The Domestic Revolution

By Ruth Goodman

Twenty years ago, when I first stepped foot into the kitchen aisle of an american supermarket, the first thing that i was blown away by was - how user friendly almost every gadget was. How things were designed to meet different use cases.

I was like this is a scam! Indian women are clearly at a huge disservice here! Its like none of the industrial designers ever entered an indian kitchen or no woman ever worked as an industrial designer. Or worse - may be none of them see it as a profitable market.

That problem repeats in many related areas. Take History, for example - Activities that are predominantly done by women get very little attention from historians. This author Ruth Goodman wants to change one slice of that history.

She tells the story of why/how England switched fuels from wood to coal and what it meant for kitchens, domestic work, and women, in general.

The book starts in sixteenth century London. Many cities of the medieval world needed to have two things going for them. Transportation by water, and access to wood/proximity to a rich forest.

London has excellent access to transportation, thanks to River Thames, and the sea. But London unlike, Paris, Constantinople, Naples, Venice was running out of nearby forests.

Wood was the primary fuel and the primary building material for this age. The price of wood kept doubling every couple of decades. Wood was hard to transport in cart loads over long distances. Close-by forests were essential for a big city, else they imposed limits on how much a city can grow.

London's over reliance on wood, and the Great fire of London exacerbated the availability of wood problem. There was no forest left with in 50 miles of London.

And so, London had an energy crisis. It had a construction material crisis. London had a wood crisis. Transporting cart loads of wood from further inland was getting prohibitively expensive.

Coal, on other hand, could be mined easily at New Castle-upon-Tyne (even before industrial revolution) and transported over sea to London docks directly, via Thames estuaries.

But why didn't this happen earlier? Why wasn't coal always the preferred fuel? The author spends a couple of chapters meticulously explaining differences between wide range of medieval fuels like different kinds of wood, peat, charcoal, and coal. They produce different kinds of flames. Some burn fast, some burn high, some burn long on constant temperatures. In today's age of instant burners, we don't have a sense of any of this.

Turns out cooking with wood has significant advantages. It is easy to control the flame intensity by feeding it more wood. Wood burns more or less clean without toxic fumes. The smoke often imparts flavor to the food.

Wood makes a pyramid fire, which means round bottom pots (think of గుండిగ, हांडी, देगची) are best suited, as the fire curls up and heats the pot on the sides. Since wood makes pyramid fire, it made sense to have an open hearth.

An open hearth made it easier to heat up large living places. So people had just one room for cooking, eating, hanging out and sleeping. On a sunny day, the smoke from wood fire rose up the ceiling. But on winter day, the smoke hovered around much lower. There was a real possibility of asphyxiation, and so people avoided furniture of any kind.

If you recall, an Indian thatched hut has exactly the same design elements. Its one room, with usually no furniture, with an open hearth, and no chimney. Wooden fires don't like chimneys, as the draft makes you lose a good 70% of the heat into chimney. A wood fire has a cyclical nature. You have to keep tending to the fire, keep feeding it wood, to keep the fire going.

As wood got more expensive, coal offered a cheap fuel alternative. But coal had significant hurdles to get over. Coal produces toxic fumes, imparts a foul flavor to food (charcoal briquettes, on the other hand give a smoky flavor). So houses needed chimneys, and cast iron ranges. That had immediate implications for a lot of things.

Houses no longer needed to be large open spaces, as there is no wood pyramid fire heating up the space. Instead, houses started to have smaller rooms that can be heated by coal fires with chimneys. The bed of burning coals needed to be separated from the pots to exhaust the toxic fumes. That meant pots needed to have flat bottoms, hence the birth of modern pots.

Coals burn longer with steady intense heat. People had to change recipes to accommodate for the new fuel. Roasts went out of vogue, as nobody wants coal fumes on their meat. It was harder to stir contents of the pot on a cast iron range. The easy thing to do was add extra gravy and let things come to boil longer.

This had a secondary effect. Women no longer needed to spend hours tending to the fire. They could leave things to boil on a coal fire and attend to kids or other chores. Women could suddenly finish household chores and go to a work, as industrial revolution was just getting started.

Houses also started using coal fires for heating smaller fires. Households without a kitchen could toast bread by holding it on toasting fork against coal fire. Men and kids were able to toast their own bread. New possibilities opened up.

Coal fires had other problems. They made pots and pans more greasy. Pots on wood fires were easy to clean. The ash from a wood fire could be used like a nature soap to scrub the dishes. Coal fires meant there is no natural soap anymore. Also, incessant scrubbing of greasy pots and pans needed strength. So royal houses employed men as dishwashers. A soap industry was born. Households also got into a habit of washing themselves now.

America and France continued to use wood for cooking much later into 19th century and leapfrogged over coal as fuel for cooking. and therefore French recipes continued to be different from English.

British Raj had a significant coal production to the point, India was even a minor coal exporter. Using coal with अंगीठी or కుంపటి was a good middle class alternative to wood fires, but they needed to be used outdoors.

Overall, the author tells some compelling stories and all the second order effects as England switched from wood to coal. I so badly want to read the Indian equivalent.