st-just:

sigmaleph:

yorickish-deactivated20220112:

what was the deal where in the 19th and early 20th century people’s landlords would provide food for them? like I’ve seen this in Kafka right now and this history of the Russian cosmists and I think some history/memoirs of early 20th century Americans. obviously goes hand-in-hand with men not being expected to cook, to some extent. wish we could have that again I want my apartment building to have like a mess hall

also a thing with mrs. hudson in sherlock holmes

I think a part of it was also just apartments for (poor/working class) single men often not including a kitchen?

Yeah, single men did not really keep and prepare food for themselves past like, eggs and bacon. In the urban wage economy they’d eat at boarding houses, saloons, Elks and Moose halls, country clubs and other gentlemen’s associations. As a farmhand you’d stock from the farm’s supply, not go to the supermarket individually. As a single man you might live in barracks and eat in a mess hall for an isolated resource extraction job like lumberjacking or mining, if married your wife might spend scrip at the company store.

At the turn of the 20th century in post-serfdom Russia or, say, cash-poor Dixie, there were still some form of those dynamics at play along landlord-tenant lines.