The Kitchen If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home

Delicious. Baked hedgehog.

Morning. I'm Dr Lucy Worsley,

chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, based here at Hampton Court.

Another day at the office.

As a historian though, I'm fascinated by the intimate,

personal bits of history and the way they've shape modern life.

Oh, it's exciting, it's exciting!

In this series, I'll be tracing the story of British domestic life through four rooms -

the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom and the kitchen.

THEY LAUGH

From the homes of the middle ages to the present day,

I'll be exploring the ways that our attitudes and habits have changed,

meeting some extraordinary people and doing some rather odd things.

So why are we pouring Brian's urine onto this sheet?

Quick, quick, quick! This time, from the Medieval one-room cottage to an open plan futuristic kitchen utopia.

You've got your voom voom technology in your car.

Why not reapply it to your kitchen?

I'll be discovering how the kitchen came in from the cold.

-You're not too bad for a beginner.

-She bit patronising, isn't she?

Our homes are a reflection of ourselves.

They tell us so much about who we are and how we live.

But the privacy, security and technology

that we take so much for granted now are relatively recent developments.

Houses like this have evolved over many centuries and every single room has a really fascinating history.

This time, the room that's changed from being the lowest in status

in the house to the place that most people want to spend time in.

Mind the scooter.

Most people would say that their kitchen was the most important room in the house, absolutely central,

and it's also possible to spend a huge amount of money in your kitchen, more than any other room.

You can get fancy fridges, enormous posh cookers.

The technology here is just extraordinary.

But this is only possible because of centuries and centuries of innovations.

Kitchen technologies started out with some very humble beginnings.

Our story starts in the Middle Ages, when a peasant's home was one room

and their whole house was the kitchen.

It had a small fire at its centre which was the only source of heat for cooking.

The technology here is really very simple.

There is an oval shaped hearth stone with ridges on it,

a very smoky wood fire and a little pot that stands on three legs

and a wooden spoon and you can see that, actually, it's very effective.

That's why it lasted for so long - from the Saxons right through to the Tudors.

Kitchen supplies were totally seasonal and peasants had to forage for whatever they could get.

They were at the very bottom of the feudal system.

The lord of the manor owned the land they lived on, including any food sources.

The forest was the larder of the poor but there were very strict rules to observe

about what food you could take.

If I came into the woods as a serf, if I took a deer, I was poaching.

But there were sort of nasty animals

I could take, like hedgehogs, and I could also take some of the plants.

It's all controlled by very strict rules, and I can't take

any wood for my cooking fire off the floor of the forest.

I can get it out of the trees and this is possibly the explanation of the phrase,

"By hook or by crook."

Peasants desperately seeking wood in the forests.

They were allowed to take what they could get with their shepherd's crooks or their reaper's hooks.

Peasants burnt the foraged wood to avoid paying their landowner for fuel.

They also had to give him a proportion of any food they grew, so their diet was really limited.

Maybe a bit of wheat, beans, things to make into bread,

but if they had any animals, they wouldn't eat them - much too valuable.

Animals would be kept for providing milk, for providing eggs or for transport

and they cooked this stuff

literally just here on a round half stone like this, in the middle of their cottage,

with the exception of the bread, because that had to be sent off

to the baking oven at the lord of the manor.

You couldn't bake your own bread in your own home. That was done collectively.

And the easiest thing to cook in this situation is pottage.

A pot into which you throw whatever's available.

And particularly in hard times or famines,

people would literally throw what they could get into there

and keep it on the boil for day after day after day, so it became everlasting soup.

So all the best of medieval life is here, really.

Food and light and company,

and it just shows that the hearth is really the heart of the home.

While the peasant's kitchen would retain an open fire

for hundreds of years, great technological advances

were being made at the very top of society, where money and resources were plentiful.

Henry VIII's kitchens at Hampton Court were amongst the largest and most expensively equipped in Europe.

They were a reflection of his great power and status.

It seems like the kitchens go on for miles. There are 55 different rooms.

Some of them are used for storing things,

like spices and sweets and meat and fish and grain.

Some were actually used for cooking in

and there were 200 people working here in Henry VIII's time,

organised into 19 different departments.

Raw ingredients would arrive at one end and work their way

through the stages of preparation, much like in a modern restaurant.

With a separate area for cooking sauces and boiling liquids

on a series of individual fires, this is the earliest form of kitchen hob.

Domestic kitchens might have been run by women,

but the Hampton Court kitchen was entirely staffed by men.

I'm dressing up as a boy for the afternoon

because I am going to go down to the kitchens and be a kitchen boy.

Turn the spit I hope. That what I've been promised I can do.

Very pleased with my cod piece. It looks impressive.

Unlike his subjects, Henry VIII wasn't too bothered about fuel economy.

His kitchens burnt as much as six tons of wood every day.

So then, boys, I've been working here for six years

and I've never been allowed to play with your toys before.

Now why have you made me dress up as a boy?

They didn't have women in the kitchen,

basically, because women were paid less money.

It's about showing off. You are not just feeding people in this palace.

You are showing off the food, using it as a political weapon.

Bludgeon your opponents and part of that is by saying,

look, I can afford to employ the very most expensive staff - 200 of them.

Is it partly because it is really hard work?

You're producing industrial quantities of food down here.

You're cooking enough food for up to maybe 600 members of the court, twice a day.

But not just enough food for them to be fed.

You need enough food for them to be spoilt, to feel special.

Try and get comfortable.

You may be here for some time. Just focus on the chickens.

Just watch them. You don't have to look at the handle. Nice and evenly.

This is true roasting, cooking meat over an open fire.

Yes, the food that we mostly call a Sunday roast nowadays is baked in an oven

and if you bake bread in an oven, you bake ham in an oven it's baked.

A piece of beef in the oven does not suddenly become roast.

I think it shows what a powerful concept it is.

Roast meat is the best meat, so they are going to call our Sunday roast a roast

-even though we are not technically roasting it anymore.

-Absolutely.

The kitchens at Hampton Court introduced features that

wouldn't be seen in ordinary households for centuries.

Hampton Court was celebrated for its fancy brick-built chimneys,

when most houses still didn't even have them.

Chimneys were a luxury. They kept the kitchen free of smell and smoke, as well as lessening the fire risk.

But the King himself thought his kitchens were undesirable, dirty and somewhat dangerous.

Rich house builders pushed their kitchens as far away from their living rooms as possible.

That whole area is the kitchens.

There's the Great Hall, the dining room and beyond the Great Hall

was Henry VIII's own apartments, and this is very significant.

The kitchens are now a long way from where the King lived.

They are no longer the focus of the household, partly because the King

didn't want to be affected by the smell, the smoke, the noise.

But also, if there's a fire in the kitchens

then it didn't matter, it didn't burn down his bedroom. They were sort of sacrificial.

This was such a good idea that other people lower down in society began to want it as well.

The separate kitchen block.

A practical step but it's also the beginning of the lowering in status of the kitchen.

It is no longer the heart of the home.

So it's not at all surprising to find that this relatively wealthy

Yeoman farmer has built his 100 yards away from the main house.

Like most Tudor kitchens, it still has no chimney. The smoke simply escapes through a hole in the roof.

The kitchen of the middle class or middling Tudor household was the domain of women.

At Hampton Court, gastronomy and excess were taken for granted.

Here, the most important consideration was food economy.

This has been up there for two years now.

Fresh roast meat was a rarity.

In the middling kitchen, they preserved most of their meat by salting and smoking it.

A bit of salted bacon that's two years old.

Preserved meat is a luxury goods in these parts.

It's got a lovely flavour to it.

Pottage, cooked on an open fire, was still the main meal of the day.

But middling householders also started to build brick ovens into their kitchens.

Now they could bake at home, bread making became a daily ritual.

Oh, it's exciting, it's exciting!

Tudor people ate a loaf of bread every day.

They consumed almost twice as many calories as we're recommended

to have today, but their lives were far more active.

We have a fire emergency and it's not what you think. It's gone out.

The wretched thing has completely expired.

Well, not to worry. That's OK. We'll light it again.

The first job was lighting the faggots - bushels of twigs tied together with twine.

There are references to lighting faggots like these in the oven already,

but you would light them with little tiny bundles of twigs

about this size and they're called pimps.

-Are they really?

-Yeah.

-THEY LAUGH

Pimps and faggots!

-This is family viewing, this is.

-That's it.

That looks better, doesn't it?

I'm sure that's burning more. There it goes.

My idea is that, unlike aristocrats, housewives like us, we were essential

-to running a little household.

-Oh, I think so.

And we had a sort of measure of power and autonomy and responsibility.

Obviously, aristocratic women are there for a different purpose, aren't they?

They're there to reproduce. We're here to work and get things done.

The fire in the oven will need to burn down to ash before baking can start.

Tudor kitchen tables were kept clean and hygienic with a mixture of vinegar, rosemary and salt.

The vinegar is anti-bacterial and cuts through grease,

the Rosemary acts as an insecticide, and the salt is abrasive.

It's surprisingly like a modern cleaning product.

All done.

We're making very chunky, heavy, brown bread here because we're only middle ranking people.

At court, they'd be eating fancy white bread,

and the very poorest people would be eating bread

maybe even made from beans and lentils and stuff like that.

The dregs of the harvest, if you like.

It's ironic, really, that what the Tudors wanted was white bread,

fine white bread, and what we want today is the other way round.

White bread is trash and we fork out loads for a good, crunchy, brown loaf like this one.

OK, Lucy, now we are going to have to

rake out the oven.

Obviously mind your feet.

Once the wood has burnt to ash, it's removed.

But it's still hot in the oven.

Quick, quick, quick! The heat is sealed in with a wooden door.

Marvellous.

Oh, it's been soaked in water in water so it's quite heavy.

So that's now going to swell, because it's wet, to fit.

That's clever, that is.

And we've got extra dough here which we made up earlier

for you to put around the door and it will cook

on the outside of that door in the same amount of time.

-When it's cooked, the bread's done?

-Yeah.

-Ah!

A basic enclosed oven like this

could bake up to 30 loaves every day.

So, big moment, the dough's done.

Just a big hard yank and open it?

-Yeah, it'll be stiff, because its welded itself to the door.

-Oh!

-You're too right about that.

-Needs a lot of strength to pull that off, and then you'll get a waft of heat.

Hey, hey!

-How do we test if they're done?

-Just literally turn it over

in your hand and pop the bottom, and if it sounds hollow...

-Does that sound hollow to you?

-Yes, and it's nice and black on the bottom.

-That's a good sign?

-Yeah. And the nice thing to know is, if we were really poor,

we'd only get this black bit to eat, and the slightly posher people would get the upper crust.

SHE LAUGHS

I think that quite a lot of people who have got these sort of country kitchens, bunches of herbs hung up,

they'd look at the Tudor kitchen and see a lot in common there.

The oven that was like a sort of Aga.

Use of fresh herbs, that sort of thing, you feel very close to nature.

But I think that romantic surface disguises a huge amount of hard work, hard graft.

It was back-breaking just trying to keep that fire alight,

and the Tudor housewives had to do that all day, every day.

The oven proved to be a terrible fire risk,

especially in houses built from wood.

As towns expanded, more buildings were built in stone

and more of them had chimneys.

The ever-expanding British Navy

was demanding endless amounts of wood for shipbuilding.

Luckily, a new fuel arrived in the nation's kitchens -

something far more effective than the humble log.

Coal is a bit of a luxury product today.

If you're lucky enough to have an open fire,

it's probably in addition to your central heating.

But in the late 17th century, coal came along and caused a revolution in British kitchens.

It's much cheaper than wood and it burns at a higher temperature,

which makes it really good at roasting meat.

So, roast meat, which was just for the very rich in Tudor England,

by the 18th century, it's filtering down through society.

Roast meat is being democratized.

Everybody still needed a way to turn the meat on a spit over the fire, but there were now alternatives

to the underpaid scullion of Henry VIII's kitchens.

Some of those alternatives were very ingenious.

The George Inn in Wiltshire has a unique spit roast, the only survivor of its type in the country.

Ivan, we're going to do something completely unprecedented here, aren't we?

We're going to turn a spit with a dog in a wheel, which is something

I know hasn't been done for about 200 years,

so I this is a very exciting moment for me.

I've roasted meat in all kinds of ways, but never with an animal before.

What we're going to roast is the most popular meat of the 18th century,

which wasn't beef but mutton.

Cooking with coal led to changes in fireplace design.

Instead of burning wood on a hearth,

new wrought iron grates held the coal above the floor.

The roasting jack was placed in front of the fire and the dog did the work.

If you look up the chimney, you'll see that there's a shaft

that goes right through the chimney breast with a little wheel on it.

And we put a woolly animal inside this treadmill and turn it...

It's going round, I can see it.

And the shaft turns. And the chain that you see there, which is called the jack chain, turns it.

It's a very, very simple contraption.

But it actually frees up a pair of hands, because this was often done

by a human agent, and that means that they can go peeling onions or plucking a pheasant.

I've actually been a human turn spit myself so I know what hot, hard work it is.

It's one of the first kitchen conveniences.

There was actually a breed of dog which was known as a turn spit or a turn cur, and it survived into

the early 19th century and then it just became

extinct because the mechanical apparatus just became more popular.

I'm a bit sceptical that a modern breed will be able to do it.

I think that they really had it bred into them.

But it'll be fun to find out what happens.

Come on in then, girls.

This is Rachel and Coco the dog.

Oh, my goodness me, you're the star, eh?

Right, well, I think we should start, really, because the fire is absolutely perfect.

Coco, I think we've got to get you into the wheel to see what you can do.

Come on, girl. Where's the sausage?

Coco has been in the wheel before. She's been practising.

Come on, Coco, you can do it.

Otherwise we're going to have to put Lucy in there.

You see, I'm counting on Coco being able to do it, because I don't think I'm going to fit.

-Good girl.

-Second hook.

-Clever girl.

-How's she doing?

We need to turn her and...feed her.

I don't really... I think it's going to be Lucy doing this.

No, no, it's genuinely turning, look, it's going round.

Is that Coco or is it you?

Or is it a bit of both?

A bit of both.

I think it's a bit unfair of us.

It's rather like asking a poodle to do a red setter's job.

Go on, get your legs down there.

The trouble is, I think Coco's legs are a bit too long for this, and obviously she's not trained to do it.

So, she's a good sport.

I think it's time to rescue Coco.

She's done a good job.

There we go. Well done.

Round of applause for Coco. THEY APPLAUD

Just as Ivan predicted, I've ended up doing this job myself as the human hound because Coco got a bit bored.

But she will be rewarded in a few moments.

And even in the 18th century they had loads of trouble with the dog wheels.

There's a very amusing letter from William Cotesworth in 1723.

He took his dog wheel out of the kitchen because the dog was always getting in the way of the fire.

The wheel was just getting in the way, and most annoyingly

of all the dog kept doing its business all over the kitchen.

I want you to put the plate underneath, OK?

And you're going to spin round in a circle like that, up on to the table.

Can you smell that, Coco?

Absolutely wonderful.

-Mmm, can't wait.

-This is your reward, girl.

What's the verdict?

Lovely.

Top stuff.

-Delicious.

-Cheers.

I think to Coco.

Congratulations, little dog.

Inventive Georgian engineers got to work in the kitchen,

inventing increasingly ingenious methods of spit roasting.

Clockwork bottle jacks, weight-driven spit jacks

and smoke jacks, driven by the hot air rising from the fire.

Despite their passion for new technology and their pride in eating roast meat, the Georgians,

like Tudor aristocrats, pushed their kitchens out and kept them away from the social centre of the house.

Today, the smell of cooking is really a big part of a lot of people's ideas of what home is.

If you go to somebody's house and they're baking a cake

or roasting some meat, you go, "That's smells great, this is a really nice place to be."

Not so for Georgian aristocrats.

They were paranoid about having the smell of cooking penetrate their living or dining rooms.

That was only for lower class people who could only afford to live in a single space.

So, while today people really aspire to an open-plan kitchen-dining area,

in the 18th century this was just not what you wanted at all.

You wanted a huge degree of separation between your kitchen and the rest of the house.

Here at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire,

the kitchen is placed as far away from the dining rooms as possible.

Just like at Hampton Court, the kitchen was still seen as noisy,

smelly and essentially servile.

The owners had this house designed specifically

so that the smell of the kitchens couldn't permeate the dining room.

The entire environment we're in is designed

for dining separately from the kitchen.

That's why this room is all stucco and no tapestries, isn't it?

That's right, and apart from that we have a Victorian carpet here,

but when this was in use it had an oil cloth.

So, there's no textiles to hold the smell of the food or the cooking.

Have you noticed the incense burner at the back there? It's a Robert Adam design and you could burn

joss sticks, I suppose, to get rid of any cooking or food smells.

I think it shows a real disconnection, doesn't it, between

the eating, which is in this sort of elegant, sterile environment, and the

cooking itself, which we just don't want any indication of in this very grand dining room.

No. There's the door, and beyond the door, you don't want to know about that.

For the diners, the kitchen was out of sight and out of mind.

But all the while, there was an army of servants slaving away downstairs.

So, Peter, we've come down to the engine room.

We're in the actual kitchen of the house now.

Yes, very much like an engine room, in that enormous amount of heat, lots of fuel,

lots of cooking smells and things like that.

Hence the height and ventilation in the roof.

Also, it's detached from all the polite parts of the house.

So, the country house itself is isolated from the rest of society,

and the kitchen is isolated from the country house.

And how much do you think the servants in the kitchen actually saw of the state rooms?

-Virtually nothing.

-They weren't allowed in?

No, certainly not upstairs.

You might sneak upstairs to see a good table setting or

you might sneak views if there was a ball or something like that, but officially this is where you live.

Now, what I really what to know is, how did the food get from over here,

the kitchen, into the dining rooms?

There are several in the house. The one we've just set the table is here, it's marked "F",

but that's a special dining room for special occasions, isn't it?

-A state dining room.

-And the everyday dining room is right over here somewhere in this separate wing.

So the food had to get from here all the way through to here or even to here. Didn't food get cold?

Not really, because you have footmen who work very, very rapidly.

They take the trays and rush from here straight upstairs.

It's only a matter of minutes to get things straight into their dining room.

Even at the far side of the house.

I'm sceptical about this so I'm going to challenge you to see

how quickly you can get that hot tureen of soup up to the dining room.

Fine. One thing you'll notice - tureens have always got handles.

You never run with a tureen on a tray.

You'll smash the tureen and scald people, hence...

-Straight away, are you timing?

-Oh, he's gone, he's gone, he's made a good start.

Oh, oh, oh!

I'm going to go ahead.

It is warm.

-It's still warm, well done.

-It is.

In the 18th century, fine dining was a competitive sport.

French cuisine was the current craze.

It was considered the height of sophistication to employ

a French chef in the kitchens of England's country houses...

Graters? These look like graters over here.

I'll get two different sizes.

'And exotic French chefs demanded an inordinate amount of strange new kitchen equipment.'

That's a pudding cloth, definitely a cake hoop, I imagine that was something like a pate pan.

I'm kitting myself out to be a Georgian chef here.

I've got the shopping list as written down by Mr William Verrall in 1759, and he knew what we was

talking about, cos he worked for a French chef,

and he knew all the latest gear these new cooking professionals were bringing into England.

It's very, very extensive.

I need four sieves, one of laun.

That must be a very fine material sieve.

I need an egg spoon, several saucepans, rolling pins,

bowls, knifes, forks, graters, coffee mills, pestle and mortar, whisks, pastry brushes, a jagging iron...

I don't know what a jagging iron is.

Do you know what a jagging iron is?

-No idea.

-They work here and they don't know what a jagging iron is.

Look at the size of that monster.

That would hold a lot of pepper.

Fish kettle,

just what I want. Oh, I'm very pleased with that.

Ah ha!

Now, these are just the key things that I need.

These are my vital chef's tools, my copper pans, my batterie de cuisine, as they were called.

New French term meaning a whole range, an arsenal of pans.

French chefs are the ones who introduced this notion of the saucepan as a status symbol,

and they'd bring these great racks and ranges of pans that you see

in country house kitchens, going from the big to the teeny tiny dinky one, like this.

OK, my arm's about to fall off.

Are you all still there?

Come on, nobody get left behind.

Here we go, thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Copper pans aren't just for French chefs. They're also for ordinary Georgian people in their own homes.

Pans would sometimes be bought by a man courting a woman.

He would give her gifts of pots and pans, and she would take that as a sign that a proposal was on its way.

The pans would become the woman's possessions.

They were associated with her.

If there was a dispute, she would take them with her.

If her husband beat her, she could call for help...

by clashing the pans, and if she had the nous she could beat him back.

So, these aren't just status symbols, they're also women's weapons.

Along with new kitchen equipment, the late 18th century saw

the greatest revolution in cooking since the discovery of fire - the range.

It was all made possible by the development of cast iron.

The first step was placing the grate between two cast-iron ovens, but this wasted enormous amounts

of fuel and made cooking an incredibly hot business.

In 1802, the addition of a cast-iron plate on top of the fire

and sealing in the chimney created the closed kitchen range.

Economical on fuel and highly adaptable, the prototype of the modern cooker had arrived.

With it, a smoke-free kitchen.

Country house owners embraced the new technology.

But kitchen ranges weren't exactly labour-saving devices for their servants.

Out you come.

'The scullery maid's day started at 5am,

'and her first job was to clean and black the range.'

This range is really pretty sophisticated and complicated.

By the time we've got to the 1870s,

range technology has really reached a pretty high point.

'The scullery maid needed to make the range look as clean and shiny as possible,

'as her reputation rested on the judgement of the head cook.

'The maids blacked the range every day

'with a mixture of sulphuric acid, olive oil, white vinegar and treacle.'

Phwoah!

Mind it doesn't go too close to your nose.

Plenty of elbow grease there, Lucy. Really work it in.

It clears your sinuses out, the smell of this stuff.

Paper first.

So before we can light the fire, we have to pull out these.

They're called dampers, and that will make the air circulate through the fire.

So make sure all of them are out.

Look at that going. That's great.

I just love this. What you don't realise, looking at

old bits of technology, is that they do actually work.

It's brilliant to see them in action.

Well, Team Skivvy thinks that it has completed the job.

We'd like the cook's verdict on how hard we've worked.

Not too bad for a beginner.

She's a bit patronising, isn't she?

And can you hear the fire roaring?

-That's a good thing, isn't it?

-Wasting heat.

Oh, we're wasting heat?

No, you're wasting heat up the chimney.

-You need to close the damper, please.

-I'm sorry.

So we only pull that out when we're cooking something?

To get the air through so you get a good draw on the fire.

'The head cook developed an intimate knowledge of her particular range and its quirks.

'It took great skill to cook without a thermostat.'

It takes a while for the oven to get hot. At least an hour.

And then the skill of the cook - she puts her hand in and feels the heat.

You need to know what a slow oven is, a moderate oven, a hot oven.

It's controlled by the dampers and the amount of fuel you put on the fire.

So, throughout the day, it would have been continuously

refuelled with coal.

'By the Victorian era, the industrial revolution had led to an explosion in manufacturing,

'and the introduction of an incredible array of new gadgets to the kitchen.'

I thought that kitchen gadgets were something from the 20th century, but I'm wrong.

The Victorians have invented everything already, haven't they?

They certainly did. At a kitchen like Shugborough, they would have wanted the latest item.

As soon as it was patented, they would have it.

-That's the vegetable chopper and mixer.

-Like a food processor.

Look at that.

That's circa 1890, that one.

So, this is another fixture for it.

It goes in there and this slices carrots or whatever into strips,

and Victorians just loved mincing and pureeing and squashing their vegetables up into weird shapes.

Have you seen that, I think it's Mrs Beeton, she says, "Never eat a carrot

-"unless you've cooked it for 90 minutes"?

-Goodness. Yes, yes.

I know how this works.

Saved all the hand whisking.

Another whisk.

No, that's an instrument of torture. Look at it.

-What's that one?

-Potato ricer.

Cooked hot potatoes and push it through

and then you've got potato looking like rice.

I've got one of these at home. Excellent mash.

-What's this?

-A cherry stoner.

Couple of cherries.

Ow.

Have you got a stone?

-It's worked!

-Yes, yes!

-That's ingenuity, isn't it? I love it.

'This was the age of the ice box.

'Food was now kept cold in a rudimentary fridge -

'a wooden cupboard which was insulated with cork,

'lined with tin or zinc and then filled with ice.

'But the proliferation of copper pots as well as the new kitchen gadgets

'only added to the scullery maids' workload.'

I'm cleaning a copper saucepan here with salt and lemon,

and it's amazingly effective.

The scullery maid by the late Victorian age

is more important than ever because her job

has been made a thousand times more complicated

by the big Victorian upheaval in dining habits.

The most significant change for centuries in the way people ate.

Until this point, the table would be laid with all the dishes at once,

and it's like a buffet as we would call it today.

Each diner selected what they wanted from a range of dishes.

Then, in the 1830s, the new style comes in and it's courses, as we would know them today.

The first course, taken away, the second course, taken away, the third course, on and on.

It's a really grand dinner.

And each of these courses requires a clean plate and clean cutlery,

so we get the diversification of cutlery.

Things like fish knives are invented, and dessert spoons.

A really grand dinner for 18 diners

might produce as many as 500 different utensils,

and they've got to washed up by the scullery maid, by the pot boy,

all without rubber gloves.

'Just as country kitchens were built in a separate block,

'the middle classes tried to do the same thing,

'within urban constraints.'

This is a typical Victorian middle-class house.

Although this street is really posh now, originally this was a relatively rough area.

But this type of house had been invented a long time before,

in the building boom of Georgian London.

Space was at a premium in the city. Houses didn't have room for separate kitchens.

They were squeezed in sideways and the kitchen went down into the basement.

So here we've got a very clear demarcation.

The basement down there is where the smells, the dirt, the coal was kept.

It was all overseen by the kitchen maid.

It was quite separate for the genteel parts of the house upstairs.

'Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century's best-known historian,

'moved here with his wife, Jane, in 1832.'

So, you notice as we've turned the corner, we get the cheap carpet

-because only the servant is going to see it.

-Oh, yes.

It's a bit Spartan in here, isn't it?

Well, it's not unusual for a middle-class townhouse.

This is about average.

We're very used to seeing rather grand country house kitchens.

Well, when I was at Shugborough Hall, it was vast and fancy and complicated,

but this is pretty functional and it's multi-purpose.

This is a bedroom as well for the...

It is, I'm afraid, the bedroom for the maid.

Well, not a long commute. I suppose this little corner of the room,

the uncomfortable-looking chair and the tiny bed, are the cook's home.

This is work and this is home here. That's it.

They didn't expect to do this forever. This wasn't a career.

This was a stage.

'The Carlyle kitchen may look Spartan, but it had the wonderful conveniences

'of Victorian urban infrastructure - gas lighting and, crucially, water on tap.'

And what you've got here is a very small, for them very large, boiler.

It held two gallons, and so, for the first time,

they had hot water that they did not have to heat in kettles over an open fire.

Because running water was supplied by private companies, it wasn't a public utility,

it only came into the houses two, sometimes if you were lucky three hours a day.

So houses like this had cisterns built and you stored the water

and then you could have it as a huge convenience whenever you wanted it.

This is where they did the washing up, right?

This is where they did the washing up. So, the cold water came in here, hot water came out off the range.

There was, of course, at this stage no detergent.

You actually used soap that was shaved into pieces and rubbed to a jelly.

And you can see it's not very deep.

It's also rather inconveniently low.

I don't think this has been ergonomically designed.

No, but remember a lot of the servants were only about 14 or 15,

and they grew much later, so possibly it was ergonomically designed for small children.

Oh, dear.

'A middle-class woman's duty was to manage her staff,

'but Jane Carlyle's management style was somewhat problematic.

'In 32 years, she got through 34 maids.'

She had, shall we say, an unfortunate manner.

She was particularly hard on her servants.

-She did have some genuine problems, though, didn't she?

-She did.

-Like the terrible drunken cook.

-There was one servant, Helen.

One night, the Carlyles came home and they couldn't open the front door.

Finally, they pushed and pushed,

and there as Helen lying dead drunk on the mat.

Scottish Helen was causing the door to not open.

And another time she go so aggressive and unpleasant they had to lock her in the kitchen.

So, that relationship, as you can imagine, didn't last.

I'm worried about all these women who got the sack.

What do you think happened to them?

Well, a few who were congenitally drunk probably had problems,

but the power balance was pretty even.

We think of it as being all in the employer's favour,

but there was a huge pool of people wanting servants.

I mean, Jane has problems precisely because they don't need her.

She needs them.

It wasn't quite this sort of top-down power thing we see it as.

It wasn't all Upstairs Downstairs.

'Servants were constantly commanded to "waste not want not".

'One of the maid's many jobs was to do what we would now think of as the household rubbish and recycling.'

So, Judith, I've got here a week of modern waste

and I'm hoping you can tell me what a frugal Victorian housewife

would do with all this stuff and not just put it

straight into landfill, like so many people do today.

I am, as you can imagine, really looking forward to this.

What would Jane Carlyle have instructed drunken Annie to do with all of this lot, then?

Well, jars we keep.

We take them back to the greengrocer who refills them.

Tinned food was certainly available.

It started to arrive at the very beginning of the century.

It was developed for soldiers, so they could actually get food

to the front without it all being green by the time it got there.

And am I right in thinking that the tins were then

-sold to a scrap merchant afterwards and reused?

-Absolutely.

-Right, wet waste.

-Oh, my God!

Well, of course, most of this isn't waste, either.

Oh! My goodness.

What would Jane do with stinky old fish heads and bones?

Well, as soon as the fish was eaten, that would get put back in the pot for soup.

Oh, along with bones as well?

No! What a disgraceful Victorian housewife you are.

Immediately after the meat has been cut off,

you take it and put it in the stock pot.

That's soup. That's an awful lot of very good soup.

And then when the bone is clean, do you sell it to the rag and bone man?

If you have a dog, the dog gets it first,

and after the dog's had a go at it,

then it goes to the rag and bone man.

And don't forget, you're not giving it to the rag and bone man.

You're selling it. Because he's making a good living off this.

Now, what about vegetable peelings?

Again, not waste - stock. After the stock,

the cook tended to keep a bucket with unusable food scraps

and it was called wash.

And all of this went into the bucket,

and the wash man would call and he too bought your food scraps.

This was not something you paid to have taken away. And they went

to feed pigs and, of course, that's where hog-wash comes from.

-Pig food.

-Pig food.

Well, finally, we've got a very significant waste product

in the Victorian house - dust and ashes from the fireplace.

A huge amount of this was produced because the Carlyles burned a ton of coal a month.

This was the one thing for which there was actually a waste collection.

Dust, as this was called, was indeed collected by dustmen.

-Ah! In a dustbin.

-In a dustbin.

But, again, a thrifty housewife would not say that that was waste

because these cinders could be rescued

and then they're used in the kitchen range. You re-burn them.

-I see. Yeah.

-So, the real thing to remember when you look at this -

we always think about waste as stuff it's difficult to get rid of.

A thrifty Victorian householder would look at this and think, "But this has value!"

Any servant who threw this out would deserve to be sacked

because she's getting rid of a huge amount of goods which have economic value.

She is, in effect, stealing.

'Victorian poor people had never experienced the luxury of a separate kitchen.

'Their kitchens were still used for cooking,

'eating and leisure, just like in the medieval peasant's cottage.

'However, with gas lighting and the cast iron range,

'new technology finally arrived here, too.

'Domestic life for the upper and middle classes was about to change as well.

'When millions of men left for the battlefields of France,

'working women abandoned the kitchens of country estates

'for the higher wages and improved conditions of wartime jobs.

'Many of the servants never returned, and, after the war,

'the middle and even upper classes suddenly found they had to fend for themselves in the kitchen.'

'But in the early 20th century, a new wave

'of labour-saving appliances appeared

'and the majority of British homes now had a gas supply in their kitchens.

'The earliest examples of gas cookers are now exhibits at the Science Museum.

'They were marketed as wageless servants.'

They must have appeared to be almost miraculous because

you could cook without coal, without dirt, without dust.

These gas cookers were invented in the 19th century,

but by the 20s, they were really taking off.

'The other big breakthrough in cookers was the invention of

'the regulo, or thermostat device.'

You could control the temperature of your oven.

You could put things in and know exactly when they were going to be cooked.

The advertising material for this model said that now,

your wife or daughter could prepare your dinner with absolute precision.

'By the 1930s, a third of Britain's homes had an electricity supply.

'Electric cookers were invented at the end of the 19th century.

'Immediately, a battle began between the gas and electricity companies

'and it's been raging ever since.'

Now, gas was originally in the lead,

but it was reserved for people of a regular and quite a high income. Bills were presented quarterly.

In the later 19th century, though, they begin to introduce

the penny in the slot machine for poorer customers.

And this is partly because of the challenge being presented by the new electricity companies.

They were very keen on their product. This poster here says how great electricity is.

It's safer than gas, simpler than gas, better than gas in every way!

But electricity did have many disadvantages.

It cost about ten times as much as it does today,

and, until the National Grid was finished in 1933,

the current was different in different towns or even homes,

because all the suppliers couldn't agree.

So this meant that the cooker companies were reluctant to invest in electrical cookers

because each one had to be localised and personalised to the exact circumstances of the householder.

These were part of the reasons that electricity lost the battle

and gas became the supplier of choice to the nation's cooking hobs.

'The electric fridge appeared in the early 1920s, but because electricity

'was much more expensive than gas, it was a luxury item.'

So this is the next step forward from the Victorian ice box.

The refrigerator, all powered by electricity.

This is a great big model from 1932, as the advertising poster up there tells us.

"Size is so important for the housewife who owns a refrigerator."

Big whoppers like this cost a lot of money - the equivalent to a whole month's salary.

So they weren't common. Most people still had their fridge

being a marble slab in the back of the larder, but if you knew someone who owned a fridge,

they might invite you round for a special fridge party

with all the different courses laid out on the different shelves.

This is the General Electricity Refrigerator Cookbook of 1927.

It's full of fridge recipes

and here on this page there's a picture of people

having a party in their evening dress,

getting their cocktails out of the refrigerator.

It shows it was a real special occasion.

'Once more compact, modern appliances were available,

'interior designers and furniture manufacturers

'could completely re-assess how kitchen space was used.

'This is the commodious cupboard.

'A free standing multi-doored larder and scullery combined,

'it became a British domestic standard.

'In Germany, the innovative Frankfurt kitchen of the late 1920s

'emerged as the prototype for all fitted kitchens,

'but America would ultimately have the biggest influence on the British kitchen.

'When rationing finally ended in 1954,

'Britons embraced the kitchen style of their American wartime allies.

'With its integrated functional use of space and its labour-saving devices,

'it was marketed as the ultimate in modern.'

ADVERT: In the kitchen, and that's where most women spend most of their time,

we find labour-saving innovations like an oven at eye level. And about time too, eh, girls?

And a double purpose stool, so that the housewife can sit down to do the ironing

and with steps so that she can get to the high cupboards.

'To experience the height of post-war kitchen gadgetry,

'I've come to see the home of 1950s enthusiast Joanne Massey.'

My goodness. Time warp.

What a fabulous fitted kitchen.

So, this was one of the very first designs you could get?

-Yeah. It's an English Rose kitchen.

-Made by the people who made Spitfires?

Yes, apparently so. They're all made out of metal.

You could literally get the cooker to match, the fridge to match, the boiler to match.

Everything is integrated as kitchens are now, really.

So it would be great to be able to display things and have, for example, your Kenwood Chef out.

Here we have a very popular magazine of the time called Practical Householder.

"Modernise your kitchen."

That shows you basically how your kitchen would have been really during the 40s,

and then you could turn it into this lovely, modern, fabulous kitchen.

And this would show you how to make the cupboards and everything and you could even...

-Build your own refrigerator!

-How exciting is that?

Oh, my goodness.

Look at this.

So, there you go.

It's a true hostess trolley.

So, you can pop all your dishes and stuff out of the oven.

And you can go and serve them up.

And wheel it into the dining room and serve everything.

"Your dinner's coming, darling."

'Whereas Victorian kitchens relied on the sweat and skill of the cook,

'the '50s technology boom aimed to liberate housewives from kitchen drudgery.'

So this is your ultimate 1950s gadget. The Kenwood mixer.

I saw something like this in the Victorian kitchen.

They did have a sort of mechanical mixer, but the great innovation is the electricity.

It's a truly labour-saving device.

Thank you.

'The enormously popular Kenwood Chef promised to help the housewife

'produce better meals and even tastier cakes'.

Let's see how the Kenwood handles all that.

Oops.

'The mixer was invented in 1950 by Kenneth Maynard Wood,

'an ex-RAF engineer.

'And it was marketed with the slogan "Eye appeal is buy appeal."

'By 1968, ten million had been sold.'

There you go.

Lucy, are you glad you wore your apron?

How much mess can two people make?

So, do you think that it's true that a 1950s housewife was a happy little home-maker?

I think it was a liberating time for all of them because

during the war, they did have a taste of life outside the home

and had to go and work in the factories.

That was the first taster for them of freedom from the kitchen sink,

but then a lot of them did go back to that.

I think it's quite ironic, really, that the war and the air force

sort of gave us these labour-saving technologies

and Britain's victory allowed women to go back into their twee little kitchens.

OK. Let's get them into the oven.

'Designers came up with a new labour-saving layout

'of sink, cooker and fridge, known as the golden triangle.

'It claimed to reduce the housewife's movements by 90%.

'By the close of the 1950s, the modern kitchen we're all still so familiar with had arrived.

'And even if the reality wasn't available to everyone, they could still dream.'

-Shall we try them, then?

-OK.

Let's see how successful Mr Kenneth Wood was.

Not bad!

I have tasted better.

If I were a genuine middle-class housewife, sitting here in 1959,

I'd have reached the end of a decade of unprecedented prosperity.

Wages nearly doubled.

It was £6 a week, the average wage at the beginning.

By the end of the decade, it was £11 a week.

And tax had dropped, too. It had gone from nine shillings in the pound

down to seven shillings in a pound, so there was more money in people's pockets.

They were going out and buying fitted kitchens.

As the prime minister said, Mr MacMillan, "Britons have never had it so good."

'But not everybody had it so good.

'By 1963, three million people were still living in terrible housing conditions.

'When the Government embarked on its 1960s rebuilding programme,

'its new blocks of flats did have modern, fitted kitchens.

'Credit became more widely available when hire purchase laws were relaxed.

'This allowed less well-off people to invest in new kitchen white goods.'

Hire purchase is one of the greatest assets of the modern community.

It enables us to fill our homes with beautiful things we could never otherwise afford.

It raises our standard of living.

'With new, clean and more spacious housing available,

'the modern kitchen had finally arrived in working-class homes.

'Meanwhile, the urban middle classes were buying and doing up dilapidated 19th-century houses.'

The squares particularly took the middle-class fancy.

Paddy Godfrey, an actor, is one of the newcomers.

There's something splendid about these houses.

They're so beautiful when you get down to the basics.

When you get down to the basic material, and you see the Georgian details.

And having uncovered the mouldings,

one has got a bug about uncovering everything.

All over the country in the 1960s,

young couples were ripping up their Victorian kitchen basements.

They were taking out ranges,

knocking down walls and creating open-plan kitchen-diners.

They were reclaiming this part of the house as a social space.

A place for family, not for servants.

They were pioneers in the 1960s, but they were creating a way of

using houses which many, many people aspire to today.

'Having spent all their money creating open-plan kitchens,

'hunting for cheap antique Victoriana became chic

'among young middle-class people.

'Terence Conran led this new style in home decor

'and along with open-plan kitchens,

'he introduced Victorian-style reproduction crockery

'and cheap pine tables to the country, through Habitat.'

I've always been fascinated by the below the stairs objects

of the Victorian era which were made as very useful, simple objects.

The design of them probably really wasn't considered as such.

They just had to do their job,

and I found these objects very satisfying and very beautiful.

They have certainly influenced my taste.

'Patricia Whittington-Farrell was such an avid fan of Habitat

'that she ended up working there in the early 1970s.'

I loved shopping in here. I never had the money, but I loved looking round and getting ideas.

So, you were pressing your nose up to the window thinking, "This is great," even before you worked there?

Oh, absolutely. I was obsessed, I think.

It was my new world.

I think all my friends were, too. Everybody was.

This is how we want to live, this is the new us,

young mothers, young babies, you know, bit of money in our pockets.

There wasn't credit then, of course. We had cash.

There was an awful lot of entertaining at home

and, because of the new properties we had,

I had a kitchen with a shelf unit up the middle

with all my beautiful things on, and a dining room the other end.

So people could actually see you cooking, and we'd sit and have five-course meals and foreign meals.

Spaghetti bolognaise and all sorts of interesting things.

There was a funny story - a lady came in and she bought a spaghetti jar.

She brought it back and it was in pieces in the bag,

so we called the manager because any complaints we had to report,

and he said, "Well, what's the problem?"

So she said, "Well, when I put it on the cooker, it broke."

So, he said, "Well, why did you put it on the cooker?"

She said, "It wouldn't fit in the oven."

'Open-plan kitchens went mainstream in the 1980s, helped by the extractor fan.

'The kitchen became the place to eat and socialise.'

How about this for design technology?

In the future, if you want a new kitchen designing,

you simply take in the measurements to a design shop

and here in front of your very eyes, they can design it on a computer.

The foodie revolution followed. Foodies were intensely interested

in the quality of their food and treated cooking as a performance.

The kitchen had now become somewhere to entertain guests

and demonstrate your culinary skills.

By the early 1990s, over £1 billion was being spent on kitchens in the UK every year.

It's now the room we spend the most money on in the home.

The expensive fitted kitchen is a status symbol.

Packed with gadgetry, it's really something to show off about.

This is about total control, wealth, power and technology.

Where you've got your voom-voom technology in your car,

why not reapply it to your kitchen?

In one sort of technological space, you can have

a sort of Aga-bound country kitchen with sort of accessory dog.

And n another, you can have this rather more obvious expression

of shiny imperviousness.

Where this is the dream of modernity, as seen from the 1970s, almost. If you projected..

If you'd done Tomorrow's World in the 1970s,

What Would Kitchens Be Like?, well, they would be quite like this.

'In the story of the kitchen,

-'technology eventually triumphs over back-breaking labour.'

-Smells great!

'Once it was the only room in the house, then it was an out-building,

'now it's a high-tech space that many aspire to.'

It was amazing discoveries and inventions like electricity,

the thermostat, the gas cooker,

which allowed the kitchen to become the focus of family life once again.

So, after 700 years

and now without the back-breaking labour and the smell,

the kitchen has retaken its rightful place at the heart of the home.

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