If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  The arrival of the kitchen range revolutionised cooking, slashed fuel consumption, standardised recipes and encouraged the use of the saucepan

  Like the expensive and finely tuned instrument that it was, the range needed careful cleaning and maintenance. It required ‘blacking’ twice a week, first thing in the morning, a process that took about ninety minutes. The ‘black lead’ polish was brushed into the iron surfaces, then buffed up to a shine. A recipe for this noxious polish, given in The Footman’s Directory (1825), requires ‘two quarts of small beer, eight ounces of ivory black, three ounces of treacle, one ounce of sugar candy, half an ounce of gum Arabic’, plus ‘oil of vitriol’. I know from my own experience of blacking the range at Shugborough Hall that it takes a week for traces of the polish to work its way out from underneath the fingernails.

  With the range, more efficient kitchen design was now on its way. But progress came in fits and starts: the range represented a significant financial investment, and there was still an emotional attachment to the welcoming, leaping flames of the wide hearth. ‘Would our Revolutionary fathers have gone barefooted and bleeding over snows to defend air-tight stoves and cooking-ranges?’ asked Harriet Beecher Stowe during the American Civil War. Indeed no, she said: the ‘great open kitchen fire’ was their motivation; the memory of it kept ‘up their courage’ and ‘made their hearts warm and bright with a thousand reflected memories’. Indeed, even in the 1930s America’s president would call his radio broadcasts his ‘Fireside Chats’.

  And conservatism ensured that kitchens remained places of standing, scrubbing and stirring, with only rare glimpses of comfort. The Victorian household expert Mrs Panton recommended that kitchen servants might possibly be allowed to lay ‘a rug, or good square of carpet’ down on the floor, but only after their work was done and if they were very careful with it. Likewise the architect J. C. Loudon suggested in a mealy-mouthed manner that ‘a small looking glass might promote tidiness of person and a piece of common carpet would add to the comfort of the room’.

  But the seemingly endless labour of feeding, firing, cosseting and cleaning the range would not last for ever. Gas cookers – marketed as ‘wageless servants’ – were among the items displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and by 1898 one in four homes had both a gas supply and a cooker. Many people hired their cookers from their local gas company, rather than buying them outright.

  In 1923, an extraordinary invention appeared: the ‘Regulo’. This was a thermostat for a gas oven, so that for the first time meals could be cooked at a known temperature over a measured length of time. This turned cooking from an art into a science. Adverts trumpeted the Regulo as an ‘inestimable boon to our wives and daughters, enabling them to prepare for us, with the minimum of attention, a repast cooked with automatic precision’.

  The electric Belling ‘Modernette’ cooker of 1919. The gas and electricity companies waged all-out war for customers

  While gas had the advantage of cheapness, electricity would challenge it as Britain’s favourite kitchen fuel in the late nineteenth century. The great drawback to early electrical supplies was the wild variation between the voltages produced by different plants in different towns. This meant that no electrical appliance could be made and sold nationally. This eventually began to change in 1926 with the laying of plans to create the National Grid, and in 1930 a group of manufacturers finally managed to agree a set of common standards for cookers. The electricity companies vigorously proclaimed the benefits of electric as opposed to gas cookers: they were easy to use, safer and cleaner. Even so, in 1939 a mere 8 per cent of British homes had electric cookers, and 75 per cent stuck with gas.

  In 1908, Ellen Richards calculated that an eight-room house required eighteen hours of cleaning time a week just to remove dust. Washing the windows and walls would take the total up to twenty-seven hours a week, even before the clothes-washing, bed-making and cooking began. This was simply unsustainable after the two world wars removed the huge infrastructure of servants who had done such work in the past. Now there began to be a real necessity for efficient, labour-saving kitchens. Books for the newly servantless middle classes began to appear, with tactful titles such as Cook’s Away. A Collection of Simple Rules, Helpful Facts, and Choice Recipes Designed to Make Cooking Easy (1943). This particular volume teaches novices how to break an egg, and advises them not to chop onions with raw hands because the smell will linger and spoil the enjoyment of a later cigarette.

  ‘There cannot have been any time in the history of our country’, wrote Lady Beveridge in 1945, ‘at which the attention of all people has been so much engaged by the problem of housekeeping without tears.’ She rightly explained that ‘it is not only that so many houses have been destroyed’ by war, ‘but also that the remainder have been discovered to be all too frequently designed for a social system which is a thing of the past’.

  After the Industrial Revolution, kitchen design became a matter for scientific study. This multipurpose cabinet represents a step along the way to the fully fitted kitchen

  The history of post-war housing leads us towards prefabrication, standardisation and an ever greater squeeze upon space as Britain filled up with people. The fitted kitchen was in fact a German invention, first appearing in 1926 in a Frankfurt social housing project. Ten thousand of these so-called ‘Frankfurt Kitchens’ were installed. They were inspired by the narrow galley kitchens of railway trains, and the space they contained was tight but very well-planned. Shockingly modern to contemporary eyes, they had work surfaces which pulled out like drawers and draining boards on hinges which could be folded away. In them the housewife was conceived as an engineer, quickly and efficiently turning out meals; in fact, the design was partly intended to free up time which could be spent instead in Germany’s factories. But the design’s drawback also lay in its tiny size. Women ended up working in there all alone, unable to keep an eye upon their children or to be helped by the rest of the family.

  The Frankfurt Kitchen might have become more popular in Britain if it had not been for the Second World War. After the war, Britons tended to look west not east, seeking inspiration for new kitchen designs from their American allies. The large, luxurious fridges and kitchen units of a more spacious and less war-torn country became post-war desirables in Britain.

  One of the early home-grown British fitted kitchen designs was ‘The English Rose’ of 1948, intended to use up the industrial-strength aluminium which had been stockpiled for building Spitfires. You could quickly fit out an entire kitchen by choosing various units and cupboards from the standard range. The work surfaces were covered with the new melamine, which could be wiped rather than scrubbed clean. It was quite an upmarket product, though, and if you couldn’t afford it, there were colourful sticky-backed plastics like Fablon or Stix-On to brighten up shelves or tabletops instead.

  The extractor fan was perhaps the greatest mechanical development of the twentieth century, as it allowed kitchens and living areas to become one single space. The most recent transformation, though, has been the arrival of online services allowing you to order any food, raw or cooked, from anywhere, and to have it brought to your door.

  A very cheeky 1970s billboard for Kentucky Fried Chicken read simply ‘Women’s Liberation’, and the production of food has now been transferred from the domestic to the public realm. What the Tudors used to call ‘dressing victuals’ is now broken down between extremely specialist producers all over the world. With many people today using their ovens as extra cupboards and their microwaves instead of their hobs, looking at the history of the kitchen is like surveying a lost realm which holds less and less meaning for us.

  But perhaps with global financial chaos this is beginning to change. Only a couple of years ago it seemed that ‘foodies’ were the few people who still cared about their kitchens. Apartments in New York were being built without kitchens at all, for people who order in every meal. Yet a slight movement in the direction of back-to-basics is apparent i
n dining habits, partly as a result of the efforts of the chef turned public-health expert Jamie Oliver. In 2003, only 24 per cent of Britons said that they ‘always cooked from scratch’, but today this has risen to 41 per cent.

  Perhaps our recent recession has driven people to examine more carefully what they eat, and put a bit of life back into their kitchens. Now that cooking is no longer a matter of stirring, scrubbing and breaking your back, there is a dignity, beauty and generosity in putting time and effort into making something to eat.

  38 – Cool

  To ice CREAM. Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them with any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten’d … you must have a Pail, and lay some Straw at the Bottom; then lay in your Ice, and put in amongst it a Pound of Bay-Salt; set in your Pots of Cream, and lay Ice and Salt between every pot … set it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes.

  Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts, 1718

  There’s no question that kitchens smelled bad in the past. Before refrigeration, seasonal food was not a desirable, it was a necessity. Even hours counted: one Victorian housewife insisted upon ‘an early dinner today’ because the salmon, green-pea soup, chickens and jellies she had ordered were going off in the hot weather. All cooks knew that putting charcoal in with tainted meat would absorb something of the putrid smell, and horseradish grated into milk would help it limp on for another few hours without turning.

  How on earth, it’s tempting to wonder, did people store fresh food before the days of refrigerators? Actually, a stone larder is an astoundingly simple yet effective invention. A thick marble slab remains cold on a hot day, and fish and meat would be laid directly upon it. Then there was the ice house, a wonderful invention, first heard of at St James’s Palace in 1666. Called the ‘snow-well’, this one was sunk into the ground and given a roof of straw. It was most convenient to build your ice house near your lake, if you had one, so that in winter it was easy to carry in frozen lake-water and pack it in straw for the summer season. In a dark, underground room of a constant temperature, ice could last nearly the whole year.

  Ice cream was a Georgian delicacy, as the recipe above from 1718 indicates, and artificial refrigeration was first seen in 1748 when William Cullen gave a demonstration at the University of Glasgow of a freezing machine that worked by the turning of a handle. As so often, though, he was too far ahead of his time, and no one saw the commercial possibilities in his idea. Only in 1834 did Jacob Perkins make the first proper refrigerator. But most people went on using ice houses, ice bought from roving ice wagons, and in their kitchens, simple iceboxes to keep their food fresh. The latter was a kind of wooden cupboard, well insulated with cork, lined with tin or zinc, and filled with food and lumps of ice. Ice was considered one of the items necessary for a picnic by The Girls’ Own Paper in 1880: ‘wrap the ice in a blanket and put it under the seat of the wagon’.

  Victorian ice cream was quicker to make than its Georgian predecessor: you used a purpose-made churn. A drumful of cream was placed in an outer chamber packed with salt and ice. You turned a handle to agitate the cream, while the intense cold surrounding it gradually caused crystals to form.

  In the late 1880s, the refrigerator finally became a practical business proposition. Fridges were among the new electrical devices to be found in go-ahead kitchens. They were initially rather glamorous possessions, and in the 1930s their owners might invite their friends to a ‘refrigerator party’ where each course was pre-prepared and then whipped from its own shelf in the fridge. Cookbooks from the period show guests in evening dress gathered in the kitchen to enjoy the novelty of eating an entire meal of cold food (plate 38).

  Not everyone appreciated how refrigerators worked. In Monica Dickens’s account of her life as a debutante cook in the 1930s, it was the gas man who finally gave her the answer to the mystery of ‘why the ice in the refrigerator was always melting. He roared with uncouth laughter when he realised that I didn’t know that one had to keep the door shut.’

  People also didn’t realise that pre-1929 refrigerators employed a noxious combination of gases as coolants. After leakages of ammonia and methyl chloride had caused several deaths, attempts were made to find safer alternatives. Einstein was among the scientists who turned their skills towards solving this particular problem, but his was not the most commercially successful solution. After research by a consortium of refrigerator manufacturers, the dangerous gases were replaced, in the 1930s, with freon, a chlorofluorocarbon. Again, this happened without anyone realising the danger freon itself posed, this time to the Earth’s environment. Freon and other CFCs have since been banned because of their deleterious effect on the ozone layer.

  Twentieth-century advertising campaigns for fridges – and indeed all the new electrical appliances – were aimed at women, tempting them with the prospect that they could go out and play golf rather than slave away in the kitchen, if only they would invest. The Magnet company invented a character called ‘Miss Magnet’, and in 1927 presented ‘Miss Magnet’s Ideal Home’. It came complete with vacuum cleaner, stove, iron, fan, washing machine and even electrical cream separator. The earliest electric kettles, dating from around 1900, were plugged into light fittings and took a lengthy twelve minutes to boil.

  The provision of electricity was nationalised in 1947, and the post-war relaxation of the hire-purchase rules made it much easier to buy expensive gadgets. By 1959, Britain was recovering from its wartime austerity. ‘Money doesn’t chink these days,’ reported Queen magazine, ‘it crackles louder than a forest fire.’ Much of this newly available money was spent on the kitchen, and by the mid-1960s 61 per cent of London households had a refrigerator.

  Frozen food and the fridge gradually eased the daily pain of having to go to the shops for fresh supplies. ‘La dolce vita did not come packed with the detergent inside the new washing machine,’ wrote Marilyn French in her feminist novel of 1978, ‘but for women especially, the new washing machine or dryer or freezer really was a little release from slavery. Without them and without the pill, there would not be a woman’s revolution now.’

  The ultimate post-war gadget of desire, though, was the Kenwood mixer. Kenneth Wood, who gave his own name to his products, was a former RAF engineer who’d worked on the development of radar. In 1947, his new venture, an electrical firm, produced its toaster, and in 1950 his Kenwood ‘Chef’ or mixer was launched at the Ideal Home Exhibition. Harrods sold out within a week, and by 1968 Wood had sold more than a million of his Chefs.

  Many people get more pleasure out of buying rather than using such a thing: today four in ten people in Britain admit that they possess kitchen gadgets they no longer use. The fridge, though, is not among them. More important even than the cooker, it’s ended up as the one absolutely essential kitchen appliance.

  39 – Peckish

  One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own,

  London, 1929

  When do you sense that gnawing in the stomach that can only be satisfied with a biscuit and a cup of tea? The times for feeling peckish have shifted over the centuries. The main meal of the day has gradually migrated from mid-morning to mid-evening, while breakfast and tea are relative newcomers.

  Tudor people had a very different rhythm to their day, and indeed to their year, as their working hours were much shorter in winter than in summer. Breakfast was not a regular meal for them and was late to develop: the Great British Tradition of bacon and eggs dates only from the twentieth century. (But the dish itself is a classic medieval peasant combination, as chickens and pigs were the animals most likely to be owned by smallholders.)

  Eating a snack of bread first thing, according to the Elizabethan William Harrison, was unusual, the action of a ‘young hungry stomach that cannot fast until dinnertime’. Tudor people could happily skip breakfast, though, because they didn’t have long to wait until lunch. As soon as enough time had elapsed for the household’s cooks to rise at day
break, get the fire started and the meat cooked, lunch was ready. The day’s biggest meal was eaten mid-to late morning. The Tudors ate again, more lightly, in the evening.

  The orders for the running of Henry VIII’s royal palaces state that ‘the first dinner’ should begin ‘at ten of the clock, or somewhat afore, and the first supper at four of the clock’. (The reference is to ‘the first’ because there were two sittings in the great hall for each meal. It was like a staff canteen for the several hundred court servants.) This main morning-to-midday meal might last two or three hours in a pretentious household: the nobility, according to William Harrison, might be found ‘commonly sitting at the board ’til 2 or 3 of the clock at afternoon, so that with many, it is a hard matter to rise from the table to go to evening prayers’.

  The increasing use of artificial light in the late seventeenth century saw the evening supper pushed back into the hours of darkness, but it would only be the eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution that brought significant changes to mealtimes. Once people began to leave their homes to go out to work in factories, offices or shops, a midday meal was no longer convenient. Now the biggest repast for most came in the late afternoon, after the working day was over. At the same time, those rich enough to lead lives of leisure began to eat later dinners and suppers too, just to prove that they had no need to rise early in the morning. Richard Steele in the early eighteenth century recalled how ‘In my memory the dinner hour has crept from 12 o’clock to 3.’