Dressing Gilded Age Cooks and Kitchen Help

“The dress was the final piece of clothing; it would still have had a high neckline in the 1890s-no low scoop-and long sleeves that had to be pushed up for cooking. Fabric colors were solid and muted: a light blue or gray, perhaps. The final touches were sensible shoes, perhaps boots, hair pushed into a mobcap or cook's cap, and a spotless apron. (Women almost never cut their hair and therefore a cap was necessary. In fact, a short-haired cook applying for a job would be regarded with suspicion. A woman had her hair cut for just two reasons: to remove lice or to sell hair for money.) According to a 1904 House Beautiful article, outfits were often changed mid-afternoon to provide a more formal appearance for the evening.”

In a large private household, the kitchen maid was always the first to rise, cleaning the stove, firing it, scrubbing the floor, making tea, and then bringing a cup to the cook, who might request help in getting dressed. The first article of clothing donned in the morning was a set of split drawers followed by a camisole: cotton in the summer, wool in the winter. The lady of the household, however, wore a one-piece version that was made of silk or extremely fine cotton, so thin that it could pass through her wedding ring, much like a handkerchief. This distinction in the quality of clothing between employer and cook was continued within the household hierar chy: kitchen and housemaids wore even coarser fabrics than the cook. The same inequality was also true between households of different social sta tus: a wealthy family provided better garments for its cook than did one of merely middle-class stature.

Next were the wool stockings, held up by ribbons or, toward the end of the nineteenth century, elasticized garters. The cook would then slip on a petticoat: red flannel in the winter, cotton in the summer. The corset was next, loosely laced and ending above the hips so that the cook would bend easily while working. (Her mistress wore a tightly laced corset to appear as narrow-waisted as possible; a thin cook was never a good sign. Corsets also provided bust support since brassieres were not invented until the 1920s.) The stays were made of a springlike steel, rather than whalebone, another contribution of the Industrial Revolution. One inevitably wonders how one tightened a corset when dressing alone. One clever solution was to install a metal ring on the wall of a servant's bedroom. The wearer would tie the corset strings to the ring and simply walk away to tighten it. A cook was likely to wear a corset made of coarse material and there fore a sleeveless corset cover was often slipped on next; this protected the petticoat or dress that rubbed up against it from chafing and wear. 

The dress was the final piece of clothing; it would still have had a high neckline in the 1890s-no low scoop-and long sleeves that had to be pushed up for cooking. Fabric colors were solid and muted: a light blue or gray, perhaps. The final touches were sensible shoes, perhaps boots, hair pushed into a mobcap or cook's cap, and a spotless apron. (Women almost never cut their hair and therefore a cap was necessary. In fact, a short-haired cook applying for a job would be regarded with suspicion. A woman had her hair cut for just two reasons: to remove lice or to sell hair for money.) According to a 1904 House Beautiful article, outfits were often changed mid-afternoon to provide a more formal appearance for the evening.

As the century progressed, however, social equality became the cry of the working class and so the workmen, maids, and cooks often chose clothing that mimicked that of their employers. Harper's Bazaar noted this trend in 1867, pointing out that crinoline and a flowing train of silk have no place next to a red hot stove or dirty kitchen floor. Instead, they promoted looser, more practical clothing, preferring the flowing blouse of the French workman to the tight-fitting coats and pants often worn by the lower classes in imitation of their masters. This smacked of putting the working class in their place, however, as in this printed admonition: "Let her take the advice of the tasteful, who will tell her that the rude freshness of natu ral appears to the greatest advantage in a plain setting."

The pay was modest-a few hundred dollars per year-although cooks in wealthy households were at the high end of the scale and were usually treated well, since a good cook was hard to come by: poaching within one's social circle was not uncommon. (Cooks had their own menu books collections of personal recipes and the mistress of the household would choose among them to create menus.) Life with a middle-class family, however, was often a nightmare; the mistress of the house often had little experience with managing servants, so they were often poorly treated and paid. To get by, then, the cook had her own bag of tricks. When interviewing for employment, she would ask if she could choose the tradesmen. This was crucial, since she often asked purveyors to mark up their prices, paying her the difference. She would also inquire as to the dispensation of the pan drippings and candle ends, both of which could be sold for ready money. On the other hand, servants, including cooks, had their quarterly pay docked if they broke a plate or burned the pudding. In some cases, the servant owed the household money at payday.

As for washing, undergarments, including petticoats, would be laundered either commercially or in-house, but dresses would only be spot cleaned, since they were usually made of finer, more expensive material and could not withstand constant soap and water. One could purchase "double-motion" hand-cranked washing machines, fashioned from galva nized iron and white cedar tubs. Also for sale were endless designs for racks to dry clothes outside (including one model that attached to a window frame), wash benches, ironing tables, ironing boards, and bosom boards, designed specifically for ironing shirts.

By the early 1900s, however, a private home was often no longer staffed by numerous household servants but reduced to employing just one all purpose maidservant. In the 1904 The Expert Maid-Servant, the mistress of the household is cautioned that cooking would be just one of the maid servant's many duties and therefore one had to inquire whether the potential employee understood plain cooking and could follow a simple recipe. “More elaborate accomplishments can rarely be looked for in a maid-of-all-work.” By 1920, after the devastation of the First World War and the influenza epidemic, and the increased availability of factory and other nondomestic jobs, the era of the well-staffed Victorian household was at an end both here and in England. – From Christopher Kimball’s book, “Fannie’s Last Supper”

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia