If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (38 page)

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 dinner-time’. 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 daybreak, 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.’

Throughout the eighteenth century, supper grew grander, and was nudged later and later into the evening hours. Eventually, by the 1840s, a new meal had to be introduced to fill the long gap between a light lunch and a night-time dinner now customarily at 8 p.m. The new meal, ‘tea’, quickly became an institution (
plate 32
).

Tea itself developed in two contrasting ways. The ‘high tea’ of working people included kippers, baked beans and other hot food, and stood in for dinner. Meanwhile, the aristocracy prided themselves on serving more refined food that wouldn’t spoil a later dinner. James Lees-Milne in 1943 contrasted one solid, bourgeois spread – ‘breads of different hue, jam, potted meat, biscuits, shortbread and cake, delightful but curiously middle class’ – with Lady Cunard’s ethereal and upper-class ‘weak China and a thumb-nail of chocolate cake’.

The next step for the rich was to dissolve teatime into an American-style cocktail hour: in 1938, we hear that ‘hostesses who only two years ago would have shuddered at the clink of tall glasses’ now ‘offered intoxicating drinks to those to whom the new-fangled afternoon tea seemed too reminiscent of the school-room’.

Another consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the need for workers to eat something substantial first thing. Since Georgian times breakfast for all had been standard, consisting of tea and toast. By 1810, people could say that ‘next to water tea is the Englishman’s proper element’. Foreigners were also intrigued by the phenomenon of toast: ‘you take one slice after the other and hold it to the fire on a fork until the butter is melted … this is called toast’. It was ‘incomparably good’, thought a Prussian visitor in 1782. It might also be spread with what James Boswell called ‘that admirable viand, marmalade’.

The light aristocratic breakfasts of the eighteenth century – tea and toast, coffee and rolls – were replaced by the heavier meals that Victorian gentlemen considered necessary to sustain them during a day at the office (‘a malady of incurable character’ might well result from going to work without the proper fortification). A journalist named George Augustus Sala compiled an awe-inspiring list of his regular breakfast dishes: ‘a mutton-chop, or a rump-steak, or a good plateful from a cold joint, or a couple of eggs broiled in bacon, or a haddock, or a
mackerel, or some pickled salmon, or some cold veal and ham pie or half a wild duck’.

Higher up in society, though, the peculiar tradition persisted that an aristocrat somehow didn’t need a breakfast. It was considered a middle-class meal, necessary only to wage slaves, and males made light of it by refusing to sit down while eating it. ‘The men walked about to eat their porridge,’ explained the narrator of the novel
The Go-Between
, set in the last days of Queen Victoria. ‘This, Marcus told me, was
de rigueur
; only cads ate their porridge sitting down.’

Now, anything goes when it comes to mealtimes. Three meals a day and no snacks, or five small meals, or no carbohydrates after 5 p.m.: you will find dietary advice recommending any possible permutation imaginable. But there is a clear consensus that food is most usefully consumed early in the day. Medieval people seemed naturally to have known that a big meal in the morning is better for the body, so the food fuels a day of activity.

In the Middle Ages they got something else right too. With sugar, hydrogenated fats and chemicals missing in both cases, there isn’t that much difference between the medieval and macrobiotic diets.

40 – Trying New Foods (and Drinks, and Drugs)

When will this evil stop? Your very Chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose, by sipping tea. What an army has gin and tea destroyed!

Jonas Hanway, 1757

The single room of a medieval dwelling developed into a range of spaces for different purposes. The medieval palate likewise developed over time to take pleasure in an ever-growing smorgasbord of tastes. Each novel ingredient had consequences for the kitchen because it required new utensils. Your own teapot and wok are the result of Europe trading ever further eastwards, while your sugar bowl and cocktail shaker are the effects of reaching out west.