Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (29 page)

Just as slaughterhouses were disappearing from cities, cooks now began to alter the appearance of food in order to disguise its origins. Piglets, rabbits and geese that would once have been presented at table in all their lifelike glory – snout, fur, feathers and all – now either arrived with all their distinguishing features removed, or were served à
la russe
: carved out of sight of diners and brought to the table on individual plates. The new sensibility echoed the remarks of the humanist William Hazlitt: ‘Animals that are made use of as food should either be so small as to be imperceptible,’ he wrote, ‘or else we should … not leave the form standing to reproach us with our gluttony and cruelty.’
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Ritual carving at table, once a way of celebrating the life of the creature about to be eaten, was now replaced by ruses to obscure the fact that it had ever lived.

Victorian levels of carnivorous guilt were heightened in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, in which the author raised the awful possibility that, far from being distinct from all other animals, man might actually be related to some of them. Although Darwin’s theory was highly controversial at the time, the possibility that man might be consuming the flesh of his own distant relatives lent a new potency to the meat debate. Food, which had always occupied a place in the human psyche somewhere between desire and fear, now took a decided lurch towards the latter. The materiality of meat became a source of repugnance; the sight of a bloody lump of steak too close to human flesh for comfort. The British, once mocked by the French for eating their beef barbarously
underdone, now took to blasting it to oblivion, much as we still have a tendency to do.

While Victorians struggled to come to terms with their bodies, the physical space they inhabited was changing too. Until the eighteenth century, people of all classes had mingled together in cities, often living next to one another in the same streets. Georgian estates were the first to break with this tradition: exclusively middle and upper class, they presaged modern gated communities, with private security guards and barriers that were locked at night. Such estates marked the beginnings of social segregation in Britain, but it was the railways that firmly established single-class enclaves – social monocultures – as the dominant residential pattern. From the mid nineteenth century on, those who could afford to do so began to abandon cities for suburban neighbourhoods such as Bedford Park in west London, completed in 1881 by the architect Richard Norman Shaw. With its redbrick gabled houses and winding, leafy lanes, Bedford Park was essentially an idealised rural hamlet; the prototypical British garden suburb.

The flight of the well-to-do from the city was not just because of the desire to escape overcrowding. Cities had always been known to be filthy places full of plague and pestilence, but since the cause of such infections had never been understood, the risk of disease was accepted as one of the hazards of urban life. Then in 1854 the London physician John Snow made a discovery that put a new perspective on things. During a particularly virulent outbreak of cholera in Soho, Snow managed to trace the source back to a single contaminated water pump. He recommended that the pump be dismantled, which (after some argument) it was, causing an immediate drop in the number of cases, just as he had predicted. The incident showed for the first time that infectious diseases were carried not by some form of bad air, or ‘miasma’, but by the spread of germs in a physical medium – in this case, water. The discovery of so-called ‘germ theory’ was both a crucial step in the history of microbiology, and the start of a psychological shift in
people’s attitudes towards their fellow humans. All of a sudden, rubbing up against one’s neighbours didn’t seem quite so appealing. Germ theory heralded a new era, not just of social segregation, but of mental segregation too.

By mid-century, there was a powerful sense of ‘them and us’ both outside and inside the home. The semi-detached villas that proliferated around cities increasingly took on the aspect of refuges. John Ruskin hailed the family home as a ‘temple’, calling it ‘the place of peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division’.
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But few mistresses of their oak-lined, heavy-curtained ‘temples’ felt quite as sheltered by them as they would have liked. Left isolated while their husbands commuted to the city, women spent their days paying morning calls on one another, maintaining the illusion of competence in front of the servants, and planning the next – dreaded – dinner party.

It was against this background of unease that Victorian houses evolved. Dinner parties were full-blown theatrical productions, and middle-class houses vehicles for staging them. No matter how much blood, sweat and toil were required to produce the meals (and it was a lot), they depended for their success on the illusion of effortlessness. Until the late eighteenth century, meals even in affluent homes had often been taken informally, sitting at foldaway tables in the family living room. Now such an arrangement was seen as far too casual. Separate dining rooms were de rigueur, as were complex service quarters arranged so that, as one architect put it, ‘what passes on either side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other’.
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The ‘upstairs–downstairs’ segregation of the Victorian household was taking shape, and with it a new desire to hide the inner workings of the home. The design of kitchens became an urgent preoccupation; not in order to make them easier to cook in (a plenitude of servants could overcome any degree of inconvenience on that score), but in order to suppress their very existence. The architect J.J. Stevenson stated the problem in 1880:

… unless the kitchen itself is ventilated so that all smells and vapours pass immediately away, they are sure to get into the house, greeting
us with their sickly odour in the halls and passages, and finding their way to the topmost bedroom, notwithstanding all contrivances of swing doors and crooked passages.
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Stevenson’s description of cooking smells as ‘sickly’ rather than ‘appetising’ tells its own story. An unwelcome reminder of baser bodily realities, cooking in the Victorian household was seen as a source of embarrassment. However, as the architect Robert Kerr conceded in 1865, for a society hell-bent on lavish entertaining, this was something of a self-defeating attitude:

The means of communication, or
Dinner-route
, ought to be primarily as direct, as straight, and as easy as can be contrived, and as free as possible from interfering traffic. At the same time it is even more essential still that the
transmission of kitchen smells
to the Family Apartments shall be guarded against; not merely by the unavailing interposition of a Passage-door, but by such expedients as an elongated and perhaps circuitous route, an interposed current of outer air, and so on – expedients obviously depending for their success upon those very qualities which obstruct the service and cool the dishes.
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The Victorian kitchen was required to produce meals on an unprecedented scale, and to do so invisibly, inaudibly and odourlessly. In social and spatial terms, it represented a fundamental contradiction – one that we have yet to resolve. Victorian society is long gone, but as far as food is concerned, many of its attitudes still linger. Squeamishness, faddishness, suppressed and unacknowledged guilt – all took root then in the British psyche, and despite all we have been through since, they are still with us.

One of the reasons that fear of food took such a powerful hold over our Victorian forebears is that so few of them knew how to cook. Mass migration to the cities had separated many people from their traditional
links with food, and few city-dwellers cooked much for themselves. It was beneath the dignity of the middle classes to do so, and the poor lacked the wherewithal. Living conditions for the urban working classes were deteriorating rapidly, with many previously decent neighbourhoods becoming overcrowded ‘rookeries’ where entire families lived in a single room. New housing built for industrial workers was often little better: the notorious ‘back-to-back’ terraces common in northern cities consisted of doubled-up rows of houses with no rear windows; containing just two single-aspect rooms one above the other. The houses had no running water, and were generally arranged around courtyards with a communal stand pump in the middle.
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From the 1830s onwards, better housing for skilled workers began to appear in cities: ‘two-up, two-downs’, which, as the name suggests, had two rooms to each floor, and usually backed on to alleyways. Most had sculleries at the rear giving on to a small yard, and it was in these rooms – originally intended as washrooms and storerooms – that the cooking, such as it was, was usually done, as well as the eating. All family life, in other words, took place in the scullery, while the parlour at the front was ‘kept for best’: it was barely used. These modest terraced houses, together with the more elaborate versions that followed, would form the dominant blueprint for Victorian domestic architecture. Blocks of flats never took off in Britain as they did elsewhere in Europe, but those that were built, whether model workers’ housing built by philanthropists such as George Peabody, or serviced mansion flats for the middle classes, continued to treat kitchens as repressed service spaces. Many of us still live in these flats and houses, and whether we like it or not, they help to preserve the Victorian mindset about the place of cooking in the home.

Gradually domestic sculleries in terraced houses morphed into what we would now recognise as kitchens. The transformation was largely due to a single piece of equipment: the closed kitchen range, invented by the Anglo-American thermodynamic physicist Sir Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) in the 1790s, primarily as a means of saving fuel. In place of an open fire, from which most of the heat escaped straight up the chimney, Rumford proposed enclosing the fire in an iron box, beneath a hot plate on which pots could be placed, so
making much better use of the heat. The Rumford range could also produce hot water for the house, and later models featured an iron compartment with a hinged door beside the firebox – the first commercially produced domestic oven. Although kitchen ranges remained essentially middle-class accessories until the early twentieth century due to their cost, their gradual adoption made home cooking, with its familiar processes of boiling, roasting and baking, possible in much humbler households than ever before. With the arrival of the kitchen range, the class distinctions of domestic cookery began to dissolve. The question among the aspirant classes was no longer whether or not one had one’s own kitchen, but whether or not one employed a cook to do all the work. Despite all the advances in kitchen technology, cooking for oneself at the turn of the century remained the social anathema it had always been, but the First World War was about to sweep away any such scruples.

By decimating the working population, the First World War brought a more emphatic end to
fin de siècle
society in Europe than any protest movement could have done. The so-called ‘servant problem’ made the running of houses along Victorian ‘upstairs–downstairs’ lines close to impossible. In the same way that plagues had once raised the fortunes of peasant farmers, the devastation of war now changed those of domestic servants for the better. From now on, mistresses lucky enough to employ them would have to treat them properly. As for everyone else, they would just have to learn to fend – and cook – for themselves.
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For the first time in history, genteel European women were forced to enter their own kitchens, and few of them liked what they saw. Considering their importance, kitchens had been astonishingly neglected spaces. In the days when servants had done all the cooking, nobody had cared much what their kitchens looked like, so long as they did their job adequately. But now that mistresses were going to be putting on aprons, what did that make kitchens? Could they still be considered mere service spaces, or did the status of
their new occupants elevate them to centre stage in all matters domestic?

A century on, the question remains unanswered. Years of debate have failed to clarify the role of cooking in the modern home. The subject goes to the heart of so many twentieth-century preoccupations: questions of identity, family values, feminism. For the past 100 years, domestic kitchens have been political battlegrounds; stages upon which the ongoing struggle for social prestige and meaning have been played out. Everything about them has been a matter of debate: their function, their design, their materiality, their image, their visibility. There could be no more eloquent symbol of our conflicted attitudes towards cooking than our lack of consensus about any of these questions.

Although the design of kitchens in ‘servantless homes’ became a major preoccupation for European architects and designers after the First World War, they were far from the first to address the issue. Due to an earlier ‘servant problem’ across the Atlantic, Americans had had an 80-year head start in facing up to the problem. First to the task was Catherine Beecher, leading light of the American women’s movement and author of the groundbreaking 1842
Treatise on Domestic Economy
, in which she sought to dignify the role of the housewife. ‘It may be urged,’ she wrote, ‘that it is impossible for a woman who cooks, washes and sweeps, to appear in the dress, or acquire the habits and manners, of a lady; that the drudgery of the kitchen is dirty work, and that no one can appear delicate and refined, while engaged in it.’
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However, that view, argued Beecher, belonged to the past: ‘As society gradually shakes off the remnants of barbarism, and the intellectual and moral interests of man rise in estimation above the merely sensual, a truer estimate is formed of women’s duties, and of the measure of intellect requisite of the proper discharge of them.’
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