Two nineteenth-century kitchens: Mexico and China
Mexican kitchen in Mineral de la Luz, Guanajuato, Mexico ca. 1905. John Horgan
Photographs of old kitchens are not that common so I was delighted to come across this one. In the early twentieth century, Mineral de la Luz was a boom mining town with a number of well-to-do houses. This I suspect was one because the door is open to the dining room where someone (a servant, probably) is pouring what could be horchata into the glasses on the table, already covered with a sparkling clean tablecloth.
In the kitchen, one servant is standing on a wooden box fanning the fire in the bench stove. You can still buy these fans in the market. The spiky things at the back of the stove are more fans. Copper vessels are resting in the holes in the top. The other woman is peeling onions. There is a small table in the room but judging by the pile of soup plates, this was for serving rather than work. A metal grill, a couple of enamel spoons (one slotted, one for soup) and another couple of copper cazuelas (pots) hang from the wall.
What can’t be seen is the storage area or the tall jar containing water.
I like to compare this to a photograph of the kitchen in the childhood home of Xiong Xiling (1869-1937), now a museum, in Fenghuang, Hunan. Xiong was a moderately important politician in the early days of the Chinese Republic.
Nineteenth-century Chinese Kitchen. Donald Wagner.
In many ways it is so similar. The kind of stove, with pots (this time covered woks) set in a bench it the same. So are the few utensils handing from the wall, the use of wood, pottery and basketry, and the utterly basic essentials. Here we can see the water jar and buckets and a pole, perhaps for carrying the buckets.
And yet both would have turned out elaborate, multi-dish meals for the owners of the house.
I am not suggesting influence here, just parallel developments. Both are more typical of kitchens worldwide than the open hearth kitchens that we associate with 18-19th century England and America. Both drive home the contrast between the formal rooms of the house and the dark, simple rooms where servants worked to prepare meals.
Many thanks to Kay Curtis for sending Mineral de la Luz: La obra fotográfica de John Horgan Jr. en Mexico (Guanajuato:Ediciones de la Rana, 2010) a collection now owned by the well-known Guanajuato artist, Jesús Gallardo. And thanks too to Donald Wagner for sending and discussing the photographs he took (he’d already kindly discussed woks and wok menders with me). He’s the person if you want to know about the history of Chinese metallurgy. As he pointed out, the brickwork looks suspiciously new in the Chinese kitchen so who knows how much reconstruction of the kitchen may have altered.
Makes me think of the proclamation of Chicago architect, Louis Sullivan, who closed a statement with the now famous quote, “… form ever follows function. It is the law.” It was later simplified and was a call to get design back to the basics and pay less attention to decoration. Certainly, it is still true of these pre-decorative era kitchens. Then there is the probability that money would never be spent to decorate anything at all for the servants or slaves.
And now we have very complicated functions and very complicated forms!
Wonderful pictures and information, Rachel. Thanks for writing abut this. The Chinese stove looks a lot like the stove at Monticello, among other places. A very old way of cooking, as I have seen similar stoves in archaeological reports from various locations.
This was, I think, the standard stove for sophisticated cooking world wide. Variants of course.