Georgians At Home
It is the evening now and Mrs Andrews, the Cook and Jane, the Scullery Maid are still hard at work, preparing food for the next day. The cook is making chocolate puffs, can you see how they are made? The puffs have sugar in them, a very expensive ingredient that most servants did not get to eat. The sugar was made in the West Indies by enslaved (this means they were forced to work without pay) people in terrible conditions. During the Georgian period, a famous lawyer called Granville Sharpe had started to put an end to the slave trade.
Jane Austen
If a family could afford them, the kitchen would have been used by their servants, the family would never come into these rooms. In Jane Austen’s book called ‘Pride and Prejudice’ a dinner guest asks the lady of the house if one of her daughters had cooked the meal. She was very upset as she could afford servants to do this for her and did not need her children to do any cooking. She did not want her guest to think of her as poor. Do you help in the kitchen at home?
Explore an Object: Can you spot the two mouse traps?
Mice were often found near food and these traps were one of the ways they were caught. Can you tell how they work? One drops a large weight onto the mouse and the other has a spring.
Look up and you will see another way that Georgians kept their food away from pesky creatures. Hanging from the ceiling is a wooden rack that was used for storing meats and bread to keep them safe.
Find this object. What was this object used for?
These are called sugar nippers. Sugar in these days was bought in a cone shape like the one that you can see on the table and these nippers were used to break the cone into smaller pieces. The cook would then grind the sugar further with a special bowl and crushing tool called a pestle and mortar – can you find a pestle and mortar in this room?
