Garden puts workhouse food on menu

Helped by fine spring weather, volunteers at the Ripon Workhouse Museum have been preparing the Workhouse Garden for its daily opening to the public tomorrow.

For the first time, visitors to the museum will be able to see how fruit and vegetables were grown to support the inmates of the workhouse over 100 years ago.

This will be the first full year for growing crops, of all varieties, that would have been around at the peak of production in 1890.

Although Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist made workhouse gruel infamous, experts said the 19th century menu consisted largely of potatoes, milk, scraps of meat, oatmeal and tea.

Much of the food was supplied by various contractors, most of them local, supplemented by a variety of vegetables grown in the workhouse gardens.

A pauper had three meals a day. Breakfast was oatmeal with either sweet or sour milk. Each adult pauper would have received a six to eight ounce serving, with children under 15 getting a third less.

Potatoes, meat and vegetables were served for dinner though the quantities of meat were miserly, with the average inmate lucky to get more than four ounces in a week.

Supper, the final meal of the day, consisted of just tea and a few mouthfuls of bread. The monotonous diet, which was even more meagre when crops failed, only changed on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday.

On these "feast days" an extra ration of meat, sugar or cocoa would be doled out.

During the Irish potato famine, many workhouses began to belatedly cultivate their own crops. In the meantime, the paupers were offered bread instead, or – in the worst cases – stomach-turning animal feed.

Plans for the garden were first aired by Ripon Museum Trust about six years ago, but the main work to bring the disused plot back to life has happened in the last 18 months through the support of several charities and organisations.

The growing band of volunteers was helped last Saturday by 40 Girl Guides who planted snowdrops, dug and weeded, and prepared the vegetable beds for planting.

However, the garden needs more volunteers and for further information on helping out contact the museum office on Ripon 690799.