Joys Of Modern Life We Take For Granted - Part 2

June 6, 2012

Interview with Lucy Worsley, author of the book If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

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Mike Carruthers:
When you cook your next meal you’ll likely use a pan on the stovetop and you’ll take it for granted. But for centuries that was impossible going back to medieval times.

Lucy Worsley:
The absolute basis utensils that medieval people had were their round bottomed iron pots which hung from a hook over the fire. And into it you would put the mainstay of the medieval diet which is a kind of a soup.
 

Lucy Worsley, author of the book If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home...

You put in any grain, any meat if you have it, any vegetables and you keep it bubbling away in this sort of perpetual potage. And if you know the nursery rhyme; peas pudding hot, peas pudding cold, peas pudding in the pot sometimes literally 9 days old - because you keep on topping it off. So that’s the sort of basis and that lasts for centuries it’s only with the arrival of the kitchen range that pots give way to the saucepan.

Silverware is a relatively new concept, Henry VIII had a fork and that was thought to be quite novel.

Until this point people would be using just a knife and their fingers. So you would have your own personal knife, you’d carry it with you, you’d use it to slice your meat and then you’d use the point to pick up those pieces and pop them into your mouth. So the fork begins to appear in the Tudor period and then in the Georgian period in the 18th Century we get the consumer revolution and suddenly there’s a sort of great explosion into all the different kinds of knives and forks.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.