Kathryn Hughes

“Fanny Adams, though, was destined to rise again. For while no one remembers Frederick Baker’s name today, everyone knows hers, and uses it often. It happened like this. In 1869, two years after Baker’s execution, the British navy introduced tinned mutton into its rations. Canning was still a newish technology, but the navy had been quick to adopt it as a way of supplementing the usual salting method by which food had for centuries been preserved. The problem was that the process didn’t always work as well as it should. All too often canning was an excuse to use inferior meat, offal of no discernible origin. And on those many occasions when the tins hadn’t been airtight, the meat started to turn within days. The disgusted sailors in the victualling yard at Deptford came up with a joke about how the putrid canned mutton they were being made to serve to their colleagues actually consisted of bits of Fanny Adams. The grisly story of the chopped-up girl had been passed along the lines of navy gossip that stretched from Southampton and Portsmouth, just thirty miles from Alton. So ‘Fanny Adams’ became navy slang for disgusting mutton or stew, and then, by extension, for anything worthless. Even today, 150 years later, ‘Sweet FA’ means ‘nothing at all’ – or, if you are in a particularly bad mood, ‘Fuck All’.”
― Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum