The hazards of milk and the glories of puddingtime

"My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies"--W. C. Fields

Perhaps Fields's doctor had been reading Lord Chesterfield? Chesterfield wrote to his son on March 12, 1768:

In my opinion, you have no gout, but a very scorbutic and rheumatic habit of body, which should be treated in a very different matter from the gout; and, as I pretend to be a very good quack, at least, I would prescribe to you a strict milk diet, with the seeds, such as rice, sago, barley, millet, etc., for the three summer months at least, and without ever tasting wine.

Fields would not have been surprised to learn that Chesterfield's son died soon after.

Though Chesterfield's son may not have suffered from gout, one who did was Tobias Smollett's cranky country gent (and alter ego) Matt Bramble in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), whose lively rant about the horrors of London milk Emily Cockayne draws on in Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007):

[T]he produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered within hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke's-sake, the spewings of infants . . . and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

Cockayne goes on to explain that London milk was thought to be particularly bad not just because of the contaminants that fire Smollett's powers of invective, but also because of the horrid conditions in which London cows were forced to live:

With a small and diminishing number of grazing opportunities and little space to store fodder, beasts were left to wallow in their own excrement, tied in dark hovels, where they fed on brewers' waste and rank hay. Their milk was known as "blue milk," and was only good for cooking.

The conditions described sound frighteningly similar to those found on contemporary factory farms; though I suppose pasteurization has cut down on the potential for contamination, the lives of the cows themselves don't seem to have improved much. And I'm sure I'll never be able to look at the blue tinge of a bowl of skim without thinking of horrid London blue milk.

In the right locations, however, Londoners could get the freshest of fresh milk:

[F]resh drinking milk was available in small quantities from cows that were walked along the streets, as mobile bovine vending machines. The Lactarian in London's St James's Park provided some fashionable milk, drunk warm, fresh from the udders of cows able to exercise.

{"The merry Milk Maid," from Marcellus Laroon's The Cryes of the City of London, Drawne after the Life (1688)}

Ah, but who would want milk, however fresh, from a cow rather than from a lovely milk maid--or, as Matt Bramble deems her, a "nasty drab"? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the maids walked the streets of London, carrying pails and announcing their presence with, as Peter Ackroyd explains in London: The Biography (2000), a familiar--if incomprehensible--call:

It was certainly true that, as Addison wrote in 1711, "People know the Wares [tradesmen] deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words." The words were often indistinct or indistinguishable: the mender of old chairs was recognised by his low and melancholy note, while the retailer of broken glass specialised in a sort of plaintive shriek quite appropriate to his goods. . . . There was also in the passage of years, or centuries, the steady clipping or abbreviation of jargon. "Will you buy any milk today, mistress" became "Milk maids below," then "Milk below," then "Milk-o" and, finally, "Mieu" or "Mee-o." . . . Pierce Egan, author of Life in London," recalled "one man from whom I could never make out more than happy happy happy now."

Before I milk this lazy little Saturday meander dry, I have to check in with Dr. Johnson. Though the definitions for milk in his Dictionary are relatively dull, he does define one of my favorite eighteenth-century terms, derived from a milk-based dish:

puddingtime
1. The time of dinner; the time at which pudding, anciently the first dish, is set upon the table.
2. Nick of time, critical minute.

Mars that still protects the stout,
In puddingtime came to his aid.
HUDIBRAS.

It clearly being puddingtime, I'll close.

"Methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies into the same water," or, Looking after the Codpiece Oeconomy

{Flea, by Robert Hooke, from Micrographia (1664)}

Is it a mark of shallowness that I never feel the difference between modern life and the past more clearly than when I am reminded that for most of human history people weren't able to take showers? Sure, baths have their virtues--though they, too, were so rare as to be almost nonexistent for most of history--but there are few things quite so satisfying as a hot shower. I think of my post-marathon showers, when I can feel the salt encrusted on my skin give way beneath the water; or the shower in high school that followed a day's work cutting horseweeds out of young beans, with not a hint of shade in sight; or the shower that cleansed the stench of cream cheese and cheap ham that lingered after a shift at Bruegger's Bagel Bakery during college. Oh, how lucky we are!

Those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren't nearly so fortunate, as Emily Cockayne reminds us in her spectacularly rich Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007)

Washing routines were so unexceptional that they are usually ignored in contemporary diaries, autobiographies, and letters. Consequently it is difficult to be sure how people washed in the period. . . . Samuel Pepys rarely mentions washing himself, and for him cleansing did not need to involve water--on 5 September 1662 he records "rubbed myself clean." It is unlikely that soap featured much in the cleansing routine. Made from rancid fats and alkaline matter such as ashes, most cakes of soap would have been quite greasy and would have irritated the skin. . . . Some authors did extol the virtues of a wet wash. . . . At the age of thirty-three John Evelyn began "a Course of yearly washing my head with Warme Water, mingl'd with a decoction of sweete herbs, & immediately with cold spring water." This "much refreshed" him.

In line with other physicians Joseph Browne thought that many conditions were improved with cold bathing, which could cure scrofula, rickets, venereal diseases and "weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Oeconomy." . . . Chimney sweeps were besooted from head to toe and known as part of the 'black Fraternity." "I would not recommend my Friend to breed his son to this Trade," remarked Mr. Campbell in 1747, adding, "I think this Branch is chiefly occupied by unhappy Parish Children. Sweeps effectively acted as the chimney brush--their clothes were tattered on the way up the chimney and their skin endured grazes, burns, and scratches. Soot, a carcinogenic substance, would not have washed readily from skin. Millers were prone to lice, which fed off pockets of flour held in folds of skin. Grocer's itch was a condition caused by handling flour or sugar. . . . Jonas Hanaway reported that some sweep masters washed their apprentices annually.

Cockayne continues by citing Lord Chesterfield, which sent me back to his letters to his son for a more full statement of his position on cleanliness. As usual with Chesterfield, I wasn't disappointed:

In your person you must be accurately clean; and your teeth,hands, and nails, should be superlatively so; a dirty mouth has real ill consequences to the owner, for it infallibly causes the decay, as well as the intolerable pain of the teeth, and it is very offensive to his acquaintance, for it will most inevitably stink. I insist, therefore, that you wash your teeth the first thing you do every morning, with a soft sponge and swarm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times. Mouton, whom I desire you will send for upon your arrival at Paris, will give you an opiate, and a liquor to be used sometimes. Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar, and illiberal, than dirty hands, and ugly, uneven, and ragged nails: I do not suspect you of that shocking, awkward trick, of biting yours; but that is not enough: you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people's always are. The ends of your nails should be small segments of circles, which, by a very little care in the cutting, they are very easily brought to; every time that you wipe your hands, rub the skin round your nails backward, that it may not grow up, and shorten your nails too much. The cleanliness of the rest of your person, which, by the way, will conduce greatly to your health, I refer from time to time to the bagnio. My mentioning these particulars arises (I freely own) from some suspicion that the hints are not unnecessary; for, when you were a schoolboy, you were slovenly and dirty above your fellows. I must add another caution, which is that upon no account whatever, you put your fingers, as too many people are apt to do, in your nose or ears. It is the most shocking, nasty, vulgar rudeness, that can be offered to company; it disgusts one, it turns one's stomach; and, for my own part, I would much rather know that a man's fingers were actually in his breech, than see them in his nose.

Since she started me on this topic, it seems only fair to let Cockayne have the last word, which is not completely foreign to those of us who spend our summers swimming in Lake Michigan--though, again, our sufferings pale in comparison to those of the early moderns:

Despite the pollution Londoners used the Thames for bathing. John Evelyn noted that even when they bathed in water "some Miles distance from the City," they still became coated in a "thin Web, or pellicule of dust" gathered from the clouds of city smoke by falling rain.

It's so nice to go trav'ling . . . ?

[Photo by rocketlass]

Because it seems I've been doing more than my share of traveling lately, I offer up some notes on getting around.

From Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War for Independence (2007), by John Ferling:

Little time passed before it was evident that the leadership had grossly underestimated the difficulties that would be confronted in the wilds of Maine. Within the initial three days--over a fifty-mile stretch that drew the army well beyond Maine's last settlement--the soldiery came on a succession of churning rapids and disquieting falls, including some "very bad rips," as one soldier noted, which resulted in far more portaging than had been anticipated. . . . The men were wet constantly--"you would have taken" them for "amphibious Animals," [Benedict] Arnold wrote to Washington--and the night temperatures routinely plummeted below freezing. Each morning the men awakened, said one, to find their clothing "frozen a pane of glass thick." Before he had been in the interior of Maine a week, Arnold reported the "great Fatigue" of his men and quietly worried over whether he had brought along a sufficient supply of food and blankets. The men grew concerned as well, not only about the dwindling supplies. They "most dreaded" the cold, fearing not only disease, but anxious at their fate should they fall on ice and fracture a leg or hip while deep in the wilderness.

Well, maybe it's better if one keeps out of the wilderness (let alone the Continental army), sticking to cities instead?

From Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007), by Emily Cockayne:

In a few cases [of deadly road accident] the driver was found guilty of causing an accident by failing to pay due care and attention. The attitudes of the carters and coachmen were questioned. In particular, commentators complained about the lackadaisical way the drivers positioned themselves on their vehicles so that they could not easily see the road ahead. It was recorded in 1692 that "most of the carters, Carmen, and draymen that pass and repass with their several carts, carriages, and drays through the public streets, lanes and places [of London and Middlesex] . . . make it their common and usual practice to ride negligently on their several carts." Often nobody guided the horse, "so that oftentimes their horses, carts, carriages, and drays run over young children and other their Majesties' subjects, passing in the streets about their lawful occasions, whereby many lose their lives."

It seems that at least one recognizable type of driver-for-hire has persisted through the centuries; imagine how much more imperiled the lives of those seventeenth-century Londoners would have been had their draymen had cellphones on which to chatter away throughout their shifts.

Speaking of which, Stacey saw a cabbie yesterday who would, I think, have done well in the rough-and-tumble of seventeenth-century London: after his running of a red light led to his cab blocking an intersection, he was verbally assailed by a stuck motorist--which he took as an occasion to, after shouting to his far, "Hold on!", get out of his cab and go fight the other motorist. The last Stacey saw of the incident was some police cars heading that way, lights flashing.

So maybe a train would be a better idea?

From a letter from E. B. White to Henry Allen of 22 February, 1955 telling about White's attempt to catch a 6:30 train,collected in Letters of E. B. White (1977, 2006):

I looked at my watch again and it said 6:31. We screamed into the station yard, jumped out, and the engineer saw us coming and I guess he took pity on me. They had the train all locked up, ready to go, the bell was ringing for the start. The taxi driver grabbed my bags and whirled down the platform, and I trotted behind , carrying my fish pole and the Freethy lunch box. The trainman saw this strange apparition appearing, and he opened up the coach door. I plunged on board and the driver threw the bags on, and away we went. I had no ticket, no Pullman receipt for my room, just a fish pole. For the next hour or two, I was known all through the train as "that man." But the porter got interested in my case, the way porters do, and he stuck me in the only empty bedroom and told me to sit there till we got to Waterville. The conductor stopped by, every few minutes, to needle me, and between visits I would close the door and eat a sandwich and mix myself a whiskey-and-milk, in an attempt to recuperate from my ordeal. At Waterville, the conductor charged in and said: "Put on your hat and follow me!" Then he dashed away, with me after him. He jumped off the train and disappeared into the darkness. When I located him in the waiting room he looked sternly at me and said, "Are you the man?"

"I'm the man," I replied.

"Well," he said, "go back and sit in the room."

Then planes, and luxury travel--being met at the airport and whisked away to a spa and all that instead.

From a letter from Jessica Mitford to Robert Truehaft of November 15, 1965, collected in Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (2006):

I arrived more dead than alive, the plane being 2 hours late in the end. Shall draw a veil over that. Was met by a gliding lady (they all glide here, rather than walk) and driver. The latter drove me here, the glider having to leave and fetch another arriving flower. As you can imagine, I was pretty well sloshed by the time the plane finally downed.

Ultimately, perhaps the key is not to care about the mode, but just to set oneself into motion and hope for the best. I'll leave that for James Laughlin, who in the following note from his sort-of-autobiography, The Way It Wasn't (2006), seems not much to care about the details of his upcoming trip--and while I suppose such blithe unconcern is easier for a wealthy heir than for the rest of us, his approach does seem likely to be satisfying.

I am going to see Gertrude Stein for a few days on Friday and then I am going to Lausanne -- Basel -- Freiburg -- Strassbourg -- Stutgart (H. Baines) -- Wurzburg -- Erfurt -- Leipzig -- Dresden -- Prague -- Brunn -- Bratislava -- Budapest -- Vienna -- Linz -- Salzburg -- Ljubljana -- Zagreb -- Dubrovnik. What all this will add up to is not known, but if I write a poem in each place, I shall have had some practice in this matter.

Or I suppose you could travel by not traveling at all, as seems one explanation of an image featured in a show that Luc Sante's currently curating at apexart, The Museum of Crime and the Museum of God. It's an old black-and-white print that incorporates two photos, the larger one showing a black man in clerical robes waist-deep in a wide, muddy stream, an "x" scratched into the print near him.. The caption, apparently typed on it at the time the photo was printed, reads:

Reverend C. H. Parrish, D.O., standing in the River Jordan, April 13, '04, a short distance from the place where John the Baptist baptized the Saviour. See cross-mark.

The inset photo shows the same man in the same robes standing under a tall, thick, knobbly tree, and the caption reads:

Dr. Parrish standing under the Oldest Olive Tree (1800 years old) in the Garden of Gethsemane, April 16, '04.

Meanwhile, the print itself is captioned thus:

Photographed while attending the World's Fourth Sunday-School Convention, held at Jerusalem, April 18, '04.

All of which would be fine except that the two photos are obvious fakes: the man, who is exactly the same in both photos, has been cut from a different photo and pasted in place. In the river photo, he's been cut in half to show that he's partially submerged, while the olive tree photo presents him whole.

Now, perhaps there's a reason for this fakery. Perhaps the Reverend Parrish's photos from the Sunday-School conference simply didn't turn out, and he felt that a little cut-and-paste work would be more likely to draw his parishioners closer to holiness than seeing nothing at all from his trip. But what if that's not the case?

What if the Reverend Parrish didn't go to Jerusalem at all? Presuming that his parishioners paid for his trip, just what, this hundred years on, do we think he actually did with the money? Did it go to a lady friend in dire need of mink? Was it laid on a can't-miss horse? Or did it support a trip to some lesser locale than Jerusalem--someplace far less exotic, historical, and sacred, but for all that far more congenial, hospitable, and fun? Someplace like Atlantic City?

Oh, that's probably enough speculation for a lovely summer Saturday. I'll let Sammy Cahn close it out, with the end of his "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling":

It's very nice to be footloose
With just a toothbrush and comb
It's oh so nice to be footloose
But your heart starts singin' when you're homeward wingin' across the foam.

It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home.

As Frank himself might say, ain't that the truth.

Indexes, lice, and the land of Cockaigne

I'm in New York for work this week, so there won't be much posting. But while flipping through the index of Emily Cockayne's Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 (2006), I found something I thought you might enjoy:

lice
on an apprentice 76
in beds 58
figs blamed for 94
head 60, 66, 67
houses infested with 155
millers prone to 61
spreading typhus 212

Doesn't an index entry like that more or less guarantee a good book?

Emily Cockayne would seem to have the right name for someone writing about filth; by some accounts, the mythical medieval utopia of Cockaigne was only reached by fording a river of dung--up to one's nose--that took seven years to cross (though some other versions of the legend opt for eating challenges instead, such as a ten-thousand-foot-high pudding or a mountain of cheese).

Oh, but it'll all be worth it once you get there, you poor, lice-ridden late-medieval apprentice! Cockaigne is an earthly paradise, its pleasures--unlike the vaguely boring perfection of Eden--earthy and explicit. Here is how Pieter Brueghel the Elder imagined it in his 1567 painting The Land of Cockaigne:



In various versions of the story, after crossing the river of shit, travelers are rewarded with rivers of oil, honey, milk, and wine. Pigs in Cockaigne have knives in their backs for easy cutting, the owls lay fur coats, and grilled geese fly into people's mouths. On top of that, everyone in Cockaigne is forbidden to work--presumably even the lice. If this whets your appetite, you can learn much more about Cockaigne in Herman Pleij's Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003).

A final, unrelated note for today: in my online searching for the definition of "cockaigne," I stumbled across a word I didn't know, but which I will certainly find occasion to employ in its first sense in the future:

cockalorum

1) a self-important little man
2) the game of leapfrog
3) boastful talk