Food in the Migrant Experience

Anne J. Kershen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754618744
• eBook ISBN: 9781351936255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At its most basic, food is vital to our survival there can be no form of life without it. But in economically developed and thriving societies there is more to eating and drinking than just surviving. As the centuries have passed, the marketing, preparation and presentation of food has become an intrinsic part of the modern consumer society. Food operates in the religious sphere too, with consumption and abstinence playing their part in religious ritual whilst methods of animal slaughter have moved into the political, as well as the religious arena. Food not only sustains the migrant on both the real and metaphorical journey from home to elsewhere, it also provides a bridge between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Food acts as a catalyst for cultural fusion and excitement but it can also endanger: change of diet all too frequently creating as many health problems as it resolves. Its multi-disciplinary nature enables Food in the Migrant Experience to address all the above issues in chapters written by leading academics in the fields of migration, economics, nutrition, medicine and history. As we continue to explore the minutiae of the immigrant experience, this book will be essential reading to all those engaged in the study of migration.

PART ONE

FOOD IN MIGRANT HISTORY

Chapter 2

Italian ‘Penny Ice-men’ in Victorian London¹

Lucio Sponza

In a vivid piece of journalism, which was to find its way into his collection entitled London Labour and the London Poor, the observant Henry Mayhew recorded the entry of ice-cream street selling in London, at the beginning of the 1850s, as follows:

The sale of ice-creams was unknown in the streets until last summer and was first introduced, as a matter of speculation, by a man who was acquainted with the confectionery business and who purchased his ices of a confectioner in Holbom. He resold these luxuries daily to street-sellers [...]. The sale, however, was not remunerative [...]. After three or four weeks’ trial this man abandoned the trade, and soon afterwards emigrated to America.

However, Mayhew also noted that apparently the seed found a more fertile soil in Petticoat Lane on Sunday mornings:

There were many difficulties attending the introduction of ices into street-traffic. The buyers had but a confused notion how the ice was to be swallowed. The trade, therefore, spread only very gradually [...]. Ices were sold by the street vendors generally at 1 d. each, and the trade left them a profit of 4d. or 1 s., when they served them ‘without waste’ [...]

From a street-dealer I received the following account: – ‘Yes, sir, I mind very well the first time as I ever sold ices. I don’t think they’ll ever take greatly in the streets, but there’s no saying. Lord! How I’ve seen the people splutter when they’ve tasted them for the first time [...]. The persons what enjoyed their ices most’ – the man went on – ‘was, I think, servant maids that gulped them on the sly. Pr’aps the’d been used, some o’em, to get a taste of ices on the sly before, in their services. We sees a many dodges in the streets, sir – a many’.²

The Ice-Men Cometh

Some 20 years later, in the early 1870s, ice-cream street vendors were a common feature in London – and they were virtually to a man, Italian. To explain this development we must consider the changing patterns of the Italian immigrant community in London, in the context of changing Italian and British societies.

The first Italian colony in London was located around Hatton Garden and Saffron Hill, in the area of Holborn. The early references to those immigrants, in The Times, go back to 1820. For the next 50 years or so, the colony hardly changed in terms of location and occupations, and the increase in their numbers was steady but contained (see Table 2.1). Italians in London were probably somewhat fewer than 1,000 in the early 1820s. The first limited census statistics on foreigners, in 1841, recorded about 1,500 of them. There were a little more than 2,500 in 1871. The increase in those 50 years can be assumed therefore to be in the region of 40 per cent. In the 30 years between 1871 and 1901, the number of Italians in London increased more than fourfold, to nearly 11,000. The ‘penny ice-men’ were the key factor in that remarkable increase in numbers (see Table 2.2) and the more successful of them would contribute to the stereotyped image of Italians in Britain as petty shopkeepers in food dealing. However, unlike food shops, which mainly catered for the Italian community and enabled its members to pursue their dietary customs – frugal as they were – ice-cream was no staple food for the immigrants. This delicacy may have been made for the first time in Italy as far back as the sixteenth century, but it was confined to the tables of the rich and the aristocracy.³ Unlike the pizza, a common and simple dish of southern Italy (especially Naples) which became an international food as a consequence of the large-scale emigration of Italians to the United States at the turn of the century,⁴ the street selling of ice-cream was merely induced by the growing demand for a cheap treat by the lowest social strata in London.

But let us return to the dawn of the Italians’ presence in London, early in the nineteenth century. Until the 1870s, the Italian colony in Holborn consisted of two broad categories: first, the skilled artisans – makers of precision instruments (especially barometers and thermometers), looking-glass and looking-glass frame makers; picture-frame makers; cabinet makers and carpenters. Within this category we should also place the plaster-of-Paris figure makers, who employed many servants as street vendors of their wares: these made up one of the two components ofunskilled, itinerant ‘Italy’. The second component of this vagrant community was that of the street musicians, notably the organ-grinders.

Table 2.1 Location of Italians in London, 1861–1911 (when at least 300 were recorded on any census day)

London districts	1861	1871	1881	1891	1901	1911
Kensington	152	205	193	162	318	346
St Marylebone	130	155	183	233	462	513
Westminster (City of)	137	251	304	652	2282	2606
St Paneras	114	155	222	308	828	1155
Holborn	757	909	1561	1451	2029	1488
Finsbury (from 1901)	-	-	-		1065	1267
Islington	48	60	84	165	446	464
Southwark (from 1901)	-	-	-	-	356	261
Lambeth	24	56	76	135	269	662
Total in above districts	1362	1791	2623	3106	8055	8762
Total in London	2041	2553	3504	5138	10889	11668
Total in Britain	4489	5063	6504	9909	24383	24983

Source: British Decennial Censuses, 1861–1911 – adapted.

Table 2.2 Main occupations of Italians in the Holborn District, 1841–91 – Parishes of St Andrew’s Eastern, Saffron Hill, St James/Clerkenwell (when at least 50 were recorded at any census)

Occupations	1841	1851	1861	1871	1881	1891
Looking-glass makers, silverers	29	47	73	31	8	3
Cabinet makers, carpenters, French polishers	8	11	14	21	30	57
Picture/looking-glass frame makers	15	79	110	46	25	24
Figure makers, modellers	67	92	103	89	73	33
Asphalt workers, labourers, bricklayers	1	6	11	19	240	127
Organ-grinders	216	178	191	339	412	166
Ice-cream makers and dealers	-		-	18	207	339
Italians in the three Holborn parishes	472	526	635	737	1302	1410

Source: Census Enumerators’ Books, Holborn District, 1841–1891.

Incidentally, it is worth noting that distinct regional origins went hand in hand with the different broad categories of occupations. The skilled artisans engaged in precision instrument making were from the valleys around Como, north of Milan; the makers and sellers of statuettes were from near Lucca, in Tuscany; the street musicians came from the valleys of Parma and Piacenza. They all came, therefore, from small towns and villages in mountain districts, where temporary migration (especially in winter) had been a permanent feature and a necessity for centuries.

One of the earliest to observe that a new, pervasive itinerant trade was fast developing in the streets of London was Blanchard Jerrold. In his book, London. A Pilgrimage, better known for Gustave Doré’s etchings, Jerrold wrote:

The fashion of the West [of London] ripples faintly even here [in East London] [...]. It has established penny ices – for which the juvenile population exhibit astonishing voracity – in all the poor districts of the Metropolis. Wherever we have travelled in crowded places of the working population, we have found the penny ice-man doing a brisk trade – even when his little customers were blue with the cold. The popular ice-vendor is the fashionable rival of the ginger-beer hawker – an old, familiar London figure.⁵

Contemporary to Jerrold’s observations was the taking of the 1871 census, in which some itinerant Italians were given a double occupation: in addition to what appeared to be their main activity, as ‘Ice Makers’, the phrases ‘Winter Music’ or ‘Winter Organ’ were often included. The reverse ‘genetic’ order probably applied: ice-cream making and street selling started in many cases as a seasonal complementary activity to organ-grinding. Ten years later, at the 1881 census, Italian ‘penny ice-men’ were well established in their new occupation.

An example of this transition is offered by Table 2.3, which shows the entries in four successive censuses, concerning various members of a particular family, whose surname was Cura:

a) They appeared for the first time in 1861: the head of the household, Domenico, was afigure maker, and so were his two elder sons and a brother of his. Domenico was then 40 years old. Unlike other figure makers who employed young...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Food in the Migrant Experience
• PART 1 Food in Migrant History
• PART 2 Migrants, Food and Entrepreneurship
• PART 3 Food and the Health of Immigrants
• Index