The communal kitchens that fed seven villages

“The bread is out,” the cook says, and everything else in the morning moves to her clock.

The brick ovens have been going since before daylight, fed with wood cut the previous winter and stacked against the back wall of the kitchen house. The air is smoke and steam and the sour-sweet turn of rising dough. On the counter the loaves cool in rows, rye and wheat, dark as the garden soil out back. A helper carries a tureen across the passage into the dining hall, where the benches stand empty and the flat gray light of an Iowa morning comes through the windows. Somewhere in the village a bell begins. It will ring twice more, and by the third ring every bench will be full.

These were the communal kitchens of the Amana Colonies, seven villages in the Iowa River valley that for seventy-seven years ate as one body.

The people who built them called themselves the Community of True Inspiration. They were Germans from the Rhineland, religious dissenters hounded across Europe, and in the 1840s they crossed the Atlantic and bought land near Buffalo, New York. In 1855 they came west to Iowa and laid out six villages of their own — Amana, East Amana, High Amana, Middle Amana, West Amana, South Amana — and six years later they bought the town of Homestead for its railroad depot, making seven. Everything was held in common: the land, the horses, the mills, the workshops, the calico on the looms, and the food that came out of the kitchen houses. The elders assigned every member a place in the common work, and they assigned some of the women the most public job in the society — feeding it.

A kitchen in every district

Each village had several kitchen houses, and each one belonged to a district of families who ate there and nowhere else, day in and day out. A head cook ran the kitchen with a crew of helpers, and the elders chose her from among the women whose tables were known to be good. There was no pay, because nobody had pay; there was only reputation, and a good cook's reputation traveled all seven villages. She planned the meals from what the storehouses held: pork from the smokehouse, sausage links hung in the attic, sauerkraut in cellar crocks, root vegetables in the bins, apples in the fruit room, and beans and cucumbers, beets and horseradish, from the garden behind the kitchen. The colonies brewed their own beer and made wine from their own grapes, and the cellar of every kitchen house had both for the tables.

Meals were eaten in the adjoining dining room at long tables, men on one side, women and children on the other. Soup came first, heavy with barley or dumplings and pork. Then the platters: roast beef or pork, sausage, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut laced with caraway, pickled beets, cucumbers in brine. Bread at every meal, cut thick. Coffee with cream, and sugar. Nobody ate alone.

The bell did the arranging. It called the village to work at first light and called it back for the noon and evening meals, and everything stopped when it rang. The man in the field leaned his hoe. The smith set down his hammer. The miller closed the water gate. They came in their work clothes, sat in the same seats as the day before, and helped themselves from the bowls that went around. In harvesttime the tables ran long past dark, and the helpers kept the soup kettle on for the late crews. In winter the kitchen house was the warmest room in its corner of the village.

The kitchen house was the nearest thing the colonies had to a public square. Between meals the long tables served for committee meetings and visiting, and the kitchen door was the door a neighbor knocked on.

The Great Change

In 1932 the members voted to end the common life. The Depression had strained the colonies' finances, and the young wanted wages of their own and stoves of their own. The Great Change, they called it. The land, the mills, and the shops were reorganized into a corporation, the Amana Society, with the members as shareholders. The communal system closed its books.

The kitchen houses closed with it. Women who had taken their meals from the common pot for all their lives set up stoves in their own homes, many for the first time. The dining halls emptied. Some kitchen houses were torn down; others became storerooms and workshops; a few kept their long tables.

Those tables came back in another form. As the colonies turned to the traveler's trade, some of the old dining halls reopened as restaurants and put the old style on the menu — family style, it is called, which is what the neighbors said when it was the only style there was. The platters still go around the same way, and the sausage, the sauerkraut, and the heavy dark bread come from the same kind of brick ovens.

Today the colonies are a National Historic Landmark, and the surviving kitchen houses stand among the old workshops and mills that visitors walk between. The ovens are cold, and no bell calls the village to table. But the rooms keep their scale — the iron range built big, the doors worn smooth at the threshold, the long tables still set as if the next ring of the bell might fill them.