Episode 147 of the Renaissance English History Podcast was the start of a tour through a Tudor home, beginning with the Kitchen.
The Tudor kitchen was the heart of the home, though that was beginning to change through the 16th century as kitchens moved to outbuildings because of fire damage, and to keep smells away.
Book Recommendations to learn more about Tudor Kitchens:
Bill Bryson At Home: A History of Private Life – Buy on Amazon here using my affiliate link – you pay the same price, and the podcast gets a commission – yay!
The Tudor Housewife by Alison Sim – Buy on Amazon here using my affiliate link – you pay the same price, and the podcast gets a commission – thank you!
I also mentioned the Diary of Samuel Pepys, which is later than our time, but still a fascinating read! Buy it here on Amazon using my affiliate link – you pay the same price, and the show gets a commission – hooray!
Previous Englandcast Epsiodes related to Tudor Kitchens
Episode 80: The Great Tudor Bake-along
https://www.englandcast.com/2017/06/tudorbaking/
Episode 86: Food, Dining, and Sumptuary Laws
https://www.englandcast.com/2017/10/episode-086-food-dining-and-sumptuary-laws-in-tudor-england/
episode cover photo credit: Ethan Doyle White / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Rough Transcript of Episode 147: Tudor Kitchens
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is Episode 147, and I’m going to do something a bit different than I’ve done before. A few weeks ago I did an episode looking at just one year – 1527 – and the feedback on that was great, so I’ll be doing another one in another couple of weeks looking at another year. And that episode was inspired by Bill Bryson’s book where he chronicled one summer in American history, 1927. And because Bill Bryson is ever-inspirational, I’m going to take an idea he did in his book Home: A Short History of Private Life, where he examined all the rooms in a home, and how they evolved over the years. All of that brings me to, today I’m going to talk about the Tudor Kitchen. You can get show notes for this episode at englandcast.com/kitchen.
Let’s dive right in, shall we?
The kitchen is possibly the room in our homes where technology has changed the most, and which has changed the most. Sure, electricity has made TV’s, stereos, and mood lighting available in the living room. Running water changed the way we take baths. And central heating, and mattresses have changed the way we sleep. But it’s in the kitchen where we see the integration of centuries of changes in technology and chemistry, and looking back to how our Tudor friends would have prepared food gives us fascinating insights into the ways we live today.
For most of human history, when we lived indoors, we lived in one room, and there was no distinction between the kitchen and the rest of the home. The kitchen *was* the home. A fire in the center of the home provided heat for cooking, and kept the rest of the house warm. Chimneys were invented during the Roman period, but they weren’t very effective until the 16th century when the Tudors changed them from round to square, and lined them with fireproof clay. The kitchen/home of a medieval peasant would not have had a chimney, and would have been very smokey – the small hole in the roof would not have pulled the smoke out very well.
The fire was at the heart of everything in the kitchen, and finding fuel for the fire would have been almost a full time job. For peasants, everything they had was controlled by the owner of the land, and there were strict rules about what could be taken from the forest. Peasants were not allowed to take wood off the ground of the forest, but they were allowed to take wood that was still attached to the trees, and so they would use hooks on their staffs to pull branches down for use in the kitchen fires. For those who lived in areas where there weren’t forests, or a good supply of wood, they would have to forage. Poor people living in Cornwall, for example, would forage for driftwood that came up on the coast. And they would have to save and ration their wood for use during winter months when they needed more firewood to keep warm.
Peasants would cook their simple meals – plants, vegetables, legumes, anything they could find foraging – in a pot with three iron feet that stood right in the fire. You would cook pottage on the fire – a mix that you kept boiling of whatever you could find on the ground, which you would just keep adding to. But bread had to be sent away to a communal baking oven. There are still places in the world where communal bread ovens are used – I went to Morocco a few years ago and saw the underground baking ovens where people still bring their bread to bake each day so that their homes don’t heat up so much from oven heat.
Poor people would keep using this fire-in-the-middle-of-the-home method for hundreds of years, but in the wealthier classes, technology was changing the kitchens by the 16th century. At Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s kitchens took up 55 different rooms, with over 200 people employed in the kitchen, organized into 19 departments. Some of the rooms were used for storage, and some for cooking. There were individual fires used for cooking different types of foods, varying in how big or hot they were kept. Henry VIII’s kitchens burned as much as 6 tons of wood each day. There were no women employed in the kitchens at Hampton Court – those 200 men cooked enough food to feed the court of over 500 people, twice a day. Hampton Court kitchens did have chimneys, which would help take away the smoke and smells, and reduce the risk of fire.
Henry VIII kept the kitchens in a separate block of buildings far removed from his private quarters. That was in part because he didn’t want to be bothered with the smoke and smells, but also because if there was a fire, his private rooms were less likely to be affected. This started a precedent that other wealthy households would follow, removing their kitchens to a separate place. This is an interesting development as it moves the kitchen from being at the very center and heart of the home to being not part of the home at all.
In middle classes, kitchens were starting to be built separately from the rest of the home – up to 100 yards or more away. And the kitchens of the middle class were the domain of women, unlike those at Hampton Court. Those middle class kitchens also began to build brick ovens for baking bread, and the household would eat a loaf of bread each day. They would heat the oven up with a roaring fire, and then let it burn down to ash. The ashes would be removed by raking, but it was still incredibly hot in the oven. So the bread would go into the oven, which was still hot but clean, and sealed with a wooden door that was soaked in water so that it would expand to fill up the opening to the oven. Then you would do something very clever – you would use some leftover dough and seal any openings around the door with that bread dough. When the extra dough was cooked through, then you would know the bread was done cooking.
The oven was, of course, a terrible fire risk, and a fire in a bakery on Pudding Lane led to the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Speaking of the Great Fire, one of the best accounts of that tragedy was by Samuel Pepys, the great diarist of the 17th century. Pepys himself recorded an earlier event in his life when he invited a superior to dinner, and was horrified when the meat brought out seemed to still have worms rolling around in it. He wrote: Thursday 26 June 1662
“Up and took physique, but such as to go abroad with, only to loosen me, for I am bound. So to the office, and there all the morning sitting till noon, and then took Commissioner Pett home to dinner with me, where my stomach was turned when my sturgeon came to table, upon which I saw very many little worms creeping, which I suppose was through the staleness of the pickle.”
Even in these more expensive classes, one was never quite sure what was in one’s food – today we call this Food Adulteration. It was difficult to preserve food properly without good refrigeration (and I did an episode on refrigeration a few years ago – I’ll link to it in the show notes). Sugar was often made to last longer by adding gypsum and plaster of paris, sand, or even dust. Butter would have lard added to it. Even tea would often have sawdust or powdered sheeps dung added. One police report at the time said that the tea was only about half tea, and the rest was dirt. Chalk was added to milk, arsenite of copper was added to make vegetables greener and jellies glisten. Red lead made gloucester cheese “lovelier to behold.” Jack and the Beanstalk has the famous line, “I’ll crush his bones to make my bread,” showing just how commonplace additives were to food.
All of this adulteration and worms creeping around fish points to an issue with preservation. Our kitchens probably have some of the highest tech appliances to be found in the home – on par with the electronics of the living room. And one of the most technologically advanced is the refrigerator, which helps us preserve our food. The Tudors didn’t have refrigerators, but they did have ice from the winter. “Before mechanical refrigeration systems were introduced, ancient peoples, including the Greeks and Romans, cooled their food with ice transported from the mountains. Wealthy families made use of snow cellars, pits that were dug into the ground and insulated with wood and straw, to store the ice. In this manner, packed snow and ice could be preserved for months. Stored ice was the principal means of refrigeration until the beginning of the 20th century, and it is still used in some areas.”
So the kitchens at Hampton Court, or wherever the monarch was, would have some very basic refrigeration through ice. But most people would have preserved their foods through salting.
We’ve got heat and cooling covered, but what about the other major activity in the kitchen – the washing up. Of course there wasn’t easy running water – though again at Hampton Court they did have some taps, and pumps. But most people needed to find a source of water first. You might find it easier to take your dirty dishes to the water source to clean them there, rather than bring the water to your home, given that water is very heavy. So people would often clean outdoors, even in the winter. In your home, if you were not an aristocrat, you would have a sink that was made of a wooden bench holding various tubs and bowls. But then you also had to get rid of the old dirty water without a simple drain. So you would likely have to carry the dirty water outside. In cities this would be difficult as too much water in a small area could kill plants and waterlog the ground.
Scouring was the most basic job a housewife would have to do – she usually used sharp river sand. Our Tudor friends would also keep their kitchens clean with cleaning supplies like vinegar, rosemary, and salt. We know today that the vinegar is antibacterial. The rosemary would keep away insects. And the salt was used for scrubbing. There were other plants like one called horsetail, or shave grass that it’s recorded women would use to scour their wooden and pewter things. Poorer people had dishes made of wood rather than pewter, which would be even more difficult to clean.
While no one understood bacteria or germs, there was an accepted link between cleanliness and disease. It was recommended that the dairy be kept so clean that a princes bedchamber must not exceed it.
So that’s it for this week. There are a lot of so I’ll list them all in the show notes at englandcast.com/history. And do let me know what you thought about this episode -You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or through twitter @teysko or facebook.com/englandcast. Thanks so much for listening.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]