amo vitam

“I cooked a simple breakfast of omelet and toast,” says the main character of a historic novel I recently read, in a throwaway half sentence. A simple breakfast. Of omelet and toast. In a cottage in the backwoods of Ireland, in 1911. Wait, simple?

Let’s break this down, shall we.

In order to make an omelet (or omelette, depending on where you live), you need to, of course, crack eggs, and… Hold on, back up.

I, too, had a simple breakfast this morning of eggs and fresh-baked bread (yes, I know! Just bear with me). At 8am, my breadmaker beeped, whereupon I dumped the loaf out of the bread pan and set it to cool on a rack. At around 8:30, I cracked an egg into a bowl, bunged a frying pan onto the stove, turned the knob to medium, melted a bit of butter in the pan, poured the egg into the pan, pushed it around with a spatula, then put it on a plate with the buttered end of the warm loaf of bread. I poured myself another cup of coffee from the coffeemaker, and voilà, my simple breakfast!

But with the MC of our story, oh dear me, no.

Yes, she also cracks eggs and slices bread. But before she does any of that, she has to make a fire. Probably on an open hearth, as this is a rural cottage in the woods—but we’ll be charitable and give her a closed stove (more on that in a minute).

So, making a fire. Probably raking out the ashes of last night’s fire, getting some kindling, hauling in (hopefully already chopped) wood, stacking the fire, setting it alight, waiting however long it takes for it to catch, then to sort of die down to something less than an enthusiastic flame… Truth be told, I’ve never actually cooked on a wood or coal stove, let alone an open fire, aside from roasting wieners or marshmallows on a stick (it’s on the things-to-learn list). But I’m pretty sure you can’t cook on a fire when you first set it alight, you have to let it establish itself. Especially when you want a sort of middling flame for your medium-hot pan, which you absolutely need for an omelet (the pan can’t be too hot—you don’t want to know how I know).

Okay, so now she’s waiting for the fire to get to cookable dimensions, which gives her time to work on her omelet. That’s not much different from what we do today—crack the eggs, beat them up with a fork, then… Is it a plain omelet? Or does it have cheese, and chopped onion, and maybe some chopped bell peppers or tomatoes or herbs…? All of which would need dicing, grating, otherwise preparing… Well, we’ll just go with a plain omelet, it’s easiest. So, beaten eggs are in a bowl, the fire is at a cookable state, you heat the pan to medium, melt the butter, pour egg into pan.

But then we get to the toast. Not just a slice of bread, toast. Which, in case you don’t know, is a slice of bread that’s toasted (you’re welcome). How does one make toast? Hang on, I can show you, I did a drawing (it was for a class):

That’s how you make toast, right? Every one of my classmates drew something almost exactly like this.

But our intrepid MC, she doesn’t have a toaster. No simply sticking your bread slice into an electric machine and pushing down a lever, to have a crispy golden brown slice pop up a few minutes later, steaming, for your delectation. So, again, I haven’t really made toast on an open fire myself, but I’ve burned marshmallows, so I know that they don’t work terribly well for toasting on an open flame. They want glowing coals. Which requires letting the fire burn down. And then you’re sitting there, patiently, with your item-to-be-toasted skewered on your toasting fork, and you carefully hold it to the heat source trying not to burn it (Whoosh! Marshmallow torch! Oops, sorry, that’s your modern Canadian campfire. Back to the topic—toasting bread on a breakfast fire). Which is not something you can do at the same time as carefully cooking an omelet, in an open pan, over that same fire, as you only have two hands.

And then—I did say we’d come back to the “closed stove” topic—our MC, after having consumed her simple breakfast, takes the leftovers and “tucks them in the oven” for her still-sleeping friends. That’s why she has to have a closed stove available to her. But woodfired ovens even in a woodstove are notoriously difficult to handle, from what I’ve read. They aren’t just on with a nice even heat like our electrical thingamagigs, they require fiddling with and knowing exactly what you’re doing, so you’re not burning one side of whatever-is-in-there and having the other side go cold.

Conversely, if our MC’s cottage-in-the-backwoods didn’t have a closed stove but an open fire and a separate oven, which is more likely for that time and place, that oven would be one of those stone or brick recesses in the wall with a door in front, like the one in Hansel and Gretel. That kind of oven you heat by building a big fire inside of it (that’s what the witch had Gretel do, intending to cook her), then when it’s at the right temperature, you rake out all the hot coals and quickly shove your bread (or witch) inside, clapping the door shut, to bake things in the residual heat being held by the thick stonework around it. All extremely time-consuming, not to mention highly skilled work.

In other words, very, very far from simple.

Okay, you’re probably tired of my ranting here. But you get the point: if you’re writing a historic novel, please think through what life “back then” was actually like. What’s “simple” now was actually very complex in times past. It took a huge amount of labour. Labour that, in most cases, was done by servants, or by your wife. And if you didn’t have servants or a wife, as is the case for the MC in this novel, you just didn’t have the things that took work. You made toast for a treat for Sunday afternoon tea, not for a quick, simple breakfast. You didn’t “tuck things in the oven”, you maybe put them “to simmer on the back of the hob” (which I’m not entirely sure of what that means, either, but have read about lots of times), and reserved the oven for baking once a week or so.

Today, I can have fresh-baked or toasted bread, scrambled eggs, and hot coffee for my breakfast, because I have an electric breadmaker, and a toaster, and an electric stove, and a coffee machine. I have electric servants. So for me, that kind of breakfast is simple. But in 1911, the terms “cooked” and “simple breakfast” did not belong in the same sentence.

It annoys me when today’s writers or readers completely disregard the amount of sheer labour that goes into having everyday creature comforts in the absence of the convenience that today’s electric and electronic machinery can give you. We disregard the work that people had to do in the past to get what we totally take for granted. We disregard the value of labour, and that means we disregard the value of the people who did that labour. “Simple” things actually take a lot of work. Let’s honour the people who did that work, shall we?

So next time you give your servantless MC in her historic-cottage-in-the-woods a “simple breakfast”, make it a (cold) slice of bread and hardboiled egg (cooked last night when she made dinner). I promise I won’t jump on you for it.

Life, the Universe, and Cooking a Simple Breakfast. I do like my electric servants.

PS: If you want to read more on this topic, check out my post on my visit to the Charles Dickens museum: “Dahl’s Chickens, or: Why They Needed Servants in Those Days”

PPS: I won’t tell you the title or author of the novel that I’m talking about here, because my rant only pertains to that one, tiny half-sentence. In all other respects it’s quite a good book, and I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of it.

PPPS: I said I’d stop ranting, but, don’t even get me started on the labour of producing textile work and the authors that sneer at “homespun”… I know, I know, that’s a post for another day.