For many years, it has been said that fast food is too popular because it is cheap and quick, while healthier foods require time to prepare and are often more expensive.
Today, the price gap between a fast food hamburger and other sources is often not as great as it once was. Fast food has been associated with cheap food for probably about 1,000 years or more.
Interestingly, the long-standing popularity of fast food was apparently closely tied to what was then a fairly common measure of wealth: the household.
In the 14th century, taxes were still practiced in France and England. However, they lacked simple ways to keep records and track and measure income and property values.
They’ve found some surprising ways to determine who pays how much tax. In some cases, your local “tax bracket” might be determined by the number of chimneys in your home.
At that time, homes relied on burning wood or coal for heat, but they lacked modern ducts and other means of circulating heat throughout the building.
A one-room house – where everyone slept, ate and lived in the same room – would have been surprisingly easy to heat with an open fire under a fireplace somewhere in the room.
The efficiency would be significantly lower if the building had even one additional room. That extra room would probably be freezing in the winter, and the more rooms beyond that, the more chimneys and fireplaces would be needed.
Realizing that a larger building with more chimneys would indicate the wealth of the owner, it was around this time that England adopted a “hearth tax”, once modeled on the Byzantine Empire of the 9th century, one of the first progressive taxes in the world.
People with more money than sense (and an irresistible urge to show it off) have installed fake fireplaces to appear richer.
The more frugal found ways to pay less tax. Some even found ways to make it so that even if they had multiple fireplaces, they all converged into a single chimney. This created complex networks of chimney flues and, coincidentally, created a need for cleaning.
This is how the concept of chimney sweep was born.
If you look a little further down the financial food chain, you’ll eventually come across people who didn’t have a fireplace at all.
Very poor peasants and those who worked with animals stood near these animals for warmth. Some peasants were so poor that they lived in buildings so full of holes that a proper fireplace was hardly necessary.
Those who lived in apartment buildings usually shared a single household with many other people.
Back then, fireplaces also served as the stove and oven in every home. If you didn’t have one, or couldn’t use it to cook, you had very few options.
There were merchants willing to offer a solution to these problems. Of course, the simplest option, full of essential carbohydrates, was bread purchased in bakeries. One could buy a loaf of bread and eat it fresh or cold, without the need for fire.
Bakeries began to innovate. In the absence of health regulations, some allowed customers to bring in ingredients such as meat, fish and vegetables that they could then wrap in bread and bake.
By 1350 this practice had become so common that bakers were forbidden from charging more than a penny from people who supplied their own filling.
Incredibly, these bakers pioneered bread bowls, meat pies, pâtés and the fast food industry as a whole.
Bakeries also began to make pre-prepared meat pies that the poor and working class could quickly purchase without waiting.
They often used meat scraps and fruit and vegetables to make these pies, which helped keep prices down and established English specialities like kidney pies and jellied eel pies. I prefer the “pink slime”.
These fast food joints and meat pies sprang up wherever the crowds were bustling. Along the Thames, they were home to sailors, tanners, butchers and some of the hardest-working and lowest-paid Londoners in history.
Thinking about it, I’m a little disappointed that we don’t have a fast food restaurant that offers pâtés or pies.
As a single guy, I know that one of the best parts of making a pot of soup that I can’t finish on my own is making chicken pot pies that I can quickly freeze and eat when I don’t feel like cooking.
The variety that a fast food franchise could produce today would be simply amazing. Everyone loves soup, but it’s hard to cook just one serving.
Dorothy Rollins’ Beef Pies
Freshly baked beef pies.
Photographic illustration / Shutterstock.com
Pastry shop
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup lard
1 egg
5 tablespoons cold water
1 teaspoon of vinegar
Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Add the lard using a pastry blender or a fork. In another small bowl, beat the egg, water and vinegar, then pour it all over the dry mixture and mix it all together, being careful not to overwork the dough. Once the dough is well mixed, separate it into 8 pieces and roll them out into circles.
Filling
2 pounds cubed tender beef
4 medium potatoes, diced
3 carrots cut into small pieces
1 onion, chopped
2 teaspoons beef bouillon granules
1 teaspoon parsley flakes
¼ teaspoon pepper
Mix all ingredients well, then place one cup inside each dough circle. Wet the edges of the dough and fold it in half over the filling. Pinch the edges to seal, then transfer to an ungreased cookie sheet. Poke holes in the top of the dough to allow steam to escape, then bake at 400 degrees for one hour.
