Dark Satanic Saucepans -- A review by Susan Price
The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman
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| Courtesy Paul Harrison, Wikimedia |
Here's a quiz for you. All the questions have the same answer.
These days most of us sleep on a bed that's raised up on legs, instead of a mattress on the floor. Why? And why do we sit on chairs with long legs rather than on the floor or on a low bench or stool?
The first houses, no matter where they were built, had much the same plan: a large room where everyone worked, chatted, cooked, ate and slept around a central fire. This form of dwelling lasted for thousands of years. Then, fairly recently, houses were divided up into many small rooms. Why did this change happen? And why are many people now returning
to 'open-plan living' with large, undivided spaces combining kitchen
and living-room?
Consider your cooking pots. Why are they made of iron instead of copper or brass and why do they have flat bottoms? Why don't they stand up on their own little legs any more, or hang from a hook, and have a rounded or 'sag-belly' bottom?
Why have the slow-cooked, grain-based, 'sticky' dishes, such as pottage, frumenty and morrews largely disappeared, while most of our cooking is boiled on the stove-top or baked (not roasted, mark you) in the oven?
Why do the British love toast? (I can vouch for that. I love toast.)
Why do you wash-up with hot water and detergent? Why do you wash yourself and your clothes with soap?
The answer to all these questions is:
Because of the fuel we burn to keep warm and to cook.
This may seem very obvious. For instance, a round-bottomed pot would fall over on a gas or electric stove, so we have flat bottomed pots. And since we can stand them directly on a gas or electric ring, there's little to be gained by hanging them from a hook over the stove.
But this wonderful book by Ruth Goodman -- absolutely packed with information and insights gained from her first-hand experience of cooking and house-keeping like it was 1523 -- makes it clear that there's far more behind the way we boil our kettles than we think.
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| The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman |
I will certainly never write any scene set in the past again without thinking about this book.
Many of you out there will be familiar with Ruth Goodman, who has brought her vast knowledge of the domestic work of the past to such programmes as Tudor Monastery Farm, Victorian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy and others.
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| Ruth Goodman |
Even when it became possible for women to be historians, they weren’t the women who lit the fires, did the cooking and then the washing-up afterwards. (Nor the heavy work of water-fetching and laundry, plus the cheese-making and the brewing.) Nor were they much interested in it.
But Ruth Goodman has done this work. As a re-enactor, as an advisor to films and museums, she has made it her business to cook and clean as women did five hundred years ago (and sometimes more.) She’s researched, experimented and found out what does (or did) and doesn’t (or didn’t) work.
And those questions posed above?
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| Peat Cutting, Somerset, 1905, wikipedia |
Those sticky, grain-based pottages and frumenties, so popular in the past, were easy to cook slowly over a wood or peat fire. Hang them above such a fire in a big, round-bellied pot and they could simmer slowly all day, provided you knew how to build and tend the fire.
But the more concentrated, intense and directed heat of a coal-fire meant that these 'sticky' foods quickly caught and burned. So these dishes fell out of favour when we changed to cooking with coal. (But, Ms Goodman tells us, the chip-shop favourite of mushy peas is a rare survivor from the middle ages. It is, pretty much, the favourite medieval dish of 'merrows'.)
As for the ground-plan of houses... Well, in a domestic setting, if you are burning wood or peat, then the most efficient layout is the central hearth in a one-room dwelling. The smoke, being wood smoke (but not alder), was tolerable, perhaps even pleasant. It rose up and filtered out through the thatch. On fine, clear days, the smoke rose high into the rafters. On overcast days, the smoke hung low, almost down to the floor.
The heat from the fire radiated out to all sides equally. This being so, the warmest, most comfortable place to be was sitting on the floor close to the fire, or on a low seat beside it. There, you got the most of the heat and were below most of the smoke (most of the time).
When bedtime came, the warmest, least smoky, place to sleep was on the floor, right beside the fire. Which is why almost all houses in the age of wood and peat-burning had a large, all-purpose, 'open-plan' central room.
The change began in London, in the 1500s, as the city grew and grew. Wood had to be brought in from surrounding districts, by cart, over terrible roads. Trees, once felled, or coppiced, grow again, but it takes years. So, while the coppices were re-growing, wood had to be brought from further and further afield and the small amounts that could be carried in a cart, plus the expense of cart and horses, meant that firewood became increasingly expensive.
But, up in Newcastle, coal practically fell out of the sea-cliffs into the boats, and much larger amounts could be sailed down the coast and up the Thames. So 'sea-coal' was much cheaper than wood.
Once coal is alight, it burns for longer than wood, with a hotter and steadier heat-- but getting it to light is much more difficult. For one thing, it needs a draught of air under the coals. All fires need air, but when your fire is made of logs or slabs of peat, things are easier to arrange. You make a 'wig-wam' of wood, for instance, or lay logs across metal supports called 'fire-dogs', which hold them up off the ground. Long slices of peat can be raised on stones.
Little lumps of coal are much harder to arrange like this. They keep rolling about. So fire-grates and fire-baskets were developed. To withstand coal's intense heat, they had to be forged from iron, and were expensive. Burning coal became a fashionable novelty, with lots of opportunities to buy new gadgets and remodel your house, to impress the neighbours while saving, long-term, on fuel costs. (Er... solar panels?)
The smoke from a coal fire was much dirtier and greasier than wood-smoke and layered every surface it touched with soot and grime -- hence the need for de-greasing soap if you were burning coal. Coal smoke was also more sulphurous and irritating than smoke from wood or peat. 'Smoke-hoods' and then chimneys were developed to channel the smoke up and away. But having a chimney meant moving the hearth from the centre of the room to one of the walls. With that arrangement, most of the smoke went up the chimney, but so did most of the heat. The fire’s heat could no longer radiate equally around the room. (I well remember living in a house warmed only by coal fires at one side of the rooms. On a cold day, you hunched over the fire, but still only one side of you was warm.)
Although it was a relief to have that sulphurous coal-smoke whooshing up your swanky, neighbour-impressing chimney, the sucking of the smoke upwards also caused a stream of cold air to be sucked across the room at floor level. So it was no longer comfortable to sit down low by the fire or to sleep on the floor. Seats were raised higher, above the draught, and so were beds.
As your hall-house was now heated so unevenly, it made sense to enclose the space around the chimney, to make a smaller, warmer room. The single large room soon became divided into many smaller rooms, each with a hearth connected to a chimney.
So it came about that changing what was burned on the fire changed the very architecture of houses and the design of furniture in them. Hall-houses consisting of one-room with a central fire, turned into homes of many small rooms, most with a ‘fire place’ of their own. And the furniture became raised above the floor-level draught.
And now that many of us don't have a coal fire at the side of the room any more? Central heating and underfloor heating has set people clamouring for large, ‘open-plan’, ‘light and airy’, ‘kitchen-diners’ again. Now, you don't impress your neighbours with hearths and chimneys in many small rooms -- now you impress them most with a large, open space, with big windows, and no visible means of heating at all.
I realise that I’d never really stopped to wonder why
the design of houses changed so much. If I thought about it at all, I had a
vague idea that it was 'fashion' or that chimneys were a superior way of managing a fire and that people therefore changed from central hearths to chimneys as soon as they could. Or, maybe, that everyone was keen to have a room of their own and privacy.
But it seems that the change had less to do with fashion, efficiency or privacy than with the fact that the population grew too fast for supplies of fire-wood to keep up. Add to that the expense of transporting cart-loads of wood over dreadful roads and it's clear that the changes in architecture and furniture had as much, or more, to do with the cost of fuel than anything. Coal was dirtier, more polluting and rather difficult to cook with -- but the supply was better and it was cheaper.
Could it be that the old style of house, with the central hearth, far from being 'primitive' was actually more comfortable and sociable, so long as you knew what you were doing when you chose your fuel and constructed your fire of wood or peat? (Though I have to say that living in one room with a crowd of other people, even if they were family and friends, would drive me crazy in about three days. At most.)
And the cooking pots?
Cooking pots used to be bronze
and brass, not iron and were often too large and heavy for one person to move. Ms
Goodman mentions one replica cooking pot she owns which she can roll, when empty, to where
she wants it, but not lift or carry. And it certainly can't be moved by one person when it's full and hot. But, it seems, these big, heavy
cauldrons weren’t moved much. The fire moved, not the pot. And a cook could build the fire into different shapes, as blacksmiths build fires around the iron they're working, the shape and size of the fire depending on how much heat is required and where the heat needs to be directed.
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| Pipkins, 3-legged, earthenware cooking pots. |
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| My 'Bilston Knight' | |
As I read about Ruth Goodman's cooking adventures in 16th Century kitchens, I realised that these tools would have been in frequent use then, for moving burning wood or peat to and fro, as and where the heat was needed. You could also help a neighbour whose fire had gone out by carrying round a shovel-full of hot cinders.
I remember visiting a Scottish castle and standing in the vast stone hearth of its kitchen, looking up at its sky through its wide chimney, and vaguely wondering just how they used such a huge fireplace to cook. The space within its chimney was as big as a small room. Even though it was built at the side of the kitchen and had a chimney, they weren’t burning coal on that hearth.
When I read Ruth Goodman’s description of how, with wood and peat, you moved the fire to the cooking, the size of that hearth suddenly made sense to me. You could have had several fires within that space, of different sizes and temperatures, while the cooks moved from one to another.
You could have roasted a whole cow in front of that hearth. Note that ‘roasted’ meat is meat cooked slowly on a spit over or before a naked flame. Our ‘Sunday roasts’ are mostly not roasts at all. They are ‘baked meats’, cooked in an oven.
It proved impractical to roast meat before a coal fire because the sulphurous fumes of coal tainted the fat and ruined the flavour (whereas wood or peat smoke tends to enhance flavour). It therefore became necessary to develop enclosed ovens where meat could be cooked by coal's heat while being protected from the coal smoke.
However, the hot, steady heat of a coal fire is ideal for scorching dry bread into toast and the butter is added later, so isn't spoiled. All over Britain rich and poor found they could make themselves a quick, tasty snack with a toasting fork and a fire. I remember making toast at coal fires, gas fires and even electric fires... I love central heating but it's a sad fact that you can't make toast on a radiator. (But you can make great toast in an air-fryer.)
But I was talking about roasting whole cows... The idea of roasted meat remained an idealised and romantic image. The expense of employing people to turn a spit while maintaining a wood or peat fire for long enough and at a high enough heat for such cooking had always made roasted meat a very high status item.
So the term ‘roasted’ survived even after the development of ovens made baking joints of meat comparatively cheap. It sounded much swankier to talk about your ‘roast beef’ than your ‘baked beef.’
I’d always been puzzled by the distinction made between ‘baked potatoes’ and ‘roast potatoes’ since they’re both, really, potatoes cooked in the oven. But the ‘roasties’ are usually cooked with the meat, so they take on the posher (but wrong) term for baked meat. Although when whole potatoes are cooked outside, in the heat of a bonfire, do they then become true 'roasted potatoes'?
The rising expense of wood and a cheap supply of coal changed domestic arrangements drastically.
Grates had to be developed to hold coal fires and once that happened, the fire became static. It was the pots that had to move. They also had to withstand the hotter and more intense coal fires. I hadn’t realised, until I read this book, that almost the first mover of the Industrial Revolution was not the need for railway engines, or iron ships or bridges. No: Industry started revolving because of the crying need for flat-bottomed iron saucepans to cook food over coal fires. Abraham Derby rose to the challenge.
The march of the dark satanic saucepans began.
'The Domestic Revolution' by Ruth Goodman, is an immensely entertaining and informative read-- and, I think, a must for any writer who wants to set a book in a past where any cooking or cleaning is done.
I can also highly recommend Ruth Goodman’s ‘How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain,’ a thorough guide to getting up people’s noses in an historically accurate way.
Susan Price has won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Fiction Award.
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