"The Domestic Revolution"

[fiefoe]

A chance rec from Mastodon led me to this surprisingly fascinating read. Ruth Goodman's depth of knowledge on historical domestic chores is truly impressive.

• I began to realize that the usual narratives about the development of the home, the countryside and the modern industrial world were missing something: the big switch to domestic coal in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
• Practical experience had shown me flues and chimneys were, in most cases, not only unnecessary but actively counterproductive as, along with the smoke, they channelled all of the heat up and away from where it was wanted.
• When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, England and Wales were wood-burning nations. Scotland and Ireland used considerably more peat – the compacted, partly decayed plant matter collected across the bogs
• For millennia, the vast majority of the energy people harnessed was derived from short-term, renewable plant-based sources such as trees, bushes and scrubs, with reeds and grasses, or dung from plant-eating animals, being pressed into service here and there... If you wanted more fuel, you needed more land for plants to grow upon, or you needed to increase the efficiency of the system, focusing more intensively upon those species that suited your needs most closely.
• in 1607, a case brought by the Crown in the Star Chamber stated as fact that ‘sea coal’ – a name for the coal that arrived in London by ship from Newcastle – was ‘the ordinary and usual fuel … almost everywhere in every man’s house’. A single generation had made the switch.
• The domestic switch, despite its much greater size, greater spread and earlier date, is practically skipped over in the eager rush to get to the (perhaps more manly) industrial stuff... Traditionally, we have looked for the great tides of history within the worlds of military conflict, political manoeuvrings and industrial progress. The home and changes within it have been viewed as matters primarily of interest to women, and as being only of the most mundane interest even to them.
• Competing with the need for the arable land on which crops are grown and the pastureland by which livestock are fed, was the need for combustible plant material with which to cook food, brew beer and stave off the winter chill. People had to make choices: harvest peat or firewood or harvest food.
• Flames from a coal fire tend to be small and uniform, peat rarely produces any recognizable flame, instead burning with a hot, smouldering glow, while a bundle of dry twigs can generate long, lazy tongues of wavering flame. But much depends on exactly what you’re burning. Turves, which are cut from the very top layer of a peat deposit where plants are still growing, can behave quite unlike each other if they have been harvested from different areas,... Oak and pine are as different to burn as chalk and cheese.
• Working with coal, for example, you can create a fairly shallow fire, packed down flat on top, which is suitable for tempering, or hardening, a blade. In contrast, welding, or joining two pieces of metal together, demands a deep and narrow fire. For the highest heats, you can pack the right sort of coal – a rock that is bituminous but low in sulphur and phosphorus – into such a shape that it becomes a virtual oven; the fire can be practically contained within this globe of unburnt fuel...Sometimes, and rather counterintuitively, mixing a little water with small pieces of coal can help to produce this globe of intense heat, by allowing the coal to bind together and form a ‘shell’ around the fire. This is one way in which coal is coked.
• For instance, dry thistle stalk combusts well, because the seed heads – if they have not blown away in the wind – are packed with oil. They are an excellent form of kindling,... Like all the straws they burn very fast. Hollow stems direct air to the centre of the conflagration, the long, thin proportions producing a rapid draught, not only encouraging impressive flames but blowing ash, burning fragments, and loose, unburnt material up and away from the fire... If the stalks are first formed into a set of straight, uniform bundles and securely bound, they can then be stacked and placed under a weight. This crushes the hollow stems flat, thus reducing the air flow capacity through them and slowing down the rate of their burn. It also makes the fire easier to handle and reduces the stoking rate... Anyone reliant upon thistle fuel will eat only the occasional hot meal and live in an almost completely unheated home – which is why the women of Callan must have been very desperate.
• Around the same time, George Meriton published A York-Shire Dialogue, which contained a short scene where a mother asks her daughter to fetch some dried cow dung fuel: ‘clawt some cassons out o’ th’ hurne’, the mother said, ‘cassons’ being one of the many regional names for this form of fuel. In Buckinghamshire they were traditionally called ‘clatts’ and in Cornwall ‘glaws’... Cassons were individually dried out for fuel, while manure was left wet and gathered into heaps where it could break down, ready for use as a fertilizer.
• It is also a fuel that can initially be hard for people today to understand because much of the dung produced by modern farming methods is rather unsuitable for stoking a fire... Modern cattle feed is designed to pack in nutrients, in order to produce high milk yields in dairy cows and rapid muscle growth in beef cattle. This super-rich diet has an effect upon the animals’ digestive processes. It is, in the twenty-first century, a common sight to see cows with their own dung splashing down their legs. They live their lives with something akin to permanent diarrhoea.
• Hay – comprised of dried grass and meadow plants, including their nutrient-packed seed heads – was largely reserved for draught animals who needed energy to work; the rest of the livestock typically ate straw, which was much less nutritious, consisting of the dried stems left over from a wheat, barley or rye crop after the grain had been harvested.
• In nineteenth-century America, a similar resource – the dried dung of wild buffalo herds, also known as ‘buffalo chips’ – was an essential fuel for those heading out across the Great Plains.
• Marginal areas of land were brought into cultivation despite dreadfully poor yields. Peat-digging was confined to small, linear plots, so the cuttings were pushed deeper and deeper to extract much-needed fuel. Modern practice, continuing commercially right up until the Second World War,
• If there is a grain in the peat, the blocks tend to burn along it. Since peat is what might be called a ‘contact burner’ – fire spreads through direct contact – the grain makes a difference... Hand-cut peat, with its grain running across the original deposit lines of plant fibres, helps to direct the spread of your fire, as it is more likely to ignite the peat within the same deposit layer rather than the peat in the layers above and below.
• There are two things that people particularly like about peat as a fuel: the smell and the staying power. Peat smoke has a strong, distinctive smell, one that evokes powerful memories of home,
• Wet, boggy areas are not ideal for most tree growth. It works the other way round too. Where the land is very wet, felling trees that once sucked up excess water can make an area even more boggy,
• With the exception of pine, most trees native to Britain are not generally killed when the trunk is harvested. Many species send up new shoots from the stump, and many others produce them from the underground rootball... Left uncut, the natural lifespan of an ash tree, for example, is about two hundred years, but there are numerous ash coppice stools (comprising the base of the trunk and the root systems) which are a thousand years old and still living. So long as you leave the stumps and root systems alone, there is no need to replant felled deciduous woodland... Elm in particular appears to become almost immortal through coppicing, forming huge, genetically identical patches known as ‘clones’. All of these rootballs establish long-standing symbiotic relationships with the microorganisms and fungi in the surrounding soil, which helps to give coppicing a distinct edge in efficiency over replanting.
• Many expanses of woodland historically contained a wide variety of species and a mixture of cropping regimes. Timber for building houses, ships, mills, churches and furniture required trees with fifty to several hundred years’ of growth. These older, larger trees, called ‘standards’, were often growing alongside smaller crops of ‘underwood’, used for fuel and fencing, that were turned over on a shorter cycle.
• These standard billets provided most of the needs of a person tending an open fire (with the exception of kindling). The two smaller sizes were general-use logs that provided a degree of flexibility in shaping a fire. The largest size, the two-caste, would only be used to maintain a large fire once it was burning well. It could also act as a brake upon a smaller conflagration, smothering it... Tallwood was sometimes also known as ‘cord wood’, as it could be sold ‘by the cord’, the amount of prepared wood in a stack around which a 24-foot (7.3 m) cord can pass.
• There is a superstar of firewood – ash, which burns beautifully and fairly cleanly even when quite green. It burns almost as hotly and steadily as oak but is much easier to get going... The best-managed households kept stocks of ash, oak and hazel on hand in all three billet sizes, with probably more ash than oak or hazel. The ash would be the main firewood, with a few oak billets placed at the heart of any fire for long-term staying power. The hazel would help to get the fire going quickly in the morning and be good for raising a bit of extra heat when frying or grilling.
• In fact, they stick out through the furnace’s opening by about 4 inches (10 cm) even when they are pushed right up against the back. But this traps the logs in place, so that they are unable to roll either backwards or forwards. On land this would be a wasteful arrangement – or, at least, a mildly inconvenient one... But on board a ship, I can see it would be extremely sensible: it renders fire management almost idiot-proof
• Ovens and faggots had been perfect partners for centuries. Indeed, the only real difficulty in managing a faggot fire within an oven was maintaining the flow of oxygen to the centre of the oven. <> If, for example, you permit the fire to burn up across the entrance of the oven, all of the oxygen is consumed there, and fuel is left behind, unburnt, within the body of the oven. Introducing a new faggot can also block the flow of air if you are not careful... A good firing produces a mushroom cloud of flame, rising in a central column and then fanning out around the dome of the oven’s roof, licking against the walls. The more sophisticated brick and stone ovens that have survived down the centuries are frequently not perfect hemispheres but rather flattened domes. In these structures, the mushroom of flame can be made to reach right back down to the floor of the oven, curling under and delivering the waste gases and unburnt particles into the centre of the conflagration, to yield up all of their energy.
• As one faggot burns away you replace it with another until you have reached the temperature you want. An oven with a diameter of 30 inches usually needs three faggots to reach bread-baking heat.
• Once barley has been watered and allowed to sprout, converting all of the starches within the grain into sugars (the process known as malting), it must be dried out quickly over a low heat to prevent further growth. Malted grain is particularly prone to holding on to smoke flavours, which taint the finished tipple. Killing the sprout and drying out the malt therefore had to be done with minimal smoke.
• Modern barbeque advice generally consists of lighting the fire well in advance and then waiting for a white ash to form across the upper surface of your pile of charcoal before commencing with your cooking. The heat at this stage will be high, evenly distributed and steady. You will be able to cook uninterrupted for around half an hour, almost as if you were using a gas-flame grill,
• Surviving brick-built charcoal stoves invariably have multiple charcoal-burning baskets spaced along the working surface. This permitted the cook to operate a simple regime with multiple charcoal fires at staggered stages of fuel combustion.
• Skilled charcoal burners can generally convert around 80 to 90 per cent of the wood within a clamp into charcoal. A little more is lost in the cleaning and sorting process,
• the countryside was not an open larder for all to plunder. Every scrap of earth, every twig and leaf growing upon it, was subject to ownership and carefully guarded rights of exploitation. Landlords, for instance, generally had the right to all of the timber growing upon their land, but their tenants had the right to all of the underwood... Many commons, for example, permitted the taking of dead wood – but only if it could be extracted without recourse to a blade of any sort. It was allowed if the wood was extracted ‘by hook or by crook’, which is the origin of the saying.
• Pollards are trees that are periodically cut like coppice stools, but the cut is made not at ground level but further up the main trunk. This produces a very distinctive shape of tree, one that nowadays is seen infrequently. Most of the extant examples are quite old, even ancient, the most visible of which are willows lining riverbanks... But like coppice stools, pollards can have a much longer life than an uncut tree because each cut resets the tree’s natural lifespan.
• Felling and selling timber could supply a great cash boost for an estate. (Profligate heirs, grand building projects and backing the wrong side on the political stage tended to result in major felling programmes.) In good times, a prudent landowner encouraged tree growth as a form of dynastic insurance.
• Other landscapes fared less well. Heathland and moors were particularly vulnerable to the march of coal... The hedgerow and field trees fared no better. Wood pasture had been disappearing for centuries as population pressures encouraged more intensive agriculture... armers were keen to cut back hedges and cut down pollards, allowing more light into their fields and reducing the drain on water and nutrients. The landscape was quietly, but successively, thinned. <> What emerged was a countryside focused upon food production – a little bit tidier, a little bit more uniform.
• Instead, most of the competition between food and fuel is happening on the world stage,.. Crops deliberately grown for biofuels are speeding deforestation on a massive scale and threatening food security on several continents far from Britain’s shores. The best way forward is by no means clear. Fuel, food, landscape and environment are intricately linked, as they always have been.
• From Northumberland to Kent, most English coal did not make ‘a ready fire’ that was ‘voyde of smoake’. Quite the opposite. The coal in the rest of Wales was equally poor.
• Oxygen is the key factor here. Modern coal fires are burnt in a grate that exposes coal surfaces to the air by lifting the pile of fuel up off the ground and letting the ash and clinker fall away. Cold air is actively drawn up through the grate by the very act of combustion, with the rising heat creating a vacuum, or ‘draw’. This draught is transformative. Coal with and without the use of a grate is almost unrecognizable as the same fuel.
• But it’s much harder to raise up burning coal than it is to raise up flaming logs. You need an extensive structure, one that is more complicated to manufacture, and which utilizes a lot more metal. For a long time it was probably not worth the effort or the expense to burn coal.
• The quality and behaviour of smoke within domestic environments was no small matter. In the relatively still milieu of an interior space, wood smoke creates a distinct and visible horizon, below which the air is fairly clear and above which asphyxiation is a real possibility. The height of this horizon line is critical to living without a chimney.
• Smoke management is one of those unspoken daily realities that we have next to no written record of, and yet it must have been a very pressing issue and life skill... I can attest to the annoyance of a small change in the angle of a propped-open door, the opening of a shutter or the shifting of a piece of furniture that you had placed just so to quiet the air. And as for people standing in doorways, don’t get me started.
• A well-managed wood fire in a well-managed home can produce a virtually smoke-free living experience so long as you are burning well-seasoned wood and are content to live life at ground level. No rooms above the ground floor was the norm during the era of open hearths.
• Two key technological developments were needed to transform domestic coal-burning from a difficult, horribly smoky experience into a daily ritual that could be not only tolerated but adopted across the city: the iron grate and the chimney. Of these, it was the chimney that involved the biggest and most immediate investment and upheaval in living arrangements. And again, a certain serendipity came into play.
• Chimneys, on the other hand, channel around 70 per cent of the heat of a fire straight up and out of the building. Moreover, these structures are typically located at the edge of the room, creating an unevenly heated space. They also produce a draw, which sucks cold air in at the base, creating a cold draught at floor level.
• Though the hall remained open to the rafters, the hood reduced the amount of smoke that gathered in the room, and because there was no constriction around the fire itself, no great draw was created. Like the smoke bay, the smoke hood was more of a smoke collection and channelling apparatus.
• These changes had a profound impact upon the way homes are utilized. When heat was available in just one room, there was a distinct pressure on families to spend time together communally in this single space. As the heat spread out, so did the inhabitants. The rise of games consoles and on-demand entertainment systems, for example, probably owes as much to the rise of central heating as it does to any other technology... Meanwhile, bathrooms have become much more desirable places, ones in which people are willing to spend more time, helping to stimulate the personal care industry.
• There was also the issue of furniture to consider. With an open central hearth the most comfortable area within the home is close to the floor... The same approach was taken to sleeping arrangements, with your ‘bed’ (what we would call a mattress or pallet) placed directly on the floor.
• It wasn’t just that central hearths discouraged tall, substantial furniture; chimneys actively called for it. The floor-level draught that a chimney produced was no pleasant thing if you had to sit and sleep on the floor.
• With a chimney it was possible to make use of the space above head height. A full upstairs area could be employed in the home, doubling or trebling the size of your living space within the same four walls. This was a very attractive prospect for families packed cheek by jowl in tight, often awkward urban plots. Chimneys also offered improved fire safety – a boon after the Great Fire... A three- or four-storey building was increasingly the norm in London. With rooms stacked upon rooms, smoke control became essential.
• If you wanted to burn coal in your home, you were going to have to find a way of dealing with the sulphurous and particularly low-hanging smoke. Chimneys were the answer.
• Differentiated provision was a moral good in Britain (and wider Europe), allowing lavish spending on entertainment and economizing in housekeeping to sit comfortably, side-by-side. Indeed, we see this worldview holding in many aspects of British life through to the nineteenth century. <> Sixteenth-century British society still followed a legal code for appropriate dress, called the sumptuary laws, which stipulated cloth types, colours and even cuts of clothing according to a person’s social status. The restrictions were laid out most precisely at the upper reaches of society,.. Food preparation fulfilled a similar philosophical function and was backed up by contemporary medical understandings. Food suitable for your station in life was considered to be healthy, while food for a different walk of life was wasted on you. Medical men even argued that the digestive processes of labourers and lords worked differently... Since most members of the household, regardless of their status, ate together in the main hall, the different provisions of food were very obvious. They were supposed to be. Social cohesion and hierarchy were understood to be strengthened by the daily ritual of eating together, ‘each according to one’s degree’.
• Those with wood fires were especially well furnished, with a number of textiles and upholstered chairs – the very latest thing in 1637. These were high-status spaces where Sir Thomas entertained his best guests.
• But as London’s wealthy families took to using coal in the service areas of their homes, they inadvertently raised the social status of this fuel and provided an arena for the young women (and a few young men) working for them to gain a good deal of experience in the new art of coaxing coal fires into life... Service was not considered to be for ‘the lowest of the low’; it was an occupation for young people who thought of themselves as of the middling sort... Coal may have begun its rise by being associated with poverty, but by the 1600s it was becoming linked with wealthy kitchens, brewhouses, sculleries, garrets – the world of the elite domestic servant.
• Previously, this policy had mostly taken the form of ‘patriotic’ fish-eating. Many puritanical elements in this Protestant nation had wanted to abandon the old Catholic practice of observing meat-free days. But Queen Elizabeth, near the start of her reign, had decreed that Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were still to be ‘fish days’ – not for religious reasons, she proclaimed, but as a way of providing ample employ for her country’s fishermen and thus training for young sailors. Now, the coal trade was showing that it too could help to fulfil this vital national security function...  The sailors who manned these vessels therefore had experience not just in hauling on sails and loading cargoes, but in a wide range of the skills needed for a fight at sea. And as it happens, well over two thirds of the ships that saw off the Spanish Armada in 1588 were private merchant ships rather than government-owned naval vessels.
• when people moved over to metal cookware, they generally invested in two types: cast metal, which was poured as molten metal into a mould, or wrought (‘worked’) metal which was made into bars, then hammered and beaten out into sheets, before being shaped and riveted together. Cast pots required much more metal to produce, and were rather brittle and heavy, but they lasted well and the labour costs were lower. Wrought metal pots required much more labour to produce and wore out quite quickly, but they used far less expensive metal, and were lighter and much easier to mend if they got damaged... But as coal became more popular, people noticed that iron worked better than brass upon their fires... Most importantly, iron pots lasted much, much longer when employed over coal than brass ones did.
• But there were two major difficulties: getting enough cheap iron to cast pots, and gaining the know-how to do so. Abraham Darby would set out to tackle and successfully solve both problems, although not all at once, and not all by himself... European metalworkers were employing sophisticated casting techniques that involved pouring molten metal into hot moulds made from loam (a mixture of sand and clay), which allowed the metal to cool very slowly and produced a particular crystalline structure. This was a fairly expensive procedure, requiring fresh materials for each cast as the hot mould had to be smashed apart to get the metalwork out and could not be recycled...
• When coke is used as the fuel, a high proportion of silicon is present, and some of the carbon binds with it, forming graphite crystals within the molten iron. This ‘grey cast iron’ is much tougher and less brittle than its white counterpart. Grey cast iron could be made into pots and pans... It is this transition, from charcoal to coke, that gets industrial historians excited. This is one of the key innovations that sparked the Industrial Revolution, they say, although they don’t generally have cooking pots in mind when they do. Casting intricate and strong shapes in coke-produced iron opened up a huge range of possibilities... Charcoal, being a wood product, was a renewable but limited resource; coke, being a coal product, was available in seemingly vast and largely untapped reserves... Iron was the base metal of the Industrial Revolution, thanks in large part to the domestic adoption of coal-burning and the need for iron pots.
• It is perfectly possible, with the requisite skill, ingenuity and equipment, to cook any foodstuff or recipe with any fuel. You can produce an edible oatcake in an electric oven, deep fat fry your chips over dung, or toast your bread on an induction hob. I have even successfully cooked salmon in a dishwasher
• Coal cookery and British cookery are to some degree synonymous. It is not at the top of society that we encounter specific coal cookery, however, but rather in the everyday practice of poorer and middling families.
• Long-legged pots, commonly used on wood fires, gradually disappeared as coal took over. In their place came pots with three short, stubby legs, just sufficient enough to stabilize them when placed upon the floor or another surface away from the fire. The shape of the base of pots and pans also changed in response to the burn characteristics of coal. Flames from a wood fire curl out and around a rounded vessel, heating its contents, but the many little points of flame produced by coal work most efficiently when presented with a broader, flatter profile.
• Easier by far is to add more liquid and leave the contents to simmer on their own, unstirred. <> One advantage of this form of cooking is how well it complements the long burn time of coal. Coal fires require much less frequent attention than any of the wood-based fuels, but this is of little use to cooks if they have to remain at the hearth stirring... But with long-burning coal, boiling became king.
• taking full hot pots on and off a fixed bar is a fraught business. It is all about your angle of attack. Almost everything that modern health and safety people tell you about safe lifting practice has to go out of the window. You cannot get your feet and legs too close to the fire, so you will be bent forward at either the hip or the waist. A pot full of hot liquid cannot be clutched close to the body during the manoeuvre but must instead be held some distance away and in front of you.
• Today, with our modern appliances, we are perhaps accustomed to the idea of our heat source being a fixed size and shape, but I suspect this came as a bit of a shock to many a servant girl working with coal for the first time.
• a posh version of what may have been the most widely eaten meal of medieval Europe. Whole, unmilled grains swelled and softened in whatever liquid was available, would have represented the least processing of food with the least equipment and the least fuel expenditure. For a grain-based economy, frumenty was the cheapest of foods... Frumenty and other grain- and pulse-based thick dishes do very well with an initial period of high heat to get a boil going and then a ‘resting’ period of lower heat that allows them to absorb the liquid. In fact, this is exactly how good cooks approach making both risotto and paella.
• Much is made of May’s role in the rise of French cooking in England, but his experiences as a cook on the cusp of a major change in fuel use is much less discussed.
• A significant proportion of the boiled meat and fish dishes were thickened either with breadcrumbs, rice flour or raw egg (the last stirred in as you would with a custard). Indeed, a lot of medieval food could be eaten heaped on a spoon.
• It would seem that while French fashion was pulling the top end of society towards more savoury flavours and lighter, wetter boiled foods, the practicalities of cooking on coal were giving it a quiet push in much the same direction.
• Every now and again, we catch glimpses of the thick/wet divide where older styles of cookery hung on in more remote, wood-burning areas of England until they were finally swept away with the arrival of the railways and loads of cheap coal.
• So, while baked bread is very visible in the historical record, food produced within the homes of more ordinary people was far less well recorded.
• Peas could be prepared and served in a similar way, as the words of the familiar nursery rhyme record: ‘Pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold, pease pudding in the pot nine days’ old.’ It’s a dish that I enjoy immensely. Dried peas are soaked and boiled until they break down into a thick starchy mass, like a medieval purry or the modern dish mushy peas. Allowed to cool in a bowl, they set into a fairly solid mass, which can be turned out and sliced. These slices make an excellent packed lunch, especially when well buttered.
• As thick, sticky foods were removed from the repertoire, the gaps were filled first with baked bread.
• These two recipes contained most of the essential elements of the British boiled pudding tradition. The bag pudding was a rich, savoury but rather delicate pudding that called for eggs and cream to be mixed with breadcrumbs and flour. This batter was flavoured with fresh herbs and seasoned with a pinch of salt, nutmeg and sugar.
• Roasting, for a start, never happens ‘over’ a fire. The food is always placed in front of the fire, ideally over a dripping tray of some sort. If you suspend meat directly over your fire, the fat will drip onto your fuel, catch and flare up, scorching your food. Such a flame-grilled effect can be tasty when thin, quickly cooked meats are involved... The surface of a larger piece of meat, however, becomes unpleasantly scorched and burnt long before it is cooked through.
• A kitchen equipped for roasting, and supplied with sufficient fuel to sustain a large campaign of roasting, spoke volumes about a household’s finances and social standing. One equipped to do so with coal was still better off. Roasted meat – which had been actually roasted – was a status symbol.
• Their career plan was aimed at becoming a housekeeper, and this necessitated the ability to keep accounts and write letters. Little notebooks full of cake recipes thus functioned as both practical memory aids and status symbols. Being a housekeeper was considered to be the more genteel route through domestic service. The gentility of home-baking and preserving was also evident in smaller households where the mistress did a share of this work. The lighter, tidier and cleaner share of housework, as well as what Mrs Beeton called the ‘higher department of cooking’,
• Coal also influenced baking recipes. Wood-fired ovens are especially good at producing crispy textures. Think of how different a thin-crust pizza cooked in a wood-burning oven is from one baked in a conventional electric model... That which we call ‘cake’ – a mixture with an almost equal amount of butter, eggs, sugar and flour – bakes especially well in a cast-iron, coal-fired oven; it’s rarely successful when attempted in a wood-fired oven.
• A coal fire in an iron grate is a fantastic thing for toasting, so fit for purpose it seems to have been specifically designed for the task.
• Among the upper and middle classes, the experience of living in lodgings at the mercy of the landlady’s cooking fuelled a slightly surreptitious toasting boom... The fashionable people packed into remarkably small spaces during the season at Bath, removed from the more substantial households of their main country seat, took to toasting their own small supper when not entertaining. Basic grates set between two short brick piers were often termed ‘Bath grates’ because they were so popular in the spa town.
• Many of the most famous and long-lasting British food creations of the eighteenth century owe their origins to the toasting phenomenon. Bath buns and Sally Lunn cakes, crumpets, pikelets, muffins and teacakes all date to the days of the coal fire and the iron grate.
• This then was the cuisine of coal: boiled or steamed puddings both sweet and savoury, roast meats which are in fact baked meats served with ‘roast’ potatoes and all the trimmings, Victoria sponge cakes and hot buttered toast with jam. It is a familiar menu, a nostalgic, romantic and old-fashioned form of cookery for which Britain is known around the globe... This style of cookery arose in large part as a response to the practicalities of a coal-burning kitchen, where bringing a fire up to heat can be a rather slow process, but once the fire is burning vigorously, it can be maintained at high heat with relatively little effort. It also favours foods that respond well to that other coal-based technological innovation: the small domestic oven.
• The very earliest of such settlers, leaving Britain in the early seventeenth century for America, hailed more from the wood-burning regions of Britain rather than the coal-burning metropolis of London, and finding themselves on a wood-burning continent and encountering new sorts of food, quickly reverted to their old practices... Australia and New Zealand, colonized in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were more strongly marked by coal’s influence.
• No wonder that many of those who first encountered ‘British’ food in far-flung climes were unimpressed by the results, or that many British people adapted their diet and cooking techniques to something closer to those of their new home. <> Indeed, in Europe, British cookery was viewed throughout much of this period with a degree of bewilderment. Every other nation was able to maintain a certain continuity with the menus of the past... The change from wood to coal as a cooking fuel had a much less dramatic effect among these late adopters. Nor was it so complete... London, by contrast, cooked on coal for over 350 years. Around three quarters of England’s population burnt coal for 250 years,
• Together, cooks and coal produced a set of recipes that cut down on the amount of attention and attendance that cooking demanded, and families of all social classes came to expect homes equipped with ovens and hobs. Steamed puddings and baked meats gave women a little more time and flexibility in one aspect of their domestic chores
• Free and readily available in wood-burning homes, wood ash formed the basis of food, laundry and household hygiene regimes. When dry, it is easily removed with a brush; when wet, it is an effective cleaning agent in its own right. In contrast, coal ash is essentially dirt – and a pretty sticky and rather difficult dirt to clean up, requiring quite a bit of elbow grease and usually some soap for it to be removed.
• Mind you, Tusser was also keen that his readers should not overdo it, and wear out their pots: ‘No scouring for pride, Spare kettle whole side, Though scouring be needful, yet scouring too much, Is pride without profit, and robbeth thine hutch.’ Even in the sixteenth century, it seems, some people were too house proud... It was quite a delight to discover that two different plants have carried the name ‘scourwort’ in Britain.
• Using sand to scour dishes, for which there is ample evidence, brought practical considerations. Firstly, it demands a cloth... A cleaning method that required no hot water must also have been a real boon. It not only freed people from the time and labour of heating water, it was also cheaper in terms of fuel.
• Historically, wood ash was called ‘pot ash’, a name derived from its source, the cooking fire. The chemical reaction between pot ash and grease produces a new substance generically known as ‘soap’.
• The staining of ‘pickled rabbits’ was evidence of the action of food acids upon metal dishes. Pickled foods can eat right through a pewter plate.
• Commercial soap boilers turned to two other fats in place of tallow: train oil and olive oil. ‘Train oil’ are marine oils derived from the bodies of species of fish such as cod as well as the bodies of a range of whales.
• How rapid would have been the take-up of pottery had Londoners not, by great happenstance, recently converted to a new method of washing-up, one that suited these new wares to perfection? It works the other way round too. Households that were acquiring more pottery were more likely to convert to soap.
• I have made and used my own besoms of broom, ling and butcher’s broom and can attest that they behave very differently and would suit different areas of the home. Butcher’s broom (Ruscus aculeatus) is a stiff, spiky plant that, turned into a besom, is particularly good at cleaning cobbled areas or loose-laid brick floors, as it can get into the various cracks and crannies and flick out the dirt.
• Gone were the besoms and sand, the whiting and Flanders’ tile, the brimstone and ash. Instead there were mops – a tool almost completely absent in earlier wood-burning households – for use with soap and water.
• Seventeenth-century Londoners’ homes differed from those of their forebears in other ways too, as fashion and practicality combined to oust the traditional coverings for walls and floors. For those who could afford it (and many of course could not), comfort and fashion up until the sixteenth century had called for textile wall hangings and rush floor matting, which kept out the chill and added a burst of colour – and an indication of social status.
• Seventeenth-century Londoners’ homes differed from those of their forebears in other ways too, as fashion and practicality combined to oust the traditional coverings for walls and floors. For those who could afford it (and many of course could not), comfort and fashion up until the sixteenth century had called for textile wall hangings and rush floor matting, which kept out the chill and added a burst of colour – and an indication of social status.
• Even the royal household was happy to buy and display used tapestries. A study of the tapestries of the court of Henry VIII made by Thomas P. Campbell revealed that some tapestries given by Philip the Bold to Richard II sometime before 1399 were still hanging at Windsor Castle in 1547,
• Because tenterhooks were often purchased at the same time as these hangings, the textiles were probably stretched upon fixed batons an inch or so away from the wall surface. This lifted them free from damaging damp, while also trapping a layer of air between the wall and the hanging.
• You always work downwards along the grain of the fabric, holding the cloth either flat upon a table or draped over your hand to give a gentle curve that opens up the texture and allow the bristles to get deep inside the weaving.
• When a starched ruff became soiled, the dirt barely touched the linen, instead sitting upon the starched surface. So long as it was promptly laundered, the soil dissolved away with the starch as soon as the item was immersed in hot water.
• Dung may perhaps be particularly surprising as a cleaning agent, but it does work. Somewhat obviously, you do not use the dung directly as it falls from the beast. Instead, you lay it in a bucket of water overnight and strain off the liquid the next day. This liquid both loosens grease and bleaches stains.
• A fresh lot of water was brought up to the boil and a small load was again soaped – although less soap was needed at this stage – and a small portion of blue dye was added. This dye was essential if you wished your laundry to appear white at the end of the process. Soap, unlike lye, always yellowed cottons and linens, even if it was old soap. The blue dye did not take away this yellowing, but instead disguised it.
• an issue about which I have found nothing in the historical record: the increased workload. I believe there is vastly more domestic work involved in running a coal home in comparison to running a wood one.
• This raises a question about the increasing emphasis upon women’s place being within the home. Did the philosophy of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women, which defined much of life in the Victorian period, initially grow out of practical realities? ... But I wonder if the additional demands of running a coal-fired household might have also helped to push the idea that a woman’s place is within the home.
• Perhaps the divide between those who could meet the additional domestic burdens and those who could not became wider and more marked, dividing the population more visibly into a ‘respectable’ elite and ‘the great unwashed’. <> Cleanliness asserts itself as a powerful class marker throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• These novels naturally reflected the prevailing social attitudes and realisms, but they also helped to cultivate them. Soap, cleanliness, order and morality were more and more closely bound together in the culture and the marketplace.
• Fuller’s earth and water (or olive oil, if you have very dry skin) mixed to a paste does a very good job of thoroughly cleaning the hands, especially if you add a drop of lemon juice.
• And in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, soap use was embraced in a wave of almost crusading zeal. Korean scholar Hye Ryoung Kil argues that in this period, in particular, soap was an effective weapon in the ideological struggle to define superiority based on race. <> We live in a world cleaned according to methods and principles that were hammered out in the seventeenth century, by a generation of Londoners who made a largely economic decision to switch to coal as their daily fuel.
• The domestic matters. It is the base unit upon which all else is built. The history of the domestic is the history of everything: how ordinary people choose to lead their lives dictates the future of mankind. Politicians come and go, ideologies wax and wane, but the practical details of how you warm your house or do your washing-up will, added up with the actions of your neighbours and their neighbours, reach into the longer term.