Finding one’s food in an advanced state of animation was not a commonplace event even in Pepys’s day—he was truly mortified—but being at least a little uncertain about the freshness and integrity of food was a fairly usual condition. If it wasn’t rapidly decomposing from inadequate preservation, there was every chance that it was colored or bulked out with some dangerous and unappealing substances.
Almost nothing, it seems, escaped the devious wiles of food adulterers. Sugar and other expensive ingredients were often stretched with gypsum, plaster of paris, sand, dust, and other forms of daft, as such additives were collectively known. Butter reportedly was bulked out with tallow and lard. A tea drinker, according to various authorities, might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep’s dung. One closely inspected shipment, Judith Flanders reports in The Victorian House, proved to be only slightly more than half tea; the rest was made up of sand and dirt. Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery products a golden glow and brought radiance to mustard. Lead acetate was added to drinks as a sweetener, and red lead somehow made Gloucester cheese lovelier to behold, if not safer to eat.