Life in the Victorian kitchen: culinary secrets and servants' stories

178 Pages·2014·90.175 MB·English

by  Foy, Karen

Life in the Victorian
Kitchen

LIFE IN THE
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Pen & Sword History
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Karen Foy 2014
ISBN 978 1 78303 639 4
The right of Karen Foy to be identified as the Author of this
Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Introduction vi
Chapter 1 The Rural Revolution: Feast and Famine 1
Chapter 2 T he Heart of the Home: Inside the Cottage
Kitchen 9
Chapter 3 Country Matters 17
Chapter 4 Preserving Produce 27
Chapter 5 Regional & Seasonal Cuisine 37
Chapter 6 Domestic Duties: Life in Service 52
Chapter 7 Culinary Creativity 78
Chapter 8 Food from the Empire 89
Chapter 9 The Professionals 110
Chapter 10 The Country House Garden 124
Conclusion: Changing Times 138
Tracing Food Industry Forebears 141
Timeline 147
Bibliography 149
Index 151
Introduction
Have you ever read an old recipe, or an inherited family cookbook
and wondered how your ancestors managed long before the
introduction of the microwave and freezer? Just how should you
‘coddle’ an egg, how would you source a pineapple in the 1800s and
what on earth was mock turtle soup? Today, we rarely take seasonal
cooking into consideration, but long before the development of the
modern supermarket, the availability of produce and ingredients
dominated people’s lives.
Picture the scene: it’s a hot summer’s day and fields of corn sway
gracefully in the gentle mid-afternoon breeze, as jewel coloured
kingfishers watch the world go by from the riverbank. Outside a
tumbledown cottage children play, skipping alongside the vegetable
patch, chasing each other between the lines of freshly laundered
washing, whilst the aroma of hot fresh-baked bread wafts through the
open kitchen window. Add appropriate costumes and a dash of makeup
and you could have walked onto the set of a television period drama.
Even before TV gave us historical adaptations, our forebears often
romanticised life in the past through paintings, which presented a
highly idealised view of the world. These images of rural life, where
the mother of a brood of children casually bakes bread on the kitchen
table, seem carefree and easy – a moment in time captured on canvas. I
often wish we could revisit the same scene half an hour later to see the
reality: the mother up to her armpits in washing, with the stone floor to
be scrubbed, the fire to be stoked, and the ongoing dilemma of feeding
eight with only one loaf of bread.
Although these artists secured rose-tinted snapshots of an era before
the camera, the reality was often harsh and unforgiving. Summers in
the Victorian countryside, uninterrupted by industry and bursting
with the sights and sounds of nature must have been glorious, but what
about the bleak winters, when fields of frostbitten crops brought little
work for the menfolk, leaving their families hungry?
Period novels help to give us further perspective, enabling us to revel
in the luxurious lives of the wealthy whilst feeling grateful that we are
not exposed to the dire situations experienced by the poor. Jane Austen
largely avoids the subject of poverty in her novels and when she refers
Introduction vii
to the servants they rarely speak for themselves or reveal their thoughts
and feelings, only confirming the belief that at this time domestics were
‘seen and not heard’. Jane showcased polite society in her upper middle
class tales of Regency life but, as the Victorian era dawned, writers
began to give a truer picture of the wildly differing living conditions
experienced among the social classes.
Dickens offers a glimpse of the underbelly of nineteenth century
society and criticises the blind eye turned to it by the wealthy. Flora
Thompson wrote of her late Victorian Oxfordshire childhood in what
now seems like a rural idyll, yet behind the everyday occurrences she
skilfully exposes the hardships faced by the hamlet dwellers compared
to their contemporaries in the nearby town.
During this period, the lives of the rich and the poor could not have
been more different. Their homes, amenities, employment choices and
incomes were poles apart. In the nineteenth century, your social status
determined everything from the way you wore your clothes to the food
you ate. Etiquette was essential among the educated upper classes,
but the working classes didn’t have the time to linger over a leisurely
breakfast. Employment was hard to come by and easily lost, so getting
to work on time was their priority. They didn’t possess multiple sets
of cutlery, taking up a fresh one for each course, instead a single knife,
fork and spoon for each family member.
For most ordinary working people, meals consisted of one simple
course to deliberate over, and they could only dream of the lavish,
exotically flavoured dishes enjoyed by the upper classes. Few had
access to expensive ingredients, or the wherewithal to pay for them.
Country people would sow basic crops in their small kitchen gardens
or on a rough patch of land near their cottage and hope to grow enough
produce to last the winter. Life was a constant battle of finding work,
putting food on the table, clothing their families and maintaining their
homes and, on the rare occasion when they had a spare half an hour,
they had very little resources to do anything with it.
But every social class shared one common denominator. No matter
what era we live in, our lives revolve around food – what we eat, when
we eat, the quantity of our food, or the lack of it. As a result, the kitchen
has long been the heart of every home, whether a basic cooking pot in a
rural cottage or the bustling hub of a country mansion.
To fully understand the development of the Victorian kitchen, we
must first look back at the economic history of Britain and the inherited
legacy left by previous generations. From the battle to reduce the global
price of wheat to the introduction of new labour-saving methods and
viii Life in the Victorian Kitchen
innovations, each event, incident and invention revolutionised life
within the home. The Victorians witnessed more rapid changes in
mechanisation than in any previous era. Cooking over an open grate was
commonplace at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, but when her era
drew to a close, gas and electric devices, ground-breaking technology,
and an endless variety of ingredients from the Empire had opened up a
new and exciting culinary world to the British public.
Chapter One
The Rural Revolution: Feast and Famine
Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in
Scotland supports the people.
(Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Britain was in
the midst of one of the many transitional periods that were to
take place during her reign. Working the land remained one of the
most common ways for Britons to earn a living, yet with compulsory
education still far off on the horizon, a quarter of the population was
living in poverty, with 40 per cent of the country’s wealth owned by 5
per cent of the population. Britain was still feeling the effects of a war
that had ended 20 years previously. The Napoleonic Wars had made
it impossible to import corn from Europe, resulting in the expansion
of British wheat farming and, for the landowner and farmer, an era of
advancing progress and affluence.
Corn cultivation was on the increase. There had been huge
improvements in machinery and farming implements: fields had been
divided into a convenient workable size; drainage had been innovated;
roads had been constructed and farm buildings erected. Investments
were free-flowing and profits were rising, but for labourers and farm
servants rents were rising and bread prices were soaring.
When the Napoleonic conflicts finally ended in 1815, it had been
feared that foreign corn imports would lower grain prices, so British
landowners appealed to the House of Commons to protect the profits
of their farmers. The first of the Corn Laws was introduced stating
that no foreign corn would be allowed into Britain until domestic
corn reached a price of 80 shillings per quarter. Although landowners
benefited from this decree, among the working classes this move was
devastating. Artificially high corn prices meant that the bulk of their
wages would be spent on bread. With little money left for workers to
spend on other goods, manufacturing suffered, workers were laid off
and slowly the economy began to decline.