by Lucy Worsley
The First World War and the collapse of the kind of economy in which one third of the country had worked as the domestic servants of another third brought about change. When the mistress of a household finally entered her own kitchen and was forced to learn how to cook, kitchen conditions inevitably improved.
Of course, in working people’s houses there had been no such distinction between kitchen and living rooms: they remained one and the same. The National Trust’s ‘back-to-back’ houses in Birmingham represent a housing type once found all over the Midlands and north of England. These houses, one backed against another to save bricks, had two bedrooms, one often shared by a whole family, the other let to a couple of lodgers. In the downstairs room, perhaps nine people would spend their leisure and eating time, and even their working hours. The front room/kitchen of one of the houses now on display was used by a glass-eye-maker as his workshop as well.
Over the course of the twentieth century, though, open-plan living became acceptable even in expensive homes. No longer was the kitchen squeezed into the smallest possible space and made a second-class room; it returned to being a social space, where family, not servants, would spend much of their time.
In the later twentieth century, Terence Conran once again demonstrated an unerring instinct for making money out of a major domestic shift (just as he had done with his duvets). His shop Habitat provided cheap but stylish products for young couples remodelling the traditional Victorian terraced house to their new and Swinging Sixties needs, as they ripped out the walls between sculleries, kitchens and dining rooms. ‘You may well find’, he wrote in 1974, ‘it’s worth combining the living/dining-room or kitchen/dining-room so that the dining space can be of use all day.’
Habitat spaghetti jars, wooden salad servers and chunky mugs (instead of cups and saucers) were the chosen utensils of mothers who worked all day and did their own cooking in the evenings as well. The robust yet cheerful 1970s kitchen was ‘central to entertainment, as well as to tasks like homework, and there was a certain homespun air that went with the potted herbs and the use of “honest” building materials such as brick, stone and wood’.
Since then, a rejection of 1970s country-cottage kitchen kitsch has seen sleek and streamlined interiors with slate worktops and handle-less cupboard doors dominate style magazines. But you can’t really imagine cooking in a kitchen designed by Porsche, for example, and its owners are more likely to be found eating out in restaurants.
Today the aroma of dinner cooking in a warm, bashed-about room, with children’s pictures taped to the fridge, has come to symbolise home and security for many people. But the idea that cooking produces an attractive scent is another very modern idea. Throughout the previous centuries it wasn’t just fear of fire that kept the kitchen so remote for so long. It was also a dread of smell.
36 – The Pungent Power of Pongs
The taste of the kitchen is better than the smell.
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
We live today in an age of deadened senses. People in the past could be shocked or transformed by a smell, something that rarely even registers in our sanitised world.
Perfume in the past was much more important than it is today, not least to disguise the odour of an unwashed body. A beautiful smell was considered rarer and more valuable, and the concept of ‘miasma’ as the bearer of disease meant that a bad smell was thought to be positively harmful. Smells were believed to be so powerful that a tiny baby born without breath would have onions placed under his nose, and only if this failed would a midwife take the (much more effective) action of blowing into his mouth to inflate his lungs.
Today pregnant women are told to avoid smoking, drinking and uncooked eggs, but early modern women had instead to avoid the upsetting smells, sounds or even sights that might damage the foetus. In 1716, Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans prided herself upon her unusual ability to carry a child to term despite strong scents: ‘If I hadn’t been able to stand perfumes I should have been dead long ago. Every time I was lying in Monsieur [her husband] came to visit me, wearing perfumed Spanish gloves.’
Unpleasant tastes were not remarked upon nearly so often as unpleasant smells or sights, and the word ‘disgust’ (literally ‘unpleasant to the taste’) only entered the English lexicon in the early seventeenth century. ‘Disgust’ is a modern concept: only when food is relatively abundant can people afford to overlook certain forms of nutrition on the grounds of nastiness. In lean, mean times no one found any type of food disgusting.
Once the concept of ‘disgust’ had arrived, though, people began to find various forms of food potentially offensive, and to think that cooking smells should to be eliminated. So, when new houses were designed, this was another reason for kitchens to be hustled out of the main part and preferably placed into a separate block.
The architectural writer Roger North did his best to persuade people to eject kitchens from the new ‘compact’ houses or ‘piles’ of his century, the seventeenth. To include a kitchen in a compact house was an error, he thought, because ‘all smells that offend, are a nuisance to all the rooms, and there is no retiring from them’. An important strand running right through the history of house design thereafter is concerned with vanquishing the smell of drains or cooking alike. In 1773, Robert Adam wrote that dining rooms, ‘instead of being hung with damask, tapestry &c’, should be ‘always finished with stucco … that they may not retain the smell of the victuals’.
When the open fire was replaced by the enclosed kitchen range in the early nineteenth century, it actually made the problem of cooking smells even worse. Before this, the open chimney and its updraught had acted as a ventilation system, but not even royalty could escape from the unfortunate consequences of the range. ‘The Queen remarked that you ought to be thankful that in your house you have no smell of dinner,’ recollected a servant named Joshua Bates of a conversation overheard while he was waiting upon Queen Victoria during a visit to his employer’s home. ‘It is because I am constantly shutting doors,’ was her host’s reply. ‘And so am I,’ remarked Prince Albert, ‘but I can’t prevent it.’
The idea that the smells of cooking should be eliminated from the home remained in place throughout the nineteenth century, and only in the twentieth century did it begin to break down. In the 1980s, a new subculture was born: the ‘foodie’. This epicurean but amateur cook had existed previously, but a work published in 1984 by Paul Levy and Ann Barr, The Official Foodie Handbook, really marks the term’s coming of age. ‘Foodies’ are interested in where their food comes from and what it tastes like; to them, the smell of a chicken roasting or a cake baking is central to ideas of home.
However, nobody wants their house to reek of fish the morning after the night before, and what really allowed the twentieth-century open-plan kitchen and living room to function was the invention of the extractor fan. Placed in the cooker hood, it sucked the cooking smells out of the room. It was an invention of the 1930s, but only really came into use in domestic (rather than restaurant) kitchens in the 1960s, when kitchens, dining rooms and lounges began to blur in function.
It took these two vital developments – a new pleasure to be taken from good smells, and bad ones to be removed with the extractor fan – for the kitchen to become not just a room for cooking, but a room for living.
37 – Stirring and Scrubbing and Breaking Your Back
– ‘You’re very faddy, Mrs. Rawlins!’
– ‘Perhaps I am, Mum, but it’s them as has to do the work knows what’s best!’
Housekeeper Mrs Rawlins insists on using
Robin starch, advert in Good Housekeeping, 1928
Although it sounds like rather a dry topic, the ergonomics of kitchen design has had a tremendous impact on the lives of men and especially women throughout the centuries. Badly designed kitchen products could even kill: the lead leached from pewter vessels mistakenly used to store vinegar was poisonous, as were copper pots once their protective tin coatings had wo
rn off.
The first and most basic of cooks’ needs is flame. Intense heat is required to produce the ‘Maillard reaction’, the process which causes the savoury browning of food. Its effects are clearly visible in bread crusts, chocolate, dark beers and roast meat. The other, sweeter type of browning is the caramel effect of burnt sugar. Either needs a high temperature; both are high-status forms of cooking.
Stewing food (essentially cooking it in water) requires less heat, but fails to produce the intense bitter or sweet chemicals of the two browning processes. To quote Mrs Beeton, stewing ‘is the cheapest method … little fuel is used. Nothing is wasted … the cheapest and coarsest meat can be used.’ Having understood the economics of both cooking processes, it’s not surprising to find that browned, intensely cooked food has been eaten by preference by richer people from Tudor times until the present day, from the spit-roast chicken of Henry VIII’s kitchen to the seared tuna steak consumed by today’s health-conscious billionaire after his second heart attack.
The one-room medieval peasant’s dwelling contained a central open hearth. A hearthstone – a flat rock – provided the base for a fire. Fires sometimes burned for years, even decades, without being extinguished. They were nursed carefully because it was no mean feat to ignite a fresh flame. Over fires hung iron pots with rounded bottoms. Although it can’t be stood on a table, a round-bottomed pot has many advantages: it’s easy to make, to nestle into a sandy floor or to sit upon an iron tripod. To stir your pot without getting burnt you needed a very long-handled wooden spoon.
This was very simple technology, but it was extremely effective. You could throw any food that came to hand into your pot to make the soup called ‘pottage’, which cooked all day without too much attention. Pottage was the ubiquitous dish of medieval England. You could even cook numerous items simultaneously in a single pot, wrapped in cloths or separated by wooden dividers. In early-twentieth-century Oxfordshire, the rural family described in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (1939) still eat a whole dinner cooked in a cauldron: a small square of bacon; boiled vegetables; and a pudding in muslin. So the open fire reigned supreme for centuries.
The oven, however, which represented a significant financial investment, was located outside most people’s homes. Early ovens work quite differently from modern ones, where heat is provided continuously throughout the cooking process. A stone-or brick-lined oven is heated before the food goes in, by the burning inside it of bundles of twigs called faggots. Then the ashes are raked out, loaves are shovelled in, the door is closed, and the bread is left to bake in the slowly cooling oven.
When I used the bread oven at the Weald and Downland Museum, we stopped the oven’s opening with a wooden door previously soaked in water to prevent it from catching fire. We sealed the gaps round the door with a strip of uncooked dough. When this dough was baked, we knew that the bread inside must be finished too. After the baking of the bread, the oven still contained just enough heat to bake a second round of cakes or biscuits. The very word biscuit means ‘second-cooked’.
Part of the skill of the cook lay in judging just how hot the oven was. There were tricks such as placing inside it a big white stone that would change colour as it heated. These simple thermometers were called ‘wise men’ in Buckinghamshire kitchens. A cookbook from 1882 reveals that even then cooks had to use a mixture of observation and guesswork to deduce the temperature of their ovens:
If a sheet of paper burns when thrown in, the oven is too hot.
When the paper becomes dark brown, it is suitable for pastry.
When light brown, it does pies.
When dark yellow, for cakes.
When light yellow, for puddings, biscuits and small pastry.
Clearly, if you were going to all this trouble to heat up a large oven, it was sensible to bake a considerable quantity of loaves for all your neighbours, and baking was most efficiently done outside the home. In rural areas, many leases dictated that tenants pay for the use of the lord’s mill and bakehouse for their bread. It made sense to share facilities in cities as well.
In fact, city dwellers have always been reliant on takeaways, and many foods are more conveniently cooked in bulk by the shopkeepers who make it their business. A Description of London (1183) mentions an early pie shop on the banks of the Thames selling ‘coarser flesh for the poor, the more delicate, for the rich, such as venison’. Not only pies but even stews prepared at home might be sent out to baking shops near by and returned cooked.
In the homes of the great, where fresh meat was available to be roasted over the open fire, the spit was a very labour-intensive device that needed constant turning. The sweaty and dirty turnspit boys of the Tudor royal kitchens were commanded to smarten up, no longer to ‘go naked or in garments of such vileness as they do now … nor lie in the nights and days in the kitchen or ground by the fireside’. And yet the turnspits at least had a warm place to sleep, and they could snack on the meat. They ‘lickt the dripping pan and became huge lusty knaves’, wrote John Aubrey.
But the days of the human spit-jack (a ‘jack’ is simply a man who does an odd job) were numbered once a mechanical alternative was invented. Some mechanical jacks worked by clockwork; others relied on the heat rising from the flames to turn a fan. One amusing technological dead end, quickly abandoned, was the dog-turned spit, in which a specially bred ‘turnspit’ dog from Pembrokeshire was employed. Bred to have long bodies and short legs, these turnspit dogs looked a little like sausage dogs (plate 36). Charles Darwin commented on their shape as an example of genetic engineering. They worked in teams of two, taking turns to run inside a wheel linked by shafts and chains to a spit. But the dogs were not completely reliable. In 1723, the tycoon William Cotesworth of Gateshead gave up on his dog-wheel and demanded its removal ‘to keep the dog from the fire, the wheel out of the way and the dog prevented from shitting upon everything it could’. The poet John Gay had another common complaint – lazy dogs who simply scarpered:
The dinner must be dish’d at one
Where’s this vexatious turnspit gone?
Unless the skulking cur is caught
The sirloin’s spoiled, and I’m at fault.
But a naturalist noted in 1853 that ‘the invention of automaton roasting-jacks has destroyed the occupation of the Turnspit Dog’ and ‘almost annihilated its very existence’. In due course the turnspit dogs died out completely as a breed, but you can see one (stuffed) at Abergavenny Museum, Wales.
The grandest medieval kitchens also contained the equivalent of a hob, a brazier over which gentler, pan-based cooking could take place. In the eighteenth century this device was known as the ‘stewing stove’. The burning charcoal was placed beneath iron grids supported from a brick structure. Noxious charcoal fumes, inhaled during a lifetime spent bent over his signature delicate sauces, destroyed the lungs of the Regency ‘celebrity chef’, Antonin Carême. His epitaph from a fellow foodie described Carême as being ‘burned out by the fire of his genius and the charcoal of the rotisserie’.
The Industrial Revolution was followed by the invention of a new ‘science’: domestic economy. Fresh from creating more efficient factories and industrial processes, various innovators now turned their attention to the centuries-old habits and equipment established in the nation’s kitchens. ‘Nothing can be more preposterous’, expostulated Charles Sylvester in 1819, ‘than the prevailing construction and management of a gentleman’s kitchen.’
By 1864, the architect Robert Kerr could write that efficiency had become the chief consideration below stairs. ‘The Family Apartments have to be contrived for occupation,’ he wrote, ‘but the Offices for work … every servant, every operation, every utensil, every fixture, should have a right place and no right place but one.’
The writer H. G. Wells had personal experience of domestic service, having grown up ‘below stairs’ at Uppark in Sussex, where his mother was the housekeeper. He dramatised the problems facing servants in old, inconvenient
houses in his novel Kipps (1905): ‘They build these ’ouses … as though girls wasn’t ’uman beings … It’s ’ouses like this wear girls out. It’s ’aving ’ouses built by men, I believe, makes all the work and trouble.’ It’s also exasperating to observe that the maids depicted in adverts for household appliances and detergents all wear perilously impractical high heels. Footmen suffered too: one calculated that in his own London place of work there were ‘eighty stairs from top to bottom, sixteen stairs to answer the front door, thirty-two to the drawing-room with tea’; and a colleague calculated he’d walked eighteen miles, indoors, during a single busy day’s work.
‘The first thing to be considered in a plan for the kitchen is saving steps,’ wrote Laura E. Lyman in The Philosophy of Housekeeping (1869). Catherine Beecher, the American Victorian kitchen guru, was impressively prescient in imagining how the different elements of the kitchen could interplay more effectively. She recommended a sliding door between the kitchen and dining room, for example, demonstrating a new attention to ergonomics. Catherine and her sister Harriet went on to design, among other futuristic things, moveable screens and cupboards on wheels. The multifunctional spaces they envisaged in their ideal American Woman’s Home (1869) looked both backwards to medieval flexibility and forwards to the twentieth century’s Modern Movement open-plan house.
The industrial age also brought with it the seismic shift from open fire to enclosed kitchen range. Steps along the way included the American Count Rumford’s eponymous ‘stove’: the neat grate and enclosed iron surround that could be introduced into wide and wasteful hearths. While it could hold several pots, Rumford’s original design was too big for many homes. But it held the germ of the idea of the kitchen range. In due course, this ubiquitous piece of iron equipment contained a fuel-efficient stove, an oven, a boiler to provide continual hot water and a hot plate, all in one. Every range had its own quirks and needed careful handling to limit its fuel consumption to the recommended monthly half ton of coal. ‘Each housewife should study the draughts … so that she may be able to direct the cook how best to get good results from the amount of coal burned,’ advised the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1897. Operating a range was like performing on the organ: ‘only to be played by one who knows the stops’.