"Dreich" is what the weather is like. It's a Scots word that describes the grey misery of a miserable cold, rainy day, when you feel like the damp will just seep into your bones and stay there forever. And ever. You will never get warm, or fully dry again. The rain will always teeter on that fine line between mist and drizzle. Not enough to warrant opening an umbrella, enough to get you soaked and chilled regardless.

Since there is nothing I can do about the weather, I decided to cheer up our winter diet with a "Gratin Langedocien". Also known as the French version of an Italian Parmigiana. It was going to be a break from the endless rounds of cabbage that I feel compelled to cook in winter. Just a reminder that we will see the sun again, eventually.

It all sounded so good. After hours of reading through different recipes, making sure I had all the ingredients on hand, I did what I usually do: I ignored all measurements, combined the different steps in several recipes to make it as easy as possible, and set about it. It was beautiful, it smelled gorgeous, and when I lifted the dish out of the oven, my fingers found a threadbare bit of oven-mitt, and...splat. My lovingly crafted aubergine/eggplant casserole lay on the kitchen floor, and I jumped across it to cool my burnt finger.

In times past, this would have been a greater catastrophe. But back in the day, throwing away two days' worth of food was unthinkable. In the West, these days, we are quite used to throwing food out. It isn't a matter of life or death any longer, so I got the luxury of just feeling sorry for myself, rather than thinking "what am I going to feed everyone now?", and possibly scooping the whole mess back into the dish. The latter would have been horribly unsafe, since we are still battling a mouse. But in past centuries that was a luxury to consider.

Spices and sauces used to be a great way to hide spoiled food. And in an age before refrigeration, especially meat spoiled quickly. Daniel Defoe, the author of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders", complained in 17th century England that:

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in extreme hot weather, when meat will not keep from Saturday to Sunday, we throw, or cause to be thrown away, vast quantities of tainted meat, and have generally stinking dinners, because the butchers dare not sell a joint of meat on a Sunday morning.

So, food did get thrown out, but apparently only when it had rotted so badly that it was past salvaging. Or dressing up with sauces, like this:

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Beef à la mode

Cut some buttock-beef a quarter of an inch thick, and lard it with bacon, having hackt it before a little with the back of your knife, then stew it in a pipkin, with some gravy, claret-wine, and strong broth, cloves, mace, pepper, cinnamon and salt; being tender stewed, serving it on French bread snippets.

Besides sauces, there was advice for how to make your tainted meat smell less. You had to bury it, over night. That would take away the smell. While the advice is to wrap the meat up before burying, I doubt that even that would pass any modern "Health and Safety" check.

As for fresh ingredients, well, peas were quite the thing in the 17th century. They were a fad food, made popular by the French King Louis XIV. Vegetables were plentiful, but expensive, in 17th century London. And salads were usually a boiled dish.

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To make boiled sallads

Boil some carrots very tender, and scrape them to pieces like the pulp of an apple; season them with cinnamon, ginger and sugar, put in currans, a little vinegar, and a piece of sweet butter, stew these in a dish, and when they begin to dry, put in more butter and a little salt, so serve them to the table; thus you may do lettuce, spinage or beets.

Londoners who could not afford expensive ingredients, would eat fish. The sea-fish was usually already dried, salted or pickled. Fresh fish was expensive, since it had to be kept alive in water-tanks or carts, as the fishwives went around town hawking their wares. Or in the case of fish-tanks, stood around Billingsgate market. Apparently, Billingsgate market was infamous for the foul-mouthed fishwives, who would curse and swear at their customers during haggling. It was not a place for delicate ears.

Or as Defoe said:

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Not only strumpets, but labouring women, who keep our markets, and vend things about the street, swear and curse at a most hideous rate.

Personally, I quite like the image of working women, who shocked Defoe's sensibilities. After all, they weren't there to pander to his imagination, but to make a living. And their customers had families to feed, and meals to cook. For someone who wrote a rather sympathetic book about "Moll Flanders", he really didn't seem to know much about the realities with which women lived. On the other hand, "Moll Flanders" is very sensationalistic, so he probably had a romanticised idea, imagined all hardships that life could throw at a woman, and ignored the most obvious ones. Like, trying to make ends meet. But, I digress.

After all, this is about food, and one very popular and cheap food were oysters. They were plentiful and very cheap. Here's a recipe:

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Oyster Pies

Parboil your oysters in their own liquor. then take them out and wash them in warm water, dry them, and season them with pepper, nutmeg, yolks of hard eggs and salt; the pye being made, put a few currans in the bottom, and lay on the oysters with some sliced dates in halfs, some large mace, sliced lemmon, barberries and butter, close it up, and bake it, then liquor it with white wine, sugar and butter.

Not only rather rich, but the ingredients in this, like in the other recipes, speak to a wealthy household. Pepper? Nutmeg? Just using the yolks? Salt? Mace? Lemons?

Those ingredients were luxuries in 17th century London. If you were poor, your oyster pie consisted of oysters and greasy bacon. If you could afford that. If you were poor, your bread consisted of more chalk than flour. Chalk made bread look whiter, which was more desirable. If you were poor, your wine was likely stretched with lead - to make it sweeter. If you were poor in 17th century London, you were falling down a bottomless hole. The few charitable societies were never going to catch everyone, especially not women, who had children out of wedlock.

If an unmarried woman had a child, the parish was responsible for the upkeep of said child. What did parishes do? They drove pregnant women across their borders, so someone else would have to deal with them. Or, they made you and your children beg, by handing out licenses to beg. You had to have a licence, otherwise you were a criminal, and gaol cost dearly. You got charged for board in gaol. By being poor, you could work up a real debt and stay in gaol indefinitely. Or, you could go for prostitution. The Bridewell gaol in London, a women's prison, charged 2 shillings to visitors, to pick any woman that caught their fancy. The two shillings went to the turnkeys, mind you. But you could earn a little on the side. If you made it tip-worthy for your rapist. 

Let's not even go into all the punishments you could get for being pregnant out of wedlock, in the first place. Suffice to say that if you were a poor woman and set one foot wrong, trying to dress up rotted meat with a sauce was the least of your problems. So, what did poor people in London eat? Difficult to tell, since they weren't the ones bothering to write down their recipes. As mentioned, oysters were cheap. Kippers as well. And the undesirable cuts of meat, or offal. In the absence of the potato, which was not very popular in London back then, I'd also guess pulses and whatever grain was cheap.

"Dreich" is too harmless a word to describe what things used to be like, in the good old days in Western Europe. Before Health and Safety. before women's rights, before human rights. In the spirit of the Billingsgate fishwives, I got to shout a few obscenities as I dropped that dish, but neither was there a Daniel Defoe around to complain, nor was it a cause for devastation. I just went to the shops and re-did the whole thing. It was indeed the perfect antidote to the dreich weather. And I was glad that I don't live in those times. So, in the grand scheme of things, all is well that ends well.