I love to cook, and my Italian mother did, too. Most weekends of my childhood I watched my mother knead a huge mound of bread dough. Sometimes I helped, but I tired quickly at that task. Kneading enough dough for half a dozen loaves is hard work. (Nowadays I use Mark Bittman’s amazing no-knead recipe.)
I just finished a very cool book by Bee Wilson, called Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. Wilson cites a fourteenth century recipe for pancakes:
“First, get a quart-sized copper pan and melt a large quantity of salted butter. Then take eggs, some ’warm white wine’ (this takes the place of our milk) and ‘the fairest wheaten flour’ and beat it all together ‘long enough to weary one person or two.’” (147)
As Wilson says, “there is a startling nonchalance in this ‘one person or two.’” It suggests that in better houses, kitchens had platoons of servants standing at the ready to take over the beating (and grinding and rolling and kneading) duties when one underling wearied.
Wilson also cites the toll such grinding took on (mostly female) bodies. Middle Eastern burial sites have shown female skeletons with signs of severe arthritis in the knees, hips, and ankles, from grueling hours of kneeling and grinding grain. (153)
It does humble one to think how much harder it was to prepare a meal in the days before electricity, gas stoves, and refrigeration.
I’m off to lie on the couch to listen to the reassuring hum of all my 21st century appliances.