Idylls of the Farmhouse Kitchen
In my last post, Memories of English Farmhouse Cooking: Beyond England, I talked about three books that reminded me of the English farmhouse cooking with which I grew up: Joan Parry Dutton’s The Good Food and Good Cheer of Old England (1960), Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (1976) and Darina Allen’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking (2010).
One reader remarked that the post was pure nostalgia. And so, in many way, it was. It could have been called “Idylls of the Farmhouse Kitchen.”
None of these books mention what was less than good about farmhouse cooking, nor what was less than pleasant. It was not all an idyll. So let me point out some of the less than idyllic aspects in my own experience, paralleled I suspect in the experience of these authors.
If the damsons and greengages of summer were delights that I have not been able to replicate in the many towns in which I have cooked, they have to be set against the sprouting potatoes and mealy apples that were all that were left in the spring. “Oh, for something green, ” my father said. We children devoured young hawthorn leaves and the first shoots of parsley.
Or, to take the bread and dripping that I agree with Darina is divine, I remember meeting a old schoolfriend, a city girl. Thirty years after graduating, she identified me as the “girl who liked bread and dripping” and I still cringed with the shame of my eleven-year-old self who had innocently revealed such a lower class preference.
In winter, in an unheated house where a glass of water on the bedside table froze, my mother got up in the dark to go down and get a fire going before cooking breakfast. Prior to preparing dinner, she cut cabbage in driving rain.
And in late summer, the fruit always seemed to ripen on the hottest days of the year. It had to be picked, washed, the jars sterilized, the fruit bottled. My father, in for a brief meal, before going back to the field to make use of the last daylight, was too tired to sympathize as she went back to do the dishes, wipe down the jars before labelling them and storing them in the pantry.
And none of this ventures into lack of money, of limited horizons, or even of the violence that social historians have found to be so prevalent in small scale societies.
Above all, the work was relentless, with no take out, no restaurants within reach even had they been affordable. I talked about this in a post, A Good Cook, a year or so ago.
So the farmer’s wife cooked, even if she had flu, even if she was bent double with menstrual cramps, and even if she had morning sickness or have been up all night with a child with measles.
Darina Allen’s mother had nine children and yet she made soda bread every day, or at least frequently enough that her daughter remembers it as being daily.
Cooking, in short, was a job, not an enjoyable hobby or diversion. “What on earth is joyous about cooking?” asks Anne Mendelson in Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (1996). “People who do not know its capacity to bore, weary, and frustrate are people who have never cooked . . . Marion [Rombauer, author, following her mother, of The Joy of Cooking, one of America’s most popular cookbooks] and her mother knew very well that people do not find joy where they do not perceive freedom, control, leisure, or esteem. To put the matter in bald historical perspective, such things were not socially appropriate to cooking in the days when it was done by servants or those too poor to hire them.”
My parents were determined to give their daughters the best education they could afford so that we had a choice about whether or not we cooked as the job that came with being a farmer’s wife.
One of the biggest and least noted job migrations of the past hundred years is from rural farm wife, which meant full-time unpaid cook, to paid work, including cooking.
Neither Joan Parry Dutton nor Edna Lewis nor Darina Allen were unpaid rural cooks, any more than I am. In their books, they are talking about their mothers. Two of the three built on their experience to launch professional culinary careers, Darina Allen running a successful culinary school, Edna Lewis as a chef. In these careers, they had the freedom to move, the control over what they did with their lives, and the esteem of their colleagues and patrons.
When these three women turned to writing cookbooks, it was only natural that they wanted to show their culinary heritage in the best light.
Just as important, major trade publishers like Knopf, Reynal (later absorbed by Harcourt), Kyle, and Gourmet do not publish cookbooks as social history. The stock-in-trade, the tone of cookbooks and most food memoirs is nostalgia.
I learned that the hard way in the mid 1990s, when I wrote to several trade publishers inquiring if they would be interested in a book on the cuisines of Hawaii. Editors responded enthusiastically, words like bounty, tropical paradise, and coconuts peppering their comments.
In response, I explained that, if Hawaii was a paradise for those with airline tickets, for the successive settlers it had been a dusty red moated food desert with no edible plants. My book was about the courage of the Hawaiians, the Asians, and the Anglos who with imported plants and sweated labor had made it habitable. The rejection letters came by return mail.
The New York editors were right. They have to publish books that sell, and my ironically-titled The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage (1996) was much better suited to a university press.
The cookbooks and memoirs published by big trade presses are for readers who work, who cook as a hobby, who want recipes to try or, just as often, glimpses into imagined alternatives to kitchens in city apartments and suburban houses. And few alternatives are more exotic than the rural kitchen abandoned several generations ago. Each of these authors, less far removed than most of their readers, offer that glimpse.
Each of us naturally tailors our life story to our audience. I know I tell mine differently to an academic, a family member, or a neighbor, say. For readers looking for the escapism of a pastoral idyll, Joan Parry Dutton, Edna Lewis, and Darina Allen oblige. They would have been foolish not to. Their stories ring true with the part of my experience that was idyllic. Beyond that they are silent.
Rachel,
Long live university presses and academic journals.
I wonder how many of the old cookbooks had a university press or an equivalent that supported description of the hard realities of the domestic kitchen (as opposed to the royal courts). Or, how many unpublished notes or diaries exist that describe everyday life in the domestic kitchen?
Bala
Interesting question, Bala. I am sure you can find accounts of ordinary kitchen life. It was so taken for granted, though, so obvious to most people, that I am sure only a tiny minority found ordinary kitchen life worth commenting on. A good place to look would be the outpouring of work on servants in the nineteenth century English and American kitchens.
There are “memorial cookbooks”.
When a particularly talented home cook died (almost always a woman historically), it’s not uncommon to have the person memorialized via a cookbook of her recipes.
It was rather common in Thailand. I’ve seen similar stuff in Sri Lanka as well. Also the Philippines. I think Haiti as well.
David Thompson bases many many of his recipes in his masterly “Thai Food” based on these obscure sources. (Of course, the Royal Palace paid him to do so.)
If you expand these cookbooks to royal or semi-royal sources, you actually have a really vast collection. I have a large collection on Indian, Sri Lankan, and Thai cookbooks in my collection of the “royal kitchen” variety. Needless to say these recipes are laborious and extravagant. However, modern equipment makes short shrift of a lot of the technical problems.
To be perfectly cruel, a lot of this material was published when the royals and semi-royals lost their status. The stuff in the kitchen was “intellectual property” and publishing it was the one thing that would ensure an income for the formerly landed class. The pattern is very clear!
If you get down to just the “domestic kitchen”, a lot of the stuff dates back to the transition between the agrarian and the industrial. That’s when for the first time, you actually need instruction manuals for the housewife. Before that, you were just assumed to know that stuff. Why write it down?
As she says, the manuals for the servants are particularly telling.
Let me know if you need more details on any of these. I’ll be happy to provide references, etc.
Thanks for reminding me of the memorial cookbooks. And of the royal cookbooks. By a nice coincidence I spent Friday afternoon talking to a graduate student working on the royal cookbooks of south India. I like the idea of those recipes as intellectual property and hence a source of income. They don’t have to be royal, though. Upper middle class will do nicely too!
I would love a list of references from the graduate student if he/she could share.
Agreed on the upper middle class as well. I have a quite a few of those in my collection as well. I guess I included them as quasi-royals.
Let me ask her.
You’re right, Rachel, that publishers aren’t looking for social history when they consider a cookbook for publication. And you’re also right in your related point, over on FB, where you referenced the limits of trying to use cookbooks when we write social history.
As many people have pointed out, cookbooks can’t tell us what people actually cooked. But the cookbooks people bought at a particular moment in time do tell us something about how those people imagined food in their lives, and how they imagined themselves in the world.
Yes, absolutely to your second points, Erica. I would be the last to say that cookbooks have no value for the historian. We can’t do without them.
I wrote about the cookbook as “pastoral” here:
http://shockingschadenfreude.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-dark-side-of-pastoral.html
It attacks the same points that you do but from an economic angle.
Crazy Chef, we agree about so much about food. Thanks for pointing out this post of yours which I had missed. I’m not sure I would agree that farming is that simple though.
You’re using the word “simple” in the colloquial sense. I’m using it in the economic sense.
Even washing clothes by hand is “difficult”. However, it’s not a very economically productive skill when washing machines are plentiful.
Farming follows the same pattern. It may be laborious, back-breaking and “difficult” but it has low economic value when machines can do the job.
If an uneducated farmer can do the job in India and Africa, Ricardo and Economics 101 will tell you that the returns on that will be minimal. Difficulty is irrelevant.
Only very specialized jobs have high economic returns – a food historian, a mathematician, a physicist, a nuclear engineer. Something that the vast majority of humanity simply cannot do.
Thanks for the clarification. I’m waiting for the high returns on being a food historian!
“Two hundred years ago everybody made their own clothes. Nowadays we haven’t time to do that—we go out and buy our clothes. Nobody makes their own clothes unless it’s their hobby. The same thing will happen with food: I estimate that in about 50 years time dinner will be something people will go out and buy, and nobody will cook, unless it’s their hobby. We in the food industry are working towards that.” Food industry spokesman on TV a quarter century ago.
We’re getting there; will it take even another quarter century? There are a relative handful of us who are living at the best time to eat in the history of the world. We in the West who are moderately comfortable may eat as well and even as ethically, by our own standards, as we choose. Meanwhile, those who eat not wisely but too well are an accelerating number who are stretching the resources of our health services. Be careful what you wish for!
Agree, John. Thanks for posting.
Writing my own cookbook titled Got Rats in My Kitchen (have too, I keep and occasionaly breed pet rats, they process most organic waste and leftovers into uniform pellets while performing free Harold Lloyd stunts) but ow … it will be a seriously make do, buy cheapest utensils, mystery meat, and cabbages, substitute anything, experiment out on a limb, add any none too green potatoes with a pinch of any herb that smells nice, and whatever seems sad in the fridge … No glossy pics either unless rat photos count. In a language of approximately one million speakers (not sure about readers), and from our local cookery magazines and blogs, I get the impression all our enthusiastic cooks are either fervent fans of Jamie the Olive or deep into New Scandinavian goat cheese and beetroot concoctions. Neither exactly available for a small town cook or affordable for young families or even Just What Mom Used to Make. However the people I write for, the people who might feel happier and more creative in their kitchens despite their limited resources, they would never waste their money on a cookbook (and one with rats in it to boot!) when they can buy cheap Russian fast noodles instead. Doesnt help writing, that thought. No university presses for this kind of cookbook but maybe the people who publish my poems …?
Cooking has become cuisine. Having everyone fed and unpoisoned has become a fad fest. Sad and not at all practical.
And a great burden on the cook. I look forward to Got Rats in My Kitchen and will give it an honored place on the shelf.
Following on Ganna’s comment, I wish there were a cookbook for poor people using the four basic vegetables available everywhere year round – potatoes, cabbage, carrots and onions. One could also include rice and beans. Maybe it could be a chef’s challenge project – create delicious and simple to make recipes for the money- and time-challenged.
Great idea. Lots of good recipes around, though many require fat/oil to create variety.
And I do attempt to write something along these lines. After all I have been relatively poor (not Sahara poor but certainly cabbage potatoes beans and barley poor) for most of my life.
BTW the fats are fun but variety comes from herbs. Try boiling plain potatoes with dill, with parsley, with rosemary, with garlic, with nutmeg, with sweet paprika, endless possibilities! As well herbs are relatively cheap (you only need small quantities, seasonal herbs are often pick your own or easily scavenged, potted herbs look nice on any kitchen windowsill unless Mad Gardener Pet uproots them). After all I grew up with the Soviet Trinity of fats, bacon, butter, and sunflower oil. (USSR had pigs, cows, and sunflowers. I tasted my first olive at age 16 when a relative brought a tiny priceless jar from Moscow, black unpitted somewhat preserved somewhere in the Balkan, and I remember thinking they actually eat THAT?)
But one can do a lot with potatoes, cabbages, carrots, beans, peas, apples (some nice wild apple trees near my home), buckwheat, barley, rice, just a bit of whatever meat comes cheapest, any windfalls or lucky finds, and a desire to cook. And herbs, of course;)
Olives are an acquired taste. I’ll try boiling potatoes with herbs. Mint or parsley were common additions post boiling in my youth. Love the Soviet Trinity of fats.
Try Indian cooking.
The cheapest of spices and the cheapest of ingredients in endless permutations and combinations. (Spices are not cheap in the West but that’s a marketing thing not an innate problem. Try any Indian grocery store. You’ll stock enough for a few years.)
Endless permutations of exactly those ingredients – onions, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, endless varieties of beans, rice and wheat in the form of flatbreads. Chilis too.
Peas would be a luxury product.
Add in cauliflowers, tomatoes, green beans, greens and yogurt and you’re in “desi land”.
Spices are key though!
Somehow I hadn’t checked my comments for days. That would certainly work now. I think you can, and did, get quite a bit of variation even without spices. With them, as you say, you are set to go.