AN EDUCATION: 1946, A SCHOOL FOR HOUSEWIVES
Part I: Hunger
My grandmother, Nel van der Kaaden
In the Netherlands, the winter of 1944-1945 is known as the Hunger Winter. By late September 1944, out of retaliation for the allied forces liberating parts of the country, the German occupier had cut off food supplies to the western provinces, as well as the supply of fuel for heating and travel. The extreme cold that year in combination with the lack of food caused for more than 20.000 deaths, until the distribution of produce slowly restarted in May 1945 — another 200.000 would suffer from the effects of the famine for years to come. My grandmother, Nel van der Kaaden, 87, was a thirteen-year-old girl living in Rotterdam at the time. She and her family ate whatever they could get their hands on: sugar beets were boiled and pancakes were made out of flower bulbs. Hungry people would cycle far to distant farm lands in hope of giving away their valuable belongings in exchange for only a few potatoes, to farmers hoping to benefit from the situation. These trips were dangerous, too: At any given moment could a German show up and demand you give up your bike, as the steel was much needed for the weapon industry. At some point during this winter, Nel got so sick she almost died. As doctors would later say, the only reason she survived was a mysterious pot of honey a neighbour had kept hidden somewhere. Even today, just thinking about honey makes her shiver.
In late 1946, just a year after the war had ended, Nel embarked on a new adventure. Since the schools had reopened after the war, she had gone back and finished her secondary school degree. Being only fifteen years old at the time, she wasn’t really sure what to do with herself. And how could she? What kind of hopes and dreams were available for a girl traumatised by war, living in a city so heavily bombed it was easy to lose your way? She was young and times were weird. Her father spoke to her teacher. He said: You’re not really thinking about letting this kid loose in society, are you? Nel heard the words she feared most: housework school.
The kitchen of the Rotterdamse Huishoudschool’s new building in the nineteen-twenties. (Via Stadsarchief Rotterdam)
De Rotterdamse Huishoudschool was founded in 1917 with the aim of teaching girls how to cook, sew, wash, make tables and beds, take care of the sick, do household administration and so on, in short: how to be a housewife. There were special courses for orphans and nannies, but particularly the ‘complete lady education’ and ‘marriage education’ were popular options. New on the curriculum in 1946 was a ‘shaping’ course, aimed towards girls that had just gotten out of school and were, well, too young to be let loose in society. As backwards as all this may sound, early feminists were excited about housework schools. They meant an upgrade, however small, from girls getting no education at all. In fact, they did give many women some level of independence: A sewing job on the side, cleaning in other households or cooking for wealthier families, all for some extra money. The word ‘housework’ also stretched further than work around the house: One spoke of hospitals, nurseries and schools as ‘households’. In effect, however, going to a housework school was generally a way to keep girls that weren’t granted any other education busy, and usually did lead to a domestic life. The emergence of this type of school in the late nineteenth century meant that what mothers had been teaching their daughters at home for hundreds of years, was now being professionalised and quantified. Girls were being graded for their cooking, sewing and washing. They were building up a CV potentially useful on the job market, but probably more so in selling themselves as good housewife material.
Part II: A dream
Nel resisted. She was not going to be a housewife. What she couldn’t know was that in fact, it would be almost ten years until she’d meet my grandfather at a fencing match. For now, she was a teenage girl that had never shown any interest in housework; the idea of going to a school that was ironically referred to as the ‘spinach academy’ filled her with dread. On the other hand, Nel did love food — as would anyone that had just gone through the peril of having virtually none for months on end. She had grown up in a middle class household with loving parents and a mother that took special pride in her cooking. What she cooked wasn’t anything wild or eccentric, but she was precise and took great care in feeding her family. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The decision had been made. At the beginning of the school year 1946, Nel began to attend the Rotterdamse Huishoudschool. By that time, the school had moved into a huge building in the chic Graaf Florisstraat, not too far away from where Nel lived. She was lucky in that respect. A girl she befriended, whose parents lived a mere 20 kilometers away, had to live on the school campus, because there was essentially no infrastructure at this time. In the first year, the girls learned the essentials, cleaning, sewing, some basic cooking. It was only the cooking that could spark some interest in Nel, so it was obvious that it would become her focus in later years of the curriculum. It was then when it became more interesting, too: Added to the basic cooking lessons — ranging from traditional dishes such as split pea soup and ‘stamppot’, potatoes, vegetables and meat mashed together — were the classes in fine cuisine. They meant a gateway into a bigger, more exciting world: the chic, French banquet-style dishes a sharp contrast to the grim reality of the post-war city. The girls were presented with their textbook, their bible: the Neerlands Kookboek der Rotterdamse Huishoudschool, edition 1946. It is a manifesto of hope for a better future. The authors in the preface gladly admit that, sure, we don’t know how on earth you’re supposed to get cream or butter, but we are going to use them in each recipe. These girls were trained to be cooks for a time of abundance in a time of shortage. And, sure enough, those days of plenty would follow, some ten, fifteen years later.
“A lifelong of feeding family and friends is no less of a qualification than any job in a professional kitchen.”
Nel’s copy of Neerlands Kookboek
Like many, many grandmothers across the country, Nel still holds onto her cookbook dearly. Not only is it a souvenir of what turned out to be a fun and fulfilling time in her life, it also holds up as a great cookery book, a real workhorse. Every Christmas until a few years ago, the entire family would eagerly await the moment Nel would bring out her famous Orange Bavarois. (Click here for the recipe) It’s safe to say that this recipe from page 256 of the book has been in her repertoire for ages — the page not only yellow and brittle, but also splattered and stained. But it’s hard to say exactly when making it first became a possibility again, as it relies heavily on cream and imported ingredients, such as oranges. It takes a little patience to make, but it’s a real treat. In case you’re wondering: Yes, Nel did end up as a housewife for a part of her life. But that was much later. First, she would become a great cook, under the guiding eye of Ms Toors, her teacher and one of the authors of the cookbook. She would go on an internship at a hotel in Nijmegen, for which she moved cross country and got her first taste of independence and experience in the work field. She worked at the National School for Midwives and later steered away from jobs in housework-related fields to become a dentist assistant. This also went on after she had met my grandfather at said fencing match in the park, and even after they married. It wasn’t until Nel became a mother in 1960 that she started to adjust to a role that society had seemingly planned for her all along, until re-entering the job market much later. At least one aspect of being a housewife never felt like a tiresome chore to her. Long after her time at the huishoudschool had ended — a time she didn’t want to end, by the way —, she would keep on teaching herself new cooking techniques and trying new recipes. Maybe she would have made a great chef in a professional kitchen. Her food — though I might be biased — is better than what’s served in many restaurants. On the other hand, there is no use in comparing home cooking to restaurant food, and a lifelong of feeding family and friends at the level my grandma has is no less of a qualification than any job in a professional kitchen.
Part III: The future
Looking back at her time at the huishoudschool, Nel says she had a lot of fun. She doesn’t really like to talk about it, though. Having to pick her brain about details from over seventy years ago doesn’t interest her much. And I can’t blame her — I’m glad she still has her book, though. When I was in my teens, I would sometimes call my grandmother and request for her to teach me how to make a certain recipe that I had grown up loving. I would go over right after school and we would start cooking, usually eating late at night, because these dishes are not about saving time. I can’t help but think how I was just about the same age she was when she was taught how to make them. About how I was a boy wanting to learn something my grandma had more or less been forced to. How just about everything had changed since she was young. Except the food. The food was still just as good.
Text: Yannic Moeken
