Gothic Auntie

If you’re following along with Dracula Daily then you may have ended today’s instalment wondering about the “London Cat’s Meat” that Jonathan wrote about in his diary. Surely it must just be a pejorative name given to a cheap street food? Right?

“Robber steak”- bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks, and roasted over the fire, in simple style of the London cat’s meat!’ — Dracula, Bram Stoker

Wrong, but don’t worry, no cats were harmed in the making of London cat’s meat. Quite a few horses, but no cats.

The Victorian era saw cats transition from primarily working animal, serving as pest control everywhere from warehouses to pubs, to beloved pets. While the gainfully employed members of the feline population could largely feed themselves, that is, if they were doing their job right, the diet of their bourgeoisie cousins needed a little supplementation — and that’s where the cat meat vender came in.

With their hat, apron, and barrow full of pungent, miscellaneous meat, the cat meat vender was a common sight in Victorian London. Having identified a vital gap in the city’s chain of supply and demand these enterprising men and women rushed in to fill it; buying up meat deemed unfit for human consumption from knackers yards and abattoirs and repurposing it into the first commercial pet food of the modern age.

This meat would be cut into pieces and set onto skewers for ease of portioning — hence Jonathan’s fascination with the robber steak. For someone who’d only ever seen skewered meat in this context, foul smelling and often dyed an alarming blue or green to make sure it wasn’t upsold as a working man’s dinner, the robber steak must have been something of a paradigm shift. Jonathan, the adventurous foody that he is, doesn’t seem to have been put off by it however, merely delighted by the novelty.

The cat meat trade was a hard one, requiring intense physical labour for little profit, with venders fiercly defending their patch from newcomers trying to muscle in. That said they were known for being a soft hearted crew when it came to cats, often knowing all their furry customers by name, keeping track of whether any of them were missing or looked unwell, and slipping the occasional bite to hungry strays. They also sometimes helped those strays find a loving home, on one occasion with no less a person the Duchess of Bedford, though I’m not clear how such a meeting across the classes could have happened.

There’s even an account of a vendor named Old Tom who’d trained his furry customers to wait in an orderly line while he gave them their food one by one. As an experienced cat owner whose watched the feeding frenzy that ensues when you try to feed multiple cats at the same time, sometimes requiring one particularly egregious offender to be locked in the bathroom until her brothers are done, that’s something I would pay to see.