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Sara Pennell

'Pots and Pans History': the Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England
77its paper attempts to review early modern food processing and preparation, and the material culture of such operations, as constitutive of the practical, spatial and relational household in early modern England. The spatial and material construction of the kitchen between around 1650 and 1750 operated as a locus for quotidian but nevertheless informative interaction between potential and actual consumers, and objects of consumption. Kitchen goods encompassed fluid notions of necessity and novelty, offering households an interface with innovative technologies on a domestic scale. The combination of accumulated and introduced goods, which kitchen assemblages comprised, connected utensils to multiple conceptions of value—functional, moral, familial and sexual. Their representation and location have consequences for the re-evaluation of economy contemporarily and historiographically understood, and for readings of consumer practices as a conduit for securing not change, but domestic continuities. Keywords: domestic space-domestic utensils-historiography-household management-kitchen design-material culture studies

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Introduction
To stew a Rump of Beef . . . stuff the under part of the beef with forc'd meat made of grated bread, beefsuet, sweet herbs, spice . . . then put it into a pot to stew . . .' 14 pewter potts great and small . . . one brass pott. . . three iron potts.2 On Tuesday the third of this month [September 1667] . . . she the examinant did take some broth out of a pott being on the fire in the house of Agnes Watson, widow in Selby [Yorks.]3

In the basement of Number One, the Royal Crescent, Bath, visitors may view 'historic' kitchen utensils, in a space that was never used as the kitchen of the house.4 The items, displayed haphazardly, and with little explanation of diverse purposes and provenance, nevertheless provoke much visitor comment and contemplation. These are, with few exceptions, familiar artefacts, not least because they connect visitors more directly

to personal experience of the domestic than do the late Georgian formal spaces recreated on the floors above. Yet this identification with what is familiar—because it is apparently non-aesthetic, immutable in the face of social distinction, and because it is irreducibly functional—is superficial. The pots which sit in the 'hearth' of this museum space are disconnected from the actions and evaluations with which this paper is introduced, and which contemporarily located and enlivened daily encounters with necessary utensils. These pots and pans might have their functional uses reincarnated in the modern kitchen as usable antiques—or to use the collectors' term, 'kitchenalia'5—but recreating practical usage is not equivalent to understanding their formal and figurative value in the early modern 'kitchen'.6 An important analytic in the recent historiography of early modern domestic life has been the phenomenon of consumption, with its satellite
201

Journal of Design History Vol. 11 No. 3 © 199S The Design History Society

variant regional names given to such space are terms both functionally descriptive and yet senIn this paper, the space and the fittings of the sually evocative of the hearth and its fire as the kitchen will be visited as a major site for both structural and psychological centre of the houseconsumption and its counterpart, accumulation, hold. Not only was the cooking hearth often the and thereby presented as an arena in which sole fire to be kept alight throughout the working stability and continuity as ends of the consuming day, but the chimney, although a novel structural process were paramount. The kitchen will also be addition in many vernacular houses of the sixcentury, supplied the physical spine of the explored as a laboratory in which needs and teenth 11 house. A chimney well stocked with curing novelty were experimented with, and coalesced; meats and sausages, was viewed locally in Cumas the place where female competencies were bria as 'the most elegant furniture with which [the founded and realized; and as the topos underyeoman] could adorn his house'.12 The provision pinning the moral and practical disposition of the of monies for chimney repairs and for hearth fuel early modern household. by parish overseers for distressed parishioners was certainly practical aid, but also a prompt to the recovery of self-worth in the rekindling and The Space, the Objects maintenance of the hearth.13 The received model of the pre-industrial, but postModern depictions of the kitchen as a 'backmedieval, kitchen is that of a space dominated by an open hearth, a functional, plain place, 'subor- stage' zone and as 'private' homogenize the varidinate' to more furnished, formal domestic ability of its location and accessibility.14 A sample spaces. Most deterministically it is for Ann of probate inventories from two metropolitan Yentsch a colourless, routinized place, a femin- extra-mural parishes, St Sepulchre without Newized zone of processing, not transformation; and gate and St Giles in the Fields, illustrates that the of extraction, not elaboration. More generously, it practicalities of available space and pre-existing is described by Lorna Weatherill as a general facilities dictated spatial arrangements concerning living room, where cooking was 'convenient' to food preparation. The main food preparation undertake. And these qualities extend to the space is found variously in cellars; combined
202 Sara Pennell

themes of fashion and taste, of product innovation, supply and demand, and of luxury and necessity.7 Concerns with presentation and perception have nevertheless swamped what is arguably the key to understanding consumption: practice or, rather, what consumers did with the goods they consumed. The practices of householders, dealing with what one contemporary termed 'that many-headed monster, housekeeping',8 in fact supply an important corrective to readings which prioritize the ascendancy of novelty as the pre-eminent purchasing incentive, and thus the lodestone of consumption. Getting and spending in the early modern household was neither linear nor inevitably cumulative; consequently, the establishment of a household depended upon the coming-together of goods introduced and accumulated; and goods disposed of. Location and utilization, the agencies involved in accommodating objects physically and emotionally, are as crucial to comprehend as the innovatory aspects or initial appeal of objects, be they shoe buckles or salt cellars.

utensils and vessels used there: 'no unusual or lavish equipment was associated with it,' notes Weatherill, while Yentsch avers that cooking pots were not 'objects to which power accrued'.9 And yet food-related goods rank highly in the catalogue of additions to the overtly consuming households of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. To quote Weatherill again, 'some of the most visible changes in domestic equipment in the early eighteenth century were associated with eating and drinking', and as her data show (but she stresses somewhat less), processing tools as well as tablewares were proliferating [i].10 A room at once informal, unseen and yet often 'convenient', replete with objects which are not unusual, but which are changing— this suggests a contested, highly populated space, quite unlike the static tableau of Number One, Royal Crescent, and the brief excursions to it spatially, conducted by Yentsch and Weatherill.
Firehouse, bodystead, hearthroom, houseplace—these

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CMp J4

i Array of household, and particularly kitchen and table implements, depicted by Randal Holme, An Academie or
Store of Armory or Blazon,

Roxburghe Club, 1905, Book m, Ch. 14

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with shops and commercial productions sites (for example, in the 'shops' of bakers and cooks); on upper floors; and both fronting on, and away from, the street or yard from which primary access to the houshold was gained.15 Spatial access analysis upon non-elite house plans in which kitchen spaces have been identified further suggests that these areas were rarely
The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England

the most segregated and least accessible of rooms. Developed as an analytic tool for modelling urban planning and settlement layouts, access analysis has been adapted by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson to present 'genotypes' of building structures and also to suggest 'how a building works to interface the relationship between the occupants and those who enter as
203

visitors'.16 Applied to various early modern house plans, the 'justified gamma maps'17 produced by access analysis suggest that the logic underpinning kitchen location was both practically and socially constructed [2]. Food preparation spaces often had separate external entrances to facilitate access to wood /coal sheds, cisterns, gardens and yards, and in certain situations this could limit who gained immediate access to kitchen spaces from the exterior (for example, where yards are only accessible from one point). But in access analysis all exterior space is considered equivalently enclosing or 'contiguous', and kitchens and ancillary preparation spaces

are thus often more 'shallow' in their accessibility than so-called 'frontstage' rooms, such as parlours and dining rooms.18 This 'shallowness' might also be construed as liminal positioning, a feature stressed by Robert St George in his anatomy of the colonial New England yeoman house; the kitchen was a key place of transitions and conversions, of conjunction and passage. Although this sense of liminality is not one addressed by Hillier and Hanson, who construe the main spatial boundary as that between interior and exterior, and the main social threshold as that between inhabitants and visitors, it is suggestive that the activities and agents of the early
2 Access analysis justified gamma maps of selected early modem house plans (ground floors only; plans not to scale. Drawn by author)

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1

k<OM

i
Justified gamma map of left

Bradboume Farm, Sevenoaks (Kent), built c.1700

Part of 7-10 Aldersgate Street, London, built before 1615 Legend K kitchen exterior P parlour
kitchen

Justified gamma map of left

H hall B buttery Ch chamber parlour hall

F hearth other rooms

D during room through space

©
204 Sara Pennell

modern kitchen space frequently embraced all such elements.19 Kitchen spaces were indeed seldom static in either position or constitution. Priestley and Corfield, in their study of domestic spatial uses in early modem Norwich, have suggested an increasing specialization of room use, visible in chattel locations, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, from which the kitchen was not excepted.20 But this general observation can be mediated by kitchen contents, where shifting utensil nomenclature is arguably as important as spatial and artefactual reorganization; and, more generally, by geography. It is undoubtedly true that urban non-elite housing in centres the size of London and Norwich was increasingly subject to spatial constraints, and seldom contained the profusion of ancillary domestic service rooms such as butteries and pantries, which Maurice Barley has noted for early modern vernacular rural housing.21 It is also the case that the term 'kitchen' is increasingly used to denote the main food processing and preparation space in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century housing, suggestive of a 'closing down' of the variety of domestic, non food-related operations carried out there [Table 1]. But these two observations, derived from one level of reading of inventory data, present spatial specialization merely superficially. The continued diversity of access and usage can also be recovered from inventory appraisals, in the disposition of non food-related objects in the main food preparation area. Although there was a relocation of substantial furniture, such as bedsteads, into other rooms, smaller items remained in the kitchen, characterizing this space as the central reference point of multiple daily activities.22 Those who left inventories who were fortunate enough to inhabit more than one room tended to keep those books they owned, particularly Bibles and other religious texts, alongside their food utensils. John Robinson, a labourer of Lambrigg (Westmorland), died in 1700/1 owning a Bible and other books, valued at 2s. 6d., which were in his 'low parlour', along with his cooking vessels, hearth furniture and a store of victuals.23 If the kitchen was a convenient place to keep a spiritual text to hand, it was also the location for
The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England

storing weaponry. William Peplo, possibly a victualler, kept a musket, 'bandoleers' (bandoliers) and a javelin in his kitchen in St Giles in the Fields, just as Thomas Smith, a carpenter of the same parish, kept a musket and an old sword alongside his two meat cleavers.24 The bird cage and magpie which Smith accommodated in his kitchen alongside this small armoury were likewise not unique to his household. Thomas Wetherall, a cutler from St Sepulchre had fourteen cages and nine live birds in the first-floor room which also contained his cooking equipment.25 Yet more numerous than bird cages, and present in increasing numbers across the final decades of the seventeenth, and the first years of the eighteenth, century, were timepieces. The clocks found in the 'bodysteads' or kitchens of inventoried Westmorlanders between 1650 and 1740 were often the only timepiece in the possession of these decedents. Their location at the heart of so much quotidian activity articulates the alliance of functionality, aesthetic appeal and material value which placed them above looking glasses in the consuming predilections of their owners, people all too frequently misrepresented as 'backward' and 'primitive' because of the seeming stasis of domestic and communal organization in the Lake District counties.26 Such placement of clocks, especially when they were the only non-portable timepiece in a household, inevitably directed those not primarily concerned with food preparation to the kitchen whenever the timing of labour and other actions was important to register. The complication which such a location for so many early modern timepieces introduces in the discussion of gendered control of, and responses to, the imposition of time-keeping, cannot be overlooked. Unlike pocket watches, kitchen clocks were hardly personalized items, but they were arguably most frequently referred to by female servants, their mistresses and housewives in general, to mark the time taken in domestic actions. Certainly by the first quarter of the eighteenth century, contemporary culinary advice texts assumed access to a timepiece, and the ability to read it (as opposed to merely listening for chimes or bells), as givens amongst their readership.27 Books, clocks and birds are hardly objects to
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Table 1 Numbers of and terms for food preparation/consumption rooms, as listed in probate inventories from London, Norwich and Westmorland, 1650-1740
Inventories with no room terms

Area/date

N

Terms used for main food preparation area (number in each period sample)

London 1660-80 1690-1710

50 50

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1720-40

50

kitchen (28) low room (5) first floor chamber (2) lodging chamber (1) the room (1) kitchen (37) chamber (1) yard (1) room next to the street (1) little back room below (1) ground-floor room (1) widow's room (1) third room (1) parlour below stairs (1) washhouse (1) shop (1) kitchen (31) first-floor room (3) back room (3) cellar (2) low room (1) back parlour (1) shop (1) little room (1)

12 3 7

Norwich

1660-80 1690-1710 1720-40

50 50



kitchen (37) Low room (1) chamber (1) parlour (1) kitchen (33) cellar (1) best chamber (1) kitchen chamber (1) bakehouse (1) kitchen (43) fire chamber (1)

10 13 6 32 14 13

Westmorland 1650-70 1690-1710 1720-40

50 50 50

house (8) kitchen (5) low chamber (2) bodystead (2) buttery (1) house (18) bodystead (9) kitchen (1) low parlour (1) buttery (1) forehouse (1) housestead (1) bedchamber (1) hall (1) house (13) kitchen (11) bodystead (5) firehouse (2) buttery (2) parlour (1) bedchamber (1) chamber (1)

Note: N (column 2) » number of inventories in each period sample. Sourer. London Commissary Court inventories for St Sepulchre without Newgate and St Giles in the Fields parishes (at LGL); Norwich Consistory and Archdeaconry Courts inventories for the city of Norwich (at NRO); Kendal Deanery of the Archdeaconry of Richmond inventories for south-eastern Westmorland (at Lancashire Record Office, Preston). For further details, see Pennell, The material culture of food', Chs 2, 4 and Appendix.

invoke a spartan kitchen environment. Neither is colour, but the kitchen offered up as many surfaces for decoration as other domestic spaces, conventionally viewed as more visible. William Skipper, of St Edmund's parish, Norwich, whose inventory was taken in 1742, furnished his kitchen with decorative as well as functional goods; the inventory appraisal itself suggests the colours and textures which would have met the appraisers' gaze. There was a 'white dresser' and an extensive selection of blue and white ceramics—dishes, plates, basins, tea goods—all of which were clearly out on display or in use, since there was a further selection of 'cheney' (decorated earthenware) and Delftware in an adjoining closet. A copper coffee pot, brass candlesticks, a looking glass and various drinking glasses supplied reflecting, burnished surfaces, while the occupants of the four bird cages once provided their song. In his scullery were goods which would be used in the kitchen and which added further colours, particularly local red and white earthenwares. Skipper's inventory certainly overturns the assignment of excavated food preparation ceramics to a purely functional kitchen environment, a reading which will be addressed more closely in the following section. It is necessary to note here, however, that while the degree of detail supplied for Skipper's chattels in regard to colour is perhaps unusual, it does not make the depicted environment exceptional. Given the centrality of such domestic rooms in the quotidian activities of households, items of comfort and colour should be surprising in their absence, not by their presence.28 Nevertheless, such amenities of comfort should not overshadow the experience of the kitchen as a threshold. Its liminal qualities introduce the potential for disrupting the household or, more precisely, as a location for housing disruption. The early modern kitchen was the arena for events as melodramatic as homicide, domestic violence and conjugal dispute, and as mundane as lease arbitrations and debt repayments, depicted in witness depositions before justices of the peace, and in personal diaries and correspondence. On 21 June 1684, Hannah Gillam of Happisburgh (Norfolk), was fatally shot by a labourer,
77K Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England

William Crow, in Thomas Chamberlain's kitchen. The event was recalled by Mary Gillam, motherin-law of the deceased: Mary went into the house of Thomas Chamberlain . . . called the kitching and did then and there see William Crowe of the same town . . . with a Gunn in his hand. And then and there this informant did go towards the fire to wash a pott in a kettle over the fire and then she did hear the Gunn go off.29 This tragic accident—for accident it was, Crowe having picked up the gun which Chamberlain had left ready loaded behind the kitchen door—was witnessed by a further twelve people who signed a declaration confirming they had witnessed the alleged manslaughter. The numerous dramatis personae of this scene alone present a kitchen which is far from spatially routinized. Some gathered in or near Chamberlain's kitchen were there for more routine, occupational ends, like Mary Gillam at the hearth; but others were visiting, resting, or merely 'playing' like the hapless Crowe. Thomas Turner, a mid-eighteenth century shopkeeper of East Hoathly (Sussex), used his kitchen as a locus of business. On 13 October 1755, he employed it as a place of transaction, when he oversaw the cancelling of apprenticeship indentures between one William Weller and Samuel Elphick 'in my kitchen'.30 Such actions reiterate the kitchen as a locus of 'spatial solidarity', where those internal and external to the household could come together with relatively equal rights of access and belonging, and in which relations of proximity—between family, kin and neighbours—are often enacted.31 These factors enhance its informality and thus suitability as a place for the highly personalized transactions of early modern business and credit relations, just as much for the congregation of Crowe, Gillam and their witnesses.32 But this informality should not be read as always encouraging harmonious relations. As the location of the fire most regularly lit and maintained, the connections between the kitchen and conflagration, realized in popular visual and literary depictions of Hell and its torments as a kitchen hearth equipped with malign utensils, were regularly reinforced, whether through the frequent fatalities resulting from falling into the lit
207

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hearth, or through more premeditated criminal actions.33 As Frances Dolan has suggested, the crime of poisoning was one of the most subtle, malicious means of wreaking harm upon individuals, and one which lay particularly in the domain and control of women. Although the frequency with which wives poisoned their spouses as a premeditated act is difficult to quantify in the early modern period, it is symptomatic of contemporary suspicions of female culinary and medicinal competencies and the arenas in which those competencies were developed, that poisonings, especially marital ones, were a vividly depicted literary theme. Likewise, although the killing of a husband by a wife was in reality much rarer than the reverse crime, highly publicized and fictionalized accounts of 'murderous wives' depicted women fatally striking spouses with spits and frying pans.34 The early modern kitchen space was thus not solely a locus for routinized activity (although it certainly embraced culinary and other domestic procedures which were repetitive), but a multifunctional space; one which contained within it the possibilities of transformation, but also of transgression. This liminal component is arguably overemphasized through the presentations of legal indictments and depositions concerning kitchen-located cases. But it is a context which is

recognized and confronted in the character of many of the culinary and food-related artefacts of the kitchen. The functional forms and decoration of such objects fed into ideas about stability and the familiar which, it is contended, are as crucial to the character of early modern consumption, as are dynamics of change and novelty. Food-related utensils and tablewares in the early modern period are problematic artefacts for study, not least because of the paucity of datable artefactual/archaeological survivals, and the consequent shortage of reliable formal and functional vessel typologies. Thus historians and archaeologists falter before variant nomenclatures (regional, medium- and function-related) which may conceal the same vessel. How dissimilar, for example, are brass, porridge and boiling pots, all of which terms appear in early modern inventories, with the latter two seemingly superseding the former by the mid-eighteenth century, if inventory-employed terminology and data are to be relied upon [3]? Likewise, equating all items appraised as saucepans in inventories (and having few, if any excavated examples to assist in classification) obscures crucial temporal and socio-economic factors reflected in medium (the difference between an iron and a silver saucepan), number (owning one saucepan compared to owning a graduated set of four or five), and
3 Terms for cooking vessels, and their frequency in London and Norwich inventories, 1660-1740. Source. London Commissary Court inventories for St Sepulchre without Newgate and St Giles in the Fields parishes (at LGL); Norwich Consistory and Archdeaconry Courts inventories for the city of Norwich (at NRO)

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I Bras pot • porridge/pottage pot B boding pot/ boikrl

Harwich 1660-tO

London 16901710

Norwldi 16901710

Loodoa 1720-<0

Norwtd 1720-«0

area/period

208

Sara Penneil

geography (since saucepan is a vessel term well established in late sixteenth-century Worcestershire probate inventories, but not in those of midseventeenth-century London). Detailed trajectories of change will not be essayed here, but important shifts include those from vessel multifunctionalism to specialization, reflecting diversifying and more numerous processing requirements; and from single to multiple, both in terms of item numbers (from singular objects to sets) and of medium (from items available in one fabric to availability in different media [Table 2] ).35 An item which usefully embodies these trajectories is the dredging box, a utensil arguably truly novel in the sense that the saucepan, often argued as the epitome of a new kitchen utensil in the eighteenth century, was in fact not.36 Containing seasoned flour or breadcrumbs, the dredging box had a perforated lid, so that contents could be sifted over the roasting joint, in the manner of the modern flour dredger [4]. Dredging is a process significantly not employed by cookery writers much before 1700, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it had become a basic practice in instructions for roasting of all types of meat.37 The increasing numbers of dredging boxes (also 'drudging boxes', or simply 'drudger') in contemporary inventories evidence a growing predilection for roasted meat and access to cheaper seasonings within non-elite households in this period. Dredging boxes survive fashioned from silver, but those mentioned in inventories were more often made of brass and tin-plated iron, valued at only a few pence each. The increasing presence

of tinwares like dredging boxes in early eighteenth-century probate inventories was predicated in part upon successful innovations in the production of indigenous tin-plated iron; upon its qualities as a non-corroding, vermin-proof medium; and upon its aesthetic appeal as a substitute for silver and high-quality pewter.38 Tinned iron was also used to produce containers for other dry goods, becoming more accessible in their cost and more diversified in their usage; thus dredging boxes are often appraised alongside pepper and spice boxes, and tea caddies and canisters. As Thomas Mortimer declared in his Universal Director of 1763, the tin-plate worker supplied 'the poor with a vast quantity of domestic utensils at a most reasonable rate: good tinware being perhaps the cheapest commodity in England in proportion to its use.'39 Tinwares thus entered the modest eighteenth century household not as a luxury, but rather as a vehicle of largescale technologies writ small and accessible, and, moreover, as a basic component of a rapidlyextending range of kitchen equipment. Agency and Consumption in the Kitchen Acknowledging that domestic consumption of functional objects could embrace the sort of technological scope more usually associated with the manufacture of semi-luxury goods, such as Wedgwood ceramics and Birmingham 'toys',40 does not, however, mean that such consumption necessarily fits a traditional conception of the consumer 'revolution'. Attendance at household pre- and post-mortem sales, recourse to part-exchange

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Table 2 Types of tinwares appraised in London and Norwich inventories, 1660-1J4.0 Period 1660-80 1690-1710 1720-40 London dripping pans, unspecified tinwares items as before plus patty pans, pudding pans, plates, porringers, pot covers, candlesticks, covers, sconces, flower pots items as before plus kettles, tea kettles, dredging boxes, pepper boxes, coffee pots, japanned tea kettles, strainers, graters, tea canisters, chocolate pots, basting spoons, runnels, colanders Norwich dripping pans, covers, latchpans, candlesticks, unspecified tinwares latchpans, dripping pans, kettles, pans, dredging boxes, unspecified tinwares kettles, colanders, pudding pans, boxes, sieves, coffee pots, covers, pots, ladles, slices, meal kits, unspecified tinwares

Source: London Commissary Court inventones for St Sepulchre and St Giles in the Fields parishes; Norwich Consistory and Archdeaconry Court inventones for dry parishes. The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England 209

J'UlrJ.

lltnitfljiiecc totfai*OontpJfHrKu<rlilli Cook

4 Dredging box in situ (on extreme left of mantelpiece): engraving facing title-page of Martha Bradley,
The British Housewife, London (c.1760)

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and repair of objects—all emerge as alternative practices entailing alternative types of early modem consumption, which circumvented some, if not all, new purchase in the accumulation of household goods. This combination of worlds of goods does not of course preclude encounters with novelty, which could reside in different
210

aspects of the design and production of otherwise 'known' objects. The consumer's perception and reception of novelty could derive from the unfamiliar medium of a familiar form—earthenware dripping pans made anew in tinplated iron—as well as the location of her first interaction with it. Furthermore, the accommodation of novelty
Sara Pennell

within established contexts depended upon the ability of both consumer and the object to be consumed to achieve a conjunction between desire and need. The identification of the object as possessing 'recognizable novelty' facilitated its acquisition, and perhaps smoothed the path towards a better 'achievement' of its utility.41 Contemporary cookery texts—artefacts not in themselves new in this period, and yet which were reaching wider audiences in novel formats, from sixpenny chapbooks to exquisitely engraved folio editions—serve as sources for idealized procedures and apparatus, but the householder, and especially the female householder, mediated such prescriptions with the possibilities of access to utensils and the parameters of their utility. The boundaries of necessity were not inelastic, but domestic virtue inhered in the maintenance of the necessary as a governing principle of the household. As a contemporary proverbial caution against prodigality exhorted, 'a little kitchen makes a large house'.42 The food-related purchases made at household sales of used goods illustrate this mediation. Buying someone else's brass pots or even their table linens not only enabled a circulation of goods throughout a vibrant commercial system with which manufacturing capacity had yet to catch up; it also answered the possibility of object obsolescence with the potential of reuse, a potential that arguably turned upon the formal and functional continuities of the objects in view. The retention by William Hall of St Sepulchre parish, London, of an older-style pull-up jack in an upstairs room, while a more costly, presumably newer wind-up model occupied the main hearth of his home suggests that adaptation and accommodation are dynamics which need to be incorporated within that of consumption, with its often neglected implications of using up and exhausting goods.43 For arguably, consuming was as much about retaining or, in Martha Howell's term, 'fixing', material goods, as it was about increasingly renewing and rendering them redundant. And the goods for which such fixing may have appeared most appropriate, even while they may have undergone some formal and material changes, were precisely those items which provided daily continuity: 'the linens and pots . . .
77K Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England

used daily'.44 Food-related goods are nevertheless substantially devalued in an historical predilection for diluting their plural values into merely economic worth. Moreover, the economistic tendency to equate access to and knowledge of a good and its uses, summarized by Bourdieu, further obscures the ways in which such social capital was deployed.45 Except for the very large metal pots, most kitchen goods were of negligible value, but the moral resonances of hearth goods and vessels projected them as key items of social capital, in household formation and maintenance. Cooking vessels, utensils and hearth goods were frequently incorporated into the 'paraphernalia'—conventionally clothing, linen and jewellery—legally allowed as limited property to married women in the early modern period, and were common bequests between and to female kin and friends. Thus Sarah Boult, a widow of St Lawrence parish, Reading, left to her married daughter, Sarah Clements,
my largest and smallest brass kettles . . . my largest brass skellett [skillet] one dozen of my pewter plates . . . my iron jack . . . my skreen . . . my largest pair of iron doggs [fireirons] my bell metal pott . . . my limbeck [alembic still] my chest of drawers and my Bible.46

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Significantly, the detail provided in this record of her bequest to her daughter is not repeated in her instructions as to what her son, Francis, is to receive from her estate.47 The heritable potential of these goods does reiterate continuities of shape and material, and thus probably of use; but it also arguably communicates physical and moral solidity, the recognizable and the durable retained amongst the ephemeral.48 Possession of these objects was not impersonal or temporary, and continued ownership of a plate, pot or even a utensil as inconsequential as a pastry jigger, was inscribed via a name and a memorable date—often of marriage, purchase, or the date of donation, rather than recording manufacture [5]. On an immediately practical level, monograms and decorative patterns enabled the owner to identify objects and vessels when they had been stolen; hence perhaps the certainty of James Cobb of Norwich who
211

5 English steel pastry jigger combined with tweezers, 5.5 in. long. After original in Colonial Williamsburg Foundation collections (drawn by author, not to scale)

confirmed that the two saucepans William Crew had purchased from George Hodgkins were the two stolen from him on 6 March 1697/8.49 But the inscription of possession upon and in items as small as a five and a half inch-long pastry jigger belies the characterization of these objects as 'utilitarian . . . not mysterious . . . plain'.50 Furthermore, contrary to Yentsch's assertion that these were utensils to which access was not limited, kitchen utensils were undoubtedly objects of expertise, and hence arguably mysterious. The re-evaluation of culinary and domestic knowledge as precisely that—knowledge, rather than merely competence—is long overdue, not least in the attempt to relocate the active relationships involving women, which underpinned technological change in the early modern household. Via its roots in tehkne, technology may be read as technique, as how to do something. Women's domestic expertise, so often depicted as practical, 'how to' information and ability, can thus be construed as far from passive, irrational and routinized.51 Even with the proliferation of didactic culinary texts, much kitchen know-how remained intuitive and implicit. A recipe would provide only partial insight into process, and little information at all as to what utensils to employ, how they worked, how they were to be cleaned, maintained and replaced.52 Ann's inscription of her name on the little pastry jigger is not only a proprietal gesture; but also perhaps self-confirmation of her skill in pastrymaking, a culinary field of no little complexity and, moreover, one traditionally associated with female gentility.
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Durability and stability were virtues instilled through and within the household and its organization. The Overseers of the Poor of Dorchesterupon-Thames in Oxfordshire paid is. 8d. in 1727 to redeem bastard-bearer Mary Bassell's skillet from pawn, a recovery to aid her return to economic self-sufficiency. And if Bassell's skillet handle was emblazoned with an improving phrase or sanctimonious proverb—'pity the poor', 'the wages of sin is death'—the duties of Bassell to keep her hearth and herself orderly would have been further ramified [6]. Certainly, such axioms reinforced a particularly feminized set of domestic responsibilities—frugality, philanthropy, patriarchal loyalty—but the subordination of the housewife to certain domestic tasks through culturally constructed notions of aptitude, authority and propriety does not preclude the possibility of the pre-eminence of domestic order being exemplified through the kitchen. The cultivation of the virtuous 'good' or 'complete' housewife was a project for the common good, and thus the kitchen perceived as the public locus in which that persona was made visible and accountable. Although the cuckolding wife was vocally condemned for her errant sexuality, her subversion of the hearth, whether through its neglect, or refusal to feed her spouse and family, was no less communally decried. Tellingly it was the beating of kitchen pots and pans, 'the harmony of tinging kettles and frying pans', as Cotgrove tartly described it in 1611, which accompanied downtrodden spouses and errant wives during skimmingtons.53 As E. P. Thompson
Sara Pennell

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6 Cast cooking vessel handles with mottoes, c. 1640-80. R. Seymour Lindsay, Iron and Brass
Implements of the English House,

London, 1927 and Gentle &
Feild, Domestic Metalwork, p. 239

(drawn by author, not to scale)

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implies, these cacophonic events should perhaps be seen less as crucial moments which illuminated the immanent patriarchal order, in which pots and pans were usually 'silent', invisible objects; they could instead be viewed as instances of communal female recognition of the importance of their cultivation of the hearth. Indeed, it was women and wives who happily lent and played their utensils for such purposes.54 This extra-domestic use (in more than just the spatial sense) of kitchen utensils also returns us to the liminality of the kitchen and its housing of disruption; and to the issue of spatial solidarity, posed above. The gendered, feminine character of the spatial solidarity which Hillier and Hanson construct for the modern kitchen is arguably applicable to its early modern predecessor, but only through the mediation of the objects arrayed in such spaces. Female control and 'fixing' of utensils of the hearth, and to a lesser extent of the table, assisted in 'fixing' the parameters of the kitchen which had the potential to be spatially and relationally so fluid. What has been overlooked by historians in their physical and figurative location of the kitchen on the periphery of
The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England

meaningful domestic spaces is the agency required to effect such 'fixing', and to stabilize and render durable utensils, which, if not 'objects to which power accrued', were no less evocative goods in the daily, rather than episodic, relationships of family and community. Conclusion: the Economy of the Early Modern Kitchen As John Walter has rightly observed, early modern England was a world 'in which the content of relationships is perhaps better captured by consideration of ceconomy, rather than economy', and this sentiment is also central to Bourdieu's construction of the symbolic capital of quotidian practice.55 Rehabilitating the household economically/oeconomically requires not merely an understanding of the lifecycle contributions made by its individual members, just as comprehending it technologically requires more than an anatomy of commodification and innovation. Tellingly absent from existing readings of early modern consumption is a sense of how individuals accommodated a proliferating material environment
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within what was still a profoundly ordered world. The early modern sense of self was in great part formulated through spatial relation to the material world, and a fear of what might lurk in the spaces between ordered objects. Household order was profoundly economic, and the quotidian actions of the hearth, the scouring of pots for their maintenance, the appropriation of new goods and their adaptation to prevailing conditions—fed into economic management. (Economy was a term often considered, and used, synonymously with good housekeeping in the early modern period, a fact which demands reinstatement of female expertise to its place as an essential underpinning of economic survival and success. The material culture of ceconomy surely pertains more to the kitchen hearth than it does to the tea table, both spatially and artefactually. But it is this encompassing ethic and its contemporary comprehension, which has been subtracted from economic histories of the household, and which has consigned pots and pans to a purely materialist, antiquarian periphery, and to the basement of Bath's Number One, Royal Crescent.

food preparation and consumption frequently took place; it was, however, by no means the sole term used for this space in early modern England. 7 For a valuable critical overview of this historiography, see Paul Glennie, 'Consumption within historical studies', in Daniel Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, Routledge, 1995, pp. 164-203. 8 The phrase is that of a Lancashire parson, Thomas Brockbank in R. Trappes-Lomax (ed.), The Diary and
Letter Book of the Reverend Thomas Brockbank 1671-

1709, Chetham Society, vol. 89, 1930, p. 256. 9 Anne E. Yentsch, "The symbolic divisions of pottery: sex-related attributes of English and Anglo-American household pots', in Randall H. McGuire & Robert Paynter (eds.), The Archaeology of Inequality, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 192-230, at p. 212; Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760, Routledge, 1988, pp. 150-1. 10 Weatherill, ibid., pp. 44 (table 3.1), 155, 205-6. 11 Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 49-50. 12 William Rollinson, Life and Tradition in the Lake District, Dalesman, 1981, p. 44. 13 See, for example, London Guildhall Library (hereafter LGL), MS 3149/1, St Sepulchre without Newgate Vestry Minutes, March 1653-1661, pp. 214, 220, SARA PENNELL 224, 235; Oxfordshire Archives, MS D.D.Par.DorcheVictoria and Albert Museum ster b.10, Dorchester upon Thames (Oxon.) Overseers of the Poor accounts, 1680-1744, fols. 4ir, 68r, 96V. Notes 14 Yentsch, 'Symbolic divisions', passim; Johnson, 1 Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplished Archaeology of Capitalism, p. 176. Gentlewoman's Companion, 15th edn., London, 1750,15 See Sara Pennell, The material culture of food in early modem England, circa 1650-1750', unpubp. 32. lished D.Phil., Oxford, 1997, Ch. 5. The same obser2 London Guildhall Library (hereafter LGL), MS vation is made for structures in pre-1666 City and 9174/18, metal pots appraised in the inventory of suburbs, in Roger Schofield (ed.), London: Surveys of Richard Eldridge, St Sepulchre without Newgate Ralph Treswell, London Topographical Society Pubparish, London, dated 4 February 1666/7. lication 135, London Topographical Society, 1987, 3 Public Record Office, London ASSI 45/8/2/132, pp. 85-7. Northern Circuit Assize examination of Anne Martin, allegedly poisoned by Lidya Willson, ser- 16 Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 143-97, vant to Agnes Watson of Selby (Yorks.), dated 6 especially pp. 143-7. September 1667. 4 The kitchen was not sited in the space designated as 17 These are the plans of spatial accessibility generated through an analysis of the relative 'depth' or 'shalsuch in the museum guide, but probably on the lowness' of room spaces within a building plan. same basement level, beneath the adjacent building; Number 1, Royal Crescent Bath: An Illustrated Guide They are 'justified' in relation to exterior space; that is, each space is depicted in its access relationand Souvenir (Bath, n.d.): Brigitte Mitchell, Board of ship to other spaces, but the primary relationship is Trustees, pers. comm., August 1996. that of all interior spaces to exterior space: for more 5 This word has yet to find its way into the OED. details, see Hillier & Hanson, op. tit., pp. 149,154-5. 6 This term is used as a shorthand reference to denote the space in which a non-elite household's main 18 Hillier & Hanson make a similar point in analysing
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19

20

21

22 23

24

25

26

a typical modem houseplan and its variants, although their observations about 'front parlours' in modern housing are perhaps less applicable to comparable spaces in the early modern household. It should also be noted that few representations of non-elite early modem house plans include upper storeys, so that their inclusion in any access analysis plan is not possible; see Hillier & Hansom, op. cit, pp. 155, 158-9. Robert B. St George,' "Set thine house in order": the domestication of the yeomanry in seventeenth century New England', in J. F. Fairbanks & R. Trent (eds.), New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1982, pp. 159-88. Ursula Priestley & Penelope J. Corfield, 'Rooms and room use in Norwich housing, 1580-1730', PostMedieval Archaeology, vol. 16, 1982, pp. 93-124. See also Frank E. Brown, 'Continuity and change in the urban house: developments in domestic space organisation in seventeenth century London', Comparative Studies in History and Society, vol. 28, 1986, pp. 558-90. Maurice Barley, 'A glossary for the names of rooms in houses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries', in I. L. Foster & L. Alcock (eds.), Culture and Environment: Essays in Honour of Sir Cyril Fox, London, 1963, passim; and Priestley & Corfield, op cit., pp. 105-10. Brown, op. cit., pp. 576, 584-5. Cumbria Record Office, Kendal branch (hereafter CROK), HK660 (R), John Robinson inventory, dated 18 February 1700/1. LGL, MS 9174/28, William Peplo inventory, dated 14 November 1702; MS 9174/28, Thomas Smith inventory, dated 12 June 1702. LGL, MS 9174/42, Thomas Wetherall inventory, dated 24 October 1723. Interestingly these are no longer present in the inventory of Wetherall's widow, Anne, which was taken eighteen months after his in April 1725; MS 9174/44, Anne Wetherall inventory, dated 26 April 1725. For birds in nonmetropolitan inventories, see Norfolk Record Office, Norwich (hereafter NRO), ANW 23/i/i7[iii]/ fol. 6, Robert Rippin inventory, dated 10 April 1727. For more detailed discussion of the particular character of consumption in the north-west, see Pennell, op. cit., Ch. 4; data from this study suggest nearly 40% of decedents from a sample of Westmorland inventories between 1720 and 1740 died in possession of a kitchen clock, compared to only 26% of decedents from the two metropolitan parishes already noted. See also J. D. Marshall, 'Agrarian wealth and social structure in pre-industrial Cum-

27

28

29 30 31 32

33

34

35 36

37

bria', Economic History Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1980, pp. 514, 520.; and idem, Old Lakeland: Some Cumbrian Social History, David & Charles, 1971, p. 45. Pennell, op. cit., Chs. 3 and 4; cf. Moira Donald, " T h e greatest necessity for every rank of men": gender, clocks and watches', unpublished paper given at 'Gender and Material Culture: from PreHistory to the Present' Conference, University of Exeter, July 1994, u.p. Skipper's appraisers scrupulously noted down the colours and media of items in other rooms of the house, so that we know he also owned a 'green bed' and a 'black-framed looking glass' in the 'green chamber', while in the garret there was a Tjlue canopy bed' and a 'three leaf painted screen': NRO, CN8ib/i2, William Skipper inventory, dated 21 September 1742. Abbott Lowell Cummings makes a similar point about the decorative detailing in colonial New England kitchens and service rooms: Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay 1625-1725, Harvard University Press, 1979. pp. 195-7NRO, C/S3/B0X 55a, 36 Car. H, roll 3, Norfolk Quarter Sessions, information of Mary Gillam et al. David G. Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754-1765, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 15. Hillier & Hanson, op. cit., p. 159. Craig Muldrew, 'Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England', Social History, vol. 18, no. 2,1993, pp. 169, 179, 181-2. See, for example, Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968, pp. 20911; Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, trans. Lucinda Byatt, Polity Press, 1990, passim; Philip Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 81-94. Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representatives of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700, Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 24, 30-2. These shifts are examined in greater detail in Pennell, op. cit., Ch. 4. Weatherill, op. cit., p. 179; for more examples of dredgers, incorrectly labelled as 'muffineers' (a nineteenth-century term), see Ruper Gentle & Rachael Feild, English Domestic Metalwork, 16401820, rev. Belinda Gentle, Antique Collectors' Club, 1994, p. 243. William Salmon, The Family Dictionary or Household Companion, by ]. H., London, 1695, u.p. See also 'The best dredging' in Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best, McGill University Press, 1994, p. 84; Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like 215

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39 40

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45 46

Closet, or Rich Cabinet Stored with all Manner of Rare 47 This testamentary detail also usefully supplements what is recorded in Boult's inventory which is Receipts for Preserving, Candying and Cookery, fifth lodged with the will (same MS reference). edn., London, 1684, p. 176; Edward Kidder, Edward Kidder's Receipts in Pastry and Cookery, for the Use of 48 Amanda Vickery, 'Women and the world of goods: a his Scholars, London, c.1720, recipe 11 (fol. 8). Lancashire consumer and her possessions, 1751-81', in John Brewer & Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and For a more detailed examination of tinplate innovathe World of Goods, Routledge, 1993, pp. 283, 292-3; tions and production in the period, see W. E. MinAmy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early chinton, The British Tinplate Industry: A History, Modern England, Routledge, 1993, pp. 26,144-5, 222Oxford University Press, 1957; and F. W. Gibbs, "The rise of the tinplate industry', parts I and n, 49 NRO, N.C.R. Case 12, shelf b (1), Norwich Sessions Annals of Science, vol. 6,1950, pp. 390-403, and vol. 7, informations and examinations, information of 1951, pp. 25-43. James Cobb, dated 10 March 1697/8. 50 Cf. Yentsch, op. cit., pp. 206, 212. Quoted in Minchinton, op. cit., p. 15. Cf. Neil McKendrick, 7°siah Wedgwood and the 51 W. David Kingery, Technological systems and some implications with regard to continuity and change', commercialisation of the Potteries', in Neil McKenin Steven Lubar & W. David Kingery (eds.), History drick, John Brewer & J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth from Things: Essays on Material Culture, Smithsonian Institute, 1993, pp. 218-19; c^- Christine E. Bose, Century England, Hutchinson, 1983, pp. 100-45; a n d Philip L. Bereano & Mary Malloy, 'Household Maxine Berg, 'Commerce and creativity in eighttechnology and the social construction of houseeenth century Birmingham', in Maxine Berg (ed.), work', Technology and Culture, vol. 25, 1984, pp. 54Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe, 5, 81; Erik Arnould & Wendy Faulkner, 'Smothered Routledge, 1991, pp. 173-204. by invention: the masculinity of technology', in Marina Bianchi, The collector', unpublished paper Wendy Faulkner & Erik Arnould (eds.), Smothered given at 'Consumption and Culture in Europe 1650by Invention: Technology in Women's Lives, London, 1850' Conference, University of Warwick, 16 Febru1985, p. 22. ary 1996. Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in 52 Pennell, op. cit., Chs. 2 and 3. England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 53 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England i^yo-1640, Cambridge University Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1950, K m ; cf. Bourdieu's concep1987, p. 163; R. Cotgrove, A Dictionarie of the French tion of the 'taste for necessity' as an 'amor fati': and English Tongues (London, 1611), quoted in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Thompson, 'Rough music', in E. P. Thompson, CusJudgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, Harvard toms in Common, Penguin, 1991, pp. 467, 469, 471-2, University Press, 1984, pp. 177-8. 475 and passim. LGL, MS 9174/31, William Hall inventory, dated 16 54 Thompson, ibid., pp. 490, 499-503. January 1706/7. Martha C. Howell, 'Fixing movables: gifts by testa- 55 John Walter: The social economy of dearth in early modern England', in John Walter & Roger Schofield ment in late medieval Douai', Past and Present, no. (eds.), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early 150, 1996, pp. 34-5, 39-40. Modern Society, Cambridge University Press, 1991, Bourdieu, op. cit., pp. 125, 224. pp. 121-2; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Berkshire Record Office, D/Ai/49/160, Sarah Boult trans. Richard Nice, Polity Press, p. 120. will, dated 11 September 1732.

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