At Home - Bill Bryson [40]
Developments in food preservation were part of a much wider revolution in food production that changed the dynamics of agriculture everywhere. The McCormick reaper permitted the mass production of grain, which in turn allowed America to produce livestock on an industrial scale. This in its turn led to the development of large meatpacking centers and improved methods of refrigeration—and ice remained at the heart of that well into the modern era. As late as 1930, America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars, all cooled with ice.
The sudden ability to transport food over great distances and to keep it fresh enough to reach far-off markets transformed agriculture in many distant lands. Kansas wheat, Argentinian beef, New Zealand lamb, and other foodstuffs from around the world began to turn up on dinner tables thousands of miles away. The repercussions in traditional farming areas were enormous. You don’t have to venture far into any New England forest to find the ghostly house foundations and old field walls that denote a farm abandoned in the nineteenth century. Farmers throughout the region left their farms in droves, either to work in factories or to try their hand at farming on better land farther west. In a single generation Vermont lost nearly half its population. Europe suffered equally. “British agriculture virtually collapsed in the last generation of the nineteenth century,” says Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and with it went all the things it had previously supported—farm laborers, villages, country churches and parsonages, a landed aristocracy. Ultimately, it put our rectory, and thousands of others like it, into private hands.
During a visit to New England in the autumn of 2007, I drove some fifteen miles north from Boston to see Lake Wenham, once briefly the most famous lake in the world. Today Wenham stands along a quiet highway in attractive countryside and provides a picturesque glimpse of water for anyone driving between the towns of Wenham and Ipswich. Lake Wenham now serves as a freshwater reservoir for Boston, so it is surrounded by a high chain-link fence and is closed to the public. A historical marker beside the road celebrates the town of Wenham’s tercentenary in 1935 but makes no mention of the ice trade that once made the lake famous.
III
If we were to step into the kitchen of the rectory in 1851, a number of differences would strike us immediately. For one thing, there would have been no sink. Kitchens in the mid-nineteenth century were for cooking only (at least in middle-class homes); washing up was done in a separate scullery—the room we will visit in Chapter V—which meant that every dish and pot had to be carried to a room across the corridor to be scrubbed, dried, and put away, then brought back to the kitchen the next time it was needed. That could entail many trips, for the Victorians did a lot of cooking and provided an awesome array of dishes. What Shall We Have for Dinner?, a popular book of 1851 by Lady Maria Clutterbuck (who was actually Mrs. Charles Dickens), gives a good impression of the kind of cooking that went on in those days. One suggested menu—for a dinner for six people—comprises “carrot soup, turbot with shrimp sauce, lobster patties, stewed kidneys, roast saddle of lamb, boiled turkey, knuckle of ham, mashed and brown potatoes,