What did those convicts eat?

Especially after I've enjoyed a wonderful (and often filling) meal at the Servant's Kitchen at Woolmers I get to wondering how different things were in days gone by. What, for example, did those convicts assigned to such an estate eat?

When I think about the abundance of wonderful food we can enjoy every day - especially in Tassie - I wonder how different it must have been in the early days of settlement.

It's possible the convicts who were transported here were actually better fed when they arrived than they were in the grindingly poor slums of Victorian England from whence they came.

Those who had originally lived in the country would have been better able to survive as their skills could have included knowledge of edible wild plants, such as nettles, dandelions and wild berries.

Starvation was always a prospect for the poor, especially in the urban slums of England and Ireland. Porridge made with boiled maize, oats or rye in water or milk and vegetable soup bulked out with bread - was what people ate if they were lucky - three times a day.

A family's entire diet might consist of no more than potato parings, vegetable refuse and rotten vegetables made into soup and eaten for want of other food. Or they might have lived chiefly off bread and cheese, with bacon two or three times a week, varied with onions.

At Woolmers there was a thriving veggie garden (just as there is today) and an orchard with many different fruit trees, and at one time there was a sizable apple orchard grown for making cider.

So, when convicts were finally assigned to work at Woolmers or Brickendon or any one of the other large pastoral properties of the day, they were at least much better fed than probably they had ever been before. And they would likely have been well able to produce nourishing meals from a wide variety of meat and vegetables.

Soup seems to have been almost a staple, which could be made from almost anything at all - animal or vegetable.

And the early settlers used wild animals and parts of aminals we would never dream of using now - for example I've seen recipes for stews and soups using wombat and echidna and even for sheep's head soup ..... the mind boggles!