Ready meals will become more popular: Brazilians still cook most meals from scratch, even though the country has some of the world’s biggest food-processing companies, which export their tins and sachets to America and Europe. Fine dining at home will largely disappear. “For the 4,000 reais a month a really good cook now costs, you could eat out ten times in São Paulo’s fanciest restaurants,” says Ms Leite. Many Brazilian mansions have no hot water in the kitchen, and there are paulistanos who time-share helicopters but do not own a dishwasher. That will change when getting congealed fat off pans stops being someone else’s job.

This from an interesting article on the parallels between the disappearance of servants in Britain (and I would add the US) in the early twentieth century and from Brazil (and I would add Mexico) in the early twenty-first century in The Economist.

Put another way, lots of the laborious “traditional” cuisines created for the well-to-do are going to vanish if the world keeps getting wealthier.

Domestic Servants Waiting for Street Car, Atlanta 1939. Farm Sevice Administration. Courtesy NYPL.

As if in response, the New York Times had an article on 27th December called Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés – NYTimes.com.  The subhead for the piece went “A thriving movement of food producers wants to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions, and redefine American cuisine for a global audience.”

Hmm, still a few clichés I’d say.  But that’s editors for you.  I wish all those enthusiasts trying to raise great farm products the very best of luck. I’d love their pork and their fruit.

The article does, though, raise yet again the whole question of just who is going to do the work.  One of the growers talks about the  great days of Carolina rice.

The flavor of Carolina rice made it world famous; the finest grains were hand-pounded, barrel-aged and scented with bay leaves. From African slaves, white farmers learned to rotate crops of peas with rice, to replenish the soil; they learned that the two foods, eaten together, could sustain life over many months of winter or hardship.

Hand pounded rice?  Certainly there seems to be evidence that hand pounded white rice tastes better. The Thai royal family, who knew good food, insisted that their rice be hand pounded even when rice mills had come to Thailand.

But is anyone seriously thinking of returning to this, except as an experiment?  Surely not.  Not with slave labor, to be sure.    So by whom? And at what price?

Afterward.  The Economist is on a roll about servants. The psychology of service: Why have servants?  talks about servants as necessary to status as they certainly were through much of history. I know of families who could barely pay their bills but felt that if they “let the servant go” they were themselves on the downward path.

And a link to a roundup of my earlier posts on servants and cooking. Will there be a return to servants? (Open the page completely and the links work).

Why hasn’t rising inequality resulted in in the much-predicted oligarchy?  Or to put it as he does: with so many unemployed, and income increasing faster among the affluent, why aren’t people hiring more servants?

Or to put it more personally, would you hire a servant?  Would you go out to work as a servant?

McArdle suggests that neither the rich nor the poor are enthusiastic about these options.

1. The cost is greater.  The poor are wealthier than they used to be. Hard as times may be, they don’t want to work for as little money (even inflation adjusted) as 100 years ago.  The rich don’t want to pay the higher prices. Plus taxes, regulation and liability make servants less appealing to the rich.

2.  The hassle is unappealing.  For the poor, they have more independence in regular service sector jobs.  For the rich (or middle class) servants have to be managed, including training.  And the rich value their privacy more, they don’t want servants in the house. And McArdle does not mention that it is socially taboo to have servants now in the United States.

As someone who feels that living in Mexico, as a rich gringa, I really should employ people, I would add that it’s not just a matter of managing. Servants are part of your life, other very real human beings. They have their own problems, usually much greater than yours. Taking these seriously (their child’s persistent eye infection, their jerk of a husband, the murder of their father) is something no one with any decency would avoid. Equally there’s no denying that it takes time and money.

3.  The alternatives are greater: cleaning services, take out, dry cleaners, and washing machines, for example.

I don’t think Americans will go back to working as or employing servants until things get a lot worse.  And that’s another reason to hope they don’t get worse. I would dearly love to live a servantless life.

Understanding food history, however, means you have to take the presence of servants into account.  This seems a good moment to repost a summing up of several of my posts about servants in the kitchen.

1. Lest We Forget: Servants in Culinary History

Why we tend to forget servants and who servants were

2 Mistress and Servant Go to Cooking Class

How the mistress learned to supervise the cook and how the cook learned to cook

3. Servants who Steal

What did and didn’t count as stealing, a response to readers’ questions

4. Servants: The Missing Link in Culinary Change

How an Indian servant learned to cook Indian food from a cookbook for British housewives

5. Servants and Ethnic Cuisines

The shadowy role of servants in “ethnic” cookbooks designed for an American market

6. Servants and Julia Child

The shadowy role of servants in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Last year I wrote a series of posts on servants in the kitchen. A reader asked me to put them together, so here goes.

1. Lest We Forget: Servants in Culinary History

Why we tend to forget servants and who servants were

2 Mistress and Servant Go to Cooking Class

How the mistress learned to supervise the cook and how the cook learned to cook

3. Servants who Steal

What did and didn’t count as stealing, a response to readers’ questions

4. Servants: The Missing Link in Culinary Change

How an Indian servant learned to cook Indian food from a cookbook for British housewives

5. Servants and Ethnic Cuisines

The shadowy role of servants in “ethnic” cookbooks designed for an American market

6. Servants and Julia Child

The shadowy role of servants in Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I had a number of very useful comments about these posts when they first appeared.  I will collect them and post them in a few days.

For the non-Americans on the list, The Joy of Cooking was one of the two or three iconic American cookbooks from the 1930s until the end of the twentieth century. A totally re-written version is still sold but it lacks the verve of the original, written by Irma S. Rombauer, and of the subsequent editions that were under her and her daughter’s control.

A history of the Rombauers and their cookbook is thus close to being a history of American food in the twentieth century and it’s been wonderfully well told by one of America’s most insightful food writers, Anne Mendelson, in Stand Facing the Stove.

Here are some excerpts from the introduction, where Anne Mendelson ruminates on their choice of “such an unlikely slogan as ‘the joy of cooking.’”

“What on earth is joyous about cooking? People who do not know its capacity to bore, weary, and frustrate are people who have never cooked. When Marion Becker (the daughter) came to publish a brief memoir of the book’s first thirty-odd years, one of the mementos of its success that she chose to reprint was a 1944 New York Times Book Review cartoon in which a well-upholstered dowager lies propped on a sofa gracefully perusing The Joy of Cooking while her harassed maid glares from a steaming kitchen. Marion 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. Ministering to the cook’s morale became the task of cookbooks only when the cook was also the mistress of the household–or sometimes, as life got more complicated, the master.

The Depression did not initiate the departure of hired cooks from American households, a demographic readjustment that had begun at least a century earlier. But it speeded up the process for middle-class families, leaving many people occasionally or permanently responsible for producing meals that they would previously have paid someone else to get on the table. Irma was born into and remained in a somewhat privileged sisterhood who did more of their own cooking than their counterparts of a few generations back but could rely on ‘domestics’ (as some tactfully called them) to see to a good part of the week’s meals. She knew, however, that millions of women who might once have told the cook what to make for dinner now were their own cooks. It was to assure such people that their new responsibility really wasn’t menial that the social implications of cookery could now be enlarged to include ‘joy,’ a discrete rearrangement of necessity so as to make it not only a virtue but a delight.”

Newly arrived in New Delhi, Mrs Keenan sallied forth to hire servants. She found an Indian couple, Hari and Meena. Hari was to be the cook, his wife Meena was to do the cleaning.

Mrs Keenan thought that some Indian food would be nice. Small problem. Hari only knew how to cook Korean chicken.

(An aside here.  The assumption that servants in a foreign country know how to cook the middle class foods of that country is mistaken.  Their repertoire is usually very small and restricted to the few things they can afford, or that they have learned from former employers).

So Mrs Keenan whipped out her copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking. Why didn’t Hari use it to learn to cook Indian food? Why not start with“the Moghlai Chicken Braised with Almonds and Raisins on page 39.”

(Another aside.  This dish with expensive chicken, almonds and raisins was part of court cookery, a world away from Hari’s experience).

Now to see the irony, you have to know a bit about Madhur Jaffrey’s background. And I did, just a little, having worked my way through the  Invitation to Indian Cooking in the 1970s and 80s. So I checked my stained and battered copy and, yes, I was right.

“Food—good food—just appeared miraculously from somewhere at the back of our house in Delhi . . . A bearer, turbaned, sashed, and barefooted would announce the meal and soon we would all be sitting around the dinner table, a family of six,” says Madhur Jaffrey.

When Madhur Jaffrey arrived in England to study drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she naturally had not the faintest clue about cooking. She wrote home and the letters she got back about the classic Mughal dishes prepared by their cooks are the basis of the Invitation to Indian Cooking.

Madhur Jaffrey has had a second career as a cookbook writer even more distinguished than her career on the stage.

Mrs Keenan and her husband have moved on to Khazakstan where perhaps another cook is learning to prepare Moghlai Chicken.

Hari is doubtless preparing authentic Indian Moghlai Chicken for another diplomatic family. His wife Meena perhaps prepares it for their own family, at least on special occasions.

So Indian court cookery reinterpreted in well-to-do Indian family, sent to daughter studying in England, written up in her cookbook, taken back to India by diplomatic wife, taught to Indian servant, maybe now entering into his family’s repertoire.

This is a special case of all situations where rich and poor live or work close together. Today shops report that their employees shoplift.

So I’ll just make three observations about theft in the kitchen.

1. Kitchens were designed to prevent theft. When my parents moved into the farm house in which I grew up there was no direct access from the “housewife’s parlor” and the pantry that opened off it to the adjacent kitchen. The kitchen servants had to go out the kitchen door, into the back patio, knock on the door leading to the back hall of the house, and ask the housewife for any supplies they needed.

Not burdened with servants, my parents opened (or had opened) the three foot stone wall between the pantry and the kitchen. But this was standard in large farmhouses as we discovered when we found the pattern book with plans for farmhouses like ours.

2. Stores were doled out daily, a standard chore for housewives who had servants. Any book on British India, for example, lists this as one of the first tasks of the day.

3. The line between theft and rights was shadowy.  Having lived in various places were servants were common and plowed my way through various housekeeping books, it is clear that servants who shopped generally expected and were allowed a small cut on the purchases for the household. Servants either live in or at least eat a main meal in the house, that this was and is part of their wages. Servants might eat leftovers from the main table.  They might be entitled to the leftovers of their own and others’ meals to do with what they want. The sale of bones and kitchen grease, for example, was a thriving business in nineteenth century London and I am sure in many other cities too.

These are not just any old cooking classes, mind you. She offers cooking classes for young society ladies who are about to marry, together with the women who will be their cooks.

Together the mistress and the cook learn the classics of the Mexican kitchen and the international kitchen.  Together they will be able to provide the finest of Mexican cooking and in international, that is largely French, cooking.  This is essential because the bridegroom will be a senior lawyer, politician, businessman or diplomat.

What the course costs, I don’t know. I do know that the spiral-bound recipes book goes for $200, US dollars that is, not Mexican pesos.

In the past in Europe and the United States, and still today in many parts of the world, anyone who can afford to do so hires a cook.

We’re not talking modern America and personal chefs trained in a professional culinary school. We’re not talking royalty or the super rich who have always had male chefs trained by apprenticeship. Queen Elizabeth never had to take cooking classes with her servants.

Upper middle class and upper class housewives did have to, along with the servant who was to cook.

The young lady about to start on her housewifely career had not learned to cook at her mother’s knee.  She had not had to lift a finger to do household chores because they were done by servants. She might know a good bit about fine food because she had eaten at her parents’ table.  Or perhaps not, because she ate in the nursery or boarding school. In either case, she could not cook.

Hence the cooking classes. In the 1950s in England young ladies went to finishing school in Switzerland before they “came out” into society. They were taught the survival skills they would need such as how to swoop gracefully down a staircase in a long dress and do a deep curtsy without falling on their faces.

They also learned how to make gelatin from pigs’ feet. In my innocence, I thought this hopelessly impractical because who, fifty years after the introduction of packet gelatin, was going to go through the mess of boiling pigs’ feet and clarifying the gelatin?

Not these young ladies, of course.  That was a job for their cooks so that they could offer a variety of dishes in aspic. That, at least,  was the expectation. I suspect it was swiftly dashed as empire melted away.

Such schools, though, I think were pretty common in many parts of the world in the first half of the twentieth century, often run by poverty-stricken single ladies from the appropriate class background.

The bride-to-be learned three things, I believe.

First, how to manage a kitchen, how to put on a dinner party without breaking the bank, how to supervise the servants, how to manage the supplies, how to preserve foodstuffs from the estate, how to check the silver and china to see if any had been robbed, how to oversee the pantry and the shopping. Those supposed ladies of leisure I suspect worked harder than we can imagine.

Second, the basics of the recipes so that she could supervise the cook. She had to know the complex terminology of French cooking (wherever she was more or less as French cooking swept the world), know the traditional high class recipes of the region, have a sense of how to season and make final adjustments to the recipes. It was the housewife’s duty, in general, to plan the menu, to explain any novel dishes to the cook, to go into the kitchen and put the final touches to the dishes.

Third, how to cook sweet dishes: confections, sweets, and desserts, skills that were appropriate to her station and that demanded great skill and exact measurements.

I find it hard to read many of the great cookbooks of the nineteenth century without this perspective. Just take a look at the marvelous work by Elena Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives, first published in Russia in 1861 and wonderfully translated (at least much of it) and edited and introduced by pioneering food historian, Joyce Toomre.

In essence, it’s a more formal version of that $200 book that the young ladies of Guadalajara purchase.

Julia Child’s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine, her kitchen is now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, and she is widely credited with having brought American food out of the dark ages of cans and tv dinners and into the light of gastronomy.

Yet I would bet that the number of American housewives who in the 1960s or subsequently who actually prepared lobster thermidor or ham braised in cream and mushroom sauce or beef filet stuffed with truffles and foie gras was a vanishingly small proportion of the total.

And the reason (apart from the expense of such dishes which are obviously for special occasions) is that the cuisine bourgeoise that Julia Child fell in love with was not middle class cuisine American-style but a cuisine for the tiny proportion of French who shortly after World War II still had cooks.

Julia Child never actually said this outright in her book. But if you read her memoir, My Life in France (2006) written with Alex Prud’homme, little hints pop up all over.

The book she worked on with Simca and Louisette (the germ of Mastering) consisted of recipes from Simca’s “own experiments, her mother’s notebooks, her family’s cook, restaurant chefs, and the Gourmettes” (the exclusive women’s eating club, mainly wives of the premier men’s eating club, limited to a hundred members).

When the three of them started a cooking school for Americans in Paris she “brought an American practicality to such questions as how to shop, cook, and clean without a staff (something that Simca and Louisette did not have a grasp of at all).”

They included a “peasant dish” cassoulet only at the insistence of their editor, the half dozen they already had being quite sufficient.

In short, Mastering describes the cooking of wealthy households who had highly-paid cooks.

If I think back to my time in Paris in the late fifties and early sixties when Julia Child was living there, when I shuttled between a top drawer diplomatic family and a solidly middle class family, the food I had, although good, was very simple: vegetable soups, small pieces of meat with no or very simple sauces, boiled potatoes, salads, fruit, occasionally a bought pastry for a special occasion.

In short, Julia Child was explaining in exquisite detail how Americans without cooks could reproduce the food of the French with cooks. It was a supremely American, supremely democratic, supremely idealistic thing to do. Not surprisingly, though, once she started her television career and once she began her subsequent series of books, the recipes became much simpler and veered away from the cook’s and restaurant dishes of Mastering.

In fact, Mastering is more the rule than the exception. Most cookbooks written before 1900, and a surprising number written after 1900, were cookbooks written for people who had a staff, usually a staff that included one or more cooks.

The skewing of pre-1950 cookbooks to those with servants is something I think we need to keep in mind when we hear laments about the decline of kitchen skills and the failure of women to provide tasty home-cooked meals. High quality home cooking can be pulled off without a staff, no doubt about it.

It’s worth remembering how often the good home cooking that is held up as a model is one that is damn difficult to emulate without a kitchen staff.

Few people in modern America or Europe (or Canada, Australia, or New Zealand) have servants in the house. Perhaps they have a cleaner who whizzes through once a week, perhaps they have a babysitter. But servants are not the norm. Nor do many people work as household servants. It just doesn’t seem a good way to go when there’s such a choice of paid employment out there.

That makes the Americans and Europeans among us oddities. We’re oddities in terms of world history as the first society not divided into patrons and servants. We’re oddities in terms of the world today where in many countries this is still the basic division.

I’ve heard friends in Mexico say “either you have a servant (or lots of them) or you are one.”  Too true. In most places, past or present, being a servant is the only employment available if you are poor. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but not much. Most people were and/or are servants for part or all of their lives.

A few facts and figure:

• Until the early twentieth century the single largest occupation for English women was domestic service. For men and women taken together, it was the second-largest occupation (even though both at the time and later factory workers and miners got much more publicity).

• One in every five people in a European city was a servant. Leaving children and the elderly to one side, this means at least a quarter and probably a half of all adults were servants.

• Even in the relatively egalitarian United States in 1900 almost one in ten households employed servants.

These statistics all come from rapidly-industrializing Europe and America. In China, India, Africa, and most other parts of the world, the proportion of servants was higher yet.

I’m pretty sure that if I (or you, the reader of this blog) went back three generations, we’d find that our great grandparents were servants for at least part of their lives.  If we want to understand the history of food, we’ve got to bring servants back center stage and give them their fair due.

Who were these servants?

Obviously over human history, what it meant to be a servant varied enormously.

• Some were young men and women from the local village or estate. Some were poor country girls or boys who had moved to the city hoping to improve their lot (common almost everywhere).

• Some were prisoners captured in war (common practice in all ancient societies).

• Some were serfs (Russia). Or slaves (the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or plantation societies from Brazil to the American South).

Wherever they came from, whatever their exact legal status, the majority of servants worked in the kitchen. Preparing food was the most tedious, time-consuming back-breaking job in the house. The one exception was laundry and laundry did not come around three times a day.

What are we, in our little odd servantless fishbowl, missing if we don’t take servants into account when we write food history?

______

This is an updated version of an article I wrote in June 2006 for the newsletter of the Food History Committee of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, edited by the astute Mary Margaret Pack.

Meanwhile here are a few sources. John Burnett, The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working Class People, 1820-1920 (Indiana University Press, 1974; Peter Stearns, European Society in Upheaval, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1979), 52; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Pantheon), p.172; Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done (Chatto and Windus, 1982), ch.8.

Perfectly good question. And I think there is an answer to this question. In a word, the servants.

Talking about servants is not particularly politically correct in the English-speaking world. It is a reminder of a time that we would like to forget.

Consider though. A nun in one of the well-to-do Mexican convents had perhaps six servants. The lady of the hacienda probably a whole lot more. The servants were the people who did the actual cooking with their mistress doling out the ingredients, teaching techniques, dictating the recipes, and making the final taste adjustments.

The world of the elite and the world of the village were not completely separate. They were linked by the to and fro of servants.

My suggestion is that that the servants made the high cuisine of their employers the festival cuisine of their villages. This is a very common pattern worldwide. I have no direct evidence so it’s just speculation. But it seems pretty probably to me.