The Hearth of the Home (Kitchens #5)
Does it matter what fuels our fire in the kitchen? Javon Bennett explains how his family adapted their cooking when they moved from Jamaica to England, and Carwyn Graves explores Welsh kitchen traditions.
CREDITS
Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove
Thanks to the contributors on this episode, Javon Bennett and Carwyn Graves.
And also thanks to Naomi Oppenheim who put me in touch with Javon via the British Library Caribbean Foodways project and also to my friend and previous Lecker guest Sian Stacey for telling me about Carwyn’s work.
Buy the Kitchens print zine featuring original essays and illustrations!
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.
Extractor fan recording by Victoria Ferran
Cover collage by Stephanie Hartman
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A big thank you go out to my new Patreon patrons: Anna, Naomi, Sonya, Gloria, Sian, Harriet, Jane, Kirsten, Sian and Hannah! And if you’ve really enjoyed listening to this episode, or are a big fan of the podcast in general already, please consider becoming a patron of the podcast at patreon.com/leckerpodcast
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Before this episode starts I just wanted to say thanks so much for all your lovely comments about Kitchens the series, I’m so glad you’re enjoying it. If you’d like to support the work that Lecker does - like this series -you can join as a patron for just £3 a month, which will help cover production costs. FInd out more at patreon.com/leckerpodcast
[Sound of gas hob clicking, then bursting into flame]
Javon Bennett: The first place that my memory takes me, I guess, would be my maternal grandmother's kitchen. That's the one that stands out to me. And actually, both my grandparents. The kitchen was quite is a separate entity to the rest of the house, because actually that house was was burned down in 1975. So it was just the ruins that that remained throughout my entire childhood. And, but then there was this little hut to have like wood and zinc. But it had I remember all the things that is that you would expect like shelves, little sections, where her pots and pans. And everything just made sense for her sort of height. My cousins and myself, my mom, uncles, everyone who knew her...neighbours, we would sort of congregate there. And there were like fruit trees, there was like a, there's a big plum tree that's sort of it was blown down slightly, when I think in 1988 there's a big hurricane, Hurricane Gilbert, one of the most famous ones there. And it knocked this tree down, but it still grew and bore fruit.
There was just so many days of just playing and learning and conversing with my family. And that's where everything was made and breakfasts, lunches, and dinner every day. And my grandmother, she cooked every day,
My name is Javon Bennett. I am 31...living in Oslo, Norway. I lived in London for 15 years. And prior to that in Jamaica.
I was introduced to Javon via Naomi Oppenheim, who ran this year’s brilliant Caribbean Foodways oral history project at the British Library. I was really interested in the stories of people who had moved to the UK from Caribbean countries, and what their memories of kitchens were. It was both of his grandparents’ kitchens that had really stuck in Javon’s mind.
My paternal grandmother, it was a similar thing. That one was inside but immediately towards the back. So it was all the pipes, all the washing, everything was done outside, but the cooking was done inside. As well as having a stove, they’d also use coal, coal fires. Things like roasting bread fruits. It almost looks like a tire cylinder. And you would have coal built on top, you could create a fire. And then you just sit the breadfruit on top. And you slowly roast and it blackens and then you peel the breadfruit off...the skin.
Breakfast is quite big in Jamaica, I think more commonly, particularly Christmas, I always feel like the breakfast is the more important meal than the, the dinner. So we have ackee and saltfish, plantains, whatever meat you want, breadfruit. They would all be prepared both in and outside. And, and that's the one thing I think I realized was, that was a constant in all the different kitchens and all the different places I've lived when I lived in Jamaica, was the kitchens were very close and approximal to being outside.
And I asked my mom about it, and she...I asked her how she felt and she's like, yes, it was fresh, there was a lot of aeration or ventilation, it was lighter. You know, even as, like, there are trees bearing fruit, and, for example, you know, the trees were like, part of our pantry. So, you know, we were able to, like, pick things and the day we pick them, that's when we'd cook them. So it was very accessible. And there was like a fluidity to how you access these spaces of indoor and outdoor.
And so a lot of preserving happened outside as well, a lot of other components of food and food preparation took place outside to, from killing and preparing an animal, like all of that was, you know, happened outside. Watching and learning chicken, you know, from farm to to...what's the term? Farm to table. And that all happened and I watched it happen in...all the processes. The garden or the...just the yard, was part of the kitchen.
“The trees were part of our pantry.” I think that’s so beautiful, and what an amazing way to cook and to live.
The reason I’d been interested in Caribbean kitchens is this. As Javon has explained, the way him and his family ate in Jamaica had developed out of the way that they lived, the way that kitchens were set up. It was warm enough to have that indoor outdoor fluidity he mentions, and kitchens were set up to cook things outdoor if that was required, like roasting breadfruit over a coal fire.
So what happens when you move to a different country with very different kitchens?
[Hob clicks and bursts into flame again, the noises of the kitchen intensify; cupboard doors are shut, cutlery is rattled, pots are clashed, a collage of voices talking about kitchens begins to speak over jaunty lounge music. Each speaker is separated by a dash].
[5:00] You go in the back door - It’s a really small kitchen, it’s tiny - It’s like a tiny little box - Gas hob - So you have the stove - Worktop - Counter - Sink - A small fridge - Underneath the draining board was the gas fridge - If more than one person’s in there, everyone starts to get a bit flustered. That’s the general vibe.
This is kitchens, a podcast series by Lecker, about the most important room in the home. I’m Lucy Dearlove.
They left out any element of human emotion and emotional intelligence in what people needed from kitchens. - This kitchen is not, it’s not suitable for me, it doesn’t enable me to cook. - Kitchens are more clones of each other than living rooms or bedrooms are. Why? Why is that?
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Episode 5 - The Hearth of the Home
JB: We moved in March of 2002. It was officially spring. And [LAUGHS] I remember it being quite sunny. But I was not used to the cold, it was still very cold. Actually, my mom got a fever because she looked.. She was inside, looked outside, it was bright and sunny, and went out, dressed in just like, just a tiny T-shirt, and got a fever and got really ill.
Obviously moving anywhere new involves a lot of adjustments, particularly if it involves moving countries. But there were lots of things related to the weather of their new home country that were a shock to them.
We realized that suddenly we're now living in a country that has very drastic seasonal changes that we need to adapt to. And our style of cooking is, in a way controlled by those seasons...or the way we cook particularly in the winter, we can't just have it open we have to...suddenly ventilation is an important factor, having air ducts and, and the horrible sound that when you turn on...that whirring, horrible drone.
Having only ever lived in Northern European countries with cold winters, I’ve never lived in a kitchen without an extractor fan, so for me they go hand in hand with kitchens. But they are a pain! Big, noisy, ungainly, And I can imagine an annoying thing to have to adapt to if you’d been used to just cooking outside, or having the kitchen open enough to the outdoors for any smells to blow away quickly.
In fact the whole set up of their new kitchen took some getting used to.
It's like a tiny little box. And so you had the stove, counter, the the air duct above it. And there was a small fridge beside it. Cupboards above going round. So it's almost like a
little hatch. And it was quite...just very simple, very modest. And, but it wasn't very clean. I remember when we moved in and my mum wasn't happy. And then she got to work on it. Because she's clean. She's a fanatic when it comes to cleanliness. And also, I think in Jamaica we lived in in homes where the floors are mainly tiled. So it allowed us to keep cool. And suddenly we're going into a place where it's carpeted. So again, that feels a bit more claustrophobic.
As well as adapting to the kitchen itself, finding the things they wanted to eat and were used to cooking was a challenge.
And I think for my mum that was the main thing; that she had to suddenly source everything. So it took a long time for her to, like, find the ingredients that she's accustomed to, to cook the food she knows and and then we have to stock everything. And then you find yourself doing a lot of bulk buying.
And another thing that was difficult to get used to...was the stove.
We're used to using gas in Jamaica and that offered...I mean, the way I think of it is...it's fire, it's instant heat and suddenly going from that to using an electric hob. It was a lot slower. Your sense of sight which you relied upon quite readily before...you no longer have that. So now you have to, you know you put your hand over the pan, is it hot enough yet? Is it ready? The skill that goes into controlling an open flame is also redundant. You're bound by the specific controls on the knob from like one to nine. And working out what does that mean? So and it takes a long time to work out what they really, you know, to gauge in your head, like a sense of that’s medium high or...You have no finesse anymore with a, say, as you would have with the gas. So I think for her, it was a bit slower.
This is one of the elements of kitchen design that I was most interested in exploring when I started working on this project. And it’s something that’s been relatively difficult to find writing and research on. For me the single most positive influence on the food that’s available today in the UK is immigration. The food available here would be nothing without the food brought here by people from other countries. But when you consider the domestic kitchen in the majority of homes...it’s been designed for a style of food and cooking that’s a long way removed from the way people in many parts of the world cook.
The labour saving kitchens of Lilian Gilbreth - the American domestic educator who i talked about in episode 2 - featured case studies focused on reducing the number of motions required to prepare very specific kinds of food, like meatloaf, or strawberry shortcake. In the great book The 1950s Kitchen, which has loads of amazing archive kitchen photos and i highly recommend it, Kathryn Ferry writes about research carried out by Lever Bros in the 1930s, where they determined the optimum kitchen size for expending the minimum effort when cooking quote “the very British menu of soup, fish and chips, and apple pie.” But this is an extremely different style of cooking to many people who live with these kitchens. The motions required for example, to toast then grind spices before making a stew or curry with them, or to cook several dishes one after another in a wok or steamer, are very different from this exceptionally beige, oven based menu.
In the Kitchens zine released alongside this series, Ishita DasGupta interviewed her mother, who moved to England from West Bengal in the 1970s. Her mother, adjusting to the shock of a new life many thousands of miles away from home, also had to adapt to a very different way of cooking. Ishita writes: “What took most time for her to get used to was the electric cooker. In India she had first learnt to cook over a clay stove [...] using charcoal. My mother would always add far too much water to her cooking, expecting it to be like gas, and her food would often end up soggy and flavourless.”
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a recipe that takes into account the fuel that you’re cooking over. Because this is true, a gas stove will evaporate water much faster than an electric one and that will completely change the dish.
And there’s also just the power and the heat of the stove.
Sean Warmington-Wan, who talked about his unsociable shared kitchen at the beginning of episode 3, told me that when his family moved to England from Hong Kong when he was little, his mum would use a portable gas camping stove to stir fry on, because their actual hob just wasn’t powerful enough to get the heat she needed. And this is something Sean still does in shared kitchens with unsuitable hobs too.
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Javon did stress that adapting to the electric stove didn’t actually change how his mum’s cooking tasted. And he also wanted to make it clear that while there were things they missed about life in Jamaica, and everything took some getting used to, they were also really excited about their new life in the UK, and there were things in their East London kitchen that they’d never had before.
We were excited because we, you know, we were moving. We’re moving to the UK and we knew that we were moving for a better life. And so we in a way we were leaving, leaving Jamaica behind. So we were kind of excited to get a few things. We got a microwave. We, which we'd never had before. And a kettle, which we've never had before, because it just, it just felt, it - again because it was so quick, easy to just boil the water. Yeah, it was just that. Yeah. And the gas stove and the pan. Also because in Jamaica electricity. So at that time anyway, it was scarce, like, particularly on a Sunday evening. It would just go out. And, and you knew like, Oh, okay. So you haven't got the candles out. And it was always a Sunday. So I think it was timed. Having a kettle seemed a bit frivolous. And and now it's I mean, but also, that's, you know, in the 90s, the early 90s. So it's it's all of these things were becoming...were new to us.
I think I would probably describe myself as ‘hob agnostic’. Like a hob has to be functional, and ideally fast...but to a certain extent I’ve always accepted that I get what I’m given, particularly when I was renting. I’ve lived in flats with fiery gas hobs that burned things instantly until I got used to them, and I’ve lived with electric hobs that took the duration of a shower to warm up to an appropriate heat for cooking porridge. What I’m trying to say is: historically I’ve never given much thought to WHAT I’m cooking over, let alone how a particular kind of fuel or flame might be better for a particular food.
I wonder if this is a product of how many times the typical cooking fuel has changed in this country, and how cooking has been altered as a result. Ruth Goodman writes about this in her book The Domestic Revolution, about the pivotal role that coal played in Britain’s history. Britain was the first Western country to switch over from wood to coal as the predominant fuel, and London was domestically dependent on coal by 1600, and by 1900, 300 years later, 95% of households in the entire country were coal burning. Goodman states: “No other nation’s cuisine developed quite along the same lines since no other nation was to have the same relationship with coal.”
She identifies a really striking shift in English dishes pre-switch to coal, and afterwards; calling it - quite hilariously in my opinion - “the thick/wet divide”.
When wood was the main fuel for cooking fires in the home, dishes like Furmenty, a thick, starchy 17th century meal consisting of dehusked corn cooked twice, first in water, then in milk and broth, until it took on a sort of risotto-ish texture. It was then enriched with egg yolk and salt before serving. Wood fires were particularly suitable for these sorts of dishes as they were best cooked by way of an initial boil of high heat and then a period of lower heat to allow them to absorb the liquid. Wood fires burnt more quickly and subsequently cooled, allowing this to happen. But coal - which retains high heat for much longer, doesn’t allow for this cooling period. To cook Furmenty over a coal fire, you would have to pay close attention, and after the initial boil you would have to take the pan off the fire periodically so that it didn’t burn. So, partly for this reason, with the rise in popularity of coal, English cooking moved towards broth based ‘wetter dishes’, which could withstand a longer hotter cooking method without burning or catching.
It’s important to state here that we can’t just generalise about British food, because different countries within Britain have very different traditions when it comes to cooking.
Carwyn Graves: So first thing to say is that, Welsh Cakes are just one of a number of different types of dishes and cakes that work really well on a bake stone on an open fire.
My name is Carwyn Graves. I'm a food historian based in West Wales.
Talking to Carwyn was educational for many reasons, but a big one was understanding how much more connected Welsh food history feels to its methods of cooking and the fuel that historically powered them.
But what’s especially fascinating is that some of this isn’t even particularly ancient history.
CG: You’re talking about...well,two things. You’re really talking about ranges. And you're also talking about open...open fireplaces. And the open fireplace is this just amazing, rich tradition that now pretty much has died, but that is absolutely within living memory. And the range tradition, I guess, is less unique, but that continues in a lot of rural communities.
So the open fire thing is where all of these wonderful things that people from outside of Wales may have heard of, things like Welsh cakes, have come from. And it's a tradition that goes right right back in terms of archaeologists finding evidence of, this is gonna sound terribly stereotypical, but even in round houses, and some of the equipment used. So if we use the word bakestone or backstone, there's different ways of pronouncing it. The clue is the word stone, and one of the Welsh terms for Welsh cake is picau ar y maen, Picau is related to the English word pikelet. Some people may have heard of, and then maen is literally the word for a large stone. So it's pikelets on the stone.
Open fire cooking is absolutely within living memory in Wales. That’s a fact I find really hard to get my head around. By choice, people from certain generations stuck to the old style of open fire cooking even when modern stoves and fuels became available.
I’ve only ever seen pictures of bakestones while researching this ep, and never actually encountered one in real life. So I asked Carwyn to describe what it looks like and how it fits into a Welsh kitchen.
So there's more than one type that...in terms of Welsh bake stone. For centuries and centuries into the, you know, into living memory, you're talking about a cast iron, a flat cast iron implement, that is a bit like a really big frying pan with no rim. And, and a sort of handle, but not like a long handle that you'd hold, rather a handle that you might kind of clasp at the end. People would use iron tripods, all of which suffice to say, have got their own names and regional names and everything. But that would then be put above this open fire. And next to the fires, this is not just an open fireplace, like you might use to heat a living room or something. But the whole hearthspace is configured in a certain way. So left and right, there are grates. And then beyond them, there are these stone cells. And on the stone sills, you have these drying racks, and you've got places for ...ina lot of houses, you've got places for hams to dry, up above and maybe slightly out from fire. So you know that the whole space is configured but right at the center is the bakestone. And I should also say that, you know, obviously you start the fire and using you know, the right type of the right type of fuel for whatever you're going to be making that day. And you've got the bakestone above it, and it heats up and it's got this steady, gentle but sort of medium heat...obviously the skill there is in controlling the fire.
We don’t often think of how regionally specific dishes fit into life outside of the kitchen, but there’s a really satisfying way that Welsh baked goods made sense in the context of historical houses, and the way people have lived there.
CG: I'd love to just draw some of those links between Welsh cakes - that a lot of people will have tasted - and these old kitchen traditions that have just about survived into the early 20th/21st century.
To understand these fully we have to zoom right out, and come to the idea of how Welsh settlements were structured, in comparison to, for example, England, or France.
I'll just use the English example, same as France and other places...you've got villages, traditionally, villages centers around the village green, with lots of houses together and people would, people would, you know, basically sleep in the house in the village and, and go out into the field surrounding the village to work. Whereas in Wales, apart from a few areas in the southeast, the traditional settlement pattern, same true again in Scotland and Ireland, is scattered cottages across the countryside. And so in terms of social life, what that meant was...not that pubs didn't exist, but you've got to also remember about Welsh revivals and kind of nonconformist teetotal things. So, in England, and again, I'm broad brushstroke here, but the pub being the center point of the village, you finish your work as whatever you do, and you go to the pub. Whereas in in Wales, what happens is the, you know, you live two fields away from somebody that direction two fields away from somebody the other direction, and you know, there's a cluster of cottages, and you gather in a cottage and and where do you gather, well you gather, I mean, it's a cottage, it's small, and you gather in that space, but you've got the fire. The bakestone is on, it's got that gentle heat, it's just perfect, you've got a chest of oatmeal, you've got your dairy, you know, you've got your buttermilk. And when the people arrive, you can literally put together, you know, the batter for something along the lines of Welsh cakes, I mean, there’s a whole other range of things, that I won't bore you with all their names, but, but something along the lines of a Welsh cake, and you just drop it on the bakestone. And within a few minutes, there's a really moreish, fatty, sugary snack that people can enjoy as they're sat there.
And what do they do? So I'm just going to also draw this link. And people might have heard about, kind of the Welsh poetic tradition, and things like The Eisteddfod. What do they do? Well, there is a strong tradition of literally, poetry and entertainment, of that nature that happens in this kitchen space, that is also a living space.
OK, so culturally, the Welsh cake - and its siblings - fits into Welsh traditional ways of life like this, But the threads are further entangled still. Many of the items that could be cooked on the bakestone like this contain oats. As Carwyn himself writes in a series about Welsh food culture on his website: it’s hard to convey just how much in the way of oat-based foods was consumed in Wales up until the 20th century, particularly by people living in the western, windward side of the country. And here’s why.
So here's your unified theory of European food. East of Europe, you've got much colder winters, and the further west you go, winters get milder. And this is actually incidentally, why leeks are associated with Wales, because they can overwinter in the West in the garden, because it just...you get frost and you get a bit of snow, but it never stays around for long because the Atlantic comes in, and it rains again. So that means that hardy vegetables like leek can overwinter. You try and do that in Poland, and it ain't gonna work. So and then the same applies when you come to grains and baking. So...in a different way. Oats do well, hence, obviously, Scotland, you know, that, that whole well known tradition. And the same was true in Wales. So oats do really well here.
Whereas, I would suggest not particularly as the not much point during them if you go further east, in on the continent, when you get to wheat belt, France, and then East again, and you get to rye territory.
And outs don't have gluten in them. So this is where everything goes together. Because no gluten means that bread doesn't rise. And if you want to make useful things with oats, you've got to cook in a different way. And so what can you make with oats? Well, yes, you can make porridge, but I think everybody agrees...I mean, I'm a fan of porridge, I think porridge can be delicious. And it's you know, it's good food, and we know our health benefits. But I think everybody would agree that if you had porridge, you know, morning, noon, evening, you'd get, you know, you get incredibly sick of it. And so this is where, you know, human agency and you know, peasants making decisions, is a really important concept. Because they didn't just make porridge, they found other ways to use oats and have a varied diet with something as in one sense as unversatile as oats because wheat is, let's face it, wheat is just that bit sexier and that bit more useful! So if you can only really grow oats what are you going to do? And one of the things is oatcakes. Oatcakes are tough, I don't know if anybody listening to this has ever tried making cakes at home, but find a recipe and give it a go. And you will get frustrated. Because you know, it's not flour, it's not wheat flour. And it doesn't make that really satisfying dough that you're used to. So to actually make something really usable with with oatmeal, take skill and practice.
The availability of oats over wheat or rye in Wales explains why enclosed ovens didn’t see the rapid rise in popularity that there was in some countries. They still existed - there are records of amazing communal bread ovens, but when it came to domestic cooking people were very accustomed to open fire and range cooking for the sort of foods they liked to make. And so we come back to the bakestone, because this style of heat - and cooking - lends itself very well to this sort of food.
And, you know, there are obviously plenty of professional baker's in Wales today who make really good Welsh cakes. And, and you can make them on a on a gas hub, with, you know, with a diff, you know, with griddles, basically modern griddles. But they just don't work as well, because what you want is a really kind of gentle, steady heat. And, I mean, I'm not I'm not a physicist, but you could measure this, you know, I've read enough around it that you could definitely measure...I’ve experimented as well. You could pick this up in terms of physics, and there's interesting stuff written down as well from years ago, when gas hobs were coming in people complaining. Yeah, just people complaining about the kind of way of control. And that this is a generation of women, of course, who were used to the intricacies of different fuels.
So you have peat, you have gorse which is abundant in the western half of Wales, obviously, you've got wood and coal as well. But turf is another one. And, and they, you know, they have their different fuels for different things. So you had a whole range of dishes. I don't know what to call them. They're baked goods, but they're not baked goods that you make in an enclosed oven, like we think of an oven, they're all made on the bakestone. So Welsh cake is one, that there's a whole range of others using other fruits like apples, things like pancakes. So, pancakes...where are the best pancakes in the world made? Brittany. What's the word for that? Crêpe in French. Crêpe in French comes from Krampouz in Breton, and that is the same word as the Welsh word for pancake...Crempog.
I think it can’t really be stressed enough how much skill was required to cook and bake in this way. Building and maintaining a fire is very far removed from switching on a hob, no matter what the fuel is.
So the advantage of this open fire method is that you've basically got two main implements that you use, and you can do everything you need with it. So implement one is basically a cauldron. And that is for your stews and for your, porridge type dishes, so your liquid dishes, and then you've got the bakestone, and that's all the dry, you know, the baking. So it's, you've got two basic things that are very versatile and both of them are above a fire. So this is where the fuel comes in, where you say you've got, I mentioned gorse earlier, and the thing with gorse, is it burns very, very quickly. But it doesn't, it doesn't give you a steady, steady heat. So it depends on what people wanted to bake is my understanding. So if you've got gorse on one end of the spectrum, then you've got peat and turf at the other end of the spectrum, and they're very, very slow. Not very hot. And, and again, you might think, Okay, well probably people were only using them because they didn't have access to coal. But that that's actually a flattening of the historical record because - well, I say historical record, I really should emphasize this it was still going on in well into living memory in many parts. And people when they had when they had, you know, when women had and, you know, women when women had the option of coal, plentiful coal cheap coal, from obviously the the mines of South Wales and wood and peat and grose and turf, I gather that turf was basically left out so turf was deficient. But people kept using the peat, and they used it for overnight dishes. So this is the thing, it’s safe. So it's a slow gentle heat. It's literally a slow cooker, but it's not plugged into the electricity grid. And so you've got your, your, your cauldron dishes rather than your bakestone dishes. You make this peat fire you you know you know what you're doing which I don’t! But you do it right. You put what you want in the cauldron and and it will it will smolder and it will keep going and if you get up in the morning and be upset people perish this way. You get up in the morning in the morning, non centrally heated houses of course. But you get up in the morning and you've got a hot, nice bowl of porridge ready for you. Which is wonderful. So that's that's peat. Gorse, I gather - this is interesting - gorse was used outside. I don't yet know why. But I trust that there was a logic to this. When people had indoor kitchens, it was a very, very common thing. Up until I gather this stops in the 60s generally but up until the 60s for people to do some of their cooking by choice in the open air in Wales. And gorse was used there, you get you get a crackling fire going quickly. And then, and then I think people moved over a start the fire of course and you move over to another fuel I'm guessing that will be coal commonly. I don't know, for that one.
When people were making this switch from over the second half of the 20th century, for a variety of reasons but basically, the old way of cooking took a lot of time, and people were losing that time. Because, you know, for good reason. Obviously, a lot of women were entering the workforce and you know, the whole setup of society was changing, but what was lost there was the fact that, you know, you just can't...these dishes. And these recipes were adapted over literally centuries for a way of cooking that didn't kind of work anymore.
As Carwyn says, the shift to types of cooking that are easier to fit into modern lives makes sense. But what’s sad about this is that there’s a really particular loss that goes alongside it and maybe it’s a been unexpected: the Welsh language associated with these very specific types of cooking.
I think for me, maybe I can say for us, my first language is Welsh, we speak Welsh at home, I grew up speaking Welsh, And the language for all of these things, actually, even in parts of Wales that have been English speaking for, in some cases, places like Gower peninsula for centuries. They borrowed kitchen terms from Welsh, and that's not because there wasn't suitable vocabulary available in England, or in English, but actually because of their kind of kitchen culture being very distinct. Like so Gower is a really good example because they had loads of links over the sea...quicker to travel by sea over to Devon and Somerset and they spoke the same language - English - in Gower, as people did in in Devon and Somerset, and rather than their Welsh speaking neighbors. But the kitchen vocabulary in Gower English comes from Welsh. And again, this is because their way of cooking was, you know, was this kind of Welsh way and I over-emphasise, but there is something there.
And so even in the Welsh language, as we've had this massive shift, where some things have survived, you know, a lot of dishes are not going to die out ever, presumably, things like Welsh cakes, but a whole, a whole load of other things have fallen by the wayside within the last 50 years. And, and it's particularly the terminology around implements and preparation methods, and sayings and all that sort of thing. That, yeah, that have died.
There is something poignant in particularly for me as a...I guess, the way to convey it, for people listening who, you know, who maybe speak a global language like English as their mother tongue, is to think, imagine what it'd be like, if everybody who was over the age of 70 used a whole bunch of English terms in the kitchen. And then everybody else used French terms. And you'd kind of be like, Ah, there are these really nice words, and I don't know why we’ve stopped using them. But we have. No idea if that gets the emotion behind it across to an extent, but that is kind of what it feels like. So for me, it's not natural to use terms for things like spatula, So for spatula we, we, you know, anybody my age in Welsh is going to use a loan words from English, we're going to say spatula but there are loads of baking terms that basically mean spatula, yeah, they don't refer to a plastic thing, but it's the same that exists in Welsh that have just, that have just been lost as that kitchen setup has shifted. And, and there is something poignant in that. And yeah, I'm not interested in a kind of campaign for linguistic purism. But, but I don't want to throw babies out with bathwater either.
Like Carwyn rejecting linguistic purism, I don’t want you to think that I’m just pining for the good old days out of blind nostalgia. Coal is a dirty fuel, and there’s a reason why over the past few decades there’s been a decisive move away from it, just as there’s a move away from installing gas hobs in new build homes in this country. For the sake of the environment we do have to stop relying on fossil fuels to heat our homes and feed us, and, for example, electric and induction hobs allow flexibility for their power to come from more sustainable sources. But coal is still used as a cooking fuel by people in many parts of the world, and while a global shift towards cleaner more sustainable sources of energy and heat is crucial, I think it’s also really important to handle this sensitively and preserve the traditions somehow, or else risk the entire systems built around this way of cooking being lost forever.
The way the whole kind of culture, you know, all these different threads just converge. I'm so sure it’ll be true in so many other parts of the world that it fascinates me as a Welsh person to see all of these threads coming together as, yeah, as a study of the kitchen.
Lecker is written and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode, Javon Bennett and Carwyn Graves.
And also thanks to Naomi Oppenheim who put me in touch with Javon via the British Library Caribbean Foodways project and also to my friend and previous Lecker guest Sian Stacey for telling me about Carwyn’s work.
There’s also a print zine featuring original essays and illustrations about kitchens released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at leckerpodcast.com
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance from the brilliant Nadia Mehdi.
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