The fireplace, a centre for life at home and as a classroom for transmitting rural culture

The «fireplace is the appropriate part of the kitchen floor for lighting fires and cooking», as defined by the Royal Academy of Spain. Indeed, the fire, which was kept alight all day, allowed people to cook food while heating this room of the house where family life took place. Hearths disappeared from the kitchens of Spanish villages from the seventies of the last century with the arrival of central heating and electrical goods, and this in turn led to new ways of home life.

Besides the “lumbre”, as the fire was referred to colloquially, there were always some nooks for storing pots and pans and some trivets on the embers for the frying pans.

On the inside of the chimney there hung a pot where the “pastura” or food for the pigs boiled all day. It consisted of peelings (potato peelings), chopped up greens or hard bread, an example of a domestic economy based on self consumption and making use of all the products the land offered.

Either side of the fireplace were the shelves for crockery, where housewives would put some glasses (chipped after being handed down from one generation to another) as well as the kitchenware typical of the time (cups, lunch boxes, oil lamps and vials among others). A large shelf called a chanza runs from side to side above the fireplace and displayed the shiny, porcelain pots, although most of them have a bit of tin covering cracks.

The families who sat round the fireplace in the years before the mass migrations in 1970s Spain were large ones and included grandparents and single uncles. This was the only way to survive in an impoverished society where welfare benefits were yet to appear.

Household activity began at the crack of dawn, when the women of the house lit the fire to prepare breakfast and lunch for the men, who went to work the fields or tend the livestock. The támaras (dry sticks of holm oak or kermes oak) were laid first and, on top of them, the chapodos (branches and logs of the same wood). A single blast of air from the bellows was usually enough to turn the embers left over from the night before into flames.

At midday, the sound of pounding mortars in all the kitchens in the neighbourhood heralded lunchtime, usually chick peas with some bones from the slaughter of a pig. It was also common to hear a cat meowing because it had been caught taking a morsel from the pan.

But if the kitchen had been the centre of family hustle and bustle by day, in the evening it became a haven of peace, where relatives and even neighbours came to chat and relax by the fire. The men talked about the weather or the seeding while constantly stoking the fire. For their part, the women –in a separate group- sewed and knitted by the light of a light-bulb, closely watched by the younger women while the children did their homework on the kitchen table.

The first radios to reach these villages in the late 1950s were also listened to by the fireside. The men paid special attention to the parte (news) at ten o´clock, and those with a leftist ideology to the Spanish Communist Party´s transmissions from Moscow, the so-called Pyrenees Radio, although we should point out that any attempt to listen to this station were almost always frustrated by the constant interference and the low volume which the clandestine nature of the activity imposed at the time. However, what brought tears to the eyes of the women and young girls was the advice given by Doña Elena Francisa on Radio Andorra to women gone astray to bring them back to the “moral fold and good habits” in keeping with the morals of Franco´s Spain.

Time seemed to stand still during those long nightly vigils of chats, sewing, news and advice. Nevertheless, important events also took place which our forebears were probably unaware of, such as the oral transmission of rural culture to the youth, as well as their social indoctrination; and the humble kitchen was the classroom where this teaching, with its bright but also dark side, took place. The purpose of this article is precisely this: to preserve and disseminate the value of this room which focused domestic life and the transmission of the culture and traditions of our villages.

María Pilar Villalba Cortijo, who graduated in Geography and History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), specialising in Modern History, is curator at the Museo del Pastor y del Labrador in Masegoso de Tajuña (Guadalajara). She founded the institution, created in 1999 to preserve and disseminate rural culture.