Good.

There's a common belief that people in the Middle Ages ate badly,

which included not eating vegetables.

This is complete nonsense.

It may come from the fact that there are no vegetable recipes

from this time - I think that's simply

because people took cooking them for granted.

I mean, my mother used to keep a dinner party book

and you never found what vegetables they ate with whatever was served

-because it was what came out of the garden.

-Absolutely.

People in medieval times relied on a bountiful living larder.

They foraged for plants we consider weeds

and grew a range of vegetables, including garlic and purple carrots.

Carrots weren't orange then, were they?

There are various kinds of carrots.

There are white ones, which were for animal feed,

purple ones, which we've got here

and there are also what were referred to as red roots.

We know they had access to spices to flavour their food

but that's given rise to another popular misconception.

I mean, there's this ludicrous idea that crops up as well,

that, you know, they used all these spices because the meat was rotten.

Spices cost a fortune, they cost shillings a pound,

and the only spice that actually will cover up

the taste of rotting meat properly is chilli.

Which we didn't have.

Which we didn't have because it's an American spice.

It's, it's an absurdity for people

who haven't really thought about food.

These are rather nice.

I don't really like orange carrots but these are rather nice.

They're less sweet, aren't they? And they're a wonderful colour.

Medieval people loved colour.

The basic rhythms of life, including what you ate and at what hour,

were ordained on high by the Catholic church.

Meat was only permitted on half the days of the year.

Otherwise, if it wasn't a fast day,

the popular substitute for meat was fish,

which was eaten in great quantities.

The wealthy ate it fresh from fish ponds and rivers

while the poor mostly relied on salted fish.

Food wasn't considered just nourishment, it was also medicinal.

People believed the body was composed of humours, which needed

balancing, by both herbal remedies and the way food was cooked.

There were four humours, weren't there?

There are earth, air, fire and water, which are reflected in

black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood in the human body.

So part of a cook's job, as well as a physician's job,

is to provide somebody with the food that will balance their humours

and bring them to perfect health.

Fish should be roasted to balance out the wateriness of the fish,

so you want to make it hotter and drier, whereas mutton, being earthy,

you need to make it more watery, so it's being boiled or poached.

A cooked meal at 10:00 in the morning would be so welcome

after a good five hours of physical labour.

If you've ever had builders in,

you'll know that many still follow this tradition, by downing tools

mid-morning to disappear for some egg and chips after an early start.

The wealthy would enjoy eating several courses

but the poor would probably only have one.

I don't believe in holding back, I'm going to try all of them.

So begin with the pottage.

Begin with the pottage.

Smells lovely.

Mmm. It's good, isn't it?

Obviously, we've got the ham hock,

which would have been a bit of a luxury, wouldn't it?

Not really, most people could afford to keep some pigs

so they would have meat available, cured meat, over most of the year.

'There were official lunch breaks for labourers -

'meals were eaten communally and lasted over an hour.

'As a former Trade Union official, I thoroughly approve of that.'

If you wanted sea fish, it was a luxury

and people went to extraordinary lengths to get it.

It was landed on the coast and transported around the country.

There was a contract between the merchants of Whitby

and the merchants of York in the 15th century

to get fresh fish to York within 24 hours of being landed in Whitby,

which meant they set up relay stations for ponies and carts

-going over the North York Moors to get down into York.

-Good Lord.

-Yes.

The labour and the work was worth it for the premium prices

being paid for fresh fish in York.

And the fish were transported wrapped in moss, and probably alive.

-That's amazing.

-It is.

It's really very nice, and I love your green sauce.

I do try and convince people medieval food is good.

You don't need to convince me but this is particularly nice.

And I'm right in that you wipe it on the tablecloth?

If you must! You would normally have... How about my apron?

No, I was only joking.

'The meal would always end with something sweet that was

'considered medicinal,

'a way to close the stomach and aid digestion.'

So, the pears...

So these have been cooked in some water and a little honey,

and some sweet cicely to stretch the honey

because that was quite expensive stuff.

'I think this diet based on fresh wholesome food

'is how we should all aspire to eat.'

Instead of saying grace, I will just thank you

for a really delicious feast. The benefits are all mine.

Thank you.

This large main meal we then called dinner

was eaten in the late morning, the middle of the work day,

for the next couple of hundred years.

I'm leaping ahead in my lunchtime journey to the early modern period

of the late 17th century.

The Catholic strictures were replaced by Protestant puritanism,

but with the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660,

Britain enters a period of great social change.

Food becomes more about taste and style than balancing humours.

The middle classes are emerging

and although most people still live on and eat off the land,

more people are embracing city life and consequently new work patterns.

By this time, the main meal is creeping later in the day,

eaten anytime from 11:00 in the morning to 2:00 in the afternoon.

Samuel Pepys, one of my favourite historical figures,

was a civil servant in London.

He was a gourmand, a man after my own heart,

and his diaries shine a fascinating light

onto what a man of the middling sort enjoyed eating.

In January 1660, he writes "My wife had got ready a very fine dinner -

"viz. a dish of marrow bones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal,

"a dish of fowl, three pullets and a dozen of larks all in a dish."

But it was venison that was the prized meat of the age.

Nobility had a total monopoly on it,

owning all the parks in which the deer were hunted.

To eat it, you had to have connections.

Pepys revels in his access to it,

mentioning it in his diary 76 times.

I've come to Cumbria to join food historian Ivan Day,

who's going to bring some of the dishes from Pepys' diary to life.

Ivan, hello. It's been a long time. How are you?

It has, too long, I'm very well, thank you.

Wow, that's a smashing bit of meat. What you got there?

-It's a bit I've cut off a haunch.

-Of?

-Of venison, of course.

It's the choice cone of meat of the period of Pepys.

Everybody wanted it, particularly the merchant class who were aspiring

to be like the social superiors, and this is a particularly fine piece.

I'm going to bake it in pastry, in what was called a pasty.

'A pasty at this time wasn't the cheap small snack we know today

'but a large elaborate creation.'

-Can you see how tender that is?

-Isn't it beautiful?

It's absolutely wonderful.

In the 17th century, people weren't fussy eaters so, for instance,

bones were left in, the modern chef would probably remove that sinew,

I'm going to leave it for the diner to sort out themselves.

But also, I mean, if you're going to cook it, you know, so slowly,

presumably all the skins will melt down and help with the juice.

Absolutely, yeah.

What type of pastry is this?

Well, this is pasty paste, and it's quite a strong pastry

because it's got to stand up to two and a half hours baking

and it mustn't leak either.

If we lose all the gravy, our pasty is ruined.

Ruined, ruined!

-So it's really got to be sealed in.

-Yeah.

'From the medieval period,

'pie and pasty cases were rather wonderfully called coffins

'and by Samuel Pepys' time

'intricate designs were all the rage.'

This is what we're going to make.

Good Lord.

This is a design for a venison pasty.

It's magnificent.

Isn't it wonderful? By a pastry master who had various schools

in the City, and he claims to have taught 10,000 ladies how to make

wonderful pies and pastry.

You know, this is the 17th century equivalent to designer trainers.

I mean, everybody wanted food like this.

THEY LAUGH

I'm just going to trim this round so that we have our base.

Everyone wanted to eat venison but it was so exclusive

that cookery books offered recipes to fake it

by either soaking mutton in blood or marinating it in red wine.

The ingenuity in these recipes leaves me gasping,

though I can't condone hoodwinking people into believing

they're eating something better than they actually are.

This is more typical of the sort of pasty

that Mrs Pepys and her maid would have made in their London kitchen

but we know that they didn't have an oven so they sent it out to be baked.

That was often where the problem started because some bakers

might have a lot of different people's things to bake.

You wouldn't get your own back.

You might not have got your own back or they would burn it

or they would undercook it, so you were taking a bit of a risk,

but in London, not that many people had ovens,

they sent it to the bakery.

-I suppose fire risks.

-Well, exactly, yeah.

-There we are.

-Look at that.

The thing that these people had,

which we don't give ourselves nowadays, is time.

To produce something like that,

it's going to take quite a few hours of whittling away in a cold room,

away from the heat of the fire so the pastry doesn't spoil.

Nothing of the slaughtered deer would be wasted.

The offal, known as umbles, was traditionally given to

the chief huntsman to distribute among the beaters and peasants,

being deemed far too inferior for a noble palate.

It was turned into "umble pie", a dish which didn't acquire

its derogatory meaning, "humble pie", until the 19th century.

Fantastic.

It's a mark of Pepys' ability to move through social classes,

that he happily eats the best cuts of meat along with the offal.

In July 1662 he writes,

"I having some venison given me a day or two ago,

"and so I had a shoulder roasted, another baked,

"and the umbles baked in a pie, and all very well done."

-Marvellous.

-Perfect.

Much as he loved venison, Pepys also ate more modest tavern food

such as dried neat's tongue, a neat being any kind of bovine.

The neat's tongues that were the most favoured

were the ones from the young animals.

Stuart diners were in fact serial infanticides.

They loved anything young so they ate suckling pig,

and suckling pig was a pig that was still at the mother's teat.

They ate baby pigeons, of course, peepers,

they ate baby rabbits but everyone ate tongue.

But they also ate lips and noses and palates and all sorts of other bits

of the animal which now just go into dog food.

Nose to tail eating was common then,

as was preservation of the slaughtered animal

if it couldn't be eaten all at once.

Very early on, people realised that salt was something which you

could preserve meat with.

The recipe we're using is incredibly fundamental,

it just involves three ingredients.

One is the tongue itself of the beast,

saltpetre, which was either potassium or sodium nitrate,

-used in the gunpowder industry.

-Indeed.

But it was discovered that this prevents you from getting botulism

but what it does also, it creates an incredible bacterial phenomenon

where it makes the meat go red.

So that red colour that you associate with bacon and tongue and ham,

is created by this stuff.

The final ingredient is salt, which gets rubbed in over 19 days.

The tongue is then left to hang over smoke to dry.

What you end up with is something that looks like a cross between

a kipper, and one of those shoes that they find in archaeological sites.

Absolutely, it does!

-And it's a wonderful mahogany colour.

-It's a lovely colour.

And they're called dry neat's tongues cos they are really dry,

and they're quite hard.

Now, what we have here is one that I cooked for 40 minutes.

I just boiled it.

We're going to cut that up into little dice.

In the original recipe -

which is from Robert May's Accomplisht Cook of 1660,

so perfect for the Restoration - this has to be cut up into little pieces

about the size of a threepenny piece.

Robert May worked as a cook for noble families

and his book was a compendium of popular recipes

offering many suggestions for midday meals.

Our diet was strongly influenced by

the British East India Trading Company, established in 1600,

whose reach made cloves, pepper, mace and nutmeg

imported from the Indonesian spice islands cheaper and more available.

Let's get this over here.

-I'll bring the caudle.

-Yeah.

And we're instructed by the master cook Robert May

to rub some garlic onto the plate.

Garlic was not a common ingredient in 17th century cookery.

That will make a nice background flavour on the plate.

While only a small section of society had access to venison,

everyone on the social scale would have eaten dishes like this

that were much cheaper and easier to prepare.

I always think we are far too fussy nowadays

in rejecting less obvious cuts of meat.

Wealthier people would accompany their meal with a salad

to show off ingredients imported from afar.

The London Pepys knew was a world in flux.

He saw both the Great Fire and the plague.

He was also part of a dynamic time

when men could rise through patronage.

Taverns were where deals were brokered

and life played out over a midday meal.

Pepys came here in April 1668.

"To the Cock ale-house and drank, to eat a lobster and mighty merry."

It was moved here from across the road

to make way for the new law courts,

a former professional stamping ground of my own.

They brought the fireplace with them

and Pepys remains one of their most famous diners.

From his writings, we know what Pepys ate at home

and what he ate while out networking.

Have a look at the stag. He's magnificent.

Oh, it's beautiful.

See his antlers, and there's his body, and he's sort of bursting

through the greenery getting away from the dogs.

That's terrific.

'Historian Lisa Jardine and I

'are tucking into the pasty Ivan baked for us.

'She's going to tell me more about Pepys' dining patterns

'and the business lunch culture of 17th century London.'

That's a fairly intimidating bit of venison there.

-You don't have to eat it all.

-I don't have to eat it all.

There you are.

Good. Now, I think that's what Pepys' plate would have looked like.

-None of your salad rubbish.

-None of your salad.

Mmm. Now, that's really good, isn't it?

That's really good and that's benefited

so much from being cooked in its coffin,

because venison can get so dry but that's not even slightly dry.

And it's had, you know, it was cooked for a good couple of hours

and then transported and then heated through. I mean, it's delicious.

Mmm, it's fantastic.

So Pepys eating venison -

you know, you had to be well connected, didn't you?

He's by birth related to aristocracy and in a patronage society,

that's enough to get you going.

I think the reason that Pepys' diary has so much about food in it

is that the dinner, this three hour gap in the middle of the day,

is part of his social aspiration and his mobility,

it's also part of his working life, he works for the Navy office,

he's close to aristocracy

and what they eat is a sign of how elevated they now are.

The whole of Pepys' life is about connections,

and the food is part of the connections to people

with the ability to move you higher on up the scale.

And Pepys never missed an opportunity

to name-drop his fellow diners.

In July 1666, he writes, "At noon to dinner at the Pope's Head

"where my Lord Bruncker and his mistress dined

"and Commissioner Pett, Dr Charleton and myself,

"entertained with a venison pasty by Sir W Warren."

The behaviour of this group, to which Pepys is enormously proud to belong,

is very much, I think, the City in Britain

and the Civil Service in the 1980s.

So it's the long lunch, it's the expense account lunch,

it's the... I'm sorry I'm calling it lunch

because of course it's dinner in Pepys' terms.

I mean, lunch is a much later idea.

The meal will be shared with other people in the same sort of business.

It will be in a location that they all rate, a classy restaurant,

you can only go to the places that are known by name to your colleagues.

That's a brilliant point, that the long City lunch of the 1980s

was the dinner of Pepys' day. Yes, I love that.

Actually, if you go to certain restaurants

around the Houses of Parliament now at lunchtime,

it hasn't changed all that much.

I think that's really why we love Pepys.

He seems so recognisable to us in all of his attitudes and aspirations

and even the pleasure he takes in food, the pleasure

he takes in company, the pleasure he takes in reporting back

that he's met somebody frightfully grand

and sat down to a meal with them.

Pepys lived at a turning point

when our eating habits were about to change dramatically.

During the mid-1700s,

the midday meal, still known as dinner, slid later and later,

positioning itself in an early evening slot familiar to us today.

The reason why is connected to windows and light but that's

a whole other matter, and I'll deal with it when I investigate dinner.

A large gap opened up in the middle of the day

when people were getting hungry, a brand-new meal came to the rescue

and rather confusingly there were several different names for it.

For some it was "noonings", whilst others called it "nuncheon"

from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning "noonday drink".

But it finally settled as "luncheon",

and with its own entry into Dr Johnson's Dictionary,

lunch is officially born.

And as is so often the case,

the ever-fashionable Jane Austen provides us with the evidence.

In 1813, in Pride And Prejudice,

the two Bennet sisters purchase food for a luncheon,

"and triumphantly displayed a table set out

"with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords."

The leisured classes would make social calls

during the middle of the day.

Luncheon was served

and you could eat as little or as much as you wanted.

So here we have a table set out as if for a luncheon in 1813,

Regency period.

You've got your salad, which is lettuce, cucumbers and melon.

They were very keen on melons, which they grew here

so they never got very sweet.

And this is your dressing, which is made with pounded hard-boiled eggs,

and if you taste it, what you actually have is salad cream.

I love the thought of the elegant Regency eating salad cream.

We've got your cold meats that the inn larder would afford,

pheasant legs - devilled pheasant legs were a very popular thing -

and here we've got one of my favourite dishes of the period,

a sefton of herrings, which is herring roes cooked in butter,

and this dish was invented by the Regency sportsman and rakehell,

the Earl of Sefton, who developed it for his wife

because she enjoyed poor health, as they said at the time,

and you would put that on a water biscuit.

And you've got a bit of cayenne pepper.

Cayenne pepper was a new "in thing" at the time

and you get these wonderful little holders with a spoon in

for serving your cayenne pepper, which were known as lucifers,

because it's so hot it's like the devil

and I really can't resist this one.

But of course luncheon wasn't just for high society,

working people also had to eat at midday.

No sooner had lunch officially taken off, than it had to react

to one of the biggest social upheavals we've ever experienced.

As the Industrial Revolution took its grip

throughout the 19th century,

mass migration into cities on an unprecedented scale

broke down our connection between cooking and eating,

radically affecting how we consumed our meals.

Many poor workers now living in the city

had lost the ability to grow food

and had neither a kitchen nor the time to prepare a proper meal.

Thousands of street stalls sprang up to sell them cheap fast food.

For millions of people,

lunch became a giant open air buffet on the street.

Baked potatoes were the staple, but for a variety there was tripe,

sheep's trotters, udder and even penis.

I've eaten both of the latter, and perfectly nice they were too.

Seafood was extremely popular.

Whelks, winkles, prawns and jellied eels

were consumed in great quantities.

You can still find these snacks in places like Borough Market

in south-east London.

I've come to see an old friend of mine,

Les Salisbury, here at his fish stall.

Les, hello.

-Hello, Clarissa.

-How are you?

-I'm fine thanks, yes.

-Great to see you. All looking lovely.

-Yes, thank you.

This lobster's trying to enter the Derby.

Yes, it's a long way to go if he wants to go home.

So, whelks. Can I have a whelk?

These are off the Morecambe Bay coast. North of Morecambe Bay.

-Oh, really?

-Yes.

A nice looking whelk.

And they've just been boiled this morning.

Mmm, that's really nice.

There's no salt and vinegar on them cos some people like it, some don't.

Putting it in vinegar, that comes from Tudor times.

Right, preserving.

When they started getting glass containers.

Preserve it in the glass, the vinegar wouldn't eat the glass.

But, I mean, the Victorians and the Edwardians loved all this.

-These are the Irish silver eel.

-The best eel.

-The best eel, yes.

You always used to have them at the shows

-and I'd come across and buy a tub for my lunch.

-That's right.

Jellied eels originated in the East End of London

and eels were still fished in the Thames when I was a girl.

I remember our cook buying them

and she would skin and prepare them herself.

I much prefer to eat them from a stall like this

and I'll happily buy jellied eels or a pint of shellfish for my lunch

if I can find them.

-Good?

-Very good.

Victorian street food kept the poor from starving,

providing convenient basic fuel

that made their industrious lives possible.

Some portable foods were designed for specific jobs.

The Cornish pasty, eaten by tin miners, had a crimped pastry handle

which was discarded because their hands could contain

highly poisonous arsenic from the tin.

Of course, all of these snacks are dwarfed by England's greatest gift

to convenience food, the sandwich.

Lord Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, made history

by calling for a slice of beef between two slices of bread

because he didn't want to get up from the table.

He was either gambling or working,

depending on which version of the story you believe.

I'm leaning in one direction but sandwich expert

and food writer Bea Wilson is going to enlighten me.

Sandwich was said to be not a gambling man

but what he was in the habit of doing was working extremely long hours.

He was the First Lord of the Admiralty, which meant

he was in charge of overseeing the whole British Navy

and it's a far more likely explanation

that actually he was stuck at his desk for hours upon end, and that was

when he called for the piece of beef between two slices of bread.

Dinner was very late, it was the only main meal of the day,

Sandwich got up very early in the morning

and he just needed something he could hold in one hand and eat

while he was ruffling through his Navy papers with the other hand.

The problem I see with that one is how would it have got out and about?

I mean, if he was sitting in the gambling den,

everybody would go "Oh, that's a good idea"

whereas if he was in the confines of his office...?

Well, that is the big question.

I think that his valet or his butler or

whoever was bringing him the sandwich probably spread the word about it.

But the odds are that actually Sandwich was eating this snack

in all kinds of settings, he did move in London club world.

Which involved gambling.

Which involved gambling, among other things.

And the very first record we have of it being referred to as a sandwich

comes in the diary of the historian Gibbon,

who wrote The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire,

and in 1762 he came back and wrote in his diary,

"I went out to the theatre and then went on to the Cocoa Tree,"

which was a kind of dining club,

"and there were 20 or 30 of the sort of first men of the Kingdom

"and they were all sitting at tables covered in a napkin

"supping on a piece of cold meat or a sandwich."

CLARISSA SHRIEKS

Sandwich himself was probably one of these 20 or 30 men, wasn't he?

And people would have said, "Oh, I'll have what Sandwich is having."

Then it would have been, "Oh, I'll have a sandwich." Yeah.

-Absolutely.

-So why do you think it caught on so rapidly?

Well, it's really a great invention.

It's very rare to find a food which you can eat without any cutlery.

It's portable, it's just a sort of ideal thing that people could

eat very quickly on the run, take it with them while they're travelling.

The sandwich was invented in the 18th century

but came of age with the Victorians who had recipe books suggesting

fashionable new fillings thanks to the availability of potted foods.

Life was speeding up for the Victorians,

they now had convenience food and they also had rail travel.

So here we are on a modern, inconvenient, uncomfortable train

but had we been travelling in the second half of the 19th century,

we would have had the benefit of a railway hamper.

These specially made hampers were served on 50 stations

along the Great Western Railway and you would pay three and sixpence

for your luncheon hamper or one and sixpence for your teatime hamper,

and a boy would deliver it to your seat.

And this is what it looked like,

specially made in the East End of London for the railways.

And let's see what we've got.

Very exciting and much nicer

than the sort of catering you get on railways nowadays, I suspect.

First you have that wonderful new-fangled invention,

the Thermos flask, invented in 1851 by Mr Dewar of Scotland.

You'd have had your milk in a little bottle with a cork,

you would have had a teacup and saucer and it's rather

like the sort of picnic hamper in Wind And The Willows, isn't it?

You've got ham, you've got a hard-boiled egg,

butter and even salt and pepper.

Your bread roll, so you would make up your own sandwich

and when you'd finished, you'd just abandon the hamper at the end

of your journey and somebody would come and pick it up.

The Victorians had developed an interesting nutrition

and with millions grazing only on street food,

the realisation dawned that this was affecting the health of the nation.

Around half of those who volunteered to fight in the Boer War

in the early 1900s were rejected for being too short and malnourished.

The British Empire might collapse, something had to be done.

In 1906, the Government responded with a new law for the

provision of school meals, which were free for the poorest children.

All in an effort to promote the value of a proper balanced lunch.

It changed the lives of millions

and supplied the proof we had lost sight of,

that a substantial meal in the middle of the day paid dividends.

By the time World War II arrived, people were stronger

but the onset of war triggered another major Government

intervention in our diet, rationing.

It was introduced in January 1940 when many basic items

were in very short supply and the queues lasted for hours.

Just acquiring the ingredients and preparing a decent lunch

was suddenly far more of a challenge.

This is Woldingham, my old school. I had plenty of school meals here.

I was born shortly after World War II ended

and I can just remember rationing.

I've come back here to deliver some expertise on ration book recipes

to a class of girls and their tender young palates.

Serving a nutritious lunch during the war was a challenge

solved only by a thrifty and clever use of resources.

People reverted to foraging,

making nettle soup, which is loaded with iron.

They also had to make do with substitute ingredients

like powdered egg and potato for pastry and pies.

And they had their own fake recipes like these mock fish cakes

with fish paste and dripping cake made from beef fat.

Everyone was encouraged to produce their own food.

My father raised pigs on a patch of land in St John's Wood,

near our home.

Ironically, in this time of great austerity,

our nutrition as a nation was probably never better.

So what do you think of this recipe so far?

-It's really different.

-It's odd.

I mean, you wouldn't normally use potato in pastry.

-Or dripping at all.

-Yeah, you'd use butter

but then I suppose they didn't have a lot of butter.

There wasn't any...almost no butter.

I have a cake recipe which is just potatoes and butter and eggs.

-Wow.

-And orange juice and a bit of marmalade,

and it's really delicious.

But not for wartime food.

I think we'd all be quite glad we don't live in wartime.

Yes. I quite like my life here.

I quite liked my life when I was here, though I didn't

like the food much but my mother used to send me food parcels.

Give the big lumps to me because I've got stronger hands than you.

OK, I'm just getting covered in it.

-It washes off.

-Yeah.

Have you tasted it?

-No, I haven't, not yet.

-Mmm. Yep.

-Any good?

-Yeah, it's all right.

Mind your fingers.

THEY ALL LAUGH

I think you've done a really good job here.

You mixed all your flour and dripping together

and you put the currants in

and now you're just going to put it in the tin.

Oh, gosh, I can't wait for it to be cooked.

It's time to bring on the hungry lions and serve them up

with these wartime recipes.

Pie and vegetables, please.

There you go, thank you.

Many people struggled to eat during the war.

The Ministry of Food set up canteens called British Restaurants

for people in work.

They served basic food such as shepherd's pie.

It was famously dull but dependable.

The Ministry of Food also allowed commercial restaurants to stay open

but restricted them to charging no more than five shillings a meal.

They found their own creative ways to work with limited ingredients.

My mother recalled being served horse meat masquerading as steak.

Her friend couldn't stomach it so my mother ate hers as well.

Hmm, not bad. Not bad.

-Do you like it?

-It has a really bad aftertaste.

THEY CHATTER

I wonder if any of the simple food passes muster with these girls.

Who had the nettle soup?

What did you think of it?

Well, I didn't like it at first but it grew on me.

I really didn't like it.

I can see that.

And what did we think of the fish cakes?

I liked it at first but like, it really...

it had a really bad aftertaste so...

And the pie?

I thought the egg and the bacon was really nice

but the pastry was a bit stodgy and it had a kind of weird texture

but other than that, I ate the whole thing.

I really liked the dripping cake.

I thought maybe it wouldn't taste like, that sweet

because it's from sort of beef, but I really liked it.

It tastes a lot like mince pies as well, so I really liked it.

So it seems to me that generally you thought it was better than

you'd imagined it was going to be, even if you wouldn't rush

to do it again, is that right?

ALL: Yes.

With the exception of the dripping cake,

which seemed to be favourably received.

Just think back to your grandmothers probably

who were coping with such situations like that in wartime,

and I think that we should all give the cooks a big round of applause.

-THEY APPLAUD

-Well done.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when rationing ended in 1954.

Our diets were then changed to buy a new import from overseas -

not an ingredient but an idea, supermarkets,

making lunch a much easier proposition.

Sliced bread had first appeared in the 1920s

but it was the Chorleywood baking process,

devised in Britain in the early 1960s,

that gave bread a longer shelf life

and so fuelled the rise of the sandwich.

Could the Fourth Earl of Sandwich have ever imagined

his titanic culinary legacy when he wanted to speed up his work day?

I've eaten my fair share of sandwiches

but would never buy them pre-packaged.

One in four of us buys a sandwich for lunch every day.

We spend a staggering £6 billion on them a year.

The most popular selling lines are anything with chicken

and prawn mayonnaise.

With so many options to choose from, sandwiches are big business.

Sandwich designers compete to put new fillings on the shelves.

There are even awards for the most inventive sandwiches.

Tom Allen has won some of the top prizes.

I'm meeting him at his sandwich research laboratory.

-Hello, are you Tom?

-Hi, Clarissa. Nice to meet you.

-Hello, how do you do?

-Good, thank you, good.

Good. What are you up to?

Today, I'm just working on a little upgrade on the classic

New York deli sandwich to try and make it a bit more exciting,

so I'm putting a bit of caraway seed into the mustard dressing.

-May I?

-Yes.

That's nice.

What's the most popular sandwich you've ever designed?

One of the sandwiches that I've been involved in

was generating £1 million of sales in a week for just one sandwich.

No, what was that?

It was a classic turkey stuffing.

So, yeah, no, nothing complicated

but it's just a good old classic, really,

and some really good quality ingredients in there.

I heard that you designed the world's most,

how would you say it, amazing, exotic, favourite sandwich?

I was in a competition which was held in Australia

and I won the World's Greatest Sandwich.

Right, show me. OK.

So it's not all bad news.

Even if lunch is mostly shrunk down

to consuming convenience food in a hurry,

I can see there's still plenty of room for creativity.

Tom's award-winning sandwich is a clever take on the beef Wellington.

We're just getting a nice bit of caramelisation there

and the butteriness is supposed to be like

the all-butter pastry in a beef Wellington.

With beef as a primary ingredient,

I'm sure the Fourth Earl of Sandwich would approve.

And the secret winning ingredient is horseradish ice cream.

This is how it would have been presented to

the judges in the competition, with the ice cream just starting to melt

over the caramelised shallot beetroot chutney

and then the hot beef with the porcini.

I think the ice cream is so clever.

Hmm.

Really interesting, I'm not surprised you won.

Thank you.

Well done.

Despite his sandwich being the norm for many, there is,

I'm happy to say,

one day of the week when we give lunch its proper due.

Sunday lunch, whether we eat it at home or in a restaurant

like this one in North London, is not simply about refuelling

but a relaxed communal experience centring on a well-cooked meal.

When I was a child, my mother would always invite a guest

and serve us a wonderful cut of meat.

The Sunday roast is a cornerstone of our food culture.

Some think it developed during the Industrial Revolution

when Yorkshire families left a cut of meat in the oven before church

to be ready to eat when they hurried back home.

Or it may have derived from the much older medieval tradition

of roasting an ox or some other animal on high days and holidays

when religious feasts were regular events.

Chicken was the most expensive thing you could buy for a Sunday lunch.

-Absolutely delicious.

-Isn't it?

-Really good.

I think Sunday lunch is a vitally important tradition because it

reminds us of all that is best about our old food customs.

Customs that once applied to every daytime meal,

whatever we might choose to call it.

This to me is very reminiscent of the medieval meal.

It's local produce, cooked with care,

people take the time to talk to one another,

to enjoy one another's company,

to share it with their families and just generally get together.

Although this is possibly one of the very few times

that we now eat this sort of lunch,

I long for the day when it isn't quite such a special occasion.

Our medieval ancestors knew the value of stopping to eat

a proper meal in the middle of every day of the week,

and I think we would be well advised to remember that.

I'd urge everyone, whenever possible,

to take time to enjoy a good lunch.

Next week I'll be looking at dinner, our biggest meal of the day.

It's not just about food, but social aspirations and showing off.

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