Antique household equipment, furnishings, utensils - housekeeping as part of social history. Domestic life, household management - how people organised their homes and did the daily chores. Yesterday's everyday objects are today's antiques or museum pieces, and we may view them with nostalgia or curiosity about past ways of life. Old & Interesting takes a look at how these everyday things were actually used, how people managed their home life - and more. Alongside articles illustrated by excerpts from advice manuals, period novels and other literature, this page is usually updated on Wednesdays.  RSS feed or email will let you know about new articles.

Bag wash & wet wash

Cheap laundry services in the 20th century before the laundromat/launderette

Before coin-operated self-service laundries were introduced, how could people on modest incomes get their clothes clean without boiling up tubs of water, and spending hours rubbing on a board or working with a "dolly"?

There were plenty of labour-saving washing machines in city laundries in the early 1900s. Many of these laundries didn't just cater for people who wanted their things beautifully starched and pressed.  They also offered a "wet wash": tackling bags of dirty linen and clothes for a small payment and returning them still damp.

The answer ... is an ordinary delivery wagon and its name is "wet wash". Wet wash, however isn't wet. It is damp. Just ready to hang out or starch.
... get the worst part of the wash done for a little over a dollar.
New York Times, 1921

In the UK the system was known as the bag wash, or bagwash, and was sometimes offered by independent washerwomen working from home, as in the illustration (left) from a 1937 children's book, The Family from One End Street.

Since the bagwash could be so useful to the urban poor, especially to over-burdened women in cramped housing, it was of interest to social reformers. It was an alternative to municipal wash-houses where hot water and other facilities were available even more cheaply than the bagwash, but without saving time and effort.

After discussing the objections to existing communal washing arrangements...the Committee...described the "bag wash"...
Each bagful would be washed separately, wrung with a hydro [electric wringer?], and "rough dried", the ironing being left to be done at home...
This plan would rid the housewife of the heaviest and most unpleasant part of her "washday".
1919 recommendations of a women's committee advising the UK government, from a report in The Scotsman

There were concerns about this system, though. A 1917 US study by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor found that some wet washes were "unsanitary". Laundry was sometimes washed in nets, bundle by bundle, and this prevented "the proper application of disinfectants, soap, water, and heat". Keeping the laundry damp in bags for a long time added to hygiene problems.

Outside hung a blue board on which was painted in large white letters, "The Ideal Laundry. Careful Hand Work", and underneath, in smaller letters, the mysterious words "Bag-wash".
Eve Garnett, The Family from One-End Street, 1937

The first coin-operated washing machines appeared in the US in the 1930s, and in the UK in 1949. The rise of the self-service laundry put an end to bagwash and wet wash services which returned the laundry without drying it. The name bagwash lives on in some places, like Australia, to describe inexpensive "per load" laundry deals.

18 June 2008

See also:
More on US wet wash and other laundries
Making ironing easier in the early 1900s
Other laundry articles on this site

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Game pie dishes

Pie covered with ceramic wild game, not pastry 

Recipes for a good game pie, full of venison, or hare, or pheasant, tell the cook to cover the meat with a pastry pie crust. But ornate game pie dishes like the one in the photo allowed you to make a pie with no crust. There was an inner liner to hold the pie together, while the cover served instead of a pastry lid.

Why? In the late 18th century there was a shortage of wheat in England, prices went up, and flour was expensive for much of the next half-century. Many households tried to economise on flour, some following the lead of the royal household by making pies without pie-crust. (See left-hand column.)

Obviously, poor people had different problems from those whose idea of economy was buying a new pie dish with a decorative ceramic cover, then filling it with an abundance of rich meat. Nevertheless, flour prices remained high, and for about a hundred year special dishes for making pies without pastry were manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood and others, after it was suggested to Wedgwood in 1786. One game pie dish was shown at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

The liner and the cover could both made of pale beige pottery, called caneware because of its colour. The covers were also made in brightly coloured and glazed earthenware (majolica), in the style of 19th-century fish tureens, cheese dishes, and other serving dishes lavishly embellished with shiny models of flora and fauna.

The animals chosen to decorate game pie weren't always strictly game. These ducks look like farmyard creatures, not wild birds. Here the handle is a fox: associated with hunting, but not usually eaten.

The presence of the majolica game pie dish, draped with images of sumptuous game animals, at the dinner table suggested the host and hostess either owned vast tracts of property on which to hunt or had the high connections necessary to legally obtain these much-appreciated delicacies.
Jeffrey B. Snyder, Victorian Views of Nature Revealed in Majolica, c2002

Wedgwood, Josiah, & Sons, Etruria, near Newcastle-under-Lyme - Manufacturers...
Oval game pie, cane colour, ornamented...
Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue: Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London 1851

1 June 2008

See also:
Tureens and poultry

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A gas smoothing iron?

Ironing stoves, self-heating irons, and gas

It's 1858 and you've just heard of the wonderful, new self-heating irons. They're going to make life so much easier: no more running backwards and forwards to a hot stove or fire to change a cool flat iron for a freshly heated one, no more working in a roasting hot kitchen, no more trying to keep fireplace ash off the irons. Some of the self-heating irons use gas. Others carry little tanks of alcohol or gasoline.

But is this really an ad for one of the new gas smoothing irons? Although that's what the headline offers, read on and you find it's really a "miniature gas furnace" with one or two gas burners for heating traditional flat irons. In fact, it's an ironing stove rather like the larger ones used by commercial laundries or tailoring businesses.

Perhaps the ironing-stove set-up would be even better than a true gas iron? (See patent drawing below right) The rubber hose connecting an iron to the only gas supply, probably the new gas-light fitting, could be irritating or inconvenient for the laundress. Perhaps the "four feet flexible hose" is better attached to a small stove on the ironing table, than to the iron itself? Then you can press clothes freely with nothing to restrict your movements.

The advertisement started:

Gas Smoothing-Iron,
and Miniature Gas Furnace.
W.F.Shaw's Patent Cost of heating one iron is but one-twelfth of one cent. Time taken to heat one iron is four minutes. One pint water will boil in five minutes. Used by slipping the end of flexible hose over any gas burner. The most economical means yet known for heating irons.
The only true principle, whereby all unpleasant and injurious odors are avoided. Warranted by far superior to any other invention for heating Smoothing-Irons ever offered to the public. [Boston, Massachusetts, 1858]

W.F.Shaw also had an establishment in New York, where they had won a bronze medal for their "gas heating parlor, and cooking stoves, and gas flat iron heater" at the 1856 annual fair of the American Institute.

David Lithgow of Philadelphia was one of the first inventors of a gas iron. See his 1858 patent drawing to the right, and an extract from the patent text in the left-hand column. Early gas irons were also produced by Siemens in England and Germany, among others.

See also:

• Self-heating irons with tanks for liquid fuel: kerosene, gasoline etc.
• Gas smoothing irons, petrol irons and other antique irons
• Gas and spirit irons

20 March 2008

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Log cabin beds with one leg

Jack bed, one-legged bedstead, Alabama bed

Imagine a pioneer family, ready to settle in a new part of America, building a small log cabin. They have brought no furniture with them, and need a quick, simple way of making a bed-frame. They can fix two sides of the bed to two adjacent walls. Two poles will be the other two sides; each with one end fitted into a wall, and the other end attached to one single bedpost, the only bed-leg. Then you have a one-legged bed neatly tucked into one corner of the small home. Often they're called one-legged bedsteads or one-leg beds, but jack bed is another name and, in Alabama, an Alabama bedstead.

Most of these beds are gone and pictures of them are hard to come by. This photograph gives some idea of a bed supported by a floor-to-ceiling bedpost at one corner. The picture below is of a less common design where two beds fit in between three walls of the cabin, and the post helps to support both.

The wood used as the "leg" could be only just higher than the bed or it could stretch to the roof. There were different ways of fitting the logs or poles into the wall, and then various possible ways of fixing slats or branches or strips of bark or hide across the side-rails to support skins, or a tick, a simple mattress, once the family had made one. The tick was a cloth sack, and it was filled with corn shucks, or straw, or other suitable plant material. Often the bed was high enough for the family to keep a trundle bed underneath: one that you could slide out at bedtime for the children. As furnishings were added and the cabin decorated, a cotton valance might be pinned round the sides of the bed, and/or storage built beneath.

With pictures in short supply, we'll rely on descriptions, mostly from people who saw or slept in such beds. First is Sarah Brewer-Bonebright, born in 1837, talking about mid-19th century Iowa.

The pioneer wall-bedstead had but one leg; and it was put in place by the regular cabin builders. Very often two beds had but one leg-if the width of the cabin was twelve feet. I have seen two beds and several wall-bunks resting on one strong sapling leg-support. One end of the pole foot-rail and, likewise, an end of the side-rail was fastened to the single bed-leg, and the other ends were fitted into an auger-hole in the log wall....
It often happened, when the burden was too heavy, the slats settled and slipped from the wall cracks and precipitated the occupants of the bed to the floor. If cord were used instead of slats, saplings were fastened to the wall and the rope cris-crossed from them according to the usual method. Sometimes a linen blanket or quilt was fastened to the logs and to the side-rail and bed end. This did away with the slipping slats, but the sag to the center was much greater than with the cord-woven support.
Harriet Bonebright-Closz, Founding of Newcastle now Webster City, Iowa, 1921

The drawing comes from the same book on Iowa as the excerpt above. Next is a writer who saw 20th century jack beds in the "southern Appalachian highlands", and wondered if something similar had been used by the very earliest settlers in North America .

Just what [the earliest American settlers'] beds were like cannot be stated with any certainty, as none of them have survived. There is a form used by the mountaineers in the southern Appalachian highlands that doubtless approximates our first type of frame. They call it a jack bed and it consists of a single post set about six feet from one wall and four feet from another. From it, side rails extend to the two walls, and others are attached to them to provide the necessary support for slats or springy poles on which is laid the tick filled with straw, reeds, or fine-cut rags, as the case may be....
Thomas Hamilton Ormsbee, The Story of American Furniture, 1941

A description of early cabin bedsteads in Kentucky, written more than a century after the period it discusses:

A single fork, placed with its lower end in a hole in the floor, and the upper end fastened to a joist, served for a bedstead, by placing a pole in the fork with one end through a crack between the logs of the wall. This front pole was crossed by a shorter one within the fork, with its outer end through another crack. From the front pole, through a crack between the logs of the end of the house, the boards were put on which formed the bottom of the bed.
Cecil B. Hartley, Life and Times of Colonel Daniel Boone, c1902

13 March 2008

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Besoms & Brooms

Sweeping with birch, heather, and other twiggy shrubs

When you stop and think about it, you probably realise that brooms got their name because they used to be made of broom branches - except when they were made of birch or heather. Many other shrubby plants have been used across the world for sweeping and brushing. Tie a bundle of good local twigs together, with a tight, narrow grip at one end, and you can whisk dirt away. If you attach the broom to a broomstick, so much the better.

Besom is an even older name for these cleaning tools than broom, though both names go back many centuries. Broom (cytisus pictured bottom right) and other plants like heather (broom pictured right) and furze that grew on open land were popular for besoms in parts of Britain, while birch was a mainstay, especially in more wooded areas. Birch was used across Europe: in Germany, for example, and in Romania. (See picture left)

Birch brooms were popular in some industrialised countries, for some purposes, well into the 20th century. In England they were not only valued by rural people who wanted cheap brooms, but were also in demand for sweeping leaves off the lawns of stately homes, and for clearing waste away in steel mills.

In North America besoms died away relatively early. Around 1800 the corn broom started to take over: well-suited to a landscape with space to grow lots of broomcorn (sorghum). Not so in Britain. The UK's 19th century "new broom" was the bass-broom. Bass meant plant fibres of various kinds, especially palm fibres, imported from distant parts of the British Empire. The fibre "bristles" were inserted into the familiar shape of wooden brush head on wooden handle.

Broom-making was generally thought of as a man's job in Europe, often but certainly not always a Romany gypsy craft. (Confirmed by this article on brooms in south-eastern Europe - a must-read for anyone interested in plants used for broom-making.) But England had some women in the trade, outside the main birch-broom areas where male "broom squires" were predominant. Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native includes a woman besom-maker, and so does a popular 19th century bawdy song. (See excerpt in left-hand column)

Gertrude Jekyll, the garden designer, bought "four dozen birch and two dozen heath" brooms a year, presumably for her staff. She paid three shillings and sixpence for a dozen birch brooms, and less for heath: half a crown a dozen. She also took an interest in how they were made. Just after 1900 she photographed the woman above, and described the traditional craft, as practised in southern England at that time:

The birch spray is not used fresh. It is put aside to dry and toughen for some months. Then they 'break birch for brooms'. A faggot is opened and the spray is broken by hand to the right size and laid in bundles. Breaking birch is often women's work. The 'bonds' that fasten the spray on to the handle are of hazel or withy, split and shaved with the knife into thick ribbons. They are soaked in water to make them lissom. There is usually a little pool of water near the broom-maker's shed, where the bonds are soaked.

The broom-squarer gathers up the spray round the end of the stick, sitting in front of a heavy fixed block to which the further end of a bond is made fast. He pushes the near end of the bond into the butts of the spray, nearly at a right angle to the binding. He then binds by rolling the broom away from him, pulling tight as it goes. When he has bound up to the length of the bond, the butt is released and pushed into the work. Heath brooms have two bonds; birch, which are much longer, have three. A hole is bored between the strands of spray and through the stick. The rough butts are then trimmed off, and the broom is complete.

Gertrude Jekyll, Old West Surrey, 1904

The English Museum of Rural Life has a sequence of pictures showing besom making in the 1940s.

1 March 2008

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Cooking under Pressure

Steam digesters, pressure cookers

If you try to live a greener life, wasting less, cutting back on energy, you may re-discover ancient, simple domestic routines that are a source of pleasure - like walking into a sunny garden to put your laundry out to dry. Pressure cooking doesn't have quite the same feel-good levels, and yet it can save a lot of energy, and may make some people think nostalgically of Grandma's kitchen.

Of course the pressure cooker isn't ancient. It was a 17th century invention: cutting-edge technology, with the unattractive name of digester. For nearly a hundred and fifty years, it kept that name. Its inventor, Denis Papin, thought it might help the poorest people to extract nutrition from bones, but early models were far too expensive for people who really needed to save money and cooking fuel. In the 19th century, the people who were most interested in these digesters, apart from scientists, were military men who wanted a quick way of producing meals in camp, and industrial inventors looking into canning or beef extract production.

In the UK, there were digesters being sold as "kitchen furniture" from the 1830s onward, and people put the case for their "economy" in producing "nutritious" food from bones. But they would have cost a poor Victorian family a couple of days' wages and presumably were sold to more prosperous households.

[The picture shows two digesters;] both, however, on the same principle, and made of cast-iron; No. 1 being of the smaller size, and No. 2 for any quantity from half a gallon upwards ; the price being, according to the size, from 12 shillings to 30 shillings, and for the smaller sort half the former sum.
Murray's Modern Cookery Book, by a lady, c1851

It wasn't till the 20th century that steam pressure cookers appeared in a good number of ordinary home kitchens. To begin with they looked dauntingly un-domestic: hefty contraptions with gauges, valves, and heavy-duty explosion-proof construction, like the one above right. In the USA they were bought by people who did a lot of home canning. The name "pressure cooker" became established as an alternative to "steam digester", "continuous pressure cooker" etc.

Then, in the 1930s they began to look more like other cookware, in time for their popularity during World War Two. During the war the US government wanted to encourage food preserving, and supported manufacture and sales of pressure cookers to community canning centres. Across the Atlantic, there were no spare resources for manufacturing new kitchen equipment, but people who already owned pressure cookers were able to conserve fuel, and make meat scraps edible.

After the war, a few cookbooks devoted to pressure cookery were published. Another wave of recipes for pressure cooking appeared with the 1970ish interest in wholefoods. The high temperatures possible with steam pressure make it easier to cook soybeans and some other ingredients associated with wholefood/vegetarian cooking.

Pressure cookers are popular in mountainous Tibet. At high altitudes they make it possible to get water boiling.

Dates - partial timeline

• 1679  Denis Papin shows his digester to the Royal Society in London (See picture below left.)
• 1681  Papin publishes A New Digester or Engine for Softening Bones
• 1682  Supper cooked in a digester is served to London intellectuals. (See quote below)
• c1800 Nicolas Appert invents canning: a new way of preserving food using an autoclave, a "cooker" with steam pressure, like Papin's digester
• 1830s Digesters on sale in the UK
• 1874  A.K. Shriver is issued with crucial US patent for canning apparatus using steam pressure
• 1914  First record of the name "pressure cooker" - Oxford English Dictionary
• 1930s Pressure cookers start to look like "normal" domestic saucepans. (See drawing below right.) Alfred Vischer had been filing patents for easy-to-seal pressure cookers since 1921, and his Flex-Seal cooker started to get press attention in 1939. (Sometimes mistakenly spelled Vischler)
• Early 1940s - pressure cookers used for canning supported by US Victory Garden movement

1682, 12th April: I went this afternoon with several of the Royal Society to a supper which was all dressed, both fish and flesh, in Monsieur Papin's digestors, by which the hardest bones of beef itself, and mutton, were made as soft as cheese, without water or other liquor, and with less than eight ounces of coals, producing an incredible quantity of gravy; and for close of all, a jelly made of the bones of beef, the best for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that I had ever seen, or tasted. We eat pike and other fish bones, and all without impediment; but nothing exceeded the pigeons...
Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S., published 1862

Other kitchen-related pages:

• Bakers' peels
• Kitchen antiques

21 February 2008

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For sources please refer to the books page, and/or the excerpts quoted on the pages of this website, and note that many links lead to museum sites. Feel free to ask if you're looking for a specific reference - feedback is always welcome anyway. Unfortunately, it's not possible to help you with queries about prices or valuation.