A secret map of your house

Long before the infamously anomalous shipments in our local Bureau of Customs became ironically routine, there was one shipment from the US that bewildered Customs officers in Britain in the mid 1800s. They could not classify it and as a result, the shipment disappeared before they could release it. It was the first shipment of its kind in history. It was ice – in industrial and commercial scale.

The shipment was an ice block from a frozen lake – Lake Wenham in Massachusetts. Ice was the matter that defined how, where, what food could be prepared and eaten from then on. The company who imported it eventually found a way to get the next shipments out of British Customs and even displayed it on some kind of shop window in London in the summer of 1844. The transport of ice quickly improved that it was soon able to travel a 130-day sail from New England to Bombay, losing only a third to become water. Soon enough, ice became so commercially hot that it revolutionized the way we saw and treated food. Food no longer had to be consumed right away and onsite. It allowed food to wait for us and for us to wait for it.

Bill Bryson’s 2010 book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, is an intellectually enchanting well of fascinating facts that included the Lake Wenham ice story and so many things that we now find common in our houses. I have read most of Bryson’s works and this one is one of my most intimate favorites. It is like waking up to a long-hidden map to your own house, room by room, cabinet by cabinet, spoon by spoon. It made me ruminate over the spaces in the place am staying in now as I write this. In Brysonesque fashion, he opens up new angles to how we view halls, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, even attics and how they have come to be what they are now, across human recorded history. Reading it is like shaking hands anew with the material lives of the spaces in our houses, contained in the cupboards, shelves and boxes as they connect with their larger histories.

I zeroed in on the chapter on the kitchen because it contained a menu replete with facts that kept me in wide-eyed astonishment and laughter.

The kitchen, for instance, as we know it now, was in large part, a creation of ice and what it can do. According to Bryson, kitchens in the Industrial age, had no sinks because all the killing, cutting and washing had to be done elsewhere and the kitchen was just like a prep-room, before all the food was taken out to the dinner table. He mentioned that some English mansions even required a railroad track to shuttle food in between these places. But blocks of ice for food storage, and eventually, refrigeration, narrowed this distance and this is why we now have a kitchen that typically would be the space for both the storage and preparation of our meals. There was of course, salt, canning, and curing, but nothing preserved quality like ice. It is also how meat from Japan or Argentina, chocolates from Belgium or salmon from Norway could now converge in your dining table at one time. Ice is a major enabler of global consumption.

At the height of the reign of the English empire, it only had 1.6% of the world’s population but produced half of the world’s coal and iron, 2/3 of maritime assets, and held a 1/3 of world trade. You would think that with that enormous power, they would have also explored gourmand possibilities in equal proportions. But they did not. For one, Bryson noted that the Britons did not take to ice as much as the Americans did – who made ice the versatile ingredient of anything – from beverages to meats to desserts. Another is, to an unknown extent, attributable to the influence of publications that addressed life in the kitchen.

The first was by Martha Seely, who after having failed as a poet, was advised by her rather commercially astute publisher, to try her luck on more popular topics. So she came up with Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845 and its landmark contribution was to include actual precise (although not necessarily correct) measurements of ingredients. I could not believe it that until the release of Seely’s book, everything was prepared with “some” sugar, “a bit of” salt, or ‘enough” water. Knowing that baking depended on exact measurements, I would not spend any moment in a British bakery if I were given a chance to do time travel. Ms. Seely was not so much an experimenter with recipes as much as she was with words.

But it was Isabella Beeton who should really take the cake for influencing life in the British kitchen at that time. She seemed to have had very colorful and scathing, often contradictory opinions about many kinds of food including, the “offensive garlic”, the “suspicious potato” and the tomato as having “dangerous failings.” She cautioned her readers about taking ice as for various reasons and to avoid it when “persons are very warm or immediately after taking violent exercise, as in some cases, they have produced illnesses which have ended fatally.”

Bryson said that Beeton’s book, The Book of Household Management (1859), was a complete mess in terms of coherence, veracity, and consistency. But it was thick. It was full of her opinions on a range of household issues and even beyond. Her prescriptions ran the gamut from teaching how to “fold napkins, dismiss a servant, eradicate freckles, compose a menu, apply leeches, make a Battenberg cake, and restore life to someone struck by lightning.” She also had exacting lists of the kinds of cleaning implements one needs to have including all kinds of brooms. I think my mother snatched a whiff of Beeton’s enterprising spirit in terms of being comprehensive of taking charge of one’s household.

Bryson’s book is one to behold especially on a short break like I am having now in an unfamiliar house. It offers a layer of life as you consider whether a chair is still a chair when no one longer uses it as one or whether a kitchen is still a kitchen when you also eat there now and write as am doing now. Our lives are entwined with material stuff, more than we care to admit or affirm. They prove that we have been endlessly trying to tweak our world to our heart’s desires. Our private lives are inhabited by stuff that have supremely interesting histories, if you care to open the cupboard of your curiosities. – Rappler.com