A newly unearthed Victorian housewife’s journal, found in an old trunk in an attic in Cheshire, provides instructions on how to unblock a drain, make your own boot polish, feed an infant, boil toffee and clean a bedroom. The latter protocol alone has 11 steps, including sweeping the walls with a soft broom.
They used to be ubiquitous, these household notebooks. You may have one of your own, spattered with unidentifiable liquids and containing tips and recipes handed down by relatives or cut out of magazines. My mother’s notebook, which she inherited from her own mother, is so well-thumbed the pages have become as soft as chamois leather. It contains a recipe for chocolate cake devised by the Ministry of Food, which has been deployed at every family birthday since the Second World War.
It caught my eye, this story, because the first of my children is about to leave home for university. I want to send him away with a similar dossier, containing all the domestic wisdom he needs for adult life.
But what can I tell him that he couldn’t just Google? Although I have spent much of the past 30 years doing housework, these Sisyphean labours seem to have taught me nothing worth imparting to future generations. Except, perhaps, this: the error code flashing on the washing machine always means there’s a blockage in the outlet drain.
Technology has reduced the burden of housework, but made it even more boring than it was before. No doubt our ancestors always felt maddened by the repetitive, evanescent nature of their domestic chores. Cook the mammoth; eat the mammoth; tidy the cave; mess up the cave. But at least they had to develop real skills and knowledge in the process.
The domestic sciences used to be worthy of the name. In 1788, a cook called Mary Cole turned her own household journal into a bestselling book: The Lady’s Complete Guide. As well as providing such intriguing recipes as Pigeons Transmogrified and Trembling Beef, she gave instructions on how to brew beer, make your own soap, treat rust, kill fleas, reverse baldness, use leeches to predict the weather, and reset a dislocated neck (“pull the head with force, gently twisting it at the same time, [until] the joint is replaced, which may be known from the noise which the bones generally make when going in”.)