One of the best things about Genesee last weekend was a roof. After driving through torrential downpours on Friday, we were grateful for a house to sleep in, instead of a tent. I’ve never woken up to find my hip planted in a drainage channel (Saratoga was stormy) but Friday night would have provided ample opportunity for somnolent soakings.
Foster-Tufts House, photo from Genesee country Village & Museum
So we were set, right? Each of us had bedding (many thanks to Mr JS for the loan of a linen sheet: I still regret the vintage sheet I did not buy) and a real bed, a pretty plush situation, really. The only tricky part was getting into bed, and then adjusting yourself once you were on the mattress. It’s not that the bedding was going to rise up and cast us out. It’s not that the accommodations were exceptionally uncomfortable to modern, bed-spring accustomed sleepers.
It was the noise. The bed sacks were filled with packing peanuts and other inorganic materials that crunched and cracked and popped and creaked and grumbled with an and tiny movement. There was a solution, though. There’s always a solution.
Weekend billet: pretty swank, actually
Synchronized spinning. Without thinking about it too hard, though with deference and consideration for fellow occupants, we quickly learned to turn simultaneously. As soon as one of us cracked the wall of sound, the other two would shift. Problem solved.
One of the most common questions you get when you’re wearing historical clothing is the undying, “Aren’t you hot in those clothes?”
A heavily perspiring visitor wearing practically nothing usually asks this question, and the standard reply is a variation of “Aren’t you hot? In really warm weather, everyone is hot. But natural fibre clothing wicks the moisture from the skin and helps to keep you cool.” My internal response (vocalized only once) is, “Why yes, I am—and thank you for noticing. I work hard for this look.”
The “aren’t you hot” question is often followed by, “Wow, and they didn’t bathe, so everyone really smelled.” You try not to think of that Monty Python sketch about Britain’s deadliest joke program in WWII and move the conversation on to weekly laundering of body linen, multiple shifts, shirts, and under-drawers, and the general hygienic practices of the past.
What struck me after a sticky weekend is how much I noticed the smell of modern people.
two tailors and a tailoress
My traveling companions and I bathed on Friday morning, drove for 7+ hours in muggy weather, slept in our clothes, wore wool, cotton and linen in rain and thick humidity, sweated in the tailor’s shop, slept in our clothes again, and spent another warm, close, day in muggy weather, including grave digging and pall bearing. But as feral as my shift may have been on Sunday night, I never smelled us.
Mr H reported that his wool trousers were really stinky in the rain, and I think his white Spencer was well-seasoned even before this weekend, but I didn’t notice anything. Mr S’s soaking greatcoat was whiffy only at extremely close range.
What I did smell were modern perfumes, deodorants, and hair products. Those linger around their wearers and trail behind them, sometimes eye-watering in their intensity. I encountered lingering perfume in a bathroom at the museum, and we were overwhelmed by cologne at diner Monday morning: wow, people must really smell now, of petrochemicals.
more wool
This is not to say that homeless people and sulky teenagers don’t smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, but people in the past may not have smelled quite as badly as we think. They washed, if not bathed (bathing being full immersion washing) and by changing body linen and airing their clothes, they kept reasonably clean.
There was plenty to whiff in the past: wastes of all kinds, stagnant bodies of water used as dumps, rotting foods and corpses. But I’m not convinced that we haven’t simply exchanged one set of smells for another of different origin and intensity.
I troll the interwebs in the fishing and not the under-the-bridge sense: there’s a lot to read out there. Still, I’ve kept one eye on the feather-and-flower kerfluffle that erupted in certain circles this week, but have been much more interested in documentation of one kind and another.
Miss Vernon is really my favorite image of feathers on hats, and I wish I could say that a) I have replicated this fabulous creation or b) that I have seen such a thing, but alas! I have not.
Still, scouring sundry repositories for tayloring manuals (more on that another time), I found this delightful broadside. We can’t use 1782 to document 1780, and no means of using any of these items is mentioned or implied. Still, there they are, those inflammatory terms: Feathers, Flowers.
1782 Broadside. Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 45771 (filmed)
Jar. Paul Cushman, 1805-1833. Stoneware. 20032.475
Or, how do you keep your pickles?
At work, we have found that the road to history is paved with unexpected documents. As often happens, while looking for something completely different, m’colleague and I found two documents that might help illuminate the question of food preservation and storage in the 18th century.
Probate inventories: I read all the way through and had one of those d’oh! moments. Why? Because at the end, there’s all the kitchen stuff. Andirons, warming pans, roasting pans, kettles, firkins, kneading trays, piggins, barrels, casks, bottles. This is the stuff of cooking and keeping food.
There are clues in the receipts (recipes): Amelia Simmons gives a hint in the final instructions “To pickle or make Mangoes of Melons.”
“put all these proportionably into the melons, filling them up with mustard-seeds; then lay them in an earthen pot with the slit upwards, and take one part of mustard and two parts or vinegar, enough to cover them, pouring it upon them scalding hot and keep them close stopped.”
To pickle Barberries ends thusly:
“let it stand to cool and settle, then pour it clear into the glasses; in a little of the pickle, boil a little fennel; when cold, put a little bit at the top of the pot or glass, and cover it close with a bladder or leather.”
Jar, Thomas Commeraw.1797-1819. Stoneware. 18.95.13
To pickle cucumbers:
“put them into jars, stive them down close, and when cold, tie on a bladder and leather.”
To keep Green Peas till Christmas:
“have your bottles ready, fill them, cover the them with mutton suet fat when it is a little soft; fill the necks almost to the top, cork them, tie a bladder and a leather over them and set them in a dry cool place.”
If we tease these apart, we come up with some basics: preservation is done with pickling and “putting up” foodstuffs in pots, jars, bottles, and glasses. These are sealed with bladders, which are tied on; there is a sense in the first receipt that “close stopped” might imply corkage, but the repetition of bladders in the following receipts suggests otherwise for most of these; the entry for Emptins does state “will keep well cork’d in a bottle five or six weeks.”
Covered jar, Connecticut. Earthenware, 1800-1830. 18.27.1a, b
The other key? You’ve probably come across food packages that require storage in a “cool dry place,” and as we have cupboards in our kitchens, or perhaps in our pantries, early cooks also had pantries or butteries (say it but-trees). How’d they do it?
Jar,. Earthenware, 1800-1900. 18.95.11
The 18th century house was not centrally heated. 18th century Providence residents recorded temperatures of 48 and 58 degrees indoors in the winter, in rooms with fireplaces. An unheated room or cellar would be cool, too; here in the Ocean State, maintaining dry conditions could be the bigger challenge.
What did those jars and pots look like? As you can see in this post, the Met has a few– fortunately, these appealed to collectors and wound up in museums. Closer to home for the original question, the Missouri History Museum has a collection with a number of jars. A cursory look showed dates in the 1830-1860 range, but the shares are consistent with those seen at the Met.
I’m not a food historian, and I don’t pretend to be, but as I think about answering a question, these are the steps I take. Recipes, collections, and then more looking. I just hadn’t remembered that probate inventories would list everything, so one might get a sense of a household’s contents and thus its eating and storage habits.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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