A few years ago, in one of my World Civ courses at Genesee Community College in Dansville, one of my students became fascinated by how people ate in various places and at various times. As we read each chapter, he’d research the topic and report to the rest of us. We all became quite interested – and looked forward to his comments!
One thing we learned was that in days gone by, about three-quarters of what people ate was bread, and it took about three-quarters of their income to buy it. If supply went down, or price went up, millions might be pushed into death by starvation. So when we read about bread riots in the French Revolution, or the Russian revolution, they weren’t really bread riots – they were food riots.
Some religions maintain distinctness in part by dietary rules… kosher in Judaism, halal in Islam.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh… one of the oldest stories in the world… a woman tames Enkidu, the Wild Man of the Forest, in part by introducing him to baked bread and brewed beer. Much of humanity was still hunting and gathering, and those folks must have seemed like wild animals to the settled city dwellers of Mesopotamia. Brewing and baking were among the arts of civilization.
Cooking required something along the lines of a kitchen, at least in built-up areas. Western Europeans did not adopt the chimney until about 1100. Imagine how smokey their homes must have been! Many homes didn’t run to a kitchen, or at least their kitchens were very small. In A Christmas Carol, when the Cratchit family roasts their tiny goose, they join many of their neighbors in taking the goose to the baker, who makes his ovens available after the morning’s bread is done.
Stoves or ovens or hearths… they all operated by fire. Imagine cooking a meal by fire when it’s already 98 degrees in July. This problem was half-way solved with “summer kitchens” – spaces away from the main living quarters, and possibly even in a separate building. (Summer kitchens also helped to contain fires before they reached the main house.)
In 1868 the Magee House (Steuben County History Center) had a long extension reaching about to the middle of what’s now Dormann Library parking lot. I suspect that at the end of that extension was a summer kitchen.
WHEREVER the stove was, it STILL burned awfully hot. The cook had a choice between closing the kitchen windows (thus risking heat exhaustion) or opening them up… thus inviting every fly in the neighborhood to come and share the feast. (And to spread germs.) Screens weren’t invented until the late 1800s. Gas and electric ranges, with their small burners, helped to solve the heat problem, but the oven still made issues.
Much of their food we would rightly consider unhealthy and insalubrious. One Civil War soldier wrote his family in Prattsburgh that the tub of butter they sent was still fresh when it reached him in northern Virginia. This suggests that their standard of freshness varied considerably from ours.
Cooks back then had no accurate way to measure oven temperature, and no reliable way to tell time. So cooking times were by guess and by God, probably leading to underdone and overcooked portions on the table at the same meal.
American cookery varied from region to region, and many ethnic groups had their own traditional favorites. I grew up in Rhode Island on spaghetti, quahog chowder, corn-meal johnnycakes, and New York System hot dogs. Ask me some time about grinders and cabinets.
Linda Ferris is doing a free Steuben County Historical Society presentation on “The Evolution of American Cookery: From the 1600s to the Early 1900s.” It will be at 4 PM on Friday, December 6 in the Bath Fire Hall. Maybe you’d enjoy it!