If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (35 page)

The second half of the twentieth century saw the kitchen’s story split along two rival paths. According to one version, the woman of a household takes responsibility once again, just as she did in a medieval cottage, and produces simple meals from scratch for a small family unit. In the other, the kitchen falls completely out of use, and people eat food produced by other people outside the home, or even in other countries. Takeaway outlets providing hundreds of meals a day, or a meal service which brings a calorie-controlled portion of food to your door, fill the bounteous function of a great lord’s household kitchen.

We have yet to see which will come to dominate twenty-first-century life.

35 – The Kitchen Comes in from the Cold

The centre point of interest in a house is the kitchen with the adjacent Pantry, and round those apartments must range the other rooms.

R. Briggs,
The Essentials of a Country House
, 1911

In a medieval peasant’s cottage, the only room of the house was its kitchen, which served as bedroom and living room as well. The kitchen would eventually return to prominence in twentieth-century house design, but during the intervening centuries it was sent out, and away, to be as far distant as possible from the living rooms.

The kitchen might have been central to the lowly cottage, but in the grander houses of medieval England it was placed in a separate block. The Anglo-Saxon ‘thane’ was quite a significant landowner, as he possessed at least five hides of land. (A ‘hide’ was the amount of land required to grow enough food for one family.) Your average thane aspired to having a separate bakehouse and kitchen buildings, set at a short distance from his home’s main rectangular hall. The fear of fire meant that a kitchen had to be semi-sacrificial; it was much more likely to burn down than the rest of the house.

At Hampton Court Palace, too, the kitchen was originally detached from the main hall. Over time, other smaller kitchens
and related offices sprang up around the Great Kitchen, so that now it looks like a whole small town, stuck like a monstrous disorderly carbuncle onto the side of the grand courtyards of the palace proper.

One thousand five hundred meals a day were prepared in this complex of more than fifty separate rooms. The Boiling House was a room containing a boiling copper for stock and soup. The Pasty House was a room where pie cases were made. The servants of the Spicery provided fruit as well as spices. The confectioners worked in an upstairs room where they produced delicate sweets and comfits on chafing dishes. The Wet Larder contained fish, the Dry Larder stored grain, and there was a further Flesh Larder for meat.

Because grand houses were the economic centres of estates, they were almost like factories for processing food and needed many different specialist workshops. Larders, ice houses, dairies, brewhouses and bakehouses were all additional outposts of the kitchens, housed in outbuildings. ‘On the south side of the house’, ran a survey of Montacute House, Somerset, made in 1667, ‘there is a large woodyard and necessary buildings of dairies, washing, brewing and baking’ as well as ‘a pigeon house’. Households would often be rightly proud of the products made in these outbuildings. Here animals were slaughtered, beer brewed, napkins laundered.

This ideal of the kitchen being in a semi-separate building persisted into the eighteenth century, when the increasing gentility of the upper classes made them ever less tolerant of the dirt, smells and noise of food preparation. When Kedleston Hall was designed, the kitchen was placed more than thirty metres from the main guest dining room, and separated from it by a long curving corridor. The family’s own dining room, for private use, was more than twice as far distant.

This begs a question: did the owners of grand houses always eat cold food? At first it seems likely, with the distance that the
food had to travel, and considering the lengthy ceremony with which it was served. But in fact there were many tricks to minimise the loss of heat on the journey from kitchen to table. Food was only plated up in the dining room, travelling along the corridors in a heat-conserving tureen. Cloths and mufflers were used to keep the serving dishes warm as they made their way along the corridors.

Then there were the skills and physiques of the servers to be considered. In a really grand house, the job of serving-man was exclusively male. In numerous paintings of medieval halls, you can see servers carrying big dishes of food from a hatch near the kitchens towards the dining tables. These would be fine young men, quick and powerful, who would take pride in getting food to the table fast. Vigorous, fleet-footed footmen would have run with the dinner along the curved corridors of Georgian Kedleston. In a well-regulated house, where cooking and serving worked like clockwork, everybody enjoyed hot dinners.

In the nineteenth century, the idea persisted that kitchens ought to be remote from the polite areas of the house. There would be tradesmen calling, rubbish to be collected and other noisy activities to be kept distant from the master and his family. But in busy cities, with space hard to come by, the kitchen had to be squashed down into the basement of the house rather than set off to the side.

So the lofty, spacious, airy, echoing kitchens of the eighteenth-century country house were transformed into airless, lightless underground bunkers. In Virginia Woolf’s childhood home, 22 Hyde Park Gate, the six or seven maids were banished from the main storeys of the tall terraced house. They were relegated to a basement kitchen of almost ‘incredible gloom’, or to the boiling hot attics where they slept. One of these young women once let her true feelings slip out. The young Virginia overheard one of her mother’s maids describing her workplace: ‘It’s like hell.’

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.’