The historical repertoire of the kitchen

Logotype developed by Luiza Marino Sales/GEMA

The Illustrated Historical Repertoire of Kitchen Tools and Equipment is the main product of the project “Food processing in the domestic space, São Paulo, 1860-1960”, coordinated by Professor Vânia Carneiro de Carvalho and executed by the GEMA team at the Paulista Museum of the University of São Paulo (Museu do Ipiranga). It is a publication that will bring together texts and illustrations on more than 150 kitchen objects, with the aim of providing information to other museum collections and to historical research in general.

In addition to filling the gaps in the museum’s collections, with information on existing objects and on the need for others to be acquired, the research also supports the curatorship of the room “Work and Happiness” in Casas e Coisas (Houses and Things), one of the exhibitions of the Museu do Ipiranga, that reopened in September 2022.

History, hypotheses and questions

Artifacts linked to the ritual of eating and cooking began to attract the interest of researchers at the Paulista Museum (Museu do Ipiranga) in the 1990s, within a movement to renew its collections. The intention was to align the collection with issues raised within the scope of academic research, by acquiring objects related to the daily experience of different social classes – and not just the privileged ones, as used to happen until then.

Since 2010, the museum’s curatorship has intensified the acquisition of kitchen objects from different periods of the 20th century, which were added to pre-existing collections accumulated from the 1990s. An interesting fact emerged from the observation of these collections: among occasional electrical objects produced by the industry, there was a significant predominance of artifacts associated with artisanal or mechanical food preparation.

This observation was important because it opposed the common and widespread that, in São Paulo, during the 20th century, the culinary and domestic transformations merely followed the industrial and technological development of the city. Therefore, domestic kitchens and everyday food simply abandoned any traditional character, replacing it with electrical equipment and processed food products.

Based on speeches produced by advertisements from the food and home appliance industry, that were guided by an evolutionary perspective of technological innovations, this idea ends up hiding the disputes, tensions and resistances inherent to the historical dynamics of society.

From the museum’s collection of culinary artifacts, it was possible to verify that, despite the striking and undeniable transformations that took place in the domestic space throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the changes were neither immediate nor linear. As João Luiz Máximo da Silva had already observed in his book Cozinha Modelo (2008), gas stoves widely publicized in the first decades of the 20th century did not suddenly replace the wood burning stoves.

Even in wealthy homes, with access to gas pipes, modern equipment was indeed purchased, but often they were installed in the dining room, to be displayed to the public as a sign of family prestige or to heat food. Back in the kitchen, meals were still being prepared on old wood burning stoves.

The coexistence of manual, mechanical and electrical objects and, consequently, of traditional and “modern” practices raised several questions, which we seek to answer with our researches. Why, after all, did manual and mechanical artifacts so significantly remain in the city’s domestic daily life? What factors, in addition to socioeconomic inequalities, may have contributed to a resistance to certain objects?

One of these factors – and this is our main hypothesis – is related to the massive presence of domestic workers in residences of different social classes, for a long period, both in São Paulo and in Brazil as a whole. Remnants of slavery, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, many black and poor people, especially women, had no other opportunities but the ones associated with cooking and domestic work in general.

Undervalued and underpaid (often, until today), maids supplied, on the one hand, the need for families to invest in the purchase of equipment and products sold as facilitators of domestic work. On the other hand, these women were usually considered as uneducated, without sufficient knowledge or care to use electrical or more specialized artifacts. The recurrence to the service of maids was structured in a slavery moral that, as Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva has already pointed out in several articles, tacitly imposed the rule that the daily access of maids to household appliances and expensive or non-intuitive handling objects should be avoided or expressly prohibited.

A different situation seems to have taken place in other countries, especially in the United States. From the end of the 19th century and after the two world wars, North American industries employed a considerable number of women previously engaged in domestic work. Alone, middle and lower-class housewives were increasingly encouraged to consume electrical equipment and processed products, called by the industry as “shortcuts” that would reduce work and the time spent on it.

Although it is known, through works such as More Work for Mother (1983), by Ruth Cowan, and Something From the Oven (2004), by Laura Shapiro, that domestic work has not exactly been reduced, nor has industrialized equipment and products been accepted immediately, it is undeniable that the insertion of these objects and foods in the American daily life took place in a more intense way than in the Brazilian or São Paulo context.

As can be seen, Brazilian social, racial and gender problems, although similar in certain aspects to those of other countries, merged with the hypotheses and questions that emerged from the observation of the culinary objects in the collections at the Paulista Museum.

Once again mentioning the case of the United States, the notorious adherence to the products and equipment brought by the industry in that country seems to have contributed to a series of publications concerned with cataloging and historicizing objects related to domestic work: The Housewares Story: A History of the American Houseware Industry (1973), America at Home: a Celebration of Twentieth-Century Housewares (1996), From Hearth to Cookstove: An American Domestic History of Gadgets and Utensils Made or Used in America from 1700 to 1930 (1978), 300 Years of Kitchen Collectibles (1984), Kitchen Utensils: Names, Origins, and Definitions Through the Ages (2000), Encyclopedia of Kitchen History (2004), among others (read more in our bibliography).

In Brazil, as far as we could find, there are still no publications of this type, specifically dedicated to telling the history of kitchens and their objects – except, perhaps, the section of domestic and culinary objects inserted in the large thesaurus dedicated to museums, organized by Helena Dodd Ferrez in 1987 and updated in 2016. To fill this gap, the Illustrated Historical Repertoire of Kitchen Tools and Equipment is a research instrument that aims to contribute to museum collections and also to historical research in general, interested in the relationships between domestic materialities and society.

Theoretical-methodological bases

As well as textual sources, material sources – in our case, objects from the collections of the Paulista Museum (Museu do Ipiranga) – can contribute to the understanding of historical processes. Based on studies by authors such as the anthropologists Daniel Miller, Bruno Latour, Nicole Boivin, Jean-Pierre Warnier and the Brazilian historian Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses, we consider that objects are not reflections or mere products of the society that created and used them, but active and important agents in the construction of the society itself. By overcoming the duality between objects and subjects, the focus of analysis falls on the relations, interactions and mutual constitution between them.

However, as they undergo an inevitable decontextualization when they are integrated into museum collections, objects need to be understood in their old contexts so that they can become documents. This process of “recontextualization”, so to speak, structures the research for the Repertory and is based on the concept of “biography of objects”, proposed by Igor Kopytoff (1986) and revised by Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses (1998). For this author, artifacts undergo morphological, functional and symbolic transformations intimately linked to their trajectories in the social world. Therefore, they must be analyzed “in situation”, that is, they must be reinserted in their entangled uses, appropriations and destructions so that their actions can be known and discussed.

To make this biographical analysis possible, we start from the materiality of the objects, but we are not restricted to it. A multiple set of sources, especially textual ones, was mobilized to make it possible to define and discuss the biographies of the artifacts. Mentions of culinary objects in newspapers and magazines, advertisements, cookbooks, domestic manuals, inventories, among other sources, have been sought and analyzed with some questions in mind: when did a particular object circulate? Was it handcrafted or produced by the industry? What functions did it have in cooking processes? How was it handled or triggered? Who used it? With what materials was it produced? What was it called and how and why has its name changed over time?

Each object found in the research is inserted into a database, with all possible information about its uses at the time of production and circulation of the historical document in question. With more than 12 thousand data already, this database provides reports that, from the compilation of information about each of the selected objects, allow us to trace biographies. The gathering of these objects, biographed and illustrated, will shape the Repertory.


Read more

  • The “Work and Happiness” room, about the kitchen and its objects, in the Casas e Coisas exhibition at the Paulista Museum (Museu do Ipiranga)
  • More information about the database and sources of our research
  • Bibliography of the project “Food processing in the domestic space, São Paulo, 1860-1960”