Three Kitchens: Part 3

Rosaline’s kitchen

The second, and for me better remembered, kitchen of my childhood shares Jones’ description of the kitchen at Jerf-el-Ahmar where ‘culinary preparation happens in one place, and the transformed creation is taken to a second venue for consumption’. In the case of this kitchen in Sri Lanka, in a middle class Burgher household, the kitchen was at one end of the house, separated from the dining room and main body of the house by a small room that was the sleeping quarters for Roasline, our Singhalese cook.

I remember it as dark and cool, the only daylight coming in from the door into the main house (actually onto a small enclosed verandah and then into the main part of the house) and a doorway into the long narrow back yard.

 It’s during the day that I knew it, after school or on weekends and during the holidays. I would watch Rosaline as she shredded leafy greens with extraordinary rapidity on the edge of a knife precariously wedged on the bench: take a brave turn at grinding seeds and chilli with vinegar into curry powders using a cylinder shaped stone roller on a flat grindstone patterned with shallow indentations; wrap my hands around the wooden pole that she expertly pounded into the large mortar, transforming rice into flour for hoppers, thrilled by the vibrations and the fine powder that rose with each drop of the pole. These are the same practices identifiable by the artefacts at Jerf-el-Ahmar.

It was certainly bigger than the 8 square metres of the kitchen at Jerf-el-Ahmar, but not as big as memory makes it. There was a brick based shelf on which were three kerosene burners for cooking (I can’t recall that there was any particular kerosene smell or taste to the food, though then again, maybe that’s what’s missing from my curries!). There was a sink with a cold water tap, shelves and cupboards for storage and a bench top for working on.

It was very much the place for the preparation of basse cusine and not the space for the creation of ‘culinary dreams, maximising the element of surprise and mystery’. I don’t recall any meals being surrounded by particular ceremony; no cook emerging with some steaming dish to the delighted gasps of goggle-eyed diners. The only food event that held something of surprise and mystery was the making of the Christmas Cake, an activity that was the prerogative of my grandmother and the later my mother. But the scene of its preparation was the table on the back verandah on which the cake was always mixed in its enormous bowl and then the oven of my aunt’s kitchen across the road (we had none) within which happened the mysterious transformation of the wet, lumpy, batter, heavy with dried fruit, into the moist dense firm cake. But its presentation to guests was delayed further as it had to be topped with an almond icing, then royal icing, then cut into narrow oblongs, which were then wrapped in white wax paper and brought out over the days of Christmas visiting.

Everyday family meals were straightforward. Rosaline would make the requisite number of trips to and from the kitchen to the dining table to place the dishes before the family. I don’t remember us ever saying Grace. We were helped to or helped ourselves to what was laid out. We dined in a combined lounge-dining space that was common in houses like ours. There was enough space for someone to walk comfortably around the table and to the fridge which stood against one wall. It was, though, a space reserved for dining, the table not an all-purpose one for other childhood or household activities like school work or sewing.

Dinner guests would begin their visit in the lounge are, having a pre-dinner drink (alcohol for the men, soft drinks for the women) and some snack food; this would be murruku (spiced lentil paste made into noodles, deep-fried, then broken and mixed with chilli, fried green peas, and peanuts), or ‘short eats’ like fish or vegetable filled half moon fried pastries called patties. Dinner set on the table, guests would move there to eat, and then retire again to the lounge for more drinks or a cup of tea.

And each night, the kitchen would fall silent as Rosaline went to her bedroom, the rest of the family having earlier retired to ours.

Jones has a limited and rather fanciful idea of why the kitchen became a separate space, it seems to me. Reflecting on this childhood kitchen, a couple of other reasons occur to me. Getting away from smoke for one would be a good reason, though not a complete one, I guess since having a hearth in other living spaces for warmth wouldn’t solve the issue of smoke in the householder life, not until the invention of effective chimneys at least.

Jones doesn’t speculate, and there is no evidence, whether the development of the kitchens like that at Jerf-el-Ahmar were accompanied by the development also of a servant class who would have had the responsibility for cooking. I wonder to what extent the development of this separate space was also related then to establishing the domestic hierarchy, separating the cook from the householders and their guests. In our house, the kitchen was very much a servant’s space both in the sense that it was to the side of the everyday life of the family, one into which the woman householder would go from time to time perhaps to supervise the cooking of special Burgher (European) dishes or for conversations with the cook about the day’s menu and shopping, but also one that in a positive way became the space over which the cook could exercise control, organising it to suit her work, having the right to send interfering children out of it and even to have limited disciplining rights in the space of said children (the occasional smack of the little hand wandering yet again into the dry fish or lime pickle jar), and having control over other domestics (Rosaline could for example send the houseboy off to market, doing some of the grinding and chopping and so on).

Perhaps, too, as class/castes developed, being able to distance oneself from the smells, processes (such as handling raw meat with the associated blood), and possible spread of disease associated with cooking became a maker of difference. Being able to converse with guests away from all of this would also have been a social marker of wealth, or at least the aspiration to it.