What did people eat in the Napoleonic Era? It all depends on who you were. I'm going to focus on France at the time, as that's my specialty.
If you were a peasant or poor laborer, you might get by on very little food at all. France's per-capita calorie consumption at the beginning of the 19th Century was only around 2,000 calories per person, well below what an active male laborer needs — and this is an average, which means many people consumed less than that. (Within 50 years, France's per-capita calorie consumption would rise to around 3,000 calories. Today, France and other developed countries consume an average of around 3,500 calories per capita per day.) (1) As a result, malnourishment and a host of associated health problems, including short stature, was quite common in France in the first half of the 19th Century.
Peasants in particular tended to have a simple diet, per this passage in Christine Haynes Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France After Napoleon:
To sustain themselves for their strenuous work, peasants relied mainly on bread, as much as a kilogram per person per day, baked at home. This staple was supplemented with boiled porridge, vegetable soup (seasoned with lard), greens and roots, and (only after the late eighteenth century or so) potatoes; meat, especially beef, was a rarity reserved for illness and holidays. To drink, peasants had only water — which they usually had to haul from a fountain — or cider, rarely wine or even coffee. This dearth... had been exacerbated by the last years of the Napoleonic wars... (2)
The specifics of this peasant diet could vary considerably by region, as André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq report in their Restoration & Reaction, 1815-1848, which contains a very useful survey of post-Napoleonic France by region. In eastern France, for example, dwellers in mountainous regions often ate a "meagre diet of ’mixed’ bread, lentils, ‘seret’, the residual whey of their cheese production, a little salt pork and smoke-cured meat, not forgetting the berries gathered in the forest." Down in the lowlands, where the soil was better, peasants ate better, but not by much — here again it was the standard bread, porridge and soup with lard. In northern France, potatoes were a bigger part of the diet, and beer sometimes joined cider as a staple drink. To the west,
The peasant of Maine usually lived in a dark hovel, baked a coarse bread every week, drank a sour cider, and filled up with soup. The peasant of Anjou was not housed much better, but his bread was often made of wheat, and he had vegetables, onions, broad beans, and cabbage to go with it.
Salt was "scarce and dear, and treated like something precious." One writer, growing up a few decades after Napoleon, recalled eating "rye bread soaked in salt water with a thimbleful of butter on it, morning noon and night, with a piece of dry bread after and, on feast days, an apple or a piece of cheese." The bread was soaked because it was often exceptionally stale; while the Maine peasants typically baked bread every week, in other areas bread was baked as seldom as "every six or twelve months":
In the Romanche valley, between Grenoble and Briançon, Adolphe Blanqui found villages so short of fuel that they used dried cow dung to bake their bread and prepared the loaves only once a year. He himself saw in September a loaf he had helped begin in January. That sort of bread had to be cut with an axe, a hatchet, or an old sword, and you could not count yourself a man until you had the strength to cut your own bread when it was stale and hard.(3)
Even peasants who made wine rarely had enough of a surplus to drink it, such as the small vintners of the Loire Valley, who "only tasted their wine on special occasions." (4)
Finally, these were averages. If crops failed — as they still did regularly — you could easily find yourself reduced to the brink of starvation, forced to rely on begging or charity to stay fed.
If you were a little better off than these subsistence farmers, you could do rather better for yourself. For example, the Allied soldiers occupying France after Napoleon's fall had a standard daily ration of:
We would not call these rations particularly luxurious today, but they were much better than the standard French peasant fare, especially in the provision of meat. As we've seen, most peasants ate meat only on special occasions. Even well-off Parisians consumed around 65 kilograms of meat per year, while these common soldiers were getting 90. (The British, even then nicknamed "rosbifs" by the French, thought this meat ration was too small for their soldiers' expectations and arranged for them to get nearly twice as much meat per day, in exchange for less bread and no vegetables.) (5)
Middle-class Parisians were better off still. In Balzac's Père Goriot, the landlady Madame Vauquer casually orders her servant to prepare lunch for her boarders, "what's left of the mutton and potatoes, and those cooked pears, the nice cheap ones." For 15 francs per month, one boarder gets an after-dinner brandy. (A typical day-laborer's wage was around 1 to 1.5 francs per day at this time.) (6) For these people in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum, daily staples are provided for, meat is not a special occasion, and luxuries are available for those with a little extra means.
Continued in Part 2