Lest We Forget: Servants in Culinary History

Today the question of servants is an embarrassing one. We pussyfoot around the very mention of the word “servant.” It’s just so politically incorrect.

Few people in modern America or Europe (or Canada, Australia, or New Zealand) have servants in the house. Perhaps they have a cleaner who whizzes through once a week, perhaps they have a babysitter. But servants are not the norm. Nor do many people work as household servants. It just doesn’t seem a good way to go when there’s such a choice of paid employment out there.

That makes the Americans and Europeans among us oddities. We’re oddities in terms of world history as the first society not divided into patrons and servants. We’re oddities in terms of the world today where in many countries this is still the basic division.

I’ve heard friends in Mexico say “either you have a servant (or lots of them) or you are one.”  Too true. In most places, past or present, being a servant is the only employment available if you are poor. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but not much. Most people were and/or are servants for part or all of their lives.

A few facts and figure:

• Until the early twentieth century the single largest occupation for English women was domestic service. For men and women taken together, it was the second-largest occupation (even though both at the time and later factory workers and miners got much more publicity).

• One in every five people in a European city was a servant. Leaving children and the elderly to one side, this means at least a quarter and probably a half of all adults were servants.

• Even in the relatively egalitarian United States in 1900 almost one in ten households employed servants.

These statistics all come from rapidly-industrializing Europe and America. In China, India, Africa, and most other parts of the world, the proportion of servants was higher yet.

I’m pretty sure that if I (or you, the reader of this blog) went back three generations, we’d find that our great grandparents were servants for at least part of their lives.  If we want to understand the history of food, we’ve got to bring servants back center stage and give them their fair due.

Who were these servants?

Obviously over human history, what it meant to be a servant varied enormously.

• Some were young men and women from the local village or estate. Some were poor country girls or boys who had moved to the city hoping to improve their lot (common almost everywhere).

• Some were prisoners captured in war (common practice in all ancient societies).

• Some were serfs (Russia). Or slaves (the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or plantation societies from Brazil to the American South).

Wherever they came from, whatever their exact legal status, the majority of servants worked in the kitchen. Preparing food was the most tedious, time-consuming back-breaking job in the house. The one exception was laundry and laundry did not come around three times a day.

What are we, in our little odd servantless fishbowl, missing if we don’t take servants into account when we write food history?

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This is an updated version of an article I wrote in June 2006 for the newsletter of the Food History Committee of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, edited by the astute Mary Margaret Pack.

Meanwhile here are a few sources. John Burnett, The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working Class People, 1820-1920 (Indiana University Press, 1974; Peter Stearns, European Society in Upheaval, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1979), 52; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Pantheon), p.172; Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done (Chatto and Windus, 1982), ch.8.

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