The Kitchen in History

"Weirdly, a lot of food history ignores food preparation, and particularly the material needs of food preparation. There are only a small number of books that focus on the kitchen and utensils, but they’re very important in terms of what you can and can’t cook. The main reason people choose the foods they do is material. So: Do you own a cake tin? Do you have enough resources to get an oven hot enough to bake a cake? Have you heard of cake? I chose this book because it’s one of the best accounts of the way we eat and how that is shaped by what we have and what we inherit in the way of equipment and expectations. I have a story that explains this, although it’s not from the book. I had an acquaintance, who used to be senior in the Food Commission. She taught an adult cookery class in England, and at the end of the course, she said to the women: ‘To celebrate we will make a cake next week, so everyone remember to bring in a tin.’ Nothing more than that. The next week, they all came in with their idea of a tin. One brought a beer can, another brought a washed-out tin of sardines. They didn’t really know what a cake tin was, nor did they have the money to go and buy one. This was only in the 1990s. It just perfectly illustrates the fact that our food horizons are shaped by materiality. That was inspirational for me while researching and writing my book. Absolutely. Right. It’s interesting that the kitchen is a gendered space. Even in a world of male master chefs, it’s still a feminised space, a space where women are allowed to dominate. It’s marked off as this space that you’re allowed to have. But there’s something confining about that too; it can come to seem like a prison, something you’re stuck with. So we make massive efforts to turn it into a social space. We eat in the kitchen, or make it open plan—make it less like a trap. But in actuality, most women probably still feel there’s some kind of inner super-ego inspector who’s in charge of assessing whether they’ve done a good job of Christmas dinner, or a good job with the birthday cake. I think that’s right. And I think it’s uncomfortable because, in my view, domestic labour still isn’t arranged in an egalitarian way in the majority of households. Cooking is often something women are supposed to do. You could be like my own mother, and find it deeply boring; she was from a generation where cooking was meant to be thrilling and exciting. You were meant to be inventive with it. But she was one of those people who felt trapped in a kitchen."