The Great Loon

Edmund Hewlett: Um…yes? Yes, I am.

Hewlett: I’m so happy I want to shout it from the rooftops!

me:

Mostly they were too big to be included in the set, because mustard was used in larger quantities than anything else. ”Spices, Salt & Aromatics in the English Kitchen” by Elizabeth David © 1970, mentions the medieval Goodman of Paris recommending that a wedding party of forty persons needed two quarts of mustard. This dropped off a bit as time went on, but even modern mustard-pots (check Google Image) are much larger than the salt-n-pepper. Not that mustard gets eaten in quantity, just taken from the pot. J.J. Coleman, founder of the U.K.’s best known mustard company, once said: “I make my money from the mustard people leave on the side of their plate.”

So that third container may have been for sugar. Here’s a vintage cruet-set with, going clockwise, a bottle almost certainly for vinegar, a single-hole pourer for salt, a multi-hole shaker for pepper, and a taller multi-hole with larger holes that I’m convinced is a sugar-caster (from which we get caster sugar…). But sugar as a table condiment?

C. Anne Wilson’s © 1973 “Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age to the 19th Century” quotes numerous recipes using sugar as a garnish on savoury dishes (trout in wine, roast mutton with herb stuffing, various others), and even uses the term “flavour enhancer”. It sounds like sugar was the MSG of Renaissance and Early Modern England, and the US palate’s fondness for adding sweetness to savoury - such as pouring syrup onto a breakfast of waffles, bacon and sausage - is an absolute match to the historical flavour combination. Actual historical information can be overwhelmed by the business of “not writing down what everyone knows”, since it bounces off “what is written down leads to what everyone thinks they know.” 

Take “medieval” and “bathing” - two words that “everyone thinks” are mutually incompatible, reinforced by desaturated movies, dingy costumes, “There’s some lovely filth over here!” and of course “How do you know he’s a king…?”

The usual proof that medieval people were dirty was the infrequency of baths noted in household journals, since stuff like “This being All Hallows’ Eve, my Lady did take her bath”, with similar entries few and far between, indicated that so was washing.

You could apply the same rule to the present day, and be wrong. Moderns, @dduane and I among them, take daily showers but might not have an actual full-tub bath from one month’s end to the next. Just waiting for the thing to fill takes as long as a hasty freshen-up shower (though I’m sure other taps work faster than ours) and uses far more of the household hot-water supply, so just hopping in, scrubbing and hopping out again after all that seems a bit wasteful. Why not make a meal of it? Literally…

“More bread, more wine, more hot water?”

I’ve even heard baths described as unhygienic because you’re lying in your own dirty water. That’s only if you’re actually using the bath for washing in. We (I don’t think we’re the only ones) shower first because we don’t actually wash in the tub, we soak, we laze, we luxuriate, and a book and a glass of wine feature more prominently than soap or shampoo.

This time-wasting Deadly Sin of Luxury was one of the things that got bathing a bad name; also that bathing reminded the bather of Certain Parts of The Body and the sinful but fun things that might be done with them.

“Your place or mine?”

Then and now…

The first article linked at the bottom notes that (a) the monks of Westminster Abbey were required to have a bath four times a year, but (b) that the Abbey retained a full-time bath attendant who had a yearly stipend and a daily bread allowance. Why “full-time” and “daily” if he was only needed four times a year? I have a feeling those four baths were a formal religious observance (two were at Christmas and Easter) but the monks had far less elaborate washes far more frequently.

There were numerous medieval public bathhouses (frowned upon by the Church since Nakedness led to Nookie), but “taking a (private) bath” in the days before piped water and drainage plugs was a serious, disruptive performance in any household, well worth noting down. The bath had to be hauled out, or maybe even constructed from separate parts like a barrel, then enough hot water to fill it had to be heated and carried to the bower or private chamber. Likewise with the cold water, which at least didn’t need heating.

“Knock, knock, are you decent? Oops, sorreee…”

In those circumstances husband and wife sharing a “save-water” bath was common, and there’s reason to think the rest of the family took their turn, with top-ups of hot water as required. Since this was a bathe-for-luxury rather than wash-for-clean (that bit happened before the hot soak, Japanese style) the water didn’t get grubby, but there are some theories that one-tub-for-all may be the origin of “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”. IMO it’s a little too neat, but YMMV.

Old-style wooden tubs are still available, and I can imagine with great pleasure how long this one would keep the water hot (that angled thing is a backrest, padded when in use.)

After the bath was done, all the water had to be carried back downstairs again (if not flung out of a window, bucket by bucket) the bath put away, spills mopped up, and of course the staff had also to make time for all their regular chores as well. Small wonder such an event got noted and logged with a subtext of relief that it wouldn’t happen again for a couple of months.

“Is that the loofah?” “No, but don’t stop scrubbing…”

I have a feeling that ordinary keep-clean washing was much simpler, and happened far more often. It needs just two buckets, a washcloth, a basin and a towel. Stand in the basin, wet the washcloth, wash with water from one bucket, rinse with water from the other bucket, dry off with the towel. Done. If necessary you could get away with just one bucket, so long as you didn’t let the water in it get too soiled. This process was far less disruptive and wasn’t entered into the household accounts, any more than noting every visit to the well or firewood stack.

We actually proved this could be managed a few years ago, when our shower mixer tap broke and the local hardware store couldn’t source a replacement for a week. So we used our garden bucket, our kitchen bucket, a washcloth, a sponge, and stood in the bathtub instead of a basin. It wasn’t as refreshing as a shower, but used far less water than even a partially-full tub and kept us throughly clean until the mixer tap was fixed. (We’ve since bought one of those hand-shower things that go on the bath taps, and of course now we’ve got it we’ve never needed it.)