At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

“Have you ever noticed,” Brian asked as we stepped into the churchyard, “how country churches nearly always seem to be sinking into the ground?” He pointed out how this one stood in a slight depression, like a weight placed on a cushion. The church foundations were about three feet below the churchyard around it. “Do you know why that is?” I allowed, as I often do when following Brian around, that I had no idea. “Well, it isn’t because the church is sinking,” Brian said, smiling. “It’s because the churchyard has risen. How many people do you suppose are buried here?”

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well—and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies. The three great domesticated crops of prehistory were rice, wheat, and maize, but all had significant drawbacks as staples. As the journalist John Lanchester explains: “Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; wheat has a chemical that impedes the action of zinc and can lead to stunted growth; maize is deficient in essential amino acids and contains phytates, which prevent the absorption of iron.” The average height of people actually fell by almost six inches in the early days of farming in the Near East. Even on Orkney, where prehistoric life was probably as good as it could get, an analysis of 340 ancient skeletons showed that hardly any people lived beyond their twenties.

So sedentism meant poorer diets, more illness, lots of toothache and gum disease, and earlier deaths. What is truly extraordinary is that these are all still factors in our lives today. Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age. We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders and why an honest person—someone who keeps his hands visible at all times—is said to be aboveboard.

Until the 1600s, chairs were rare—the word chair itself dates only from about 1300—and were designed not to be comfortable but to impute authority. Even now, of course, the person in charge of a meeting chairs it, and a person in charge of a company is the chairman of the board—a term that additionally, and a little oddly, recalls the dining habits of medieval peasants.

In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers—the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words sometimes make and came to describe (by 1605) not just where the king met with his ministers, but the collective term for the ministers themselves. This explains why this one word now describes both the most intimate and exalted group of advisers in government and the shelved recess in the bathroom where we keep Ex-Lax and the like.

Smollett characterized London bread as a poisonous compound of “chalk, alum and bone-ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution,” but such charges were in fact already a commonplace by then and probably had been for a very long time, as evidenced by the line in “Jack and the Beanstalk”: “I’ll crush his bones to make my bread.”

Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker’s dozen.

What changed all that was a revolutionary book by a shy, sweet-natured poet in Kent named Eliza Acton. Because Miss Acton’s poems weren’t selling, her publisher gently suggested she might try something more commercial, and in 1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled.

Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

These were widely disdained for the first 150 years or so after their introduction to Europe. Many people considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew belowground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew), but danger could never be entirely avoided.

The Drummond light, or calcium light as it was also called, was based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time—that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is where the phrase in the limelight comes from.

the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments. Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.

were frequently out of their depth at producing padding that would maintain a permanent domed shape on the seat. Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather.

In the middle of the table was likely to have stood an object of costly elegance known as an epergne (pronounced “ay-pairn”), consisting of dishes connected by ornamental branches, each dish containing a selection of fruits or nuts. For a century or so, no table of discernment was without its epergne, but why it was called an epergne no one remotely knows. The word doesn’t exist in French. It just seems to have popped into being from nowhere.

Scores of other flavorings were applied in the kitchen. But just two were considered so indispensable that they never left the table at all. I refer of course to salt and pepper. Why it is that these two, out of all the hundreds of spices and flavorings available, have such a durable venerability is one of the questions with which we began the book. The answer is a complicated, dramatic one. I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.

In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods—bread and water chiefly—to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.

On his circumnavigation of the globe in 1768–71, Captain Cook packed a range of antiscorbutics to experiment on, including thirty gallons of carrot marmalade and a hundred pounds of sauerkraut for every crew member. Not one person died from scurvy on his voyage—a

The realization that an inadequate diet caused not only scurvy but a range of common diseases was remarkably slow to become established. Not until 1897 did a Dutch physician named Christiaan Eijkman, working in Java, notice that people who ate whole-grain rice didn’t get beriberi, a debilitating nerve disease, while people who ate polished rice very often did. Clearly some thing or things were present in some foods, and missing in others, and served as a determinant of well-being. It was the beginning of an understanding of “deficiency disease,” as it was known, and it won Eijkman the Nobel Prize in medicine even though he had no idea what these active agents were. The real breakthrough came in 1912, when Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist working at the Lister Institute in London, isolated thiamine, or vitamin B1, as it is now more generally known. Realizing it was part of a family of molecules, he combined the terms vital and amines to make the new word vitamines. Although Funk was right about the vital part, it turned out that only some of the vitamines were amines (that is to say, nitrogen-bearing), and so the name was changed to vitamins to make it “less emphatically inaccurate,” in Anthony Smith’s nice phrase.

Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it Koagulations vitamin for its role in blood clotting. Later, folic acid (sometimes called vitamin B9) was added to the group. Two other vitamins—pantothenic acid and biotin—don’t have numbers or, come to that, much profile, but that is largely because they almost never cause us problems. No human has yet been found with insufficient quantities of either.

Vitamins are curious things. It is odd, to begin with, that we cannot produce them ourselves when we are so very dependent on them for our well-being. If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can’t we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows. The other remarkable thing about vitamins is the striking disproportion between dosage and effect. Put simply, we need vitamins a lot, but we don’t need a lot of them. Three ounces of vitamin A, lightly but evenly distributed, will keep you purring for a lifetime. Your B1 requirement is even less—just one ounce spread over seventy or eighty years. But just try doing without those energizing specks and see how long it is before you start to fall to pieces.

The fundamental difference between vitamins and minerals is that vitamins come from the world of living things—from plants and bacteria and so on—and minerals do not.

Remove zinc from your diet and you will get a condition known as hypogeusia, in which your taste buds stop working, making food boring or even revolting, but until as recently as 1977 zinc was thought to have no role in diet at all.

Archaeological evidence shows that once people settled down in agricultural communities they began to suffer salt deficiencies—something that they had not experienced before—and so had to make a special effort to find salt and get it into their diet. One of the mysteries of history is how they knew they needed to do so, because the absence of salt in the diet awakes no craving. It makes you feel bad and eventually it kills you—without the chloride in salt, cells simply shut down like an engine without fuel—but at no point would a human being think: “Gosh, I could sure do with some salt.” So how they knew to go searching for it is an interesting question,

Pepper has been appreciated since time immemorial in its native territory, but it was the Romans who made it an international commodity.

By the time they reached European markets, nutmeg and mace fetched as much as sixty thousand times what they sold for in the Far East.

It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers—excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing on first hearty chomp.

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas.

Tea was slurped by laborers and daintily sipped by ladies. It was taken at breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime. It was easier to make at home than coffee, and it also went especially well with another great gustatory treat that was suddenly becoming affordable for the average wage earner: sugar. Britons

Britons today eat 80 pounds of sugar per person annually, while Americans pack away a decidedly robust 126 pounds of sugar per head.)

Dinner finally became an evening meal in the 1850s, influenced by Queen Victoria. As the distance between breakfast and dinner widened, it became necessary to create a smaller meal around the middle of the day, for which the word luncheon was appropriated. Luncheon originally signified a lump or portion (as in “a luncheon of cheese”). In that sense it was first recorded in English in 1580.

(a bushel is thirty-two U.S. quarts or about thirty-five liters,

by inserting different colored bricks to form a diamond pattern, known as a diaper. (The relationship between a pattern of bricks and a baby’s undergarment is that the baby garment was originally made from linen threads woven in a diamond pattern.)

In Britain a simple expedient was to give the houses a kind of permanent facial by applying a creamy layer of stucco—a kind of exterior plaster compounded from lime, water, and cement, from the Old German stukki, or “covering”—over the original brick surface.

one of the oldest of all urban legends, that rats come into homes by way of toilets, is in fact true. In one outbreak, rats in Atlanta invaded several homes in wealthy neighborhoods, and bit more than a few people. “On several occasions,” Clinton reported, “rats were found alive in covered toilet bowls.” If ever there was a reason to put the lid down, this could be it.

For many people today, gardening is about lawns and almost nothing else. In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.