by Lucy Worsley
Despite Sturgeon’s complaints, the English did eat some sauces. An Elizabethan cookbook, for example, contains a ‘sauce for a roasted Rabbit’ said to have been favoured by Henry VIII containing parsley, butter, sugar, pepper and ‘a few crumbs of white bread’ to thicken it. But Charles II returned to England from his exile in 1660 with an unprecedented taste for saucy French dishes. For a time sauces came into high fashion: Hannah Woolley’s cookbook of 1677 contains seventy-two recipes for them, several described as ‘French’.
But these new French sauces failed to become part of the bedrock of British cooking. There persisted a lingering suspicion of ‘made’ dishes such as casseroles or ragouts. French dishes, as opposed to wholesome English roasts, signified moral degeneration in literature right up to 1813, when Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice made the effete and rude Mr Hurst ignore the heroine from the moment ‘he found her prefer a plain dish to a ragout’.
In 1821, The Cook’s Oracle was among several publications which attempted to persuade reluctant readers of the benefits of the available ‘Receipts for hashes, stews, and ragouts, &c., of these there are a great multitude … in the French kitchen they count upwards of 600, and are daily inventing new ones.’ The French had a very good reason to invent all these ragouts: in their hotter climate meat perished more quickly, and decay could be delayed or disguised by stewing. In England the more plentiful supply of succulent meat, combined with snobbery about stewing, meant that the roast remains a symbol of solid respectability right up to the present day.
Yet envy also played its part in this hatred of French sauces. The best and highest-paid cooks in Britain were always French, because sometimes, when entertaining to impress, nothing but a sophisticated and complicated sauce will do. Next best to a French chef was a French-trained one, and the Georgian William Verral fell into this category. He was shocked by the primitive kitchens he found in even a fairly well-to-do house in eighteenth-century Sussex: no pans beyond a stew pan and a frying pan, and that as ‘black as my hat’ with ‘a handle long enough to obstruct half the passage of the kitchen’. When he asked for a sieve, he was handed one which had been used for sanding the floor.
The formidable list of implements that Verral considered essential for proper French cooking included eight small stew pans, two very large ones, cake hoops, lemon squeezer, sugar cutters, toasting fork, a larkspit (literally for spitting larks), dripping pans, preserving pots and a ‘mustard bullet’. But above all, he needed several ‘saucepans’, pans literally for making sauces. The new kitchen ranges could only accommodate flat-bottomed pans, rather than round-bottomed pots, and in the late eighteenth century the saucepan came of age.
Georgian consumers needed little persuading that saucepans came in ‘sets’, and that one’s set should be complete. Stone and Company, advertising in The Times (1788), informed readers that they had ‘greatly improved their sets of Tin Ware, which renders it the most wholesome and cheapest furniture in use, and preferable to others offered to the public’. Such adverts surely created a desire where none had existed before.
Saucepans were among a woman’s prized possessions: courtship gifts, everyday household utensils, personal-attack alarms or even weapons
These saucepans were usually copper with a tin lining. Copper could, over time, react with the acid in food to create a poison, so the tin was vital to keep the copper away from the food. If the tin lining became worn, it had to be replaced or the pan could potentially poison. This was the role of the ‘tinker’ roving from door to kitchen door.
So the possession of a set of saucepans became the goal of many a Georgian housewife. Indeed, a man’s gift of a pan to an unmarried woman suggested that matrimony was imminent. In a marital dispute, a woman could lay claim to her saucepans with more chance of success than for any other items from the home except her clothes. She could clash them together to summon aid in cases of domestic violence – or even use them as weapons to strike back.
The idea that French sauces and cuisine should be admired, if not adopted for everyday meals, also found its way across the Atlantic to the New World. Hot summers, plentiful pasture and an outdoor-orientated culture meant that grilled meat and the barbecue became American standards by the 1950s.
But there too fine cooking would become inescapably French. Its greatest proselytiser was Julia Childs, who had an infectious passion for sauce. Her book of 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her TV show, The French Chef, encouraged the ‘servantless American cook’ to abandon all concern for ‘budgets, waistlines, time schedules’ and ‘children’s meals’ in order to throw him-or herself into ‘producing something wonderful to eat’. Elizabeth Bennet would have been horrified.
44 – Were They All Drunk All the Time?
Would you believe it, though water is to be had in abundance in London, and of a fairly good quality, absolutely none is drunk? … In this country nothing but beer is drunk.
César de Saussure, 1720s
The alcohol consumption of people in the past often seems prodigious. For a start, everyone drank ale or beer in preference to water. The amounts consumed are impressive. The household of Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, for example, consumed more than forty thousand gallons annually, while the monks of Fountains Abbey had a malthouse capable of producing sixty barrels of very strong beer every ten days.
In large households, the ‘butler’ was originally responsible for serving the beer at mealtimes. There are two theories about where his job title comes from: perhaps from the beer ‘butts’ which stored the ale, or perhaps from the French botterlie for beer cellar. Their proximity to alcohol made many butlers susceptible to ‘the butler’s complaint’: drinking. ‘All butlers grumble,’ complained one exasperated seventeenth-century employer, ‘they’re seldom dry, yet still they … drink.’ In the 1960s, the butler Peter Whiteley found himself fortunate enough to be sent for drying out by his employer: ‘she paid for me to be treated by the highest doctor of his kind in the land’.
Apart from butlers, though, most people seemed to avoid dangerous levels of inebriation. The majority of their daily beer was very weak (‘smallbeer’) and provided a safer drinking choice than water. For working people, too, it also contained calories that were very necessary to their diet.
Many people are aware that the British climate has waxed and waned, and during the ‘warm centuries’ – the tenth and eleventh – vineyards flourished in England. In 1289, the Bishop of Hereford was still managing to produce 882 gallons of white wine on his estates. But most English grapes were used to make verjuice (a fermented sour juice), and the best wine was imported.
Strong red Gascon wine was the long-time favourite of British drinkers, except during the periods when wars with the French or disputes with the Dutch merchants who transported it disrupted supplies. In the seventeenth century, sweet wines from Portugal and the Canary Islands ousted their French and German predecessors from the top of the wine importers’ lists. The volumes consumed are impressive: each member of the garrison of Dover Castle, for example, was given a quart of wine a day in the fourteenth century.
But just like beer, wine wasn’t as strong as it is today. Neither were the sharp young wines or ‘verjuices’ of England as horrid as they sound: they were drunk with sugar or spices added. No one drank mature wine because the casks it was stored in failed to keep out air and it went very bitter very quickly. Only when bottled wine first began to appear in the later Tudor period did maturity and its resultant flavour become appreciated.
Spirits became popular in Ireland before England. They began to seduce Tudor drinkers in the sixteenth century, performing their marvellous work of taking ‘away sadness’ and of making men ‘witty’. Spirits were also known as ‘cordial waters’, and were thought to stimulate the heart; ‘aqua vitae’ or ‘burning waters’ were taken like medicines. But their advertised powers of keeping the plague away were seen sadly to fail during the epidemics of 1593, despite their being widely consu
med. The distillers lost much credit as a result.
While alcohol was ubiquitous, and while beer formed an important part of nutrition, that’s not to say it wasn’t abused. It’s been argued that many medieval battles took place between drunken combatants: both to raise their courage and to dull the pain of wounds. Less appropriate was drunkenness at home. ‘If any man do perceive that he is drunk,’ wrote a Tudor doctor, ‘let him take a vomit with water and oil, or with a feather, or a rosemary branch, or else with his finger, or else let him go to his bed to sleep.’ In 1552, the first Licensing Act was passed because of the ‘intolerable hurts and troubles’ caused by the drinkers in alehouses. From then on, landlords had to acquire a licence for their premises from the local Justice of the Peace. Constant complaints about drunkenness followed: in 1576, the poet George Gascoigne described inebriation as ‘a monstrous plant, lately crept into the pleasant orchards of England’.
But drinking remained central to social interaction in Britain, and its elites especially liked to overindulge during all-male gatherings. His cistern and wine cooler of silver were among a seventeenth-century nobleman’s most prized possessions. He and his friends would be presented with a glass of wine by their servants whenever they called for it throughout a dinner. The servant would hand a full glass to the drinker, who would drain rather than sip it and then hand it back for rinsing and refilling. The ceremonial departure of the ladies from the table to the drawing room marked the start of serious all-male drinking, something that the abstinent John Evelyn described as the ‘drink-ordeal’. Whenever he dined at someone else’s house, he found it necessary to steel his liver for trial by alcohol, which took place ‘whether for the want of better to employ the time, or affection to the drink, I know not’. There were some aristocrats, he warned, ‘whom one could not safely visit after dinner’. Ladies, though, were not expected to indulge in such antics: the eighteenth-century Queen Caroline would bawl out a drunken gentleman, railing ‘at him before all the Court upon getting drunk in her company’.
The timeless British vice of binge-drinking. The women have withdrawn to the drawing room to tea, leaving the men to overindulge in the dining room
The convivial gang of all-male drinkers could save time by having their chamber pots close to hand: hence their often being located – bizarrely to modern eyes – in the convenient cupboards of sideboards. But not everyone liked this lazy habit. According to the seventeenth-century Randle Holme, ‘the Jolly crew when met together over a cup of Ale’ should keep the chamber pot near by ‘not for modesty’s sake, but that they may see their own beastliness’. The visiting Frenchman de La Rochefoucauld was similarly unimpressed in 1784 by drinkers sharing a chamber pot: ‘The sideboard is furnished with a number of chamber pots and it is a common practice to relieve oneself while the rest are drinking; one has no kind of concealment and the practice strikes me as most indecent.’ Just as the English have always thought the French effeminate, our neighbours have always thought us boorish in return.
Yet the English remained deeply attached to their ale. The eighteenth-century craze for gin caused consternation not only because of its powerful intoxicating effect, but also because it lacked the ancient, chivalric associations of beer, the drink that ‘gave vigour to the arms of our ancestors … made them wise in council, and victorious in the field’.
Even the vigorous, religiously inspired teetotal movement of the nineteenth century failed to stamp out the demon drink: 1877 was the year in which more alcohol per head was drunk than before or since. In 1915, the lamp-boy at Longleat House in Wiltshire remembers that still ‘beer was allowed regularly … it was served in copper jacks, sort of large jugs, and was even drunk at breakfast time’.
In the very same year, the chancellor David Lloyd George, a well-known supporter of the Temperance movement, claimed that alcohol was causing ‘more damage in the war than all the submarines put together’. But in fact the two world wars would severely reduce alcohol consumption much more than any government attempts to dictate on the matter.
The production of alcohol had by then moved firmly outside the home, and the brewing industry was severely disrupted in both 1914–18 and 1939–45 by the need to divert resources elsewhere. The amount consumed would remain much lower than the Victorian standard until the end of the 1950s. Then, the return of affluence saw alcohol resume a central position in home life. The cocktail party, the central image of 1950s hospitality, involved plying people with alcohol in one’s living room, and Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party (1977) showed the same social occasion remodelled for the 1970s, with the house-proud but crass Beverley forcing her guests to drink themselves sick. Meanwhile, off-stage, the fifteen-year-old Abigail holds a raucous party of her own. The focus of the drinks industry during the 1980s and 1990s would be upon young people, who might otherwise have turned to the readily available drugs instead for their intoxicants.
Drinking at home remains the bugbear of the nation’s landlords, and middle-aged, middle-class professionals casually having wine with their dinner every night are the group in society that consumes the most alcohol. A new awareness of the health problems it brings may have lowered consumption levels from their Victorian high. What still exists, though, in all its messy glory, is the ageless and very British concept of the binge.
45 – The Wretched Washing-Up
I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes …
But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.
Marilyn French, 1978
Before the dishwasher, any grand house – and indeed many modest dwellings too – had a special room for washing up. The scullery takes its name from the Norman-French escuelerie, meaning dish room. The 1677 Directions for Scullery Maids lists their duties as follows: ‘you must wash and scour all the plates and dishes that are used in the kitchen … also all kettles, pots, pans, chamberpots’.
The scullery wasn’t just for washing dishes, but also for rinsing food, and even for plucking or removing the entrails of fowl or flesh on their way into the kitchen. Big stone sinks were complemented by wooden kitchen units (you can see some surviving medieval ones at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire), and salting or preserving might also take place here.
In medieval sculleries, people washed the dishes with a nasty black soap made out of sand, ashes and linseed oil. At least it shifted grease. Their seventeenth-century descendants used a ‘soap jelly’, made by mixing grated soap with water and soda. The cunning scullery maid knew that copper pans could be brightened with lemon and salt (I’ve tried this and it really works). Mrs Black, in her book Household Cookery (1882), was still recommending ‘warm water in which is a little soda. Once a week the saucepans ought to be well scoured inside. Rub the inside of tinned saucepans well over with soap and a little fine sand or bath-brick till they become quite bright.’
Washing up was always one of the very worst jobs in the kitchen. Albert Thomas, who’d done it many times himself, recalled that even a modest dinner party for ten in a wealthy household of the 1920s required no less than 324 items of silver, china and glass to be washed, in addition to the saucepans. Monica Dickens described the depressing state of her 1930s kitchen after dinner, when ‘every saucepan in the place was dirty; the sink was piled high with them. On the floor lay the plates and dishes that couldn’t be squeezed on to the table or dresser.’ She sobbed over many a late-night encounter with the Vim tin.
But many hands could make light work of the task. Indeed, in remote country houses, where entertainment was in short supply, washing up was even a mild form of fun: Eric Horne, the butler, recalled ‘a goodly company of us in the servant’s hall at night, as the grooms and under gardeners would come in and wash up … more for company than anything else’.
Washing dishes and cleaning plates is hard on the hands, and an off-duty footman could still be identified by the state of his thumbs. Unless a household employed a specialist plate-maid, it was he who would blister his digits rubbing
jeweller’s rouge into silver. ‘Cleaning plate is hell,’ wrote Ernest King, another butler. ‘The hardest job in the house … the blisters burst and you kept on despite the pain and you developed a pair of plate hands that never blistered again.’ Cleaning knives was a similarly dark art. According to The Footman’s Directory, it was best done with a mixture of hot melted mutton suet and powder rubbed from a brick.
Like all other domestic duties, washing up could be used to express social hierarchy. In Princess Marina’s twentieth-century household at Kensington Palace, the princess herself washed her decorative and ornamental china collection twice a year. The butler washed the best china after family meals, and the ‘odd man’ did the ordinary china after the other servants had used it.
Only when the people who’d formerly employed servants began to have to do their own washing up did they realise how bad their kitchens had been for their servants’ backs. Lesley Lewis, recalling a country-house childhood in pre-war Essex, described the ‘two wide shallow sinks under the window … it was not until I washed up here myself, in the 1939 war, that I realised how inconvenient the equipment was’. The explanation for many inconveniently low sinks is rather depressing: often they were intended for use by the young, and children were the dishwashing machines of choice in many kitchens.
An early mechanical crockery washer from c.1930
The first patent for a mechanical dishwasher was taken out in the US by one Joel Houghton in 1850. He designed a wooden tub with a handle at one side: you turned this to spray water somewhat ineffectually onto the dishes. Like so many other contraptions, it was only really made practical in the 1920s when both piped water and electrical power could be readily employed. The dishwasher, though, belongs with the extractor fan and the electric mixer, rather than the cooker or the refrigerator: it did not become a widespread commercial success until well after the Second World War.