By NICHOLAS BAKALAR


“Please, sir, I want some more.”The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.

“What!”said the master at length, in a faint voice.

“Please, sir,”replied Oliver,“I want some more.”

The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle, pinioned him in his arm and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

It may be one of the most recognizable scenes in all of English literature, known not only to those who have read Dickens’s“Oliver Twist,” but also to all who have seen the Broadway musical or plays, films and television productions based on the novel. Six melancholic words to summon all we know and feel about stark deprivation:“Please, sir, I want some more.”

But what if we coldly ask whether Oliver really needed any more - that is, was the Victorian workhouse diet sufficient for a 9-year-old boy- A group of British researchers - two dietitians, a pediatrician and a historian - asked just that question in a study published online December 17 in The British Medical Journal.

They found that the Oliver Twist diet would guarantee radical weight loss and rapid descent into illness. Oliver’s workhouse, Dickens writes,“contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.”

Based on this description, the researchers assumed Oliver would have received about 1.4 liters of gruel a day. Using a recipe from a 17th-century English cookbook, they found that a diet of watery gruel - estimated at slightly more than 400 calories a day - would not only have been inadequate for growth in a 9-year-old boy, but also would almost surely have led to nutritional diseases.

But“Oliver Twist”is fiction. An 1843 text, Dr.Jonathan Pereira’s “Treatise on Food and Diet With Observations on the Dietetical Regimen,” set out six recommended workhouse diets. None could be considered sumptuous, but the study found that each was probably adequate.

The recommended gruel, unlike Oliver’s, was substantial, each liter containing 75 grams of the “best Berwick oatmeal.”This, along with modest servings of bread, potatoes, meat and cheese, provided 1,600 to 1,700 calories a day, compared with the 1,800 to 2,200 now recommended for a 9-year-old, and with a balance of protein, fat and carbohydrates that at least approximates today’s recommended intake. Dull , to be sure, but adequate.

So while the food was far from delicious, in a real workhouse, Oliver would probably not have had to ask for more. He would have had just about enough.