Ale -- Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and
In-Between
In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin talks
about working at Watt's
Printing House in London during the 1720s.
Although coffee and tea had
arrived in England by this time, they were not
yet available to the common
citizen, who still relied on the nutrients
provided by beer to get through
the day. Franklin (sounding perhaps typically
American and puritanical in
his abstemiousness?) comments on these habits
using the precise logic that
would soon make tea and coffee the beverages of
the sober, productive
working class:
-
At my first admission into this printing-house I
took to working at press,
imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I
had been us'd to in
America, where presswork is mix'd with
composing. I drank only water; the
other workmen, near fifty in number, were great
guzzlers of beer. On
occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large
form of types in each hand,
when others carried but one in both hands. They
wondered to see, from this
and several instances, that the
Water-American, as they called me,
was stronger than themselves, who drank
strong beer! We had
an alehouse boy who attended always in the house
to supply the workmen. My
companion at the press drank every day a pint
before breakfast, a pint at
breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint
between breakfast and dinner, a
pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about
six o'clock, and another when
he had done his day's work. I thought it a
detestable custom; but it was
necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong
beer, that he might be
strong to labor. I endeavored to
convince him that the bodily
strength afforded by beer could only be in
proportion to the grain or flour
of the barley dissolved in the water of which it
was made; that there was
more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and
therefore, if he would eat that
with a pint of water, it would give him more
strength than a quart of beer.
He drank on, however, and had four or five
shillings to pay out of this
wages every Saturday night for that muddling
liquor; an expense I was free
from.
..
From my example, a great part of [the workmen]
left their muddling
breakfast of beer, and bread, and cheese,
finding they could with me be
suppl'd from a neighboring house with a large
porringer of hot water-gruel,
sprinkled with pepper, crumb'd with bread, and a
bit of butter in it, for
the price of a pint of beer, viz., three
half-pence. This was a more
comfortable as well as cheaper breakfast, and
kept their heads clearer.
From Memoirs of the Life & Writings of
Benjamin Franklin by
Benjamin Franklin. London: J.M. Dent & Sons,
Ltd., 1908 edition (pages 55
to 56).
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