Remaking the Kitchen, 1800–1850

Despite fine studies of foodways, women’s work, domestic technology, and architecture, we still know too little about the important changes that took place in American and Western European kitchens between 1800 and 1850. This chapter argues that the majority of early modern kitchen technologies emerged before most domestic advice and reform literature recorded their presence. While most households did not have the technologies explored here by 1850, owner-occupied dwellings of the middling and wealthier sort often had at least some of them. Managed mostly by women of varying ages and conditions, kitchen technologies in this era were often experimental hybrids. Implementation was strategic but near-universal adoption of the things pioneered in this era was incomplete until the mid-twentieth century. This study is grounded in fieldwork because objects materialized behaviors and ideas differently than advice literature. Buildings show the aesthetic and spatial dimensions of work and social relationships; the advice literature reflected the period conversations associated with gender roles and daily experience. The four buildings analyzed address specific cases to remind us that remaking the kitchen was a bumpy process of experimentation in the places where people were powerful.

Smell on the Streets

This chapter sets out to offer a more complex picture of smell on the streets of eighteenth-century England than has been offered previously. Far from only being disgusted, urbanites engaged with the smells of putridity and mouldy food in subtle and complex ways that were freighted with questions of social status. This is apparent from domestic advice, jokes, and satirical prints. Yet sanitary records, parliamentary improvement acts, and occupational medicine all offer declining evidence for concerns about the health threats of smell. Despite this, the smells of trades, food, and the streetscapes continued have important social meanings for city-dwellers. A study of the dichotomized olfactory representation of London’s City and the West End demonstrates the continued cultural currency of unsanitary scents.

GOOD TASTE AND SWEET ORDERING: DINING WITH MRS BEETON

In his bookDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in order to understand the workings of culture “in the restricted, normative sense” we must not only relate our discussion to the broad anthropological meanings of the concept, we must also relate it to “taste” in the physical sense. We must, he argues, bring “the elaborated taste for the most refined objects . . . back into relation with the elementary taste for the flavours of food” (Bourdieu 99). Bourdieu is writing of twentieth-century France and not nineteenth-century Britain. It may seem anachronistic to juxtapose a quotation from his work with one from an 1861 volume of domestic advice. However, his argument that social distinctions can be understood through a discussion of the material and cultural values attached to food resonates with Beeton's argument that “the rank which a people occupy . . . may be measured by their way of taking their meals.”