A Revolution in the Kitchen

A fragment of the utopian dream...fire captured in a box...a French classic

Chère amie, cher ami,
 
My grandmother had the same gas-powered refrigerator for thirty years. Neat little legs flared out in an elegant cabriole. A round gas motor sat on top like a turban. Naturally, it was white. When it gave out, my grandmother wrote to General Electric.
 
“I thought they might send me a replacement,” she said, wistfully. 
 
On the windowsill above the sink was a pair of salt and pepper shakers, a present from GE. One was the miniature of her defunct icebox and the other represented a boxy new electric refrigerator. My grandfather bought her the new model.
 
My other grandmother’s cook used a black, coal-fired stove. A little electric range purchased in the 1960s was an accessory.
 
In our family, appliances hung around.
 
So when I paid a small fortune for a Godin cuisinière 25 years ago, I expected I would still be using it today. Alas!
 
I never understood how the rôtisserie worked. It transformed the first and last chicken I attached to the broche into a blackened husk. The cast iron prongs on the metal burners broke off. The hinges on the heavy oven doors went next. The ovens became erratic. Finally, one of them began sending out warning plumes of black smoke.
 
“Godin!” rhapsodized a dear friend when she saw la grosse bête. “La vraie marque française!” 
 
The big triple “Chatelaine” with its French blue enamel case and thick brass trim was a beautiful object. To Catherine, a fervent defender of “Le Made in France” and a very old friend, I said nothing.
 
But my Chatelaine was dismantled and stored in one of the horse boxes in the stable block. Monsieur Xavier was sure he could fix it. And finally, several years later, the kitchen at the Maison de la Ferme was ready for a stove. 
 
Only part of the majestic old Godin – la Grande Chatelaine -- was reinstated. La Petite Chatelaine was cannibalized for parts. We ordered a new grill and accompanying lèche-frîte from the Godin factory. These anodyne parts cost the princely sum of 250 euros, with a three-month delay. Unfortunately, black smoke continued to billow as before. One day, the automatic ignition no longer worked. Capriciously, as if disgruntled by its descent into a humble farmhouse, the stove turned on and off at will.
 
Monsieur Xavier narrowed his eyes and compressed his lips. He is le gardien, not a thaumaturge.
 
The magnificent bête, impervious to his tinkerings, was dethroned again, banished into another horse box.

Fall from grace: the Chatelaines in storage in the stable block

Perhaps we should have taken our stove to a final resting place in Courtomer’s municipal dump, as Monsieur Xavier testily suggested. The mass of enameled cast-iron and brass weighed almost a thousand pounds, and he was moving it for the third time. None of us are getting any younger, he pointed out ominously.
 
But our Chatelaine represents something that cannot be tossed ignominiously on a trash heap. It is a grand classique of French technology. It embodies the ideal of beauty and utility in the service of the home. And it is a fragment of the utopian dream that has fed so much revolutionary fervor in France over the past two centuries.

The Godin atelier, from the company's photographic archives. Godin's prototype round heating stoves, advertised as "le meilleur et moins cher" -- "the best and the best value" -- are shown at right.

Our cuisinière's illustrious ancestor was invented in 1840. After a half century of violent political and social upheaval, France had finally entered what was then the modern world. The age of coke furnaces and steam power had crossed the Channel from England. 
 
New French patents protected thousands of inventions and improvements. The internal combustion engine, reinforced concrete, the refrigerator, the chain-stich sewing machine, the bicycle, binoculars, ball-bearings and deadlier rifles were all invented in France during the economic heydays of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, from 1830 to 1870. 
 
Jean-Baptiste Godin himself was a product of the newly inventive and industrial age.

The son of a locksmith in the North of France, he became a locksmith himself and married the daughter of another locksmith. This was the time-honored tradition of the crafts, in which savoir-faire and wealth were kept within the family confines of “les confrères.” But instead of making locks and keys, the young couple began making heating stoves. The specialized knowledge of the serrurier, metal casting, welding and soldering, were put to work in a new way. In 1840, the year of his marriage, Godin filed a patent for a small, coal-burning stove made of cast iron. 
 
Up until the mid-19th century, the only heat in most French houses came from the kitchen hearth. Firewood was expensive, even in the countryside; trees, woodlots and forests were valuable and jealously guarded. Many layers of clothing took the place of central-heating and double-glazed windows. But starting in the 1840s, new railroad lines for transport and steam-powered machinery for extraction vastly increased the production of French coal. This was particularly true of the mines du Nord, near where Godin was situated. 
 
Not only was coal now on the market for heating, but coal-fired furnaces made high-quality iron readily available. Cast-iron, as Godin noted when he filed his patent, holds heat for long periods and distributes it evenly. Enameled in attractive colors, cast in fashionable designs, and very affordable, “le Godin” became a ubiquitous feature in thousands of French homes. In 1846, Godin employed 32 workers. By 1881, the factory employed 2,000. 

The ancestor of our Chatelaine: Godin's 1846 patent for a "cuisinière économique," an economical coal-fired range

Godin did not stop there and neither did consumer demand. French households became richer. Domestic habits changed. As Marx, also hard at work in the 1840s, noted with regret, the proletariat was more interested in adopting the material culture of the bourgeoisie than in dictating to it. The housewife’s lot was becoming a happy one. That might have seemed like transformation enough.
 
In addition to an open fire and its spit, the 18th-century femme au foyer had adopted “le potager.” There is one still in the old basement kitchen at Chateau de Courtomer. It is a massive block of brick or stone heated by a small fire at its base. At first, it was used to simmer “le potage,” the vegetables and pieces of meat in a broth that was the staple of the French diet. Holes in the surface could be filled with hot coals. Next, hobs made of bronze were inserted in the openings. These concentrated the heat and made variable and higher cooking temperatures possible. It was now possible to fry, boil, and roast – to make soups and sauces, cakes and meat – at the same time, at a safe distance from flames and hot coals, and without crouching or bending.
 
In French histories of domestic life, this new technology is described as “la maîtrise du feu,” the mastering of fire. There was a profound and fundamental change in the way an ordinary person could cook, and ordinary people could eat. Gone was the open fire on the hearth; fire had been captured in a box.
 
Godin’s cast-iron stove easily evolved into a cuisinière. Adapted to city or country living, it could be fueled by either coal or wood. Unlike the hearth or the potager, it was portable. In parallel, new recipe books now provided precise measurements and instructions. Cooking, like so much that had once been intuitive or transmitted from one craftsman to another, was codified into a science in the 19th century.
 
But the kitchen also became romantic, a place to dream. Urbain Dubois’ popular cookbook of 1856 explained in minute detail the how and why of making everything from trusty potage to roasts and jellies. But it started with a discussion of table service “à la Française” and “à la Russe.” Dubois wrote with authority; he was chef to the Russian ambassador Prince Alexey Orlof.  His enlightening introduction was followed by sample menus that included such glamorous events as a “Souper au Bal pour 800” and soared from such delicacies as aspic garnished with foie gras to veal Orlof and baskets of nougat and glazed fruit.

The frontispiece of Urbain Dubois' cookbook, La Cuisine Classique, offered the romance as well as the science of French cookery -- all possible with the marvellous new technology of the coal-fired, cast-iron stove. From the archives of the BNF

Meanwhile, Godin’s range of improved domestic appliances expanded to the pots and pans required in the new “battérie de cuisine,” as well as water heaters and radiators.
 
We take these accoutrements of comfortable living for granted today, but in the booming 1840s they were as revolutionary as Karl Marx’s theory of class struggle.
 
In the space of a few generations, the world had rapidly and visibly improved. Perhaps there were no limits to its perfectibility! 
 
In 1842, as his stoves became “la référence” in household heating, Godin came upon the writings of Charles Fourier. Fourier’s vivid imagination knew no bounds: man’s ingenuity would change the chemical composition of the oceans, attract new moons into the Earth’s orbit, and annihilate sharks, lions, and “sea-monsters.” New species of fish would pull boats. And the climate would be uniformly warm.
 
Inspired, Godin set about the creation of an ideal human community.
 
And thus, chers amis, even if “beauté est affaire de goût” – even if beauty is but a matter of taste, there is more to our Chatelaines than meets the eye!
 
Until next week, to delve into Godin’s plans for humanity and to decide what to do with les belles Chatelaines…

A bientôt au Château,

Elisabeth
www.chateaudecourtomer.com

Making progress: a view of our Chateau kitchen under renovation yesterday