by Lucy Worsley
This had been so effective that, when it was unwrapped, ‘the left eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full, though it vanished almost immediately’.
The surgical advances made by Dr John Hunter in the eighteenth century included a new expertise in preserving cadavers which rendered the wax representation obsolete. One of Dr Hunter’s associates, a Dr Martin Van Butchell, had his own dead wife’s blood vessels injected with carmine and glass eyes inserted. He kept her in his sitting room and introduced her to visitors to the house. It was only the second Mrs Van Butchell who finally insisted that her predecessor should leave.
Meanwhile, those lower down in society put up with burials that ranged from pragmatic (plague victims dissolved in pits of quicklime) to the ignominious (an unmarked mass grave created after a battle). But a dead person of any pretension would commonly lie in their living room while mourners were summoned by the tolling of the parish church’s ‘passing bell’ to pay their respects, bringing sprigs of rosemary or rue.
It’s true that the increasing intricacy of mourning dress and the petty rules regarding its timing began to make the Victorian cult of grief appear overblown and insincere. But the great advantage of the funeral-with-a-cast-of-thousands was its cathartic, crowd-pleasing quality. Now our corpses are shuffled off quietly to the cemetery or incinerator, and we’re embarrassed by loss and sorrow. If this book can teach us anything, though, it’ll be the fact that this might change yet again.
A person’s final appearance in his or her own living room: in an open coffin
PART 4
An Intimate History of the Kitchen
Early censuses didn’t count people or houses, they counted ‘hearths’. In medieval times, the cooking fire was the essential, central point of a household. For the next few centuries, though, the kitchen was banished, shunted off to an outbuilding or down into a basement, relegated to servants and shunned by the family. Only recently has it come back to take its place at the heart of the home.
Another journey, taking place within the kitchen itself, is from the raw to the cooked. Today we like to have an intimate relationship with our food. We prefer to know where it’s come from, and we certainly aim to minimise the length of its journey from nature to mouth. We know that raw food and fibre are good for us. Until very recently, though, humanity longed for easily digestible, highly processed food. For centuries people went to great lengths to avoid eating raw fruit or vegetables. Trading patterns with other nations have also affected our diets – did you know that Henry VIII ate coconuts, and the Georgians enjoyed mangoes and Bologna sausages?
Technology has also shaped kitchens: open fireplaces gave way to ovens and eventually to ranges; coal and coke replaced wood before being superseded themselves by gas and electricity.
Above all, though, kitchens are conservative places. Cooking involves routine; cooks are the guardians of traditions. Their recipes order the world. ‘Empires, kingdoms, states and republics are but puddings of people differently made up,’ wrote the author of A Learned Dissertation on a Dumpling in 1817.
Food is therefore political, and the kitchen has been the scene of vicious class and gender battles.
34 – Why Men Used to Do the Cooking
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.
Saki, 1904
A feast was, and remains, an incredibly important signal that all is well within a family, household or place of work. Such set-piece meals have now migrated out of the domestic realm into the hotel or restaurant, but they once took place in the home.
That’s why the Lord Steward used to hold one of the great offices of the realm. It was his job to make sure that the king and all his servants had plenty to eat. In any great household, not just a royal one, the Steward was in charge of an extensive and vital department of servants responsible for supplies, catering and cleaning; all the functional (as opposed to ceremonial) arrangements. Clearly this was an important and responsible post, always held by a man, and it was also very honourable.
Beneath the overall guidance of the Steward came the Master-Cook, another masculine job. Most of the many people beneath his management were male as well. One of the very few women allowed at Henry VIII’s court was Mrs Cornwallis, ‘the wife who makes the King’s puddings’. (She was rewarded for her work with a house in London.)
This all-male kitchen, serving food to be eaten by the crowds of servants in the great hall, was a powerful and desirable image throughout the medieval period. The combination of warmth, security and food was made even more attractive by the camaraderie of the household. ‘Think of all the times we boasted at the mead-bench, heroes in the hall, predicting our own bravery in battle,’ reminisced an Anglo-Saxon warrior.
An eleventh-century royal kitchen staffed by men, redrawn from the Bayeux Tapestry
The male domination of the highest-status kitchens only began to change in the seventeenth century. Then ambitious young men started to want to become doctors or lawyers rather than domestic servants, and the status of household service began to fall. Towns rather than households became the building blocks of society. Women would take over domestic cooking, and the art of haute cuisine, practised by professional males, would go off into the public arena of the restaurant.
But the ideal of a well-staffed, mostly male kitchen, like those to be found in the great palaces of the nobility and church, had no place lower down in society. In the small farmhouses and cottages of medieval England women had always done the cooking. King Alfred went on the run from the Vikings in 878, ‘living a restless life in great distress amid the woody and marshy places’. Later legend claims that he took refuge in the hut of a swineherd. Here, the swineherd’s wife gave him the task of watching the cakes baking, which Alfred – notoriously – neglected, and he got an ear-bashing from the humble housewife as a result. The story has several possible meanings. Perhaps the cooking king demonstrated praiseworthy humility, or perhaps he’d wrongly neglected his kingdom (the cake) so that the Vikings could burn it. Or it might even have been a warning to other housewives against letting men into their kitchens.
The beginning of the end for the communal meal can be seen much earlier than the seventeenth-century handover of the cooking from men to women in the grandest houses. It can be placed right back in the fourteenth century. (Or at least that’s when the rhetoric began. It’s amazing that people are still complaining about this to this very day: when they criticise families for eating in front of the television, they’re echoing sentiments which have been heard for six hundred years.) The fourteenth-century Vision of Piers the Plowman describes how the lord and lady had decamped to ‘a privy parlour’ to ‘eat by themselves’, in order to ‘leave the chief hall/That was made for meals, for men to eat in’. With the departure of the master of the household from the common dining hall, the separate and private dining room was born.
Back in Britain’s medieval great halls, though, architecture continued to develop just as if the lord and lady really did dine there every night according to the nostalgic ideal. Carved panelling was introduced, high windows were added, and a dais appeared to hold the top table used when the lord did make one of his occasional appearances. (You can still see this in an old-fashioned Oxbridge college today, where the fellows eat on a platform raised above the students in the body of the hall.) An oriel, or bay, window provided the dais with extra light. Often the ‘upper’ end of the hall where the top table stood had plastered, whitewashed walls. The light from the oriel window, bouncing off the bright walls, would illuminate the master and his family, as if they were actors upon a stage for the rest of the household to admire and emulate.
In a modest house, the table, or ‘board’, might have been provided with stools for guests but just the one chair with arms, which was reserved for the household’s head. The original ‘chairman of the board’ was literally so, seated on a chair while everyone else was on a stool, presiding over his dependants and his dining table.
The notion that those in charge have the best seats is so powerful that judges still have ‘benches’, professors hold ‘chairs’ in their subjects, and those promoted to the board of a company will take a ‘seat’ there.
This top table had to be laid with extreme punctiliousness. ‘Look that your napery be sweet and clean … your table-knives brightly polished, and your spoon fair washed,’ runs one book of medieval advice to waiting staff. ‘Do not pick your nose or let it drop clear pearls, or sniff, or blow it too hard, lest your lord hear.’ The Elizabethan Earl of Montague recommends that the waiter should even bow as he places each napkin, knife and spoon upon the board.
At the bottom end of the hall an elaborately carved screen was constructed to hide the entrance to the kitchens. It disguised the doors to the buttery (for storing drinks) and the pantry (where bread was kept). The pantry was the workplace of the pantler, who handed out bread to the household. John Russell’s fifteenth-century book of advice for young servants recommends that three knives are kept in the pantry: one to chop the loaves, another to pare them, and a third, ‘sharp and keen’, ‘to smooth and square the trenchers’. ‘Trenchers’ were slices of old bread which acted as throwaway plates. They were formed from the burned and blackened bottoms of loaves. The more desirable top crust was eaten at once by the master and guests, hence the enduring term ‘upper crust’ for something posh.
Yet even as it reached its architectural apogee, the great hall was slowly dying. Lords and servants alike sloped off to eat elsewhere. Only in some very remote country places did its practices persist. An extraordinary glimpse of history is found in the recollection of an aged Derbyshire farmer in 1898. In his youth,
the master and his family sat at a table near the fire, and the servants at a long table on the opposite side of the room. First the master carved for his family and himself, and the joint was passed on to the servants’ table … the men sat next to the chair in order of seniority, and were very particular about keeping their proper places.
The farmer was describing a long-lost hierarchical but harmonious world.
In due course the great hall became such a potent symbol of Merrie Old England that the Victorians – distressed by modernity, sweatshops and pea-soup fogs – reinvented it. However, they used their great halls for displaying antiques and for afternoon tea, not for entertaining their servants to dinner.
Once cooking had become women’s work, the status of the kitchen and its staff embarked upon a slow and steady decline. The late seventeenth century saw a burgeoning of feminine roles in the household, as men went out to seek their fortune in the professions instead. The Compleat Servant Maid of 1677 lists ten different jobs for women, from waiting-woman, housekeeper, chambermaid, cook and under-cook to nurserymaid, dairymaid, housemaid, laundress and scullion.
This was the shape of things to come: more numerous and more specialist female servants, rising to a zenith in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, though, a combination of psychological and economic circumstances brought ‘the servant problem’ to an acute pitch for middle-class employers. The more extreme Victorian absurdities of household specialisation came to an end with an increasing scarcity of labour. Chefs became ‘cooks general’; housekeepers became ‘working housekeepers’; and the footman was replaced by the ‘female chauffeuse-cum-companion’.
Society was no longer based on deference, and rightly so. Shame and frustration were increasingly the emotions of the kitchen, where the servants who did the dirtiest work were treated the worst by their employers. Pity the kitchen maid who complained that among her fellow servants ‘everyone was called by their surname but as I was never seen or spoken to by anyone outside the kitchen, I didn’t have a name at all’. Eventually such women voted with their feet and left domestic service for good. As supply dwindled, there would be a gradual increase in the status of domestic servants, exemplified in their modern, less demeaning name of ‘staff’.
Monica Dickens was an upper-class debutante who for a lark became a not-terribly-efficient cook-general in the 1930s. She published a book about her amusing adventures in other people’s kitchens in 1939. This was the point at which the middle classes felt entitled to servants, but couldn’t understand why they couldn’t keep them. Dickens’s employers were usually in a state of some desperation, but she managed to disappoint even their low expectations through some calamity or breakage. At first she enjoyed acting out the unaccustomed role, but refused to dress for the part, deciding that ‘it was rather the modern idea for maids to revolt against wearing caps’. Dickens turned cooking into comedy, but the type of people who employed cooks must have found the joke rather dark.
The second half of the twentieth century saw the kitchen’s story split along two rival paths. According to one version, the woman of a household takes responsibility once again, just as she did in a medieval cottage, and produces simple meals from scratch for a small family unit. In the other, the kitchen falls completely out of use, and people eat food produced by other people outside the home, or even in other countries. Takeaway outlets providing hundreds of meals a day, or a meal service which brings a calorie-controlled portion of food to your door, fill the bounteous function of a great lord’s household kitchen.
We have yet to see which will come to dominate twenty-first-century life.
35 – The Kitchen Comes in from the Cold
The centre point of interest in a house is the kitchen with the adjacent Pantry, and round those apartments must range the other rooms.
R. Briggs, The Essentials of a Country House, 1911
In a medieval peasant’s cottage, the only room of the house was its kitchen, which served as bedroom and living room as well. The kitchen would eventually return to prominence in twentieth-century house design, but during the intervening centuries it was sent out, and away, to be as far distant as possible from the living rooms.
The kitchen might have been central to the lowly cottage, but in the grander houses of medieval England it was placed in a separate block. The Anglo-Saxon ‘thane’ was quite a significant landowner, as he possessed at least five hides of land. (A ‘hide’ was the amount of land required to grow enough food for one family.) Your average thane aspired to having a separate bakehouse and kitchen buildings, set at a short distance from his home’s main rectangular hall. The fear of fire meant that a kitchen had to be semi-sacrificial; it was much more likely to burn down than the rest of the house.
At Hampton Court Palace, too, the kitchen was originally detached from the main hall. Over time, other smaller kitchens and related offices sprang up around the Great Kitchen, so that now it looks like a whole small town, stuck like a monstrous disorderly carbuncle onto the side of the grand courtyards of the palace proper.
One thousand five hundred meals a day were prepared in this complex of more than fifty separate rooms. The Boiling House was a room containing a boiling copper for stock and soup. The Pasty House was a room where pie cases were made. The servants of the Spicery provided fruit as well as spices. The confectioners worked in an upstairs room where they produced delicate sweets and comfits on chafing dishes. The Wet Larder contained fish, the Dry Larder stored grain, and there was a further Flesh Larder for meat.
Because grand houses were the economic centres of estates, they were almost like factories for processing food and needed many different specialist workshops. Larders, ice houses, dairies, brewhouses and bakehouses were all additional outposts of the kitchens, housed in outbuildings. ‘On the south side of the house’, ran a survey of Montacute House, Somerset, made in 1667, ‘there is a large woodyard and necessary buildings of dairies, washing, brewing and baking’ as well as ‘a pigeon house’. Households would often be rightly proud of the products made in these outbuildings. Here animals were slaughtered, beer brewed, napkins laundered.
This ideal of the kitchen being in a semi-separate building persisted into the eighteenth century, when the increasing gentility of the upper classes made them ever l
ess tolerant of the dirt, smells and noise of food preparation. When Kedleston Hall was designed, the kitchen was placed more than thirty metres from the main guest dining room, and separated from it by a long curving corridor. The family’s own dining room, for private use, was more than twice as far distant.
This begs a question: did the owners of grand houses always eat cold food? At first it seems likely, with the distance that the food had to travel, and considering the lengthy ceremony with which it was served. But in fact there were many tricks to minimise the loss of heat on the journey from kitchen to table. Food was only plated up in the dining room, travelling along the corridors in a heat-conserving tureen. Cloths and mufflers were used to keep the serving dishes warm as they made their way along the corridors.
Then there were the skills and physiques of the servers to be considered. In a really grand house, the job of serving-man was exclusively male. In numerous paintings of medieval halls, you can see servers carrying big dishes of food from a hatch near the kitchens towards the dining tables. These would be fine young men, quick and powerful, who would take pride in getting food to the table fast. Vigorous, fleet-footed footmen would have run with the dinner along the curved corridors of Georgian Kedleston. In a well-regulated house, where cooking and serving worked like clockwork, everybody enjoyed hot dinners.
In the nineteenth century, the idea persisted that kitchens ought to be remote from the polite areas of the house. There would be tradesmen calling, rubbish to be collected and other noisy activities to be kept distant from the master and his family. But in busy cities, with space hard to come by, the kitchen had to be squashed down into the basement of the house rather than set off to the side.
So the lofty, spacious, airy, echoing kitchens of the eighteenth-century country house were transformed into airless, lightless underground bunkers. In Virginia Woolf’s childhood home, 22 Hyde Park Gate, the six or seven maids were banished from the main storeys of the tall terraced house. They were relegated to a basement kitchen of almost ‘incredible gloom’, or to the boiling hot attics where they slept. One of these young women once let her true feelings slip out. The young Virginia overheard one of her mother’s maids describing her workplace: ‘It’s like hell.’