The English Housewife

"This is at least partly a work of fantasy; it’s Markham’s idea of how a household ought to be run, rather than what anyone actually did. Nonetheless what it reminds us of is the attenuated role of the modern housewife in comparison with what it used to be. It used to be like running a small business—you might typically have a staff of between five and five hundred people working for you to manage. And what Markham really clarifies is just how much knowledge this involved. If you wanted to ever have fruit, you had to be acting to preserve every tiny scrap of it. They’re preserving not only peak, ripe, glossy apples, but gathering up what they call the greenings, the windfalls that dropped before they were ripe. There are dozens of uses for those—you can make them into a kind of vinegar for salad dressing, or into a relish, or into a sugar paste as a dessert. All this thinking and planning and oversight is hugely interesting. It wasn’t like the weirdness of being a housewife in the 1950s, where inessentially you were confined to a tiny, not very interactive, space. It was more like running an enterprise of reasonable size. Among other things, she would need to be a shrewd bargainer, who could manage her own time and everyone else’s. She would assign tasks to people according to their skills, provide training for people coming through. It’s extraordinarily sophisticated. The reason I say this, is that we’re often rude about the past, and its food ideas. As if they were somehow just grovelling around on a muck heap. Sometimes people will casually say: ‘This brings us back to the Middle Ages.’ I’m like: ‘You wish! You don’t have the skills to survive in the Middle Ages. Tell me about your crop rotation plan.’ Just look at the number of physically demanding tasks that had to be performed by an ordinary yeoman, his wife, and the rest of his household. It’s gobsmacking. So we should always have respect for the people who did that, even if they didn’t do it in the ideal way environmentally, or in terms of animal welfare. Don’t forget that they were the people who were getting up at five in the morning—or three in the morning if they are bakers—to make sure the rest of us can eat."