Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain’s coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week. Americans enjoyed even greater abundance. New York Harbor alone held half the world’s oysters and yielded so much sturgeon that caviar was set out as a bar snack. (The idea was that salty food would lead people to drink more
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