Food and cooking

There were some almshouses which provided meals for their inmates, and some, like the London Charterhouse, still do.  But our Charterhouse never did.  Food had to be bought out of the weekly allowance or produced on site.  So what did the early residents eat, and how did they cook it?

The earliest evidence we have comes from information in the accounts in 1584 and subsequent years.  The inmates' accommodation, we learn, included brick-paved kitchens in the wings, a chicken house, a well, a dovecote and a buttery.  (We can't be sure that these facilities existed from the outset, two centuries earlier, but the buildings were the originals.)  Each of the two wings, for men and women, had a communal kitchen with brick flooring.  These would surely have included bread ovens and probably brewing facilities.  It suggests that inmates did not have fires in their individual rooms.  There was a chicken house, which would only have provided eggs for part of the year; hens did not lay all the year round as they are now bred to do.  The dovecote is unusual.  These had to be licensed and on manorial land.  It came as a surprise to learn that the purpose of dovecotes was not to provide pigeons for food.  People only ate the squabs, or young pigeons.  However, the feathers were valuable, and the guano on the floor of the dovecote was used as fertiliser.  The buttery in the list seems to be a hang-over from monastic terminology.  It would have been a store-room for supplies.

What other means of self-sufficiency might there have been?  Bee hives are highly likely.  It's quite possible that goats were kept for milk, and even a pig or two.  There was land available for growing fruit and vegetables, although not all the inmates would have been physically able to get involved in their cultivation.  There is a persistent idea that the medieval peasant diet was drearily monotonous, confined to cabbages, beans and onions with bread; but this is a mistake.  Fruits cultivated included apples, pears, plums, strawberries, elderberries and rhubarb.  A wide range of vegetables were grown, some of which have now fallen out of favour such as orach and skirret; greens of various species were grown or foraged.  It was a largely plant-based diet but it was not necessarily boring.  In addition to what was grown or produced on the site, the residents were within easy reach of the markets of Hull, and traders may well have brought their wares to the almshouse.  We would expect fish to be an important part of the diet too.

A question arises.  If some of the food was produced communally, how was it shared out?  That is something we can only speculate about.

We turn to cooking.  Ovens were used mostly for bread.  Other foodstuffs were cooked in a pot or on a griddle over a fire.  We all have an image of a cauldron and indeed the most common meal of the time was pottage, a kind of stew cooked in the cauldron.  It was a kind of "chuck it all in" stew made mostly of vegetables with grains for thickening.  But the cauldron could also be used in a more sophisticated way.  

This is from Dorothy Hartley's Food in England and shows how one-pot cooking could be an art.

The original almshouse buildings were demolished in 1642, and the Charterhouse hospital buildings which replaced them in the second half of the century are almost a total mystery to us.  We don't know whether there were communal kitchens or fire-places in individual rooms.  The rough sketches of the exterior which exist show no chimneys.  Did the well survive?  In the following century inmates were probably more dependent on the town's cookshops and markets for their food, with a wider range of foodstuffs becoming available.  But we must bear in mind that there were sporadic states of famine because of poor harvests.  Add to that the fact that inmates' allowances sometimes fell in value because of inflation and we have a picture of occasional hunger.

We have a lot more information about the new building of 1780.  Each inmate had their own bed-sit, with an open fireplace as the only cooking facility.  

This example is from the Geffrye Museum's reconstruction of their own almshouse rooms which are exactly contemporaneous with ours.  This one fits in a remarkable way the blocked-up and boarded fireplace I am looking at as I type.  We can see that it is more than a simple hearth; but there was no oven.  And there was no water supply in the rooms.  All water had to be fetched from the bathrooms or the laundry room.

We must assume that the residents had to buy all their food rather than having any produced on the site.  However, a snippet of news from 1884 reports the theft of a hen belonging to the Matron.  It is tempting to think that there was a chicken coop in the grounds, with the Matron of the time, Jane Burn, selling her surplus eggs.

When new "rooms" i.e. additional buildings were put up during the 19th century they followed the pattern of the existing buildings.  Nothing changed. 

Intriguingly, I found a single reference to "small ranges" being removed.  At some point at the end of the 19th century or the start of the 20th some or all of the fires were replaced with cooking ranges along the lines of the one pictured.  These would at least have provided an oven.  But for some reason they were not kept for long.  It was back to the old open fires.

Space for food storage was obviously limited, and it restricted what residents would have eaten and how they would have shopped.  Milk would not keep for long, bread would go stale quickly, and meat and fish (when they could afford it) would be bought within 24 hours of it being cooked.  In that respect the Charterhouse residents were in no worse position than the rest of population.  But the situation persisted here long after kitchen equipment had improved in the outside world.  It was not until 1960 that the trustees decided that improvements to the living conditions at the Charterhouse were urgently needed.  In a "modernisation" which effectively halved the number of people who could be accommodated, the single rooms were converted into two-room flatlets, a bedroom and a living-room.  Crucially, the living-room now had a sink and tap, and an electric socket.  Many of the residents used the alcove next to the fireplace as a mini-kitchen, buying a famous cooker of the day, a Baby Belling.

Equipped with these little cookers, a growing number of residents sought permission to have the fireplaces removed and replaced, at their own expense, with electric fires.  I have met people who, as children, visited their grandparents here and tell of the cosiness of the flats and the satisfaction of the residents.

But it wasn't enough.  There was a much more ambitious regeneration project in 1978; the Victorian buildings were demolished and replaced with flats with all mod cons, including kitchens which residents could fill with modern cookers, fridge freezers etc.  (But not washing machines; although at least there were now washing machines in the laundry room.)  The rooms in the remaining old buildings were remodelled to make one and two bedroom flats, with kitchen and bathroom.