The kitchen from ploughing to pie

I'm cur­rent­ly watch­ing an excit­ing series of BBC pro­grammes, British his­tor­i­cal re-enactment, about farm life in dif­fer­ent peri­ods. One of the things that fas­ci­nates me the most is to see how our urban civil­i­sa­tion has sep­a­rat­ed us from the process of pro­duc­ing our own food.

I already per­ceived this in Morocco, espe­cial­ly when I went down to the "bled" to my in-laws, but even here, many process­es have been indus­tri­alised, and food crops are becom­ing scarce.

"Life on the Farm" is a series of pro­grammes that show a year in the life of English farm­ers from dif­fer­ent periods:

• 1500, Tudor Farm shows the life of ten­ant farm­ers in a large monastery
• 1620, "The Green Valley" in the time of the Stuarts
• Around 1880, the farm in the late Victorian era shows the pro­found changes of the indus­tri­al era on agri­cul­tur­al life
• Finally, at the very begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, with the Edwardian farm, indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion comes to the farm itself.

One of the great plea­sures of Ruth Goodman, the his­to­ri­an on the pro­gramme, is cook­ing. So she uses recipe books and home eco­nom­ics from the time to recre­ate the dish­es you ate when you were a slight­ly wealthy farmer (no tree bark flour in times of famine, for exam­ple). She also makes a lot of pre­serves. And she makes or has made her own uten­sils, as well as remedies.

As she is a farmer, she also takes care of the breed­ing of cer­tain ani­mals, of cul­ti­va­tion, she makes her veg­etable gar­den, takes part in the harvests…

The use of resources, without waste

I have also seen this at my parents-in-law's house: noth­ing is wast­ed! The crops are designed to feed peo­ple and ani­mals, every part of the plant can be used.

We buy few man­u­fac­tured prod­ucts. You ask a crafts­man to help you make durable goods from local resources (wood, reeds, etc.), such as a bas­ket that will last for fifty years and that you can then repair, or use for heat­ing by burn­ing it.

It is pre­cise­ly under Victoria that this is begin­ning to change. For exam­ple, farm­ers no longer spun wool to make their own cloth, but bought ready-made fab­rics man­u­fac­tured in the tex­tile mills that processed cot­ton import­ed from the colonies.

The nails made by the vil­lage black­smith were replaced by indus­tri­al nails. At the same time, machines began to save work, not only in the fields but also at home (a spin-dryer made life eas­i­er for women when they did the laundry).

The kitchen changes with the environment

In "The Victorian Farm", we learn that the use of min­er­al coal total­ly changed cook­ing.

While burn­ing wood could make food smell good, burn­ing coal was unpleas­ant. It was there­fore nec­es­sary to sep­a­rate the fuel from the food: this was the inven­tion of the "mod­ern" cook­er, with a place where the coal burned, a pipe to evac­u­ate the smoke, an oven and above all a flat sur­face on which to place… pots and pans.

It was the end of cook­ing in the fire­place, with the pot hang­ing over the fire. It was the arrival of casseroles and the wide­spread use of long-cooked stews. It was also the pos­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing a cook­er in a small­er space than the fire­place, and of bet­ter man­ag­ing the cook­ing tem­per­a­ture. In short, the begin­ning of an evo­lu­tion towards the mod­ern kitchen.

Of course, there were already sys­tems with con­tain­ers in which char­coal was put to cook a pan placed on top, which was called a "kitchen gar­den", but they were reserved for very large kitchens.

One kilo of bread and four litres of beer per day!

As in many coun­tries, beer was a much more com­mon drink than water. Because at that time, water was not very healthy. Lots of "lit­tle bugs" and microbes could linger in ponds and wells… Beer, at least, with its (slight) alco­hol con­tent, did not have these draw­backs. And it was nour­ish­ing too. And it prob­a­bly made you a bit euphoric!

Like bread, which was the very first food. Thick slices of bread, too thick to be called toast, were used as plates on which to place the stew or veg­eta­bles that had been cooked for a long time in the pot.

Pies, "tourtes" and pasties

Pies and pasties are emblem­at­ic of English cuisine.

These recipes had a very spe­cif­ic pur­pose: they made it easy to trans­port food for peo­ple work­ing out­side. There was no need for dish­es, the crust was enough to pro­tect the food, which was sim­ply wrapped in a cloth.

In par­tic­u­lar, the Cornish Pasty (which is now a pro­tect­ed name) had a very wide rim so that the min­ers could hold it eas­i­ly and eat the rest of the pie with­out get­ting it dirty with the coal dust on their hands.