The words “Victorian science” bring to mind sober men with ridiculous facial hair peering through microscopes. What it doesn’t bring to mind are certifiable lunatics trying to fly into space, electrocute their genitals, and teach dogs the alphabet. Yet that’s exactly what researchers of the day were up to.

10 Trying To Take A Hot Air Balloon Into Space

If scientist James Glaisher had had his way, the first manned spaceflight would have taken place 100 years before Yuri Gagarin’s. That’s because 1862 was the year that Glaisher and Henry Coxwell set off in their hot air balloon for the “aerial ocean” above. Their government-funded flight took off from Wolverhampton on September 5. Almost immediately, things went horribly wrong.

Approximately 8 kilometers (5 mi) above the Earth, the temperatures dropped to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 °F) and the animals that Glaisher had brought to observe died. About 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) above that, both men suddenly got the bends and collapsed.

At 11 kilometers (7 mi) up, both men blacked out but not before Coxwell pulled the valve release cord with his teeth. To Glaisher’s dismay, the balloon descended, taking them away from the edges of the atmosphere.

Somehow, this near-death experience didn’t put Glaisher off. He made 21 more flights but never realized his dream of ballooning into space.

9 Interviewing Politicians Telepathically

As editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead championed anything that would help us talk to one another. However, he didn’t discriminate between real-world stuff and ideas from la-la land. Stead was convinced that he could talk to people using only the power of his mind.

At the time, many believed in hidden psychic abilities. So it seemed plausible that you might be able to contact people mentally. For Stead, this meant telepathically sending notes to his secretary, dictating reports to his writers while in another country, and trying to ask questions of famous politicians using only his mind.

Indeed, Stead’s greatest “scoop” came thanks to his powers. He was one of the people killed on the Titanic in 1912. His journalists later claimed that he telepathically reported the disaster to them as it happened.

8 Teaching Dogs To Read

Sir John Lubbock was one of Victorian Britain’s leading scientists. Over his long career, he invented the words “Neolithic” and “Paleolithic,” became vice chancellor of London University, and introduced Thomas Edison’s electric streetlights to England. Oh, and he also wasted hundreds of research hours trying to teach his dog to read.

Lubbock was convinced that dogs could be taught to understand English. Not just simple commands like “sit,” “stay,” or “come back with my donut,” but full, complex sentences. To that end, he drew up giant boards with sentences on them, stuck them in front of his dog, and tried to get the animal to understand them.

By his own account, Lubbock insisted he’d scientifically proven that dogs were capable of learning to read. However, no one has ever repeated this feat.

7 Communicating With Mars

In 1888, Giovanni Schiaparelli announced the discovery of canali on Mars. In Italian, canali means “channels.” A translation mistake meant the English-speaking public heard of them as “canals,” implying intelligence. Almost immediately, this sparked a craze for communicating with Martians through any means possible.

One of the maddest attempts came in 1892. A wealthy French woman had bequeathed an absurd amount of money to establish a network of giant mirrors across Earth. These mirrors would be flashed at the red planet, sending Morse code messages hurtling across the empty depths of space. The Martians would see these messages, build similar mirrors, and flash their own messages back.

By 1892, preparations were well underway to begin using the mirrors to communicate with Mars. Unfortunately, the plan fell apart when more sober scientists pointed out that Mars was now moving away from Earth so the aliens wouldn’t see them anyway.

6 Testing Spectacles On Horses

In 1893, an unsuspecting horse owner sparked one of science’s most bizarre quests. Convinced that his horse was going blind, the anonymous man walked into an optician’s store and ordered a pair of horse glasses. For optician Mr. Dolland, it was the start of a lifelong quest to provide horses with spectacles.

Dolland became convinced that all horses were shortsighted. They bolted when something spooked them because they couldn’t see what it really was. Design a pair of perfect horse specs and bolting, with its attendant injuries, would be a thing of the past.

It’s unknown how long Dolland kept at his crazy idea, but it was certainly long enough to test different glasses on dozens of horses. Eventually, he settled on a pair of bifocals he believed could improve the sight of any horse in the world. The horse-owning public disagreed. Dolland’s contribution to equine science sank without a trace.

5 Electrocuting Their Own Genitals

The Victorians liked men to be men, and any sign of unmanliness was a serious cause of concern. To battle weakness and deficiencies of “masculine energy,” Victorian scientists came up with one of the most absurd cures ever: a belt that delivered constant electric shocks to the subject’s genitals.

These were the days when electricity was so new that it was considered a potential cure-all for just about everything. Just as wackos in the 1950s claimed that radiation could heal anything, so too did Victorians consider electricity a kind of wonder drug.

The experiments were considered such a success that their use expanded to curing impotence, and they started appearing for sale in magazines. Strangely enough, they never really caught on with the general public, who seemed unwilling to embrace severe shocks to their genitalia.

4 Training Wasps As Pets

Remember John Lubbock, the guy who thought he could teach dogs to read? Turns out he had a second hobby that was nearly as weird as the first. Lubbock was convinced that you could train wasps to be the perfect pet.

He tried to train them like you would a dog—to eat out of his hand, allow themselves to be stroked, accompany him to meetings, and, presumably, attack his enemies on command.

As you’d expect, these experiments didn’t go well. Lubbock frequently got stung by his tiny charges, who we’re gonna assume failed to understand what the heck was going on. Yet he persevered and, amazingly, managed to train one single wasp to obey his commands. The creature only lasted nine months before dying, but that was enough for Lubbock to proclaim the winged monsters made perfect pets.

3 Imprinting On The Eyes Of Condemned Criminals

Optography is the practice of analyzing the eyeball to reproduce the last image it saw. If that sounds nuts, it’s because it is. Not that this stopped the Victorians from trying. From 1880 onward, scores of condemned men were asked by scientists to look at dramatic things just before they were executed.

Wilhelm Kuhne led the charge. In 1880, he acquired the head of guillotined murderer Erhard Gustav Reif and examined his eyeballs for images of violent movement. As time went on, the experiments became more elaborate. One condemned man was asked to keep his eyes completely shut as he was led onto the scaffold and to snap them open the second before he was hanged. Strangely, he acquiesced.

Such experiments were so numerous that optography acquired a respectable sheen. As late as 1927, murderers destroyed their victims’ eyeballs to prevent identification by optography.

2 Insane Self-Experiments

The Victorian era saw the emergence of medical ethics. For the first time, you couldn’t just grab a pauper to conduct your experiments on. This meant loads of scientists conducted experiments on the only available people: themselves and their associates. Some of these experiments were insane.

Take August Bier’s investigations into spinal anesthesia. In 1898, the German surgeon and his assistant Augustus Hildebrandt shot their spines full of cocaine and tried to discover if they could still feel pain. Hildebrandt punched a hole in his boss’s neck, leaving spinal fluid leaking out. Meanwhile, Bier stabbed, clubbed, and burned his partner before crushing his testicles. When neither felt any pain, they celebrated by getting riotously drunk.

Others did equally bad stuff. Jesse Lazear allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes carrying yellow fever, while Pierre Curie brought Victorian craziness into the Edwardian era by deliberately giving himself radiation burns.

1 Eating One Of Everything In Existence

William Buckland has many claims to fame. He was a theologian, a geologist, and one of the only people Charles Darwin actively hated. But we’re only interested in his strangest experiment. At some point in his life, Buckland decided it would be useful if he ate one of everything in existence and recorded its taste for future generations.

In the name of “science,” Buckland located and devoured everything from mice on toast to alligators to bat urine to puppies. He dined on potted ostrich, roast hedgehog, panthers, porpoises, and even the preserved heart of King Louis XIV. He’s been called “the man who ate everything.” And he recorded the taste of each item meticulously.

Incredibly, in his lifelong experiment, Buckland only found one creature that he didn’t enjoy eating. According to his notes, the common garden mole tasted “disgusting.”

The Victorians were a clever lot. They gave us steam trains, stamps, photographs, and the first public flushing toilet. But they were also rather accident-prone. A bit like letting a child play with matches in a firework factory, the Victorians had a lot of dangerous chemicals at their fingertips. In the days before health and safety, their idea of protection was to print a skull and crossbones on a bottle of arsenic. The flaw with this plan was that they then happily sold the same arsenic over the counter as rat bait, often with dire consequences.

Let’s take a look at a world where appearances were everything and safety came second. It was the 19th century, and the Victorians found some pretty weird ways of accidentally doing away with themselves.

10 Wallpaper

Rather than 50 Shades of Gray, the Victorians were passionate about the color green. In fact, green wallpaper was to the home what an iPad Air is to tablets. This love of green came about because of the end of the window tax and gas lamps. With natural light flooding in during the day and better light at night, the Victorians unleashed their inner passion for bright colors.

The fashionable color to dress the walls with wasn’t just any green. It had to be a lush shade called Scheele’s Green. Not only was it bright, but it resisted fading—an extra boon. The dark side of this colorful wall dressing was that it slowly poisoned people. Copper arsenite, an arsenic derivative, gave it the rich color.^[1] Breathing air polluted with arsenic vapor had the potential to kill . . . and often did.

Whole families ailed and died, with children especially at risk. The signs of arsenic poisoning were similar to diphtheria, so many politicians remained skeptical of the danger. And those doctors who did voice concern about arsenic were often publicly ridiculed, especially by companies producing the wallpaper!

It took until 1903 for arsenic compounds to be forbidden as a food additive, but the use of arsenic in wallpaper was never formally banned.

9 Baby Bottles

Roman mothers used hollow horns to feed their babies, and baby bottles were nothing new in Victorian times.^[2] What was new was a special glass bottle fitted with rubber tubing and a teat. The idea was the infant sucked on the rubber tube, like sucking cola through a straw.

These bottles were backed by a popular marketing campaign and given names such as “The Little Cherub” or “The Princess.” Mothers loved how an infant could feed themselves; it was a source of great pride. These feeding bottles became the go-to accessory for the modern Victorian mother—but with deadly consequences.

There was a basic design flaw: The rubber tubing was set into the glass and nearly impossible to clean. Inside the bottle, warm milk made it the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. The advice given by Mrs. Beeton, the household guru of the day, didn’t help. Writing in 1861, she declared it wasn’t necessary to wash the bottles for two to three weeks.

The result was babies drinking a soup of bacteria, often with fatal consequences. Indeed, the bottles soon gained another name: “murder bottles.” This, along with the condemnation of doctors, should have stopped their use. But it didn’t. Sadly, many mothers were taken in by advertising and continued using them regardless.

8 Carbolic Acid

The Victorians just couldn’t get the balance right. Take hygiene, for example. On the one hand, they used dirty baby bottles, and on the other, they came up with the saying, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Top this off with new theories about germs causing infection, and the urge to clean became obsessive. So they poisoned themselves with carbolic acid.

Every household had caustic soda or carbolic acid, used as cleaners, in a cupboard somewhere. But therein lay the problem. These deadly products came in packaging that was identical to other household items, including foods.^[3]

It was easy to confuse one box with another and accidentally poison the cakes. In September 1888, this is exactly what happened when carbolic acid was mistaken for baking soda. Thirteen people became sick, and five died.

It was another 14 years before the Pharmacy Act made it illegal for chemicals to be stored in similar bottles to ordinary items.

7 Lead

It’s almost as if the Victorians wanted to die!

With the Industrial Revolution, cities started to expand. This meant supplying households with water. Reservoirs were built to supply standpipes in the poorer districts or houses in affluent areas.

However, much of that water traveled along lead piping, picking up the deadly toxin as it went. Interestingly, it is from the Latin word for lead, plumbum, that we derive the term “plumbing.” What makes this all the more ironic is that in 1847 and 1848, the British government wrote laws making it a criminal offense to pollute drinking water.

But the danger didn’t end with water. Lead was added to paint to stop it from flaking and to make the colors vivid. The Victorians slathered lead paint over furniture, cots, and even children’s toys. When children gnawed on their cribs or chewed on toys, they accidentally poisoned themselves.^[4]

6 Laudanum

Laudanum was the Victorian equivalent of aspirin. It was a cure-all that settled nerves, eased pain, and ensured restful sleep. The only problem was that laudanum is a syrup of opium.

Laudanum was available from any pharmacy to buy, and it was affordable at around 25 drops for one penny.^[5] While the wealthy looked down on the poor as laudanum addicts, they failed to see their own dependence and merrily imbibed this addictive cordial. Laudanum was widely marketed to women to ease their ailments, such as menstrual cramps and “hysteria.” Ironically, it’s possible laudanum that was taken by women to ease the symptoms of arsenic poisoning by their green wallpaper!

Of course, opium is addictive. This meant people became dependent on the feelings of euphoria it created and took more and more. The alternative was to withdraw, with the typical symptoms of tremors, hallucinations, and sweats. With the doses unregulated and laudanum freely available, overdose was common.

5 Adulterated Bread

The Victorians judged by appearance. They tended to link white to purity, and whiter meant better. They had an obsession with white bread. With all the nasty wheat germ and bran taken out, they looked on white bread as pure and healthy. By some twisted logic, adding a chemical whitener—alum—made it even better.

Compounds referred to as alum are double sulfate salts of metals like aluminum or chromium. Traditionally, alum was used in the medieval wool trade to fix dyes and was later used in styptic pencils. It doesn’t even sound like it would be healthy.

Sadly, alum has no nutritional value. The addition of alum robbed the poor, for whom bread was a staple of goodness, and led to malnutrition. Indeed, it contributed to a range of deficiency-related diseases. Worse even than that, alum irritates the bowel wall and can cause long-term stomach upsets or constipation. For small children, this was a step too far and caused deaths.^[6]

4 Boracic Acid In Milk

Boracic acid belongs to a family of mild acids which include borax and boric acid. They are mostly used today in insecticides. Doesn’t make it sound a great addition to milk, does it? However, here we find home guru Mrs. Beeton raising her hand again.^[7]

In the days before pasteurization and fridges, milk could contain harmful bacteria and go bad quickly. To prevent this, Mrs. Beeton advised the addition of boracic acid to milk as a preservative. It also had the benefit of sweetening the flavor slightly and removing any sour, tainted taste.

The effects of boracic acid on adults are usually mild, such as nausea, stomach cramps and diarrhea. However, the chemical hid the taste of turned milk, meaning many people drank what wasn’t fit for consumption—with upsetting consequences. For children, too much boracic acid can cause seizures, neurological problems, and even death—in the very group most in need of the health-giving benefits of milk.

3 ‘Corpse’ Candles

At the beginning of the 19th century, candles were either made from tallow or beeswax. The former burned with a sooty flame and smelled bad, while the latter were expensive. But a new process formulated in 1810 changed this.

A French scientist, Michel Chevreul, hit on a way of separating tallow and adding a secret ingredient which made for cheap, high-quality candles. Although banned in his native France, these candles took off big-time in England. The craze for these compound candles peaked in 1835 and 1836.^[8]

However, one night, a professor of chemistry was working late by the light of his new candle. He smelled a garlic odor coming from the melted wax and became suspicious. He knew arsenic compounds had a garlic-like smell and correctly identified the secret ingredient as arsenic. Professor Everitt ran tests, confirmed his suspicion, and made his deadly findings public. Writing in The Lancet, he described these new products as “corpse candles” because of their deadly vapor.

2 Gas Lighting

After candlelight, one can only imagine how magical gas lighting must have appeared in the 19th century. However, it was not without considerable risks. The Victorians used mostly coal gas for their gaslights, which was a cocktail of hydrogen, sulfur, methane, and carbon monoxide.

This mix was a deadly, with hazards including suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning, plus the risk of explosion. Indeed, the image of a wilting Victorian lady suffering a fit of the vapors may be due in part to a slow leak of carbon monoxide into a sitting room, coupled with wearing a tight corset.^[9]

1 Physicians

Victorian doctors worked within the medical knowledge of the day. Most medical procedures were based on trying to restore balance to the body. Thus, laxatives, purges, and leeches were popular as a means of draining foul humors. Also, doctors believed small doses of poison had medicinal properties.

The majority of the time, patients survived despite treatment, not because of it. However, occasionally, the medics hit on something by accident, like prescribing cigarettes to asthmatics. The active ingredient, arsenic (again!), was transported in a tobacco that contained a natural derivative of atropine—which opens up the airways. So the patients did improve, but not for the reason the doctors thought.^[10]

+ Anthrax In House Plaster

It’s generally not a good idea to coat the walls of your home with a deadly bacterium. But that’s what the Victorians did—albeit rarely.

Prior to gypsum plaster, walls were lined with lime plaster. This was a mix of lime strengthened with animal hair from goats, cattle, sheep, or horses. While anthrax wasn’t common in Victorian England, it did occur. Products from infected animals, such as skin, hair, or wool, were then a possible source of infection for people.

People can pick up anthrax through the skin abrasions or inhaling it, so let’s hope the hair from a few infected animals never made it as far as wall plaster.^[11]

Dr. Pippa Elliott is a veterinarian who is passionate about animals and history. At school, she was described as a “Trivia Queen,” and this is something she has never grown out of.

It has been said that “the past is a foreign country”. When we consider some of the dietary proclivities of the 19th century, however, the past starts to seem more like an alien planet. In this list we’ll explore the sad, the bad and the vomit-inducingly vile foods the Victorians used to eat.

If we get beyond the cringing “ickfactor” of some of these quintessentially Victorian dishes (fear not, we will certainly concentrate on that too – there are plenty of entries that will make your modern palette want to curl up and die), we also find a fascinating relationship with food in the 19th century. At the intersection between nutrition and culture, we can observe the clash between the old world and the modern. This is certainly evident in some of the stranger tendencies and dishes of the age.

That’s where the horror lies – these foods tell us of the lives lived, social conditions and mores. Sometimes it was downright horrific.

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10The Poor Diet Of The Urban Poor

Less fortunate members of society had it rough in the Victorian era, often going hungry.

Uh-huh. So what’s new?

Well, in the prior centuries, England’s lowest classes had a feast-or-famine existence – they either had bread, cheese and meat or they didn’t. In the Victorian era, things weren’t quite as clear cut. Industrialisation had all but ensured a steady level of food production, making famine (in England, at least) a thing of the past.

Individual cases of starvation, however, were not dispelled. The cost of food was high, even the burgeoning middle class had to fork out around 50% of their income on food. For the poorest families it was a life of potato peelings, animal fat on low-quality bread, rotten veg and the stringiest offcuts of meat, if that. This stunted growth and contributed to considerably lower life expectancy for the urban poor. Add in a nice dose of food adulteration scandals, no or low safety precautions and a population boom and you have a recipe for disaster (pun very much intended).

But they did drink tea – this was England, after all.

9Delicacy Fit For A Zombie

Whether it’s at a fast-food restaurant, from a back yard barbecue grill or wagyu patties served slathered in wasabi mayo, gold leaf and shaved truffles at a fancy (poser) restaurant, everyone loves a good burger. Some things don’t change—if you were a Victorian housewife wanting to put on a bit of a ‘do’, you could make some ‘braincakes’ – burger-like fried meat patties… made with brains.

This recipe comes from ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ by Eliza Acton, the most Victorian-sounding lady of her age:

“Wash and soak the brains well in cold water, and afterwards in hot; free them from the skin and large fibres, and boil them in water, slightly salted, from two to three minutes. You then mash the brains with some seasonings and egg yolks and fry in butter. The recipe finishes by adding “A teaspoonful of flour and a little lemon-grate are sometimes added”.

Yes, that lemon zest will make all the difference – prion diseases are commonly cured by lemon, every doctor knows that…

8Gruel? Try Stirabout

Orphans, workhouse inhabitants or ball-and-chain dragging prisoners, all forced to eat gruel; this is the image of hard times in the Victorian era. Thanks, Dickens!

This is a misconception. The diet of these poor, unfortunate souls was actually quite sustaining, especially compared to the nutrient deficient diet of the working poor. They also had a (slightly) more varied diet – wholegrain bread, small beer, even fish and dairy from time to time (as pictured).

This doesn’t mean they always enjoyed their fare whilst institutionalised—gruel was plain, but downright fancy compared to the hated ‘Stirabout’ – gruel’s tasteless, grim, weirdo cousin. Sure, if you couple a daily ration of watery mush made from cornmeal, oatmeal and salt with a long day of physical labour, you’ll leave the institution with a lean physique, washboard abs and triceps that bulge like baby heads. But your taste buds will be shrivelled-up husks on a desertscape of a tongue.

7Ass Milk

If we get to drink the pale mammary drippings of cows, goats and, erm, soybeans, then why not donkey milk? In fact, there isn’t much wrong with donkey milk, per se. It’s becoming a bit of a fad foodstuff again, used as both a healthy alternative to regular milk and in the making of upscale cosmetics. In fact, donkey milk has been used by various cultures since ancient times. So how has it made its way onto a list of horrific foods? Get ready for a disturbing mental picture…

The Victorian age had a lot of orphaned babies. In France, motherless infants were often neglected, dying at an alarmingly high rate. One man who identified this issue was Dr. Parrot of the ‘Hospital des Enfents Assistés’ in France. He proposed killing two birds with one stone – combatting the lack of motherly contact and the nutritional deficiencies in orphaned babies. Genius!

Parrot would take babies directly to a donkey and allow them to suckle directly from the beast’s teat. Jeez.

Donkey milk was used all over Europe for ailing patients, the elderly and babies well into the twentieth century. Allowing babies to suck on donkey nips (thankfully) never quite caught on.

6Love In Disguise

Paul Simon’s classic song ‘Mother and Child Reunion” took its title from a dish that Simon had seen on the menu at a Chinese restaurant. It was a dish that included chicken and egg; hence the mother was reunited with her child. If you find this name a little distasteful, wait until you realise what lies behind the fun wordplay of the Victorian dish ‘Love in Disguise’.

This “pretty side dish” is to be found in ‘The Complete Economical Cook, and Frugal Housewife’ written by Mary Holland, 1837. It comprises of a ‘stuffed’ calf’s heart (cleaned well) encased with forcemeat (pureed lean meat, like the inside of a sausage) and rolled in in crushed vermicelli noodles. You then pop it in the oven in a dish filled with a little water. Once a nice heart-juice liquor has formed, you serve. One question remains…

‘Stuffed’ with what?

5No, This Is Food, We Swear!

To an American, a biscuit is a soft, puffy dough-bed upon which some satiny gravy can rest. To an Englishman, they are crunchy, sweet little buggers that are best dunked in tea before eaten. To a Victorian-era seaman, they were perdition incarnate—indestructibly hard, plain-as-all-hell dullcakes.

Ship’s biscuits, or hardtack, were a staple aboard English ships from as far back as the Tudor period. They became a ubiquitous mainstay in the gallies of the quickly professionalising Victorian-era Royal Navy; valued for their caloric density, ease of mass production and ensuring morale remained low. Ok, not the last one, but that was an unfortunate outcome of months and years eating these bricks.

But, at least the seamen could expect a little extra protein from consuming ship’s biscuits – the lack of modern storage technologies guaranteed weevil infestation. These bugs added some much-needed texture and a refreshingly bitter flavour to the otherwise dull biscuits. Or it convinced sailors that drowning might not be so bad.

It took until the end of the 19th century for experts to work out a solution for such infestations – the biscuit tin!

4Chaudfroid Delights

The term ‘Chaudfroid’ (hot-cold) is a term within French cuisine that denotes a dish/sauce made hot but served cold.

Using gelatin or aspic. Of course.

Given some of the creations and concoctions from this era, it seems a little more schadenfreude that chaudfroid. Famed gastronaut Monsieur Antonin-Carême brings us this classic French sauce, one that will send a shiver down your spine. Here’s a modernised recipe:

“Remove the skin of the chicken and set it to cool in the strained cooking liquid. Soak 3 gelatin leaves in cold water until soft. Plunge half a bunch of tarragon in the cooking liquid and reduce it to 40 cl (12/3 c). Add the gelatin to dissolve it. Stir in 30 cl (11/4 c) of cream, 1 egg yolk, and the juice of half a lemon. Spread out a thin layer of the sauce over a plate. Put it in the refrigerator to see if it jells. Cut the chicken into eight pieces. Bone the thighs. Dip the pieces of chicken, one by one, in cooled sauce, then drain them on a rack placed over aluminum foil. Place them in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Cover the chicken pieces a second time followed by a third layer of sauce chaud-froid, while allowing the coating to jell between each coating. Decorate with pine nuts and some tarragon leaves. Set aside for 5 or 6 hours. Serve with a salad of very fine French beans or a salad of well-seasoned purslane.”

If you think that cold, jelly sauce chicken is shudder-inducing, why not try ‘turbot chaudfroid’? Cold, jellied fish—what are you, a cockney?

3A Big Plate Of Burlington Whimsey

What a delightfully quaint name for a dish! This is perhaps the quintessential example of the Victorian proclivity of giving the grossest dishes the prettiest names.

“Set aside until quite cold half a calf’s head dressed by the preceding receipt. If, on cutting it, the gelatinous part should not appear perfectly tender, pare it off closely from the head, weigh and mince it; put it into a pint of good gravy, and stew it gently from ten to fifteen minutes. Mince as much more of the head as will make up a pound in weight after the edges are trimmed of, and part of the fat is taken away” Then you add some spices and a little grated ham…using your trusty ham grater.

The recipe continues by adding “slices of the tongue have been evenly arranged, and when quite cold it will turn out very firmly. It may be garnished, before it is sent to table, with branches of parsley, which should, however, be perfectly dry; and when served for supper or luncheon, it may be accompanied by a salad dressing”.

2Frontier Foods

Some foods that were once consumed at the edges of the increasingly colonized world were a bit gross, even if they tasted OK – ‘pemmican’, we’re looking at you; dried reindeer meat with rendered fat and foraged berries, anyone? It actually tastes pretty good.

At the fringes of the various 19th century empires, dealing with foraged food was often best left to those who’d lived in such places for eons. Want to try those purple berries, weary explorer? Get ready for it to “taste like burning”. Painful death by poison resulted from a simple lack of knowledge (or wisdom). Your fancy maps, elephant guns and handlebar mustaches won’t keep you from a death by ignorance, suh.

Take the ill-fated expedition of Burke and Wills from 1860-61. On their return from a cross-country expedition in Australia, the men found themselves out of food. Local Yandruwandha people tried to help the party, preparing them some ‘cakes’ made from the seed pods of a fern called nardoo. After some time, Burke had a sudden fit of ‘Victorian-gentlemanly-rage-at-the-indigenous’, a common condition back then, and drove off the party’s would-be saviours. When the men tried to make their own nardoo cakes as they trudged onwards, they neglected to do one thing – know what the hell they were doing. The cakes were improperly cooked, thus failing to remove the deadly enzymes in the way the aboriginal tribes did. Wills and Burke soon died, their bellies full, but starved to death. Another man in their party, a Mr. King, was the only one to survive. How? By returning to the Yandruwandha, who did know what the hell they were doing.

1All The Little Birdies

For an era when many kids were expected to go down the mines or up the chimneys, one can imagine that there was no such thing as a ‘childhood’ in the Victorian age. How wrong you are!

In fact, rural sprogs were free to enjoy nature’s bounty. But this was not so much the ‘picking blackberries with grandmama’ type of fun. Queen Victoria’s chief cook, Charles Francatelli, noted how young boys would entertain themselves in rural England back in 1852:

“Industrious and intelligent boys who live in the country, are mostly well up in the cunning art of catching small birds … pluck them free from feathers, cut off their heads and claws, and pick out their gizzards from their sides with the point of a small knife, and then hand the birds over to your mother, fried in butter then encased in suet and boiled”.

This is less “Tom Brown’s School Days” and more Chairman Mao’s ‘Four Pests Campaign’, with added knife-wielding toddlers.

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About The Author: CJ Phillips is a storyteller, actor and writer living in rural West wales. He is a little obsessed with lists.