The Victorian kitchen

In the Victorian period a typical manor house was an incongruous mixture of status symbol, luxury hotel, business headquarters, kindergarten, wine warehouse, and bric-a-brac collection. In its role as luxury hotel, a manor house had to provide rich food as part of the entertainment for the landed gentry.

According to Victorian inventories, most country house kitchens had red tiled floors on which there would be a carpet hearth rug, a range, dresser, 6ft long table, a couple of Windsor chairs and a clock. The kitchen walls were painted blue in order to attract flies away from the food. (Today, blue lamps are used in butchers’ shops for the same purpose).

Next door to the manor house kitchen was the scullery in which the meat and vegetables were prepared and the copper batterie de cuisine was sometimes stored. Copper utensils were made popular in the early 19th century by Monsieur Alexis Soyer. The master chef designed the kitchens at the Reform Club, in London, and the Great Kitchen at the Royal Pavilion. Victorian manor houses contained at least two larders: the “wet” larder, used to store raw meat, and the “dry” larder, used to keep cooked meat and pastry.

It was an established practise that the kitchen and domestic offices were situated in the basement – a long distance from the dining room. This was because the Victorians were very concerned with kitchen odours – odours especially strong due to the Victorian preference for roasting meat in front of an open flame.

Victorian manor house kitchens usually had two types of ranges. The open range was used for spit roasting via smoke jacks. These ranges had adjustable cheeks to vary the size of fire and they were often fitted with water boilers. The closed range, or kitchener, was used for baking and boiling via the ovens and hotplate. These ranges used coal burning fires to produce convection currents of hot air. In the eighteenth-century, the American physicist Count Rumford criticised the use of cast-iron ranges because of the extravagant waste of fuel and heat, and even the Victorians regarded kitcheners as ‘coal guzzling monsters.’