Recreating Dog Food from the Last 2,000 Years

Usually every week here on the show I make foods that people have eaten throughout history, but today is a little bit different because I'm going to be making foods that pets have eaten throughout history, specifically ancient Roman dog food and the original dog biscuit or dog cake from Victorian England. So thank you to Factor for sponsoring this video as we feed history's furry friends. This time on Tasting History. As people we love our pets. My cats are really the reason that I get out of bed in the morning, namely to feed them. They are my alarm clock, but our love of pets is nothing new. I figure we've been loving our pets ever since the dog was domesticated somewhere between 15 and 30,000 years ago, and for at least the last 2,000 years people have been writing down advice on how to feed your pets, mostly pet dogs because other pets like cats would just live off the rodents and birds that they caught for themselves. But when it came to dogs, one of the very first writings that we have on how to feed your pet dog came from the Roman author Marcus Torrentius Varro, who writing during the Roman Republic advised that they eat scraps of meat and bones, not grass and leaves. You should also feed them barley bread, but not without soaking it in milk. And basically for the next 1800 years this was kind of the general advice. You would feed your pets whatever you ate. It was scraps off of the table. Nothing was usually prepared specifically for the animal until the 1860s when James Spratt came along and developed the first commercial dog biscuit which he called dog cakes. And while he never actually wrote down the recipe there is an ad from 1882 in the Greyhound Stud Book that can give us some insight into how to make these cakes, specifically the meat fibrine vegetable dog cakes with beetroot. These special biscuits contain 35% of meat and are manufactured from the best scotch oatmeal, wheat and meal, and other ingredients. Those other ingredients are likely vegetables since they are called vegetable dog cakes, and in other ads it does mention vegetables but it never says what vegetables were in these, but other writings from this period about what you should feed dogs say that they liked cabbage, carrots, and turnips but they should be boiled first. As for the meat being used Spratt himself was notoriously tight-lipped about what meat was going into these cakes but after he died the company advertised that they would use the dried unsalted gelatinous parts of prairie beef. That is dried bison bits. Probably not the highest quality bits but still edible. In fact that is one thing that's clear. All of the ingredients in these cakes are edible for humans. It could be human food. Personally I prefer food that is custom made for a person's palate like the wonderful meals from today's sponsor Factor. Factor which is owned by HelloFresh delivers ready-to-eat chef-crafted quality meals right to your doorstep. They're freshly made, never frozen, and only take about two minutes to prepare, and now that fall is just around the corner I feel like this time of year everybody's schedule gets really crazy. I know mine does and so making food at home can sometimes become a little bit difficult so instead of relying on takeout I rely on Factor meals especially for my lunches like this Peruvian style chicken with red pepper cauliflower grits which has been one of my favorites recently, and while I do have my favorite Factor meals with 35 weekly options there's always something new to try. They have everything from vegetarian to keto, vegan, you name it. They even have options for breakfast and different juices and smoothies for snacks. So head to factor75.com or click the link in the description and use code tastinghistory50 to get 50% off of your first Factor box and 20% off of your next month of orders. That's tastinghistory50 at factor75.com for 50% off of your first box and 20% off of your next month of orders, and now with this human well-fed it is time to make our Victorian dog cakes for which you will need two cups of minced dried bison. Now they say they use the gelatinous bits but I couldn't really find the gelatinous bits because today usually the gelatinous bits of bison end up in dog food already so this dog biscuit is going to be pretty fancy with sirloin and ribeye instead. You need about a pound of meat to make two cups of dried bits. One cup or 120 grams of whole wheat flour, and one cup or 145 grams of Scottish oatmeal. Then some vegetables. I'm using carrots, turnip, and cabbage but you can use pretty much whatever you want as long as it is dog safe, and there are vegetables that dogs can't eat so make sure to get ones that they can eat. Now the first thing we need to do is dry our bison. Originally I was thinking oh I'll just get some bison jerky but they always add in a lot of other things including salt, and Spratz was very specific that they did not use salt in their biscuits so I decided to dry my own in a dehydrator. So just slice the meat nice and thin, lay it out onto the racks of a dehydrator, and let it dry at 165 degrees Fahrenheit or about 75 degrees Celsius for six to eight hours. Then while the meat dries we can measure out our vegetables. Now the reason that I chose the amount of all the ingredients that I did is because the original ad said that it's 35% meat but it doesn't say whether it's by volume or by weight so I kind of guessed but I'm using two cups of meat plus two cups of grains and then two cups of vegetables. The ratio should work out. So peel and mince your beets. You'll probably need one or two, and then chop up your vegetables nice and fine, and put them into a pot with water and boil for about seven or eight minutes just long enough for the turnips and carrots to soften, and then strain them and measure out one cup. Then once your meat has dried you can mince that up fine and measure out two cups, and then put it into a food processor with the beets and the vegetables, and blend everything up until it's sort of like a puree. Then whisk the flour and Scottish oatmeal together, and add in the meat and vegetable puree and mix. Now at this point we are essentially making dog hardtack, and if you look at the shape of the original biscuits that is exactly what they look like. So you want to make sure that your dough is very dry, just wet enough to come together. Then knead the dough for a few minutes until it becomes smooth, and roll it out about an inch thick. Then cut them into squares about three inches on either side. Now the original cakes were stamped with an X-like symbol and the words Spratz patent, and their ads claimed none are genuine unless so stamped. So if you want to try to stamp that onto your dog cakes go right ahead. If not that's okay too but what you do need to do is poke some holes along the top of the cake in lines. Images of old Spratz cake show either a 5x5 pattern or a 7x7 pattern. Then set these on a lined baking sheet, and place them in the oven at 205 degrees Fahrenheit or 95 Celsius, and let them dry out for four to six hours. Plenty of time to travel back and see how history's pet lovers fed their friends. So as we see from Varro's prescription of barley bread soaked in milk, the ancient Romans were among the first to leave us any information on how to feed our pets. Specifically dogs, and specifically sheep herding dogs. These were not hunting dogs or guard dogs, and that's why great care must be taken for their supply of food for hunger will drive them to hunt for food if it is not provided, and take them away from the flock. You should also feed them barley bread but not without soaking it in milk for when they have become accustomed to eating that kind of food they will not soon stray from the flock. They are also fed on bone soup and even broken bones as well for these make their teeth stronger and their mouths of wider stretch. And the reason that he only talks about feeding sheep dogs is because this is found in his work on agriculture. So he's really only concerned with feeding the animals on a farm but the ancient Romans also did keep hunting dogs, and guard dogs, and sometimes just lap dogs in their houses. And I always love it when the ancients leave us something that can immediately connect them to us, create this source of empathy from you know thousands of years separated, and one of those is about how much they absolutely loved their pets. Often when a pet dog would die they would bury it, and create a statue of it, and leave an epitaph. Like I am in tears while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands 15 years ago. I mean I find that so humanizing even from such a great distance in time. I just, I just love that sort of thing. And it wasn't just the ancient Romans who doted on their pets. The ancient Chinese too loved their dogs. Most famously the Chinese emperors going back at least to the 8th century kept Pekinese dogs who were said to eat only the best meat and rice. Unfortunately I couldn't find any writings from that far back that talked really about how they fed their dogs but in the 19th century the Empress Dowager Cixi wrote that when it came to the Pekinese let it be dainty in its food so that it shall be known as an imperial dog by its fastidiousness. Shark's fins, and curlew livers, and the breasts of quails, on these may it be fed. And for drink give it the tea that is brewed from the spring buds of the shrub that groweth in the province of Hangkou, or the milk of the antelopes that pasture in the imperial parks. Thus shall it preserve its integrity and self-respect." And I thought I spoiled my cats, my goodness. Now in medieval Europe they were not feeding their animals antelope milk and shark fins, but that doesn't mean that they weren't still diligent in what they did feed their pets. In the 14th century guidebook Le Ménager de Paris it suggests that should you keep birds other than the common birds of prey, birds such as turtle doves, linets, and goldfinches, you should give them caterpillars, worms, flies, spiders, grasshoppers, butterflies, fresh hemp in leaf moistened and soaked, item spiders, caterpillars, and such like things which be soft to the little bird's beak which is tender. Birds were actually a very common pet in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and were very often well fed. In the 16th century poem by John Skelton called Speak Parrot it says that the parrot is daintily dieted with diver's delicate spice, then parrot must have an almond or date. Now a nutmeg, a nutmeg, sweet cinnamon sticks. Now this is food that mostly would have been imported from the Far East taking months to arrive and would have been very expensive, especially as pet food. And even in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales a pet bird is fed on the finest sugar, honey, bread, and milk. Chaucer actually mentions different types of pets being fed in The Canterbury Tales. The prioress for example keeps several dogs. Of small hounds had she that she fed with roasted flesh, or milk, or wastle bread. Wastle bread being the very finest bread that you could get at that time. Nice white flour, very expensive, and pretty opulent to feed to a dog. Especially for a prioress who is supposed to be you know feeding the poor and whatnot. So not a great look for her and that was very much on purpose by Chaucer. That's her character. A lot of people actually saw having pets that were not work animals as kind of frivolous, and that the money and food spent on the pet should have actually gone to the poor. Yet some of the most common pet owners in the Middle Ages were the clergy, and the church would often preach against the clergy keeping pets. Though they never banned it outright but they would have to say please don't bring your pets into church with you. And in a 13th century English manual on how an anchoress should behave, an anchoress being similar to a hermit but not exactly the same but similar, it says, Unless need compels you, my dear sisters, and your director advises it, you must not keep any animal except a cat. Now if someone needs to keep one, let her see to it that it does not annoy anyone, or do any harm to anybody, and that her thoughts are not taken up with it. Now when it comes to cats medieval writings rarely talk about feeding them anything because you usually kept a cat to keep down your rodent problem, and if you fed them then they wouldn't have the need to do that work. My cats won't kill anything because they are so well fed. But there are a few mentions in medieval documents that talk about the occasional pampered pet. In an entry from 1293 from the manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire it mentions one cheese purchased for a cat, but really that was an outlier. Dogs on the other hand were very often overfed, and there were even writings kind of admonishing overfeeding your dog, especially if it was a guard dog. Like you should never feed a guard dog from the table, for the most ignoble genus of dogs before one's table are those that are thought to be on guard, but which frequently so place themselves that they keep one eye on the door, and one eye on the generous hand of the master. But this clearly didn't apply to smaller dogs who in the art from the day are often seen eating on the table itself. Now this was of course the custom of the wealthy typically. Working people couldn't afford to even keep an animal, and feed them unless they were a working animal. So it was the wealthy who were overfeeding their animals, and the Dominican friar from the 14th century John of Bromyard preached that the wealthy provide for their dogs more readily than for the poor, more abundantly and more delicately too. So that whereas the poor are so famished that they would greedily devour bran bread, dogs turn up their noses at the sight of wafer bread, and spurn what is offered to them trampling it under their feet. They must be offered the daintiest flesh, the first and choicest portions of every dish. If full they refuse it, then there is wailing about them as though they were ill. But it doesn't seem that the aristocracy much listened to old John of Bromyard because the overfed pet was a common sight in the palaces of medieval Europe. By the 16th century the French court employed a boulangerie de petits chiens blancs whose sole job it was to bake bread for little white dogs being kept as royal pets, and that's why for most of Europe's history at least only the wealthy were keeping animals that were not also work animals because most people couldn't afford to feed a pet if it wasn't also pulling its weight at home, and even when they did they really just ate what the people were eating, bread, porridge, occasionally meat. Though by the 18th century in cities especially a new ingredient had become common and that is horse meat. Throughout much of Europe eating horses for people was not common practice yet they had all these horses that were being used to pull carriages and carts through the streets of cities, and so when they died the food could be sold off to feed pets. The other change that took place during this period was the sheer number of pets, and the type of people who were keeping pets. By the 19th century many more people were starting to keep animals in their homes that were not working animals, and this led to the invention of the commercial pet food industry. It all started with an Ohio electrician named James Spratt who around 1860 traveled to England to sell of all things lightning rods. Well the story goes that one day Spratt was in Liverpool and he was looking outside at the docks and he saw some dogs fighting over that most iconic of seafaring vittles, the ship's biscuit. He was going to make ship's biscuits for dogs. Over the next few months he developed the meat fibrine dog cake but these cakes were not meant to feed the mongrels fighting on the docks of Liverpool but to the well-fed pets of the aristocracy and the burgeoning middle class who were willing to basically spend whatever they needed to to keep their animals happy, and the early advertisements for the cakes made it very clear who his target audience was. They touted that they had been served at the royal kennels of Sandringham and would include testimonials from the well-to-do. Gentlemen I have much pleasure in bearing personal testimony to their suitability and general efficiency for greyhounds, and in adding that my greyhound Royal Mary winner at Altcar of last year's Waterloo Plate was almost entirely trained for all her last year's engagement upon them. Yours obediently William J Dunbar MA. They began creating specific cakes for different breeds of dog and puppies, and if your dog was sick and then they got into other animals and would make food specifically for horses and fish, rabbits, pigeons, game, and cats. Though their advertisements for cat food which were plastered all over the streets of London would probably not fare so well today though they do catch the eye. Perhaps their best marketing ploy was when they boasted that sprat's cakes were used to feed the dogs on different expeditions to the South Pole. Sprat's dog cakes have been chosen for feeding the dogs on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 1911. On his last expedition to the South Pole Captain Scott fed Sprat's biscuits to his dogs except on his final dash when for the sake of economy of space he substituted stockfish. Now while Sprat's was the first and most famous of the dog biscuits other companies very quickly jumped in to get on that pet food craze. One of the most famous was an American inventor named Carlton Ellis who had been asked by a how he might be able to use their leftover milk. They had a bunch of just like leftover milk and so he decided to use it to make a milk-based dog biscuit, and his real genius came in making the shape of that dog biscuit into a bone. They went on sale in 1908 and eventually became known as milk bone, and it wasn't long after this before canned pet foods came on the market. The first introduced in 1922 was the Kenel ration which was made from horse meat, and since then the pet food market has exploded and today it's a hundred billion dollar business. You have so many choices when buying pet food today. I mean even Ben and Jerry's makes an ice cream specifically for dogs, but should none of those pet foods that are out there on the market suit your animal you can always do as I'm doing and make your own at home. And here we are dog cakes from Victorian England. But wait because I also wanted to whip up that ancient Roman dog food which is basically just this which is hard barley bread that is crushed up and soaked in milk, but I have to realize that neither that nor the meat fibrine dog cake is is meant for me. I'm not the target demographic so I need to find a dog. So I'm going to go over to my friend Maureen's house and whip that up and have her dog Luna do the tasting with me. Okay so I am here at my friend Mo's house with Luna. Let's see what Luna thinks of this ancient Roman dog food. She goes right for it. It's a hit. And now we have the meat fibrine dog cakes. You ready? Here you go. She loves it. I mean there's nothing not to love. It's high quality meat and vegetables. So clearly Luna loved it all. It's a hit. And yeah I'm not trying any of this dog food because Luna's gonna polish it off and you know I'm not big on sharing. So I will see you next time on Tasting History.