Whether it’s raining or sunny, or raining and sunny, probably the most quintessentially British acts is to offer the incoming guest a cup of tea. Whether it’s a crying friend, a landlord popping by to pick up the rent, or a plumber, to maintain good manners, the offer must be made: “I’ve just put the kettle on. Would you like a cuppa?”

Usually bags of PG Tips or Twinings are dropped in a variety of mugs that have developed a brown patina and a distinct fill-line, boiling water from the electric kettle is poured over, and some sort of additional offer is made: “Do you take cream or sugar?” and occasionally lemon is thrown out as an option.

That’s solid, basic hospitality.

But tea was not always the most popular drink among all classes in Britain. In fact, coffee was the most popular drink for many working-class laborers in nineteenth-century Britain. A quick look at Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor confirms that.

“It is less easy to describe the diet of costermongers than it is to describe that of many other of the labouring classes, for their diet, so to speak, is an “out-door diet.” They breakfast at a coffee-stall, and (if all their means have been expended in purchasing their stock, and none of it be yet sold) they expend on the meal only 1d., reserved for the purpose. For this sum they can procure a small cup of coffee, and two “thin” (that is to say two thin slices of bread and butter).”

“At length nearly all the busy marketing has finished, and the costers hurry to breakfast. At one house, known as “Rodway’s Coffee-house,” a man can have a meal for 1d. — a mug of hot coffee and two slices of bread and butter, while for two-pence what is elegantly termed “a tightner,” that is to say, a most plentiful repast, may be obtained. Here was a large room, with tables all round, and so extremely silent, that the smack all of lips and sipping of coffee were alone heard.

According to Mayhew, tea and coffee street-vending was all but unknown in prior to 1840. Before 1842, “coffee was in little demand, even among smaller tradesmen and farmers” but, by 1860 when he wrote, over 300 coffee stalls packed London’s streets. Most of these stalls were owned by women. Typically, Mayhew says that the coffee was adulterated with chicory or sometimes baked and ground “saccharine roots,” such as carrots. Considering the other forms of Victorian adulteration (teeming-with-bacteria water in milk, and then white lead to color it so no one can tell it’s been thinned, springs to mind), this seems relatively benign.

The coffee stalls, serving the lower class to-go breakfasts, were generally located more densely in poorer areas in London, such as Covent Garden, which housed a vigorous market, many entertainments such as theaters and “penny-gaffs,” and was famous for a certain selection of ladies (a century earlier, an entrepreneurial spirit even wrote out “a concise almanac of prostitutes available for hire,” many of whom frequented Covent Garden).

Again according to Mayhew, these coffee stalls had cans containing coffee, tea, and sometimes cocoa for sale, and they also sold bread and butter, currant cake, sandwiches, and boiled eggs. While it’s no middle-class breakfast, and it’s not much of a meal to a young man about to embark upon sixteen hours of labor, to me it sounds lovely.

While you might say, “aha! but they did sell tea, so weren’t most people drinking tea?” do consider Mayhew’s take on the subject:

“Coffee is the article mostly sold at the stalls; indeed, there is scarcely one stall in a hundred that is supplied with tea, and not more than a dozen in all London that furnish cocoa.”

The women proprietors bought the coffee berries at the grocers’, roasting and grinding it themselves. In addition to then adulterating their product with dried and ground chicory, or other roots, they’d use “finings,” or burnt sugar, to make the coffee a rich brown color.

Honestly, I think it probably tasted pretty good.

From Mrs. Beeton’s The Book of Household Management:

A VERY SIMPLE METHOD OF MAKING COFFEE. 1811. INGREDIENTS.—Allow 1/2 oz., or 1 tablespoonful, of coffee to each person; to every oz. allow 1 pint of water. Mode.—Have a small iron ring made to fit the top of the coffee-pot inside, and to this ring sew a small muslin bag (the muslin for the purpose must not be too thin). Fit the bag into the pot, pour some boiling water in it, and, when the pot is well warmed, put the ground coffee into the bag; pour over as much boiling water as is required, close the lid, and, when all the water has filtered through, remove the bag, and send the coffee to table.

Basically, this is a very similar method to what we’d do today, when making drip coffee using a coffee sock (e.g. a reusable cloth filter).

I’d suggest checking out Mrs. Beeton’s The Book of Household Management for starters, if you’re interested in authentic Victorian coffee. Her “To make essence of coffee” recipe sounds like a pretty viable way of making what today would be called coffee toddy.

Or if you want to try something else, Southern Creole / Cajun coffee was considered especially delicious, and here’s a link to The Picayune Creole Cook Book. Published in 1920, it does come from a later era but coffee’s prominence, as you can see, is maintained. It is the first recipe in the book, on page one.

