What did they eat?

[Phoenix]

Just attended a zoom lecture on housing built during WW1. The external style was very similar to that adopted between the wars in the suburban sprawl. But...some of the facilities were decidedly primitive.
In some houses, there appears to have been no kitchen as such, and you were expected to cook on an open fire in the living room.
Unlike later developments, there were no little parades of shops on the estates.
So how did you feed a family? Tea, toast and sausages?
Granny moved into a house in the thirties with a well, earthcloset and a range, and thought she had gone back to the Stone Age.
So, at the time of the 1921 census, did most houses have either a a stove or a range, or were cooking arrangements much more primitive? (I can see it would have been different in citites, where people may have had no more than a couple of rooms)

[KiwiChris]

I don't know what your houses were like, but my grandparents house was built in the late 1920s and they had a "scullery" which had a sink (with running cold water), a bench area for food prep, and shelving, and the cooking was done on a wood fired cast iron range in the "breakfast room". Hot water came from a "wetback arrangement behind the range which heated the water as it ran through, or pan on the top.
I can remember when they got their first electric stove.
It must have been awfully hot in the summer months, but during the winter it helped to keep the house cozy.

Laundry was a woodfired "copper" and it seemed like everything was boiled! No wonder it was only done weekly and took all day!

[ElizabethHerts]

My grandparents moved into a brand new house in Guildford in 1926. It had a largish kitchen with a cooker and a door into the scullery, which housed the sink etc. There was room for a table in the kitchen, up against the window sill, where my grandmother used to sit all year round with the window open to feed the birds. The window ledge had been extended on the outside to provide a bird table. I'm sure now the lay-out has been reconfigured.

[Jill]

Granny's house was a former coastguard cottage, I've just seen the ad for its sale at auction in 1933 (they rented it from about 1935) and it says it had a kitchen with a range, a pantry, scullery, two pumps and an earth closet.

The range had gone by the time I knew it in the 1960s and was replaced by a gas cooker, but in the sitting room there was a cast iron grid which clipped onto the grate in the fire where you could heat a saucepan or a kettle.

[Olde Crone]

My paternal grandparents moved into a brand new house in 1929. It was middle class, I suppose, detached with a garage and a large back garden. The kitchen was large and square with a walk in pantry and an Esse range. Grandma cooked everything on that. It had something I have never seen since, an oven bottom kettle which heated water for drinks and washing up etc. Family legend says that gran and grandad never went on holiday together because of the Esse, lol. If it went out it was murder to relight. I think it had a back boiler arrangement too.

My Scottish grandparents, firmly working class, also moved into a brand new corporation "house" which was actually a one bed flat, in 1926. Gran died there in 1989. She raised 7 children (her neighbour raised 13 in an identical flat). It had the luxury of a proper bathroom but the kitchen was a tiny afterthought no bigger than a wardrobe, with a double depth stone sink that you could do laundry in or wash a dirty child, then put a board across half way to wash up or prep veg (not much veg in my gran's life though). Cooking was done on an open fire in the living room on a grid that swung in or out. I don't know how water was heated for the bath. There were no power points, the iron was plugged into a light socket although I think power was eventually installed sometime in the 60s.

OC

[JBee]

I lived in a tenement bedsit in Edinburgh in 1976. I had use of a shared bathroom (to access water for washing up etc) and a room consisting of a bed and living area. Cooking was done on a baby belling hob in the fireplace.

Needless to say cooking was very basic ie one pot wonders to say the least. Luckily I moved after about 5 months.

[Jill]

The old lady who lived in the 1930s built council house next to us who had moved in when it was new told us when we moved in (1972) the kitchen/bathroom were the same room originally. So our bathroom was downstairs and still had the gas piping for the stove (mauve walls, pipes and woodwork picked out in orange by the previous tenant), and in her time there had been a removable board over the bath, and a sink.

The toilet was in the cupboard under the stairs and for hot water there was a back boiler behind the back room fire which my parents still used. There were still capped off gas pipes for the original gas lighting in each room.

My current home was a 1930s build and had a tiny kitchen originally with a gas cooker. We found a gas copper in the garden which I used as a planter until the rusty bottom gave way.

[Olde Crone]

Ah yes, the bath in the kitchen. My neighbours in the 60s had this. I was very envious as I didn't have a bathroom at all, just an outside loo.I


Thinking about food though - I remember my ex mil said that everything they ate came out of the big pot over the fire. On Sundays they took the meat (usually a rabbit pie) to the baker who put it in his oven for a halfpenny or something.


OC

[Phoenix]

I am helping clear the house of a friend, which his family have lived in since the early 1940s. The room called the kitchen only gets its name by virtue of a gas stove tucked in an alcove by the fireplace, and a sink on the other side of the back door. A door next to the cooker opened on a narrow passage leading to the loo. We had been working here several months before we discovered in that passage, beneath a large pile of books, a bath!

[vita]

I remember our London flat in the early 50s had a wooden top which came down for laundry jobs. Also,looked forward to watching the rubbish descend the shute to the ground floor, but then I was only five or six at the time (!)