If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (34 page)

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shaped kitchens: open fireplaces gave way to ovens and eventually to ranges; coal and coke replaced wood before being superseded themselves by gas and electricity.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.