The house of six granaries
Here’s what for me is another mind-stretching house, so far as food is concerned. It’s far away from Mexico and just as far away from the room for storing food that Ammini Ramachandran described. This time it’s not Catholic or Hindu but Jewish. This is a house owned by a prosperous, though not super well-to-do family in a small town in Hungary around a century ago.
So what’s it like? The house is built around a courtyard where there’s a well for water and a channel where water runs off into the garden. That has (at least) a quince, grapevines, black currants and red currants. And the rooms around the back–all six of them–are granaries. Imagine storing that much grain. Imagine the number of cats they must have had. Imagine that even with lots of cats, there would have been so many rats and mice.
And if we go to a blow up we find the front part of the house is divided into two apartments, one on each side. And the side that the narrator describes has two pantries.
The front panty, next to the kitchen door, was a glorified cupboard, the Handspeiz. There the wife of the house stored the really valuable ingredients: chocolate, cocoa, raisins, and cones of refined sugar.
The back pantry could not be accessed from the kitchen. The servant who cooked had ask permission to have the key, go out of the kitchen through the courtyard and back toward the granaries. The pantry was lit and ventilated by a tiny window facing the courtyard and another facing the garden. Inside she found big enamel mixing bowls filled with grains. Eggs were kept in the bowl of barley which was believed to preserve them well.
The most valuable ingredient, goose fat, was kept in an 18 inch high enameled steel pot with two handles and a hinged lid with a strap for a padlock. This family did not lock it because the pantry itself was locked. Gentiles apparently locked their pots of lard. In any case the goose fat was good for preserving roast meat which if buried in the fat lasted for weeks.
This did not exhaust the storage areas. There was also a cellar that was cool enough to store fresh meat for a day or so. And it also housed wooden crates that were filled with onions, potatoes, root vegetables and cabbage for the winter.
And the kitchen? It had a big marble topped table and a wood-fired metal stove with two burners on one side and an oven on the other. It had a bucket with the cooking water under the window, cast brass mortars for pounding the sugar, copper bowls, a cast iron scale and a poppy seed mill. The laundry tub doubled as a bath tub.
All this from András Koerner’s fascinating book, A Taste of the Past: The Daily Life and Cooking of a Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Homemaker publi9shed by the University Press of New England.
