Ladies in snow-white collars: How the Dutch did the household in the days of Rembrandt

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Dutch in the paintings of Rembrandt, Vermeer and their contemporaries amaze with their whitest cuffs, collars, caps and aprons. Especially when you understand that bleaching and starching at that time was the hardest work and that like this, in the cleanest clothes, the Dutch went about every day. How did women organize their lives to cope with everything?

Cleanliness is most important

Seventeenth-century Dutch women were, at first glance, obsessed with cleanliness. In the hostess's linen closet, if she was not completely poor, there were real treasures: cotton and linen sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins, caps, shirts, underpants and, of course, endless collars and cuffs. The fabric brought from overseas was adjacent to the carefully preserved linen of a century ago, made from the fabric of the neighboring Dutch province.

All this stuff was regularly, conscientiously and very carefully washed, boiled, bleached, starchy and ironed - after use, of course. It was women who did this, of course. A speck even on the apron, in which they cleaned and cooked, was a reason to change it. In order to notice any disorder in clothes in time, the house was hung with mirrors, fortunately, in Holland of the seventeenth century, many could afford them in large quantities.

Everything in the house was constantly wiped from dust, polished and scraped. There were no ash in the fireplaces: they were specially arranged so that the ash itself would fall into the pallet. However, most of the fireplaces were heated with peat, folded in special pots. The kitchens were like operating rooms, the living rooms were like museum rooms. The maids were charged with cleaning not only the floors and the porch, but also the sidewalk with the pavement in front of the house.

Yes, unlike most European cities of the seventeenth century, in Holland there were brick and cobblestone pavements and sidewalks, with well-arranged storm sewers: the pavement was slightly convex, and everything unnecessary flowed down to the edges where the drains were arranged. This made it possible for women to return from a walk with a clean hem - a privilege that English and French women were deprived of. True, the Dutch women walked very rarely and only accompanied by their families. Often only the maids went out on the street to shop. But they also demanded a clean hem from the servant.

Dirty and showcases

However, foreigners who had to live in Dutch cities quickly changed their perception of the Dutch as a nation of cleanliness. For starters, the Dutch disliked bathing more than anything else. They rarely washed in the morning, did not wash their hands after using the toilet, only in honor of big events they washed completely. Basically, the Dutch washed their feet before Sunday, although they washed their face and neck every day (which, of course, gave some cleanliness to their hands).

The only thing that the Dutch could please with was the frequent change of linen. In part, it also performed the function of ablution: linen and cotton absorbed sweat and grease and mechanically erased dead skin scales. So the bourgeois smelled pretty bearable. But the poorer people from the lack of the habit of washing and the lack of linen literally smelled.

The Dutch kitchens were amazingly equipped. In many, one could find a sink with a faucet, similar to those used in the twentieth century - water was supplied by a pump from a cistern. Sometimes a tank of water was cunningly attached to a fireplace or a Dutch stove, which was slowly heating up all day. This made it easier to wash the dishes.

At the same time, the kitchen was used extremely rarely, entering it only if it was impossible to prepare lunch or clean it up without looking into the kitchen. A French eyewitness wrote: “They would rather starve to death in the midst of their sparkling cauldrons and appliances than to cook a dish that could disturb this beauty even a little. I was proudly shown the cleanliness of the kitchen, as cold two hours before lunch as it would be two hours later."

In the same way, no one in their minds used the living room and the front porch, so that something, God forbid, would not be spoiled, not stained, mutilated and glazed. They entered the living room only with the guests. Even the richest housewife was sitting with the maids in the back room the other day, where they usually did handicrafts and cooking (so as not to dirty the kitchen). The front door was only open for weddings and funerals.

The worst thing foreigners who ever visited Dutch homes found was how long the chamber pots stood before the maid finally emptied them. The bedrooms were soaked in their scent, and the Dutch were not embarrassed by anything.

A good housewife has no time to cook

Since most of the day, the hostess, along with the maids, was engaged in bringing up amazing cleanliness, she had no time to do many other things. For example, cooking. Moreover, gluttony is a sin, and this was known to all Protestants.

It was precisely the fact that there was no need to prepare breakfast and the Dutch morning toilet consisted mainly of relieving themselves and getting dressed quickly that allowed the maids to get up later than the owners. The first to wake up was the head of the family. He hurried to open the door and windows, to say hello to the neighbors, and only then loudly called the maid. The whole family woke up to his cry.

The maid began the day by dressing and walking down the street. She had to prepare breakfast, that is, wait in turn for the baker and the milkman. Wheat bread in Holland was very expensive, so bakers mostly offered bread made from oats, rye, barley and even beans (Dutch bread terrified foreigners). Instead of bread for breakfast, you could have taken oatmeal cookies. All this was served with cheese and, sometimes, also with butter - although more often the butter was used for cooking.

I must say that the Dutch made excellent cheese and butter. But if they ate the cheese themselves, and not only sold it, then all the butter was exported and instead of the native one of very high quality the Dutch ate imported, cheaper and worse, for example, Irish. The morning was also a time when in some houses the taboo on the kitchen was violated: because of the very cheap eggs and milk, many baked pancakes. In that case, the breakfast was even hot!

As for lunch, the most popular dish was soup with a lot of fat and spices. It was cooked very often only on Sunday - after all, on Sunday you need to eat all the best - but for a week ahead. On other days, they were warmed up or served on the table somehow. Bread at lunch and dinner was also often served stale.

Is it any wonder if the hostesses cooked so rarely that various types of preservation were extremely popular in Holland: salted fish, plums in vinegar (by the way, they were added to soups), smoked meat, fruits of long storage and, of course, cheese, a lot of cheese. In any incomprehensible situation, the Dutch ate cheese, especially since they could amuse themselves with different varieties - with different textures and tastes.

Garden, vegetable garden, dishes

However, the hostess was not limited to washing and cleaning. On the tiny backyard, a garden was often set up. The Dutch women had simple ideas about beauty: flowers were planted according to the color of the petals, in squares. They did not make patterns from flowers and did not understand; it was the order that pleased the eyes of the Dutch woman. Flowers had one more function: in the summer they interrupted or softened the smell from the canals, which were not cleaned so often and into which the sewage was poured.

It was considered a good idea to break a bed of melons or greens next to the flowers to feast on in the summer for lunch. If the size of the yard allowed, they planted a rosehip or elderberry. Elderberry was especially loved - it was possible to make a tincture on it.

Housewives and maids also monitored the condition of the dishes. Most of the dishes in the house were made of pewter. It was beautifully designed, it was nice to eat from it, but it was extremely fragile and broke all the time. It was necessary to wait for the tin collectors and sell them scrap in order to compensate for the damage and expenses for the purchase of new dishes.

Festive sets - which were also delivered on weekdays, for guests - were ordered directly from China. This had its own difficulties. It was required to attach a detailed description of the patterns to the order, otherwise you risked getting cups with dragons and other Chinese lewdness. Popular were, judging by the descriptions, floral motifs, as well as angels. True, ordering the angels was risky, they could turn out to be bright oriental appearance, even in pagan costumes.

There was a case when the hostess, wanting to update the service, sent a cup to a factory in China, which was not a pity: with a chip. She did receive items with a perfect copy of the desired pattern, but … they were all with triangular notches. The Chinese, too, were afraid of mistakes and carefully reproduced the sample. The richest manufacturers, in order to avoid embarrassment, invited Dutch artists to work, but not every housewife in the Netherlands could use the services of these factories.

Household difficulties

Even minus hygiene and cooking, everyday life was not easy. First, the Dutch houses were narrow and multi-storey (up to seven storeys!). All these floors had to run: now to the linen closet (which was strictly in the master's bedroom), then to the coal closet (which was often placed under the roof, next to the maids' closets), then to the kitchen.

The famous Dutch ovens were not common in all cities. Often there were fireplaces in the houses - the same ones in which they put pots of peat. They heated the house very poorly, and women everywhere carried special heating pads with them - iron boxes, inside of which, again, peat smoldered. They put their feet on these boxes. The owners at the manufactories gave them out to the female workers - they were considered an obligatory part of the working conditions.

The maids also had a difficult time because they were very often pregnant. Although foreigners joked that the Dutch were not fond of carnal love, as it distracted from business, it was impossible to go to work as a servant and keep virginity. Moreover, as it was not customary to ask why the maid was pregnant, it was not customary to find out where the child had gone. It was tacitly believed that he was given to a wet nurse, but very often illegitimate children ended up in the canal: there would not be enough money to feed his mother. True, throwing the baby into the canal was not as easy as it seems - at night, for example, it was forbidden to walk around the city, since many accidents occurred due to lack of lighting. Well, the city authorities didn't like the idea of corpses in the canal either.

Due to the fact that the houses were narrow on the side of the facade and the long side ran perpendicular to the street (and parallel to the very close walls of neighboring houses), most of the rooms were very poorly lit. Candles were expensive, oil lamps gave little light, and in the rooms where the hostess and the maids were engaged in needlework, they at the same time planted their eyesight.

However, it was not easy for women everywhere. What professions did women choose about 150 years ago, and what were they most often sick with?.