Alcohol

So if your food is tainted and your water is poisoned, what is another alternative?  Coffee was too expensive. Although the English love tea, it was also expensive – tea leaves were so dear that after the rich had used them once, they were resold by enterprising cooks to the poor for reuse (Olsen, 238).  The price of tea was controlled by the East India Company (an English firm).  In 1700, when poor and middle income families made £15-50 per year, a pound of tea cost £1!  (Waller, 193-94.)  Tea also has no nutritional value.  So people drank alcohol, usually too much (Olsen, 238).

Rich people drank French, Rhenish, Spanish and Portuguese wines.  Middle income people drank or made home-brewed beer, including cock-ale.

“To make cock-ale, take ten gallons of ale [beer] and a large cock [rooster], the older the better, parbroil the cock, flea him and stamp him in a stone mortar till his bones are broken (you must craw and gut him when you flea him), then put the cock into two quarts of sack, and put to it three pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves: put all these into a canvas bag, and a little before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and bag together into a vessel.  In a week or nine days’ time bottle it up, fill the bottles to just above the neck, and give it the same time to ripen as other ale.” (Olsen, 192.) – The Compleat Housewife, 1739 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_ale, accessed 24 September 2012).

However, once imported Dutch gin was introduced to the poor, it caused devastating effects.  More about that tomorrow.