The resurrection of the genealogy DB (it crashed) has gotten me into the Dark Ages again, and fixing breakfast this morning I got to thinking how rich my ancestors would think I am.
Breakfast: I turn a tap, with a choice of hot or cold water to rinse a dish. I’m annoyed that the hot water takes ten whole minutes to arrive.
Ancestor: go to water jar, break the ice crust (it’s the Little Ice Age) and get some water in a pot, poke up last night’s fire, put on more wood to bring fire (and light) up. Put on wrap and go out back, dust off the snow and haul in 75 lbs of icy wood, which will make a small puddle on the fireside. By now the water is heated.
Me: I puncture two eggs and set them in the egg cooker, more water from the tap. I pop storebought bread into the toaster.
Ancestor: boil water for oats, add oats, boil. This is breakfast. There may be beer to drink. Unboiled water is seasonally not fit to drink, and can make you sick. While oats boil, open flour jar, measure out several handfuls of flour, get culture from small jar kept warm near the fire (a really big luxury: Wat opened a mill down the road, only a 3 mile walk from here), mix up dough, add culture, set in bowl to rise near fire.
Me: having breakfast. Get dressed. Choice of closet.
Ancestor: having breakfast. Dip up more water to boil for washing dishes (not self: baths are sinful. The local priest is agin’ ’em except on holy days.) No need to dress. Slept in clothes. Those get washed when they get muddy. Note to self: the water jar is low. Got to take the jug and fill it at the well, hauling bucket up, loading jar with 50 lbs of water, hauling it home. This is the reason for having kids.
Breakfast with my ancestor Godeswintha: Servant lights candles. Get out of bed, leave servant to arrange bedclothes. Godeswintha also slept in her clothes: it’s warmer. Break the ice on the washing bowl. Wash face. She has the same priest. Ask servant for slippers. Servant brushes and braids her hair.
Go down to hall where servants, up before dawn, since the lady rises at the crack-of, already have the fire going, the water boiled, the oats ready, and maybe have boiled an egg or two. The floor is covered with straw, partly for insulation in the fall. Rugs have not yet come in from the Middle East. The light comes from the fire. Godeswintha has beer for breakfast, since the water, while better, does not taste that good. She gives the day’s orders to Cook, consults with her maid about the linen, hears a report from house staff about a leak in the roof, and intends to spend the afternoon (when light reaches the solar) sitting and sewing her best embroidered sleeves and trim onto a new dress. She will get in about 2 hours good sewing before the light leaves the window. For the rest she will hear servants’ and villagers’ reports and make out a list for market day, which is only once a week.
Godeswintha still didn’t have it as easy as I do. And Godeswintha may taste an orange once or twice in her life, will never taste many spices I have in my cabinet, will have iffy medical care, and will probably die at 25 in childbirth. Her brother Godegund will die in a neighborhood skirmish at 38, repossessing a strayed village cow from a neighbor’s strong-arm guys on the other side of the creek.
These days, in places where recycling is seriously practiced, there is surprisingly little useful stuff that is actually landfilled. The key is “where seriously practiced”.
I am still a bit surprised that serious recycling isn’t more widespread, particularly in and around larger urban areas. But then, at least Some of those larger urban centers either are going or have gone the route of incineration (of Everything that isn’t sorted out and “reclaimed” at the incinerator), which of course leaves Nothing to be mined in the future..
I suspect that the timeline for the creation of useful landfills will end up being those created between the years 1940 and 2040, or thereabouts. Prior to that there was nearly no plastic, and most metal stuff was too valuable to simply throw away. By the middle of this century we’ll be (I would Hope) far too sophisticated Not to be sifting “trash” for any useful materials. Not to mention the increasing awareness and consideration of environmental issues.
In reality the primary stuff that will be “mined” from landfills will be the plastics. Once crude oil reserves are used up and oil becomes scarce enough to become priced out of the reach of most uses the amount of the stuff locked up in Plastics over the last 60 years (and continuing) will become an irrestible resource.
Someone made the observation that future civilizations will be amazed (and darned mad) that we 20th century folks used oil for fuels. Burned the stuff – wasted it. Well, they’ll be right.
My current furnace is a dual-fuel model, about 30 years old and on its last legs. I have a small forest about a half-mile to the back of my lot. The only problem with hauling the wood in is no truck to carry it over the undulations and haphazard trail laid out through the crop field. Last winter, I decided to quit walking out there with the chainsaw and garden wagon, loading logs onto the wagon, and pulling them by hand across a half mile of snow, rocky ground, uneven ground, etc., I drove my car out to the woods, brought the logs as close to the edge of the woods as I could, and then could drag them the rest of the way to the car. Is it good for the car? Probably not, but neither is it good for me in the middle of the field to have a sudden heart attack or stroke from pulling 300 pounds of wood for a half-mile. If I could get the lawn tractor to be reliable and start when I need it to start, I could take a tow chain out there and drag logs back to the house and cut them there. but no, the lawn tractor is temperamental, works only when I don’t really need it, and generally just sits under the carport.
All of this may be academic in the next few weeks, since my landlady is trying to get a new furnace installed. I just don’t know if it’ll be oil or propane, but I do know I won’t be able to burn wood. I can’t install a wood stove in the house, since there is no place for a flue, and it’s not my house to begin with. So, those inefficient space heaters, until I get something like an oil-filled heater that works much more economically.
Funny, just a couple of days ago as I was brushing out my hair before parting it with a comb, I got reflecting/wondering on when brushes came in. Combs, from my passive memory (i.e. checking back in my memory of archaeological/historical reading) are earlier, but CJ nicely points out that brushes don’t survive time well with their classically-identifying bits intact. My wooden comb, interestingly enough, is 22 years and counting. I’ve been through at least 3 brushes in that time.
The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, by Barbara Hanawalt (Oxford University Press), 1986, is a great book indeed. She analyses medieval legal records (accidental death inquiries) to uncover the daily lives and social organization of medieval England. It’s readable and fascinating. And, when I pulled out my copy to write up the reference here, I also uncovered another book by her, Growing Up in Medieval London: the Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford University Press), 1993. I bought it a few years ago, based on my enjoyment of her prior book, and never had time to read it. I am going to add it to my active pile of must-reads now.
Between reading the comments above and writing this one, I put together some brownies for a bakesale later today in western Massachusetts where Remer lives and is currently experiencing the same, on-going drip of rain as us just outside Boston (it’s to benefit the roller derby team, Western Mass Destruction, which is doing an fund-raising and recruiting event in conjunction with the release of Drew Barrymore’s new movie Whipit on roller derby). I got thinking about the source of the foods and CJ’s (and likely my) ancestors:
What they and we both have in common:
Wheat flour (but even the best of theirs was so much more “wholewheaty”)
Butter: but would have mostly been made from ‘soured” cream collected over several days
Eggs: no problem there at all
Salt: yup, although ours now has iodine in it and so goiters aren’t seen
Suger: yes, but only the very wealthy and not in easily pourable/spoonable small crystals. It was used as a spice and condiment and social status indicator by the powerful (see Sidney Mintz’ great, 1986 Penguin-published book Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History.
Raisins: those were pretty available if you lived in a warm enough climate to grow grapes (yes, I have added raisins to my brownies since I was 14 or so)
What we have and they didn’t:
Chocolate: from Central American and, to a poorer quality and lesser extent, South America
Vanilla: also from Central America and, like chocolate, 1st introduced to Europe by the Spanish
Expresso powder: Actually, I realize I don’t know the detailed history of coffee but believe it is Arabic in origin and certainly not used by the Anglo-Saxons. I don’t drink it either but recently realized that a teaspoon of expresso powder really punches up the power of the chocolate in the brownies.
Then I went on to “feed” my sourdough culture so that I can bake bread tomorrow with it. That would be much more similar to Anglo-Saxon ancestors but I can store mine in the fridge between using it for several months. I also knead my dough with an electric mixer and bake it in an electric oven. All in all, it takes me some 10 active minutes to “make” bread. The rest of the time the dough is doing its own thing and so am I.
I teach a Social History of Food course. MMBerry, I’d love to use your list of foods not available (presumably in Europe) before 1500 when I have my students put together a menu for a medieval feast (from my collection of “Medieval” cookbooks I’ve amassed over the years). I would give all credit due.
At this point, we are debating the price vs. value for installing solar panels for generating electricity on the roof. We are in a good area for it, and the technology has gotten to the point now where you can get half of your daily electrical needs from a roof-ful of panels, as long as your weather cooperates. Despite the fact it’s tempting, we will probably hold off for a few more years; we have more pressing projects at the moment and unless the cost of electricity really skyrockets, solar panels are a worthy but not necessary investment.
Many newer houses in our area have solar water heaters on the roof. We used to have one as well, but it never worked quite right, and when it finally broke, we just took it out of the loop altogether. Cost vs. efficiency thing again.
Quote: Well, actually, nowadays you can easily replace oil with wood chips in a central heating system.
The following site shows an example:
It’s german language, but anyway. The principle is simple: the wood is mechanically converted to chips (1″ to 2″ , 3 to 5 cm in length, visible on one of the pictures). Those are stored and automatically fed into the oven. There’s a tiny fireplace of approx. 120mm (5 inches) in diameter, and the fire is started with a small electric device and hot air. Computer controlled, fully automatic, automatic cleaning, you’ve got to only fill the wood bunker and empty the ash tray every couple days or weeks. In our house, such a system has been in use for several years now, with almost no problems. And the cost for cutting the wood and breaking it down to bits amounts to 250EUR per year or so, for 100 cubic meters of wood chips.
Endquote
Similar to wht is called a Pellet stove, here in the U.S. Wood pellets, similarly processed to what is described. There are two drawbacks, compared to “traditional” wood stoves. First, pellets are more expensive. Particularly so when compared to firewood you “make” yourself, but even compared to buying split cordwood. Second, a pellet stove requires electricity. Not a good thing when the power goes out. A Woodstove is peace of mind during a power outage – the heat stays on.
And yes, the power Does go out. We had an event, an Ice storm, last December here that left the entire region without electricity, most places for a couple of days, some for over a week. Ours was out for about 24 hours (nice to live near a local power company executive – power was restored to Our area on a Priority..). Sure we have a backup generator for such occasions, but not something that you would expect to use for operating the Furnace. Lights and hot water, those are the “neccessities”. Followed by the television and internet, then heat. Modern prioities.
There are also options for using a wood fired furnace as part of a combined wood/oil (or gas) central heating system. Heat from the wood burner is saved as hot water in a large tank, which water is normally then used for a baseboard or radiant heating system. When more heat is needed (to warm the water) the system will take it from the wood burner, if it’s hot, or fire up the oil side burner if needed. Works well but takes up a rather large amount of space, and you can’t make it work with a forced hot air system, only hot water. Rather expensive “up front” costs, as well.
I’ve lived in a house built that way, and it does work well, but I believe I prefer a stove that I can sit and Watch..
Similar to wht is called a Pellet stove, here in the U.S. Wood pellets, similarly processed to what is described. There are two drawbacks, compared to “traditional” wood stoves. First, pellets are more expensive. Particularly so when compared to firewood you “make” yourself, but even compared to buying split cordwood. Second, a pellet stove requires electricity. Not a good thing when the power goes out. A Woodstove is peace of mind during a power outage – the heat stays on.
I know those. The company from my link makes them also. But the pellets are much more expensive. In case of no wood chips available, this oven can be heated with bigger pieces of wood also, but then with manual feeding.
As for power outages: We have a 30kVA generator that is powerful enough to power the entire farm, if necessary for a week.
Our place got electricity around 1964, and public water just a couple years ago.
My grandmother was born in 1900, and died 1990. Her father’s house got electricity around 1910, but only for lighting one room. Then she married my grandfather, and there were no such amenities available. She lived through most of the developments of modern civilization, electricity, central heating, refrigerators, motor vehicles, telephone, computers, you name it. Central heating was common in the roman empire, but most everything else has been developed in the past 300 years, and the biggest part of it in the past 100.
Remer,
My furnace is forced hot air. It’s been that way for 30 years, although I’ve only lived in this house for 5 years. I remember the first winter, I had the tanks filled twice in 2 weeks, which came to about $425.00 each time, when heating oil was below $2.00/gallon. I’m in no hurry to fill the tanks now, until I find out what kind of furnace they’re going to install. It’d be silly to buy oil, and then find out they were going with propane. More than likely, they’ll go with a high-efficiency oil burner, so I won’t be burning any more wood. If the walls were insulated, it’d make it a lot warmer, and I’m going to try to go around and caulk around the window casements. I’d love to have a nice soapstone stove, but as above, I have nowhere to put it and it’s not my house to go knocking holes in the walls or roof to run a chimney.
My kitchen stove is electric. My clothes dryer is electric. My well pump is electric. My furnace blower and igniter is electric. My water heater is, yep, electric. All of them are 220 volt appliances, so there is no way I could heat water, or run the furnace, or pump water up to heat it, cook anything. I have a campstove, a propane barbecue grill, and I suppose I could build a fire outside in the patio fireplace and toast wieners and marsmallows.
Let me put in a plug for deliberately turning your back on a certain amount of convenience, for the sake of good taste and the good of the world as a whole. Not back to the Middle Ages, but back to pre-WWII or so. If you eschew food that has been transported from the other side of the state, or continent, or world, and eat locally raised food in season, you will eat MUCH BETTER. You will also drastically reduce your carbon footprint. It seems that, of the calories of energy used to raise AND TRANSPORT food, about 1% are actually eaten as nutrient; the rest goes to gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, etc. Mostly to the truck fuel, or even airplane fuel. Fruit from New Zealand in a Texas store, anyone? And not exotic stuff like kiwis, just ordinary fruits and vegetables, out of season. Buy local stuff in season; it tastes so much better! And read Barbara Kingsolver’s _Animal, Vegetable, Miracle._
OX, off my soapbox.
Yes, but Abigail, most of the farms around our modern cities are now covered in houses instead of raising crops!
AbigailM (and HRHSpence) – also consider that the farming season, and therefore any sort of Fresh produce, is just now ended here in the north – won’t be any more locally grown produce Now until next June, at the absolute earliest. Meat products are rather less seasonal, but there isn’t any serious amount of beef or pork raised/fattened/slaughtered in the Northeast anyhow. Nearly All shipped in from the midwest.
I have difficulty believing that in today’s world you would convince many people to do what their ancestors did – can and pickle vegetables and preserve fruits so as to have a supply over the winter and spring months. Or to routinely eat much (if any) of the late and early vegetables that were the norm before interstate and intercontinental shipping became common. Turnip and Parsnip in the fall, Dandelion greens and Rhuebarb in the spring, for example.
As far as saving the Fuel used, true – but only that used for Shipping. Farming is farming, and if the field is bigger than your backyard garden then it’s worked by tractor, and all manner of other diesel burning equipment. Pest and weed controlling chemicals, fertilizers, etc. are a fact of life when something like 2% of the population is expected to feed the rest of us..
We are Dependent on modern farming methods, and short of armegeddon there isn’t any turning back.
Here’s a scary statistic: more than 40% of farmers in the U.S. are over 55 years of age. Where is the next generation going to get Their food from?
I don’t say you should be a purist and eat NOTHING but local (though this is almost what the Kingsolver/Hopp family did for a year, give or take olive oil, coffee, and spices) but try to reduce your dependence on cross-country food. That fuel cost is the majority of the energy content of the food, And besides, many of the cross-country veg and fruits are hardily worth buying. Huge California peaches look beautiful in the store, but they tend to be mealy and relatively tasteless because they were picked green to travel. The little lopsided local peaches from the next county, on the other hand, are to die for — fragrant juice dripping down your front as you bite in.
And check out Slow Food for where to get heirloom vorieties of vegetables that taste wonderful but are not adapted for mass corporate marketing.
Sunday morning is one day that I am very happy to live in California. That’s the day that I hit the local certified Farmer’s Market. I love going there, talking to the farmers about what’s in season, what’s coming up, how the crops are doing this year. When I did my brief move back to Texas, my first move was to find the local Farmer’s Market. That’s when the difference between California (which grows something like 60% of the US food supply, and 80% of the world’s almond crop) and the rest of the country. The selection in the Texas market was very limited. It was summer, the height of stone fruit season. In California, I have the choice of 6 stands with peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, and pluots. And each stand has at least a couple of different types of each fruit (Rio Oso, Elberta, and O’Henry peaches, for example, all of which have a different nuance to their flavor). In Texas I had four stands, all of which had exactly the same type of peach. I quickly came to realize that if I did my same “eat local” routine in Texas, my choices were going to be much more limited.
The one thing I can’t find in the California market is root vegetables. No parsnips or rutabagas, and a very limited supply of turnips. I think it doesn’t get cold enough for them.
Oh, as to canning, I think part of the problem is that it seems very arcane unless you’ve actually done it. I’ve spent this summer making lots of no-added-pectin jellies, and now have many jars sitting in the cabinet waiting for me to open them and enjoy the taste of summer in the middle of the winter. Next year I am thinking of actually canning some fruit. It’s not that hard until you start getting into the low-acid foods.
Just skipped around in the comments so perhaps this has been mentioned? Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is very readable on the topic of good, local eating. And canning, and other food preservation techniques. I’ve owned at least 2 copies that have been passed on to friends on permanent loan, I’ve been advised that one of them has become the equivalent of a library copy as it goes the rounds. Might buy another one for myself, which is a big commitment; I went from hundreds (thousands?) of books to maybe 20 when I downsized. Donated everything to the library. Eventually I’ll probably get a Kindle, but having just contracted for a new job, I won’t have much time for reading for at least a year. I “retired” in July 2007 so it does seem that I should be awash in leisure time, but it hasn’t happened yet!
I agree with you AbigailM…take the useful from the 21st centuryand turn…sideways? to the rest….we have unparalleled historical information at our fingertips….we can pick and choose at will…….so glad to see Barbara Kingsolver’s book mentioned….it surprises me that we can get so much local stuff….we even have a prize winning cheese maker in the area. Canning and preserving is not that hard. For the iffy stuff I had a friend, who cans to the point that she never buys vegetables, show me. Preparing to Survive Winter is a World unto Itself!
My Step-grandmother was a master canner of all the farm produce grown that year. My mother was a canning hobbyist. She put up fruit one year that we had for the next half decade. She put food coloring in two batches of pears so we had green, blue, pink and orange pears for so long that I am not phased by odd looking food at all. My wife did the canning thing once and my grown daughters have never done it.
I’d say the art has nearly died out.
While I can and have done canning, a lot of the local fruit and veggies are not conducive to canning. Most of it is best eaten fresh, or at most dried, like bananas; it’s mostly stuff with too high a water content. The fruits that will preserve like lychee, you need to have a tree of your own, because they are still very expensive even at farmers’ markets. I tried making starfruit jam once, and although it was pretty, it wasn’t all that tasty. Pickling, OTOH, is a fine local art. When mango season rolls in, you can have mango bread, mango chutney, li hing mui mango, pickled mango, dried mango strips, or cut up and frozen. Canning mangoes doesn’t work out too well.
I don’t know when my house got electricity, but they didn’t have running water until some time in the 1950s, and this is the home counties, so not a particularly deprived area.
As for the ‘bathing’ I wonder how many of the people who didn’t bathe very often were splashing about in local rivers or lakes. After work, you take the horse down and splash about. Probably more boys than girls, and more young folk than adults, but swimming, or at least splashing about features in so many narratives and folk songs that I can’t imagine that the non-bathers never got thoroughly wet.
Also, not bathing != not washing. You can clean yourself reasonably well without running water – it’s not my preferred method of getting clean, but when the circumstances demand it, it’s doable.