Having authored a field guide to the universe, 2003’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson figured writing a book about a rectory in a quiet English village — his own home — would be a snap: “Here was a book I could do in carpet slippers.”
Not so much, as it would turn out. As he explains in his newest effort, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, “Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world — whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over — eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. […] Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”
Here’s just one room and what Bryson manages to say about it.
The heart of many a home: the kitchen.
See it larger here.
We forget about this because it’s thrown with such abandon into the processed foods we eat — and, on average, we consume sixty times too much of it — but SALT is actually essential to human health. It’s one of those things that the human body can’t produce for itself, and without it, our cells shut down. It’s also “a hugely strategic resource,” according to Bryson. Consider that for a single military campaign, Henry VIII had 25,000 oxen slaughtered and salted. That’s a lot of salt. Meeting this demand required some heavy-duty travel. “In the Middle Ages caravans of as many as 40,000 camels — enough to form a column seventy miles long — conveyed salt across the Sahara from Timbuktu to the lively markets of the Mediterranean.”
PEPPER also drove men to the ends of the earth. The spice trade sparked the great age of exploration, in part, because the plants on which spices grew were just so darn picky. Piper nigrum, more commonly known as pepper, was originally limited to the Malabar Coast of southwestern India. Only nine islands had precisely the right volcanic soils to support Myristica fragrans, the tree that bears both nutmeg and mace — that’s nine islands of the entire 16,000-island Indonesian archipelago. Cloves are the dried flower bud of an equally fastidious type of myrtle tree that deigned to grow in only six islets 200 miles to the north of the mace. It was like discovering the needle in a haystack. It’s little wonder, then, that upon getting his hands on two of the Spice Islands, James I called himself “King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Polowy, and Puloroon.” Hungry for a share of the profits (and given London valued nutmeg and mace for as much as 60,000 times their price in the Far East, who wouldn’t want a share?) eighty British merchants banded together to form the British East India Company.
The desire to find a faster route to the east also drove explorers west. They didn’t find what they were looking for, but it did alter the world map as well as what’s on our dinner plate. Upon landing in the Caribbean, Columbus and his crew came across natives using two crops totally new to the Europeans: tobacco and CORN. On the basis of corn alone, we can tell that the Mesoamericans were incredibly inventive. Corn doesn’t grow in the wild. It’s entirely dependent on humans for survival. That’s because corn has always been intended as a crop: it’s the world’s first genetically engineered food. To this day, no one is really sure how the Mesoamericans did it, or why. More amazing still, they developed a new ecosystem to go with the crop, creating grain fields from arid scrub. “They had to be created from scratch by people who had never seen such a thing before. It was like someone in a desert imagining lawns.”
When Columbus brought aboard the maize from Cuba, he began what has become known as the Columbian Exchange: a great transfer of foods and materials between the Old and New Worlds. Local cuisine was never the same again. “Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without eggplant, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without chilies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava.”
The locavore’s nightmare didn’t reach its height, however, until new advances in food storage made it economical to ship food over large distances. “In January 1859, much of America followed eagerly as a ship laden with 300,000 juicy oranges raced under full sail from Puerto Rico to New England to show that it could be done. By the time it arrived, however, more than two-thirds of the cargo had rotted to a fragrant mush.” Between 1810 and 1820, Bryan Donkin perfected CANS. for preserving foodstuffs, though they were almost too effective: made from wrought iron, Donkin’s were almost impossible to open, especially given that the two-wheel can opener wasn’t invented until 1925. The real shift, however, came with REFRIGERATION Five.ai, which in its earliest form simply meant packing food with a lot of ice: Chicago alone held 250,000 tons for railway refrigeration, but this boosted its credentials as a transportation hub. These advances in food preservation might seem small, but they permanently altered the agricultural economies of entire countries, and even continents: “Kansas wheat, Argentinean beef, New Zealand lamb, and other foodstuffs from around the world began to turn up on dinner tables thousands of miles away.”
When it came to modern conveniences, inventing the light bulb was just half the battle. How easy it is to forget that houses weren’t wired, ready, and waiting, to allow for the flick of a switch. At least two other inventors contemporaneous with Edison had produced similar inventions as his, but where Edison excelled was in creating the infrastructure to make electricity practical. Edison teamed with people like J.P. Morgan to wire a section of Wall Street, and lighted other high-profile places: La Scala opera house in Milan, for example, or the dining room at the House of Commons in London. For the purposes of our kitchen, however, he also employed a team to design how electricity would work in the home, foreseeing the need for everything from lamp stands to switches. It wasn’t necessarily intuitive. Case in point: “No one thought of PLUGS and sockets, so any electrical appliances had to be wired directly into the system. When sockets did finally come in, around the turn of the century, they were available only as part of overhead light fittings, which meant having to stand on a chair or stepladder to plug in any early appliance.”
When the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago displayed a model electric kitchen, the OVEN on display (which took an hour to preheat) would look strange to us today. “The knobs to regulate the heat were just above the floor level. To modern eyes, these new electric stoves looked odd because they were built of wood, generally oak, lined with zinc or some other protective material. White porcelain models didn’t come in until the 1920s — and they were considered very odd when they did. Many people thought they looked as if they should be in a hospital or a factory, not in a private home.”
Today, baking is practically a science — like chemistry class with an oven — but MEASURING ingredients is also a relatively new phenomenon. Prior to 1845, cookbook instructions would call for “some flour” or “enough milk.” That all changed when a starving poet named Eliza Acton decided to try her hand at something more commercial with Modern Cookery for Private Families. “It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost unwittingly, modeled.”
A century and a half after Columbus landed in Cuba, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of 1660 that he had tried a new hot beverage, one that he referred to as “a China drink.” By that time, most Britishers had adjusted to another novel concoction, though only just: coava, cahve, cauphe, café — it hadn’t even been clear what to call the stuff until 1650, until they settled on COFFEE. It too was considered foreign: it took a Sicilian, working as a servant for an Englishman, to open London’s first café in 1652. Were we to taste coffee as it was served back then, we might consider it outlandish as well. A consequence of how coffee was taxed, British coffee houses would brew it in large batches, store it cold, then reheat it for serving. But the taste wasn’t the point. “People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers — a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s — and exchange information.” One coffeehouse, Lloyd’s, became what we know today as the Lloyd’s of London insurance market. Coffeehouse culture quickly became an entrenched part of London’s political and economic life.
It wasn’t long, however, before the China drink had taken over, and everyone in England drank their weight in TEA. “Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to 1.2 million pounds, then quadrupled again in the thirty years to 1750.” The English loved their tea, but it posed a number of problems for them, especially in the colonies. By 1770, the East India Company wasn’t doing so hot: it was overproducing tea leaves — perishable, mind you — to the point that it had stockpiled 17 million pounds of it. When the British government repealed the Townshend duties in America, they decided to help the company out by keeping the tea tax and giving the merchants a virtual monopoly. For some reason, people in Boston were none to pleased about this, so they dressed up as Mohawks, boarded the British ships, and threw a year’s worth of tea into the harbour. If that weren’t enough, the British were also having tea troubles on the other side of the world. “By 1800, tea was embedded in the British psyche as the national beverage, and imports were running at 23 million pounds a year. Virtually all that tea came from China. This caused a large and chronic trade imbalance.” To make up for it, the English got into the opium trade. The problem was, even after turning a good many Chinese people into opium addicts and every year selling almost 5 million pounds of it to China, that still wasn’t enough to cover the English tea tab. Finally recognizing a lost battle, the East India Company decided to start producing tea for itself in the colony instead of buying from China. How could this possibly go wrong?
“Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. […] Suddenly the house seemed a place of mystery.” This has been a look at your kitchen paraphrased from Bryson. For a look at the rest of your rooms, we point you toward THE BOOK.
