A Taste For Strange Meats And Husbands' Buttocks

From chewing coal to salivating over starch and shells, pregnant women in early modern England were consumed by a number of outlandish cravings. Jennifer Evans explores how doctors made sense of these bizarre – and sometimes dangerous – desires

- Jennifer Evans

Women can experience intense food cravings in pregnancy. They plow through pickles, gorge on eggs, fantasize about mustard, and devour entire tubs of ice cream. And if early modern writers and medical practitioners are to be believed, some have been known to hanker after human flesh.

Our predecessors in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were keenly aware of the link between pregnancy and food cravings, and devoted a great deal of time to analyzing these urges – whether they were for traditional sources of sustenance or something altogether more unusual.

It was widely accepted that, in the words of the popular medical writer Nicholas Culpeper, cravings were one of the “chiefest sign[s] of conception”, and that what followed, according to the author John Sadler, would be “a longing desire for strange meats” (“meats” being a term to describe a range of foodstuffs).

The author of a satirical piece published in 1682, entitled The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, suggested that cravings were so common that “all women when they are with child; do fall commonly from one longing to another”. He complained to his readers – whom he assumed included the husbands of such women – that in the summer their wives would crave “China oranges, civil lemmons, the largest asparagus, strawberries with wine and sugar, cherries of all sorts, and… plums”. These extravagant appetites were no cause for concern for the pregnant woman themselves, the author wrote. But, he bemoaned, it was a different story for the long-suffering husbands and servants who were required to “trot out” long after dark to procure such delicacies.