Domestic Manners of the English
IT was not until the Daily General caught a chill and vanished for a week to her home in Kentish Town that I grasped the great principle which lies motionless at the base of English domestic economy. I had made before only a cursory examination of the far too small kitchen in our sixteenth-century flat. Now I learned that one cannot wash dishes very expeditiously, or very clean, when the tap sheds cold water only; that, the cupboard space being limited, most of the cooking utensils were kept in the oven and had to be extricated and set about the floor whenever one desired to bake; that the sink fell away abruptly in the opposite direction from the drain, and water ran out only when personally conducted.
Cold water is a great fact of nature, and after all there is a geyser in the bathroom; but I purchased some hooks from the indispensable Woolworth, screwed them into every available bit of woodwork, and cleared the oven for its legitimate purposes; then I sent — we live in one of the Inns of Court — for the Bureau of Works. They arrived with admirable promptness and gazed upon the sink. They considered it for long minutes in silence and at last announced judicially that it would be quite impossible to tilt it in the right direction because to do so might crack the pipe; after all, it had been like this for years; and — this was not said, of course, but implied — better men than I had had their dishes washed there and eaten off them in silence. The Bureau of Works went away.
And then at last I comprehended the principle on which the English home is founded: circumstances, material things, cannot be altered; therefore the human being must alter, adapting herself and enduring as best she may. The English housewife’s attitude toward her work is consequently quite different from that of the housewife in America or on the Continent. It does not occur to her that there might be anything beautiful in her profession, that it might be done with grace, with finesse; it requires all her moral energy to get it done at all. You do not feed the starving with golden-brown meringues or omelettes aux fines herbes. To think of cooking or homemaking as an art would be in her eyes French and decadent, uncomplimentary adjectives both. Neither has she the American impatience or ingenuity which invents labor-saving devices and sells them, which declines to do by hand what can be done better by an electric switch, which tiles its bathrooms and curves its corners to make cleaning painless and then invents a vacuum cleaner to reduce the painlessness by half.
Right here that rugged individualism, gazed at so wistfully by the overstandardized American, plays the Englishwoman an ill turn. You can use, for instance, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the electric toaster you bought in Springfield, Illinois, but move so much as across the street in London and you may have to reëquip your establishment from wireless to basement. Consequently the woman who wants to enjoy any other occupation cannot, as the unhappy American phrase is, ‘do her own work.’ She must have servants and she must exact of them tasks not unlike those imposed by the witches in fairy tales.
Perhaps an ethnologist will one day draw for us the precise line between carrying water in a sieve and ministering to the brass cans and hot-water bottles in a five-story London house; between picking grains of rice out of the ashes and washing dishes with a geyser. Not that the mistress has any witch-like qualities; she is probably exceedingly sympathetic and charming to her maids in all relations of life which do not impinge upon unalterable material things. She will pay the expenses of a long illness, celebrate her parlor maid’s engagement, or send advice and blankets to the butler’s sister’s baby, but Tudor floors must be scrubbed and Queen Anne sinks borne with. I shall not soon forget the tone of terrified amazement with which I was told in a certain cathedral town of the young wife of a newly appointed dean who had cut the deanery in halves, literally, and rented part of it because she refused to ask her maids to travel through eleven rooms every time they went from the kitchen to the front door.
And the servants themselves, of course, are for the most part quite unaware that they are being ‘ put upon.’ Tradition is very strong, and they share the attitude of their employers toward the facts of domestic life. Our little Daily General thinks our socialism just another idiosyncrasy of Americans, like our fondness for salt and sauces. Some of the Socialists’ ideas are quite good, she tells us, but she is a Conservative. Each of my American friends who keeps house in London has related to me with tears in her eyes how she has tried to prevent her maid from going down upon her knees to scrub the hall and doorstep, how she has presented her with varieties of long-handled mops, in vain. There is something peculiarly degrading to the American eye in the endless line of chars and housemaids kneeling upon the cold stone which one must pass each morning in every London street, but if they were aware of our sympathy they would receive it with wide-eyed incomprehension, or perhaps indulgence.
The complete picture of the great principle is to be seen, I think, in an advertisement I chanced on the other day in an 1850 newspaper. It would be lettered differently to-day, but the spirit continues. The demand was for a housemaid who, it was desired, should be under thirty-five years of age, a good churchwoman, and so forth and so forth. ‘Her principal duties,’ the paragraph concluded, ‘will be in the kitchen, but skill in cooking is of small consideration compared with good principle.’
The same countenance with which she approaches the sink the housewife turns toward food. Meat and vegetables are axiomatic, given, not to be altered, merely encompassed as a part of the essential duty of keeping fit. It is such human foibles as desire for variety and flavor which must be subdued by a strong will. You may heat comestibles, — though even that is a little cowardly; I have had an Englishman give me six solemn reasons for the superiority of cold toast, — but it is absurd to attempt to carry them very far from their natural state. Those French vegetables, peas and beans, the cook boils guiltily, soothing her conscience by presenting them always a little raw. For the attempt to alter Nature’s data is more than foolish; it is dishonest.
Gissing has an eloquent, and perfectly serious, chapter in Henry Ryecroft on the admirable honesty of English cooking which never attempts, like its deceitful colleague across the Channel, to disguise with sauces the pristine quality of the food it touches, never mixes ingredients or adds elaborate flavorings, but contents itself with bringing out the fundamental rightness of the British joint or vegetable marrow. That is the secret of the national passion for potatoes; treat a potato as you will, it continues triumphantly to announce its honest origin. To be on the very safe side, however, the English prefer their potatoes boiled, and without butter. They have an uncanny ability, too, to turn all their other vegetables into cabbage, that safe and solid norm. Nothing is more indicative of the strength of the national character than the appearance of Italian broccoli after it has grown for a year or two in an English garden.
Sauces, of a very definite or completely tasteless nature, — horse-radish or bread sauce, — are admitted, but they must be kept as far as possible from the meat until the final moment of mounting upon the devouring fork. An English sauce always reminds me of the small boy who was asked to draw a picture of a cruel man. In the centre of the paper appeared the conventional head, body, and legs. ‘That,’ he explained, ‘is the man, and that,’ pointing to a small spiral in the upper left-hand corner, ‘is his cruelness.’
When she does dare to compose a mixture, — to construct, for instance, a ‘sweet,’ — the English cook goes quite mad. The things which she combines in her panic have no conceivable real relationship. It never occurs to her to consider how they will taste. (You cannot persuade her to taste a dish, anyhow; she boils the fish for the proper length of time, and if it is not done then that is its own fault.) So she produces for your delight such anomalies as tinned apricots arranged with whipped cream to resemble poached eggs couched on pieces of cake-toast; assorted chips of fruit crowded into a glass and smothered with a glue-like custard; gingerbread and treacle; puddings of spaghetti and sugar flavored with vanilla.
Neither will she stoop to enlist the suggestive power of pretty names. A French cookbook instructs you to bake a crust till it is as golden as a sunset sky, to beat the eggs to a snow, to introduce a bouquet of savory herbs — the meanest action is bathed in a poetic glow. The British manual talks flatly of suet and drippings, of stale bread crumbs and of grease, while British menus bear such realistic titles as Brown Gravy Soup, Gooseberry Fool, Treacle Sponge, Cold Shape.
This is, as you see, all in exact accord with the housewife’s creed: Non mensa flectat, sed mens. Circumstances cannot be altered; man must bend or endure.
And the creed extends far beyond the table. I went into a shop in Oxford Street the other day, seeing in the window some frocks of a charming flowered print. When I tried one on, however, its lines proved to be fantastically wrong. Mildly I suggested that perhaps they had not given me the proper size. ‘Oh no, madam,’ the saleswoman assured me, ‘ the beauty of that frock is that it fits all sizes.’
The more closely one studies this point of view in the breakfast room, the sewing room, or the kitchen, the more thoroughly one understands the ways of the whole race. Even as they cook the dinner, so do they muddle through their battles and their economic crises. The Englishman makes no attempt to change the menacing circumstances about him, be they financial, political, or military; he merely stands solidly in their midst munching an underdone potato.