At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Even when the producers’ intentions were pure, the food itself wasn’t always. Getting food to distant markets in an edible condition was a constant challenge. People dreamed of being able to eat foods from far away or out of season. In January 1859, much of America followed eagerly as a ship laden with three hundred thousand juicy oranges raced under full sail from Puerto Rico to New England to show that it could be done. By the time it arrived, however, more than two-thirds of the cargo had rotted to a fragrant mush. Producers in more distant lands could not hope to achieve even that much. Argentinians raised massive herds of cattle on their endless and accommodating pampas, but they had no way to ship the meat. Most of their cows were therefore boiled down for their bones and tallow, and the meat was simply wasted. Seeking ways to help them, the German chemist Justus von Liebig devised a formula for a meat extract, which came to be known as Oxo, but clearly that could never make more than a marginal difference.

  What was desperately needed was a way of keeping foods safe and fresh for longer periods than nature allowed. In the late eighteenth century, a Frenchman named Nicolas-François Appert produced a book called The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, which represented a real breakthrough. Appert’s system consisted essentially of sealing food in glass jars and then heating the jars slowly. The method generally worked pretty well, but the seals were not entirely foolproof and sometimes air and contaminants got in, to the gastrointestinal distress of those who partook of the contents. Since it wasn’t possible to have total confidence in Appert’s jars, no one did.

  In short, a lot of things could go wrong with food on its way to the table. So when in the early 1840s a miracle product came along that promised to transform matters, there was a great deal of excitement. The product was an unexpectedly familiar one: ice.

  II

  In the summer of 1844, the Wenham Lake Ice Company—named for a lake in Massachusetts—took premises in the Strand in London, and there each day placed a fresh block of ice in the window. No one in England had ever seen a block of ice that big before—certainly not in summer, not in the middle of London—or one that was so wondrously glassy and clear. You could actually read through it: a newspaper was regularly propped behind the block so that passersby could see this amazing fact for themselves. The shop window became a sensation and was regularly crowded with gawkers.

  Thackeray mentioned Wenham ice by name in a novel. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert insisted on its use at Buckingham Palace and awarded the company a royal warrant. Many people supposed Wenham to be a massive body of water, on the scale of one of the Great Lakes. Charles Lyell, the English geologist, was so intrigued that he made a special trip to the lake from Boston—not a particularly easy thing to do—while on a speaking tour. He was fascinated by how slowly Wenham ice melted, and assumed it had something to do with its celebrated purity. In fact, Wenham ice melted at the same speed as any other ice. Except that it had traveled far, it wasn’t actually special in any way at all.

  Lake ice was a marvelous product. It created itself at no cost to the producer, was clean, renewable, and infinite in supply. The only drawbacks were that there was no infrastructure to produce and store it, and no market to sell it to. In order to make the ice industry exist, it was necessary to work out ways to cut and lift ice on a large scale, build storehouses, secure trading rights, and engage a reliable chain of shippers and agents. Above all, the producer had to create a demand for ice in places where ice had seldom or never been seen and was most assuredly not something anyone was predisposed to pay for. The man who did all this was a Bostonian of good birth and challenging disposition named Frederic Tudor. Making ice a commercial proposition became his overweening obsession.

  The notion of shipping ice from New England to distant ports was considered completely mad—“the vagary of a disordered brain,” in the words of one of his contemporaries. The first shipment of ice to Britain so puzzled customs officials as to how to classify it that all three hundred tons of it melted away before it could be moved off the docks. Shipowners were highly reluctant to accept it as cargo. They didn’t relish the humiliation of arriving in a port with a holdful of useless water, but they were also wary of the very real danger of tons of shifting ice and sloshing meltwater making their ships unstable. These were men, after all, whose nautical instincts were based entirely on the idea of keeping water outside the ship, so they were loath to take on such an eccentric risk when there wasn’t even a certain market at the end of it all.

  Tudor was a strange and difficult man—“imperious, vain, contemptuous of competitors and implacable to enemies,” in the estimation of the historian Daniel J. Boorstin. He alienated all his closest friends and betrayed the trust of colleagues, almost as if that were his life’s ambition. Nearly all the technological innovations that made the ice trade possible were actually the work of his retiring, compliant, long-suffering associate Nathaniel Wyeth. It cost Tudor years of frustrated endeavor, and all of his family fortune, to get the ice business up and running, but gradually it caught on and eventually it made him and many others rich. For several decades, ice was America’s second biggest crop, measured by weight. If securely insulated, ice could last a surprisingly long while. It could even survive the 16,000-mile, 130-day trip from Boston to Bombay—or at least about two-thirds of it could, enough to make the long trip profitable. Ice went to the farthest corners of South America and from New England to California via Cape Horn. Sawdust, a product previously without any value at all, proved to be an excellent insulator, providing useful extra income for Maine lumber mills.

  Lake Wenham was actually completely incidental to the ice business in America. It never produced more than about ten thousand tons of ice in a year, compared with almost a million tons lifted annually just from the Kennebec River in Maine. In England, Wenham ice was more talked about than used. A few businesses took regular deliveries, but hardly any households (other than the royal one) did. By the 1850s, most ice sold in Britain was not from Wenham or even from America. The Norwegians—not a people one normally associates with sharp practices—changed the name of Lake Oppegaard, near Oslo, to Lake Wenham so that they could tap into the lucrative market. By the 1850s most ice sold in Britain was in fact Norwegian, though it has to be said that ice never really caught on with the British. Even now, it is still often dispensed there as if it were on prescription. The real market, it turned out, was in America itself.

  As Gavin Weightman notes in his history of the business, The Frozen-Water Trade, Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers, and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice cream became popular—and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors. Manhattan alone consumed nearly 1 million tons of ice a year, while Brooklyn sucked down 334,000 tons, Boston 380,000, and Philadelphia 377,000. Americans grew immensely proud of the civilizing conveniences of ice. “Whenever you hear America abused,” one American told Sarah Maury, a visiting Briton, “remember the ice.”

  Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast. Chicago became the epicenter of the railway industry in part because it could generate and keep huge quantities of ice. Individual ice houses in Chicago held up to 250,000 tons of ice. Before ice, in hot weather milk (which came out of the cow warm, of course) could be kept for only an hour or two before it began to spoil. Chicken had to be eaten on the day of plucking. Fresh meat was seldom safe for more than a day. Now food could be kept longer locally, but it could also be sold in distant markets. Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet. For the first time in history f
ood didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced. Farmers on the boundless plains of the American Midwest could not only produce food more cheaply and abundantly than anywhere else but also sell it almost anywhere.

  Meanwhile, other developments increased the range of food storage possibilities enormously. In 1859, an American named John Landis Mason solved the challenge that the Frenchman Nicolas-François Appert had not quite mastered the better part of a century before. Mason patented the threaded glass jar with a metal screw-on lid. This provided a perfect seal and made it possible to preserve all kinds of foods that would previously spoil. The Mason jar became a huge hit everywhere, though Mason himself scarcely benefited from it. He sold the rights in it for a modest sum, then turned his attention to other inventions—a folding life raft, a case for keeping cigars fresh, a self-draining soap dish—that he assumed would make him rich, but his other inventions were neither successful nor even very good. As one after another failed, Mason withdrew into a semi-demented poverty. He died alone and forgotten in a New York City tenement house in 1902.

  An alternative, and ultimately even more successful, method for preserving food—namely, canning—was perfected in England by a man named Bryan Donkin working between 1810 and 1820. Donkin’s invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them. The real breakthrough awaited the development of lighter materials, which in turn enabled mass production. At the beginning of the 1800s, one man, working hard, could produce about sixty cans a day; by 1880, machines could pump out fifteen hundred in a day. Surprisingly, getting them open remained a serious impediment much longer. Various cutting devices were patented, but all were difficult to use or nearly lethal if they slipped. The safe, modern manual can opener—the sort with two rolling wheels and a twisting key—dates only from 1925.

  Developments in food preservation were part of a much wider revolution in food production that changed the dynamics of agriculture everywhere. The McCormick reaper permitted the mass production of grain, which in turn allowed America to produce livestock on an industrial scale. This in its turn led to the development of large meatpacking centers and improved methods of refrigeration—and ice remained at the heart of that well into the modern era. As late as 1930, America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars, all cooled with ice.

  The sudden ability to transport food over great distances and to keep it fresh enough to reach far-off markets transformed agriculture in many distant lands. Kansas wheat, Argentinian beef, New Zealand lamb, and other foodstuffs from around the world began to turn up on dinner tables thousands of miles away. The repercussions in traditional farming areas were enormous. You don’t have to venture far into any New England forest to find the ghostly house foundations and old field walls that denote a farm abandoned in the nineteenth century. Farmers throughout the region left their farms in droves, either to work in factories or to try their hand at farming on better land farther west. In a single generation Vermont lost nearly half its population. Europe suffered equally. “British agriculture virtually collapsed in the last generation of the nineteenth century,” says Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and with it went all the things it had previously supported—farm laborers, villages, country churches and parsonages, a landed aristocracy. Ultimately, it put our rectory, and thousands of others like it, into private hands.

  During a visit to New England in the autumn of 2007, I drove some fifteen miles north from Boston to see Lake Wenham, once briefly the most famous lake in the world. Today Wenham stands along a quiet highway in attractive countryside and provides a picturesque glimpse of water for anyone driving between the towns of Wenham and Ipswich. Lake Wenham now serves as a freshwater reservoir for Boston, so it is surrounded by a high chain-link fence and is closed to the public. A historical marker beside the road celebrates the town of Wenham’s tercentenary in 1935 but makes no mention of the ice trade that once made the lake famous.

  III

  If we were to step into the kitchen of the rectory in 1851, a number of differences would strike us immediately. For one thing, there would have been no sink. Kitchens in the mid-nineteenth century were for cooking only (at least in middle-class homes); washing up was done in a separate scullery—the room we will visit in Chapter V—which meant that every dish and pot had to be carried to a room across the corridor to be scrubbed, dried, and put away, then brought back to the kitchen the next time it was needed. That could entail many trips, for the Victorians did a lot of cooking and provided an awesome array of dishes. What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a popular book of 1851 by Lady Maria Clutterbuck (who was actually Mrs. Charles Dickens), gives a good impression of the kind of cooking that went on in those days. One suggested menu—for a dinner for six people—comprises “carrot soup, turbot with shrimp sauce, lobster patties, stewed kidneys, roast saddle of lamb, boiled turkey, knuckle of ham, mashed and brown potatoes, stewed onions, cabinet pudding, blancmange and cream, and macaroni.” Such a meal, it has been calculated, could generate 450 pieces of washing up. The swing door leading from the kitchen to the scullery must have swung a lot.

  Had you arrived at the Old Rectory at a time when the housekeeper, Miss Worm, and her assistant, a nineteen-year-old village girl named Martha Seely, were baking or cooking, you may well have found them doing something that until recently had not been done at all—carefully measuring out ingredients. Until almost the middle of the century instructions in cookbooks were always wonderfully imprecise, calling merely for “some flour” or “enough milk.” What changed all that was a revolutionary book by a shy, sweet-natured poet in Kent named Eliza Acton. Because Miss Acton’s poems weren’t selling, her publisher gently suggested she might try something more commercial, and in 1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled.

  The book enjoyed considerable success but then was abruptly shouldered aside by a brasher work—the vastly, lastingly, powerfully, mystifyingly influential Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton. There has never been another book quite like it, both for influence and content. It was an instant success and would remain a success well into the following century.

  Mrs. Beeton made clear that running a household was a grave and cheerless business: “As with the commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house.” Only a moment earlier she had saluted her own selfless heroism: “I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it,” she declared, leaving the reader with a sense of mild gloom and guilty indebtedness.

  Its title notwithstanding, The Book of Household Management whips through its professed subject in just twenty-three pages, then turns to cooking for nearly the whole of the next nine hundred. Despite this bias toward the kitchen, however, Mrs. Beeton didn’t actually like cooking and didn’t go near her own kitchen if she could possibly help it. You don’t have to read far into the recipes to begin to suspect as much—when she suggests, for instance, boiling pasta for an hour and three quarters. Like many of her nation and generation, she had an innate suspicion of anything exotic. Mangoes, she said, were liked only “by those who have not a prejudice against turpentine.” Lobsters she found “rather indigestible” and “not so nutritive as they are generally supposed to be.” Garlic was “offensive.” Potatoes were “suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious.” Cheese she thought fit only for sedentary people—she didn’t say why—and then only “in very small quantities.” Especially to be avoided were cheeses with veins, since these were fungal growths. “Generally speaking,” she added, just a touch ambiguously, “decomposing bodie
s are not wholesome eating, and the line must be drawn somewhere.” Worst of all was the tomato: “The whole plant has a disagreeable odour, and its juice, subjected to the action of the fire, emits a vapour so powerful as to cause vertigo and vomiting.”

  Mrs. Beeton appears to have been unacquainted with ice as a preservative, but we may safely assume that she wouldn’t have liked it, for she didn’t like chilled things generally. “The aged, the delicate and children should abstain from ices or cold beverages,” she wrote. “It is also necessary to abstain from them when persons are very warm, or immediately after taking violent exercise, as in some cases they have produced illnesses which have ended fatally.” A great many foods and activities had fatal consequences in Mrs. Beeton’s book.

  For all her matronly airs, Mrs. Beeton was just twenty-three when she began the book. She wrote it for her husband’s publishing company, where it was issued as a partwork in thirty-three monthly installments beginning in 1859 (the year that also saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) and produced as a single volume in 1861. Samuel Beeton had already made quite a lot of money from publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was as much of a sensation in Britain as in America. He also started some popular magazines, including the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852), which had many innovations—a problem page, a medical column, dress patterns—still often found in women’s magazines today.