Soviet "realist" style painting of good old Vlad Lenin enjoying a meal with the good Russian peasantry. Oh, the dinner conversation that such a meal would have had. Right now, we have to imagine Vlad telling the common rural folks about how the Red Army stealing livestock and shooting the neighbors is going to be good for everyone. Satire aside, the Soviets issued a lot of paintings with rural folks, although this is the only one I've ever seen in which Lenin is portrayed with them. This must be a fairly early painting as Lenin accurately wears a tie and this painting was early enough that the perfunctory well endowed Russian woman isn't in the painting. The irony, among others, depicted in such paintings as the rural population strongly resisted Communism and by and large the Communist never managed to grasp the rural mindset, even when they depicted it in romantic terms.
Wow, what a radical question from 1919:
Do Houses Need Kitchens? A Hundred-Year-Old Opinion
Communal kitchens?
No thank you.
Soviet Realism style painting of a rural gathering, this time when Stalin was in power. Next to good looking blonds, heavily bearded old men are a staple of this sort of painting.
The surprising question came from the March 1919 issue of the Ladies Home Journal, a publication that's still around. Perhaps I'm thinking of the Journal incorrectly, but I'd never have guess to find such revolutionary sentiments there.
Indeed, the author knew she was proposing something radical.
Shall the private kitchen be abolished? It has a revolutionary sound, just as once upon a time there were revolutionary sounds in such propositions as these: Shall private wells be abolished? Shall private kerosene lamps be abolished? Shall we use ready-to-wear garments and factory-canned vegetables?
What the heck?
It gets even more radical sounding from there;
In the kitchen alone the primitive, solitary, unorganized labor of our ancestors continues to be maintained. When one thinks in terms of a whole town of, say, a thousand homes, a thousand stoves going, and the unpaid labor of wives and mothers who are themselves cooks, it is to be seen that the centralized system is exactly as logical in its certainty of economy as the centralized system any other business.
Nearly the archetype of Soviet Realism's depiction of rural seen. Hearty, good looking young rustic Russian women at work in piles of harvested grain. Soviet women in these depictions were uniformly attractive, buxom and often blond. I don't know if working in piles of harvested grain requires you to be barefoot or not, let alone if this was Soviet women's work, but the artist saw it that way.
Those commenting on the post have noted that in an odd way, the radical propositions set forth by the author did in fact come true, but in a capitalist sort of way.
In a small town, it means the establishment of a central kitchen, or in a city the opening of many neighborhood kitchens. It means the preparation there of breakfast, lunch and dinner just as in a hotel or cafe. But the main industry would be the taking of telephone orders and the delivery of cooked food, hot, at the doors. Delivery would be made by auto; and, closed vans, with openings at the sides and filled with small electric ovens, heated by the power which supplies the car, are not such a far cry.
Okay, there's no central kitchen, to be sure, but there are a lot of fast food joints and lots of places that deliver. Is Domino's the Central Kitchen No. 1 envisioned by the author?
Probably not.
She seemed to have something more communal in mind.
Well, I'm glad this didn't come to pass.
But it does give rise to an odd thought or two. In March 1919, Zona Gale was imagining women enslaved in their domestic chores being freed by communal kitchens. And of course she was writing in an era when women doing domestic work was not only uniform, but much more laborious than it is today. That was about to change, although not as quickly as it could have, which we've addressed here before in what we think is one of our better posts on this site:
Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two
A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of the working woman. In reality, most Rosie's put the riveter down and actually did return to their prewar lives. This image pales in comparison to Rockwell's stunning original version.
In the popular imagination, it was World War Two that took women out of the homes, and into careers. Removed from the domestic scene for the first time by the necessity of the workplace in the greatest war in human history, the story goes, women realized that they could do a man's job and refused to return to their domestic roles. It's a nice simple story.
But there is an interesting irony to all of this. As noted, in 1919 most women were looking at preparing at least two, if not three, full meals a day, on wood fired stoves, and before modern refrigeration. As we previously noted;
Folks who cooled food with an ice box, acquired food everyday. If you wanted fresh food, you bought it that day. Many women went to the market for fresh meat everyday. There was little choice but to do that. And ice was delivered periodically also, by a horse drawn wagon. Both of my parents had recollections of the ice wagon.
Cooking the food was a long precess also. Nothing existed that was already prepared. People didn't have frozen food to prepare. Canned food, of course, did already exist. But by and large people had to prepare everything that day, whatever meal was being considered. And part of that was due to the fact that modern stoves were only coming in during this period.
Refrigeration combined with gas and electric stoves changed all of that.
So the irony?
In 1919, when Zale wrote her article, most people cooked the food or their parents, or more accurately most women cooked the same sort of food that they'd learn to cook from their mothers. For native born Americans of native born American parents, that was one thing. For those of recent immigrant stock, that might be another. In Irish American neighborhoods, that was what we'd regard (perhaps oddly, but not really) as "English Food". Boiled beef and boiled potatoes, for example. Italian neighborhoods probably smelled like one gigantic Italian restaurant after 6:00 p.m. So there would not have been a great deal of variety, but the food in many places would have been good (and in others not so much).
Now, by contrast, we have an incredibly variety of foods and food styles, and we're fascinated by food. People long for the food of their ethnic ancestors, even if they imagine it being fancier than it often really was. And they long for food styles and types that seem authentic. Hours and hours of programming is devoted to such topics on the Food Network, where people can learn recipes that ostensibly feed ranch workers, or which reflect Southern cooking, or which are traditional Italian recipes, and the like. People appear eager to really cook, looking back, perhaps to an imagined era they miss and a real one Ms. Zale was seeking to escape.
And then they order out.
Of course, in modern terms, a community mess hall, or whatever it would be, would be a nightmare for whoever was afflicted with serving food. Vegans would be demanding everyone eat nothing but celery, or whatever they eat. People on the latest diets would be demanding full Keto compliance, or something of the kind. Some would rail against deserts, others demand them.
It'd be awful.
Well, I'm keeping my kitchen, Comrade.
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