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’.38 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’.39 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.40
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.41
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.
Home and the Range
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.42
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.
The Ideal Housewife
By decimating t
he 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.43 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.’44 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.’45
Having made the case for housework to be held in higher regard, Beecher came to the crux of the matter: how it was to be carried out. The immediate problem that struck her was one of efficiency. Now that housewives were having to cook for themselves, their labour-intensive kitchens were hopelessly inadequate. Beecher’s solution was simple: to restore the kitchen to the centre of the home. That way, a housewife could do everything she needed, while keeping an eye on her children and her other housework. Beecher may have restored the ancient marriage of hearth and home, but her view of the relationship was far from romantic. Her ideal house plans had more in common with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (a circular ideal prison plan that allowed all the cells to be surveyed from a single central guardroom) than with John Ruskin’s temple.46 This was no misty-eyed vision of the sacred housewife; women were simply placed at the centre of the domain they were expected to control. Cooking, along with other womanly duties, was a job that had to be done. As for the kitchen itself, it needed to be radically simplified: in later writings, Beecher compared it to a ship’s galley.
Beecher’s many followers included Ellen Richards, whose degree in chemistry from MIT was the first in science ever awarded to a woman. Whereas Beecher had sought to give housewives social dignity, Richards wanted to turn them into scientists like her; ones with urgent duties to perform at that. In 1861, the ‘germ theory’ posited by John Snow had received clinical proof from the French chemist Louis Pasteur, whose laboratory experiments confirmed that micro-organisms in nutrient broth were the result of external contamination.47 Richards was among the first to understand the implications of these findings: they made kitchens far more dangerous places than anyone had realised. With the connivance of her long-suffering husband, she turned her home into an experimental laboratory, investigating every possible application of science to cookery and housework. Meanwhile, she urged for chemistry to be taught to women so that they could fight food adulteration and contamination for themselves. In 1876, Richards finally got permission to set up a Women’s Laboratory at MIT. Here she instructed women in the ‘advanced study of chemical analysis, mineralogy, and chemistry related to vegetable and animal physiology and to the industrial arts’, the basis of the new discipline she was to call ‘domestic science’. Richards was a visionary, but sadly her dream of a new generation of chemically aware housewives inspired by ‘the zest of intelligent experiment’ never came to pass.48 Instead, increasing awareness of ‘germ theory’ caused widespread panic about dirt in all its forms. The mood at the turn of the century was summed up by Mrs H. M. Plunkett, author of Women, Plumbers and Doctors, or Household Sanitation, in 1897. A housewife’s failure to prevent disease, she said, was ‘akin to murder’; her neglect of proper cleaning ‘tantamount to child abuse’.49
It would rest with a pupil of Richards, Christine Frederick, to come up with some practical advice that housewives could actually follow. Through her husband’s work as a factory inspector, Frederick had become aware of a revolution then taking place in factories: the streamlining of production methods that would become known as ‘Taylorism’. In 1899, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Taylor had been asked to analyse the working practices of a group of pig-iron workers to see if he could increase their productivity. Taylor performed the world’s first time-and-motion study on the workers, plotting their various tasks and the sequence in which they were carried out. He concluded that many of the workers’ movements were unnecessary, and proposed a new ‘production line’ approach to streamline their actions and maximise efficiency. The principles of Taylorism are widely familiar today, but when Christine Frederick first heard about them, they were revelatory. She came up with the idea of applying them to kitchens; for, as she put it with unarguable logic, ‘Why walk eight feet to a kitchen table and eight feet back again for the bread-knife which is always needed near the bread box kept on the cabinet across the room?’ In her 1915 book Efficient Housekeeping, or Household Engineering, Frederick contrasted two different kitchen layouts, one ‘efficiently grouped’ and the other ‘badly grouped’, to explain how each responded to the cooking process: ‘This principle of arranging and grouping equipment to meet the actual order of work is the basis of kitchen efficiency. In other words, we cannot leave the placing of the sink, stove, doors and cupboards entirely to the architect.’50
The result of her analysis was the ‘labor-saving kitchen’: the first kitchen designed entirely around the ergonomics of cooking. It featured cabinets with pull-out worktops, built-in hoppers for flour and sugar, and ‘workshop-style’ wall-mounted storage racks for utensils. The kitchen, said Frederick, should be full of light and air, avoiding the ‘ugly green or hideous blue colourings’ of former times. Work surfaces should be ‘covered with non-absorbent, easily cleaned materials’ to make them germ-free and easy to maintain.51 As for the actual work to be done, housewives were to adopt an ‘efficiency attitude’, making lists of tasks to be achieved each day and ticking them off as they went along – even timing themselves to monitor their own performance. There was no room for slackers in Frederick’s engineered household. In a tone that makes even the late Fanny Cradock seem conciliatory, she continued: ‘There is no excuse for “Oh, I
forgot to order more sugar”, for making four trips upstairs which could have been taken in one, or for finding that there isn’t another egg in the house.’52
The ideal housewife at work. Illustration from Household Engineering.
Frederick believed that her methods were ‘a route from drudgery to efficiency and personal happiness’, and strangely, her readers seemed to agree. More textbook than cookbook, Household Engineering ended each chapter with a series of questions for readers to answer, like an exam. Yet far from having nightmares about being back at school, women wrote to her in their thousands, begging for more information about her methods. Whether they managed to live up to her exemplary standards was another matter.
White and Shiny
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 21
