Servants in the Kitchen: They Have A History Too

Too poor to employ a servant or a washer-woman, a widower washes his children’s clothes by candlelight. Reproduced in Caroline Davidson, from J. Wight’s Mornings at Bow Street, illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1824.

After my last post on servants, I’d like to leap straight to the question of what cooks knew and what their employers knew, and who was appropriating what. But because far from being the exception, domestic service is so very much the norm throughout history and around the globe, and at the same time so very varied in its forms, I want here to point to the rise and fall of one particular kind of domestic service.

The rise and fall of domestic service in middle class households

The middle class that is always rising is a bit of a joke among historians, who see student essay  after student essay that talks about “the rising middle class.”  Even if over-worked, though, the middle class did rise. And with the rise of the middle class, there was a rise in  a particular form of domestic service: the one- or two-servant household, with the servants often living out. And then, this form of domestic service fell, outsourced to housewives, factories, and electric gadgets.

So a detour through the rising middle class.  The big rise in the middle class came (or is coming) when societies shift from rural to urban, from the majority of the population living and working on the land to the majority of the population, as much as 90%, living and working in cities.

The shift from rural to urban occurred first in England, beginning in the late eighteenth century.  Britain was 20% urban at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 70% urban at the end.

Then it happened in other northern European countries, Japan, and the United States. The US reached 70% urban in 1960.

Urbanization is now occurring rapidly in, say, in India, Nigeria, and Mexico. Mexico reached 70% urban in the last few years.

In short, over a brief couple of hundred years out of the twelve thousand years or so since people began living in villages and working the land, a revolutionary change from rural to city living has occurred. Today just over  50% of the world’s population lives in towns compared to the historical norm of less 20%.

During these two hundred years as one country after another urbanized, domestic service including in the kitchen became first much commoner, then peaked, and then declined when urbanization went over, say, 70%.

It wasn’t urbanization per se that caused this bulge in servants in middle class households. Rather underlying social and economic changes created a greater supply of servants and a greater need for them.

More potential servants became available in the form of young (usually) women (and men too) who had formerly labored at cultivating the land and preparing their meals.

Driven by mechanization, poor wages, and/or bad living conditions in the country, men and women sought their fortune elsewhere, whether they were English displaced by enclosures and mechanization, Irish fleeing famine, Japanese and Chinese escaping political upheavals and food shortages, blacks in the US moving northward from an impoverished south, or Mexicans seeking to make money to send home to buy land for a house.  migrated from country to city.

Sometimes the migration to cities happened within a given region or country. Often it meant crossing physical barriers such as mountain chains or oceans or political barriers such as national borders.

Domestic service was one of the, probably the major way for a recent migrant from the country to support herself.

In the cities, the middle class was growing as industrialization proceeded. Servants signaled new-found status.

Queuing for water from a street pipe in London, 1862. Reproduced in Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done, from The Builder.

Servants were also necessary to run a middle class house. It is hard to remember how onerous, what horrible drudgery housework was. Candles or lamps had to be lit and trimmed and filled. Urine and stools had to be disposed of. Water had to be carried and heated and carried again. (Paris did not get running water until the second half of the nineteenth century, much of rural England and rural France still lacked it until after World War II). Vegetables had to be cleaned of encrusting mud and insects. Chicken, a rare luxury, had to be plucked, drawn and cut into individual servings. Shopping meant going from baker to butcher to greengrocer to grocer and carrying everything home in a basket.

Meanwhile expectations were rising.  The kinds of food once available only for the rich were being reinterpreted for those lower down the social scale.  This meant meat cooked in the oven, with a sauce on the side, and vegetables cooked separately, and a dessert.

So aspiring middle class housewives hired young women frequently recently arrived from the countryside.  As Rajagopal Sukumar commented on an earlier post of mine, “Even today, in India, . . .the rising affluence of the upper middle class means the demand for servants is rising rapidly.” (05/02/2008)

Then circumstances changed and both the supply of servants and the need for them declined.  Migration from the country dwindled.  Jobs as shop assistants, seamstresses, typists, receptionists, etc became appealing alternatives to domestic service. Children of of those who had been servants often moved into the middle class themselves.

At the same time, piped water, gas and electricity made the work of lighting and heating and cleaning houses, doing the laundry, and cooking much easier. Canned, then frozen foods, supermarkets, and kitchen gadgets helped.And so domestic service declined in society after society.

So what happened in middle class kitchens with one or two servants? Who knew what about cooking?

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Just for the record, some other kinds of domestic service include:

Domestic service in courts or aristocratic houses

Courts which from earliest times–3000 BC–had  professional kitchens and processing facilities. Upwards of a thousand people labored to turn grains into flour, milk into cheese, carcasses into cuts of meat, fruits or grains into alcohol, and then to turn these into meals for the highest ranking to the lowest. Kitchen workers learned their skills as they worked their way through the ranks. Food and lodging formed the largest part of their payment.

Domestic service in artisanal enterprises

Farmer’s wives who made butter and cheese had  milkmaids living in the house essentially as part of family.  Bakers had apprentices who similarly lived in. Together with paid employees and servants, the household/family probably numbered a dozen or so. Food and lodging formed the largest part of the servant’s payment. The classic work on the baker’s “family” is Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965).

Domestic service as a way of raising children

When I taught in a Nigerian girls’ boarding school in the 1960s, my 18-year-old Nigerian colleague had her little 6-year old cousin living in and helping clean and cook in return for food, clothing and schooling.  This was common practice in the country.  And forms of this child service sometimes to aid with education, sometimes simply to be able to support children at all, as Cindy Bertelson describes in Haiti, were and are widespread.

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