Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (17 page)

There the similarity ended. Western baking and roasting were entirely separate activities with separate equipment, methods, and recipes. By the eighteenth century, baking involved a paraphernalia of wooden kneading troughs, pastry jaggers, various hoops and traps for tarts and pies, peels, patty pans, wafer irons, and earthenware dishes. The baker had no need of jacks and spits, gridirons, and fire dogs. There is an engraving of the royal kitchen at St. James’s Palace during the reign of George III, around the time of American independence. It depicts three different types of fire cookery. There is an open grate for roasting, a closed oven for baking, and a raised brick hearth for making stews and sauces. Each operation is entirely distinct.

No wonder Rumford’s closed range met with such ridicule and derision when it was first introduced. It threatened to bring together two technologies—baking and roasting—that almost everyone in Britain, if not the Western world, deemed to be incompatible. It was as if he had said you could use a deep-fat fryer for steaming or a toaster to boil eggs.

 

T
here were also doubts from many quarters over whether the enclosed heat of an oven could ever replace the homely pleasures of
warming yourself by an open fire. Could a stove whose flames were hidden from view ever be a
focus
in the way that a hearth was? A fire speaks to us in ways that are not always rational. For all the hazards and smoke of a roasting fire, those flames signified home. It was said that when stoves were first introduced in the United States in the 1830s, they inspired feelings of hatred: stoves might be an acceptable way to heat a public place such as a barroom or courthouse, but not a home.

In time, most people got over their repugnance. The “model cookstove” became one of the great consumer status symbols of the Industrial Age, and homes developed a new focus. The typical Victorian cookstove was a cast-iron “monster” that combined a hot-water tank for boiling and hot plates to set pots and pans on with a coal-fired oven behind iron doors, the whole thing connected with “complicated arrangements of flues, their temperature controlled by a register and dampers.” By the mid-nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States, the closed range or “kitchener” had become the single essential kitchen fitting in middle-class kitchens. Cooks learned that instead of building a kitchen around a fire, it could be built around an appliance, just as today’s affluent kitchens are structured around brightly colored KitchenAids and gleaming Viking ranges.

At the Great Exhibition in 1851, when Britain showed off its industrial riches to the world, many kitcheners were on display. First prize went to the Improved Leamington Kitchener, an elaborate construction, which Mrs. Beeton admired. The Leamington explicitly offered to combine the twin functions of roasting and baking with a single fire. Inside was a wrought-iron roaster with a dripping pan, but this could be converted to the unventilated heat of an oven by closing the valves at the back. The Leamington could also supply
gallons of boiling water. A range was never just designed to cook food; it was needed to provide hot water for the whole household, to heat up irons and warm hands.

“Leamington” was one of the first pieces of equipment to become a household name in Britain and was soon being used as shorthand for closed ranges in general. But there were plenty of competing models, many of them with patents, glamorous names (“The Coastal Grand Pacific,” “The Plantress”), and fancy squiggles and curlicues on the front. These were cooking appliances as fashion statements.

The sudden popularity of the closed range went beyond style. It was driven by the materials of the Industrial Revolution, chiefly coal and iron. There was a boom in cookstoves, not because people had read Rumford and turned against open-hearth cookery but because the market was suddenly flooded with cheap cast iron. The patent kitchen range was an ironmonger’s dream: the chance to offload a great lump of iron, with added iron accessories. The rapidity with which new versions came out was an added bonus: after a couple of years, a stove might become outmoded and get traded in for a more up-to-date model, meaning more profits.

Cast-iron production had improved in the mid-eighteenth century with the discovery of a new method of production, using coal instead of charcoal. John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson (1728–1808) pioneered the new method and produced the steam engine cylinders that hastened production even further. A generation later, cast iron was everywhere: Victorians shut themselves behind cast-iron gates, rode over cast-iron bridges, sat around cast-iron fireplaces, erected cast-iron buildings, and cooked in cast-iron kitcheners. The housekeepers and their mistresses who pored over the Smith and Wellstood catalog, wondering which model of stove to buy, may have believed that they were satisfying nothing but their own whim. But whichever fancy new design they chose, they were serving the profits of the iron industry and supporting the coal industry as well, as these new modern kitcheners were almost all fired with coal rather than wood or turf or peat.

Coal was by no means new to the British kitchen. The first coal revolution had taken place in the sixteenth century, when a shortage of wood transformed kitchens. The Elizabethan Age saw a great expansion of industry. Iron, glass, and lead manufacturing were all greedy consumers of timber. Timber was also needed for shipbuilding in the war against the Spanish, leaving far less for English hearths at home. The result was that many kitchens, particularly in towns, reluctantly converted to “seacoal,” so named because it was transported by sea.

The move from wood to coal brought with it other changes. The medieval wood fire was really an indoor bonfire, with nothing but some andirons (or brand-irons) to stop the burning logs from rolling forward onto the floor. It was a hazardous form of cooking. In the seventh century, the Saxon archbishop Theodore pronounced that “if a woman place her infant by the hearth, and the man put water in the cauldron, and it boil over and the child be scalded to death, the woman must do penance for her negligence but the man is acquitted of blame.” Aside from the injustice of this, it speaks of a world in which children of two or three were at high risk of toddling into hot fires and cauldrons. Women were at risk, too, because of their long, trailing dresses. Medieval coroners’ reports listing accidental deaths indicate that women were more likely to die accidentally in the home than anywhere else. Little girls died at open hearths playing with pots and pans, copying their mothers.

The combination of wood-timbered houses and open hearths made kitchen fires a common occurrence. The most famous kitchen fire in British history was the blaze starting in the small hours of September 2, 1666, at the bakery of Thomas Farriner, Pudding Lane, which set off the Great Fire of London. When the city was rebuilt in brick, the new houses had coal-burning grates.

One of the effects of a switch to coal was to enclose the fire—at least a little. Coal needs a container, in the form of a metal grate, called a “chamber grate” or “cole baskett.” The switch from down-hearth wood fires to grated coal fires was accompanied by a whole
new battery of equipment. The new fires needed cast-iron firebacks to protect the wall from the fierce heat and complex fire cranes to swing pots over the fire and off again. The other great change brought about by coal was the chimney. The great increase in chimneys in Elizabeth’s reign resulted largely from the increased use of coal, because wider flues were needed to carry away the noxious fumes of the coal as it burned. In fact, as Rumford observed, this combination of very wide chimneys and blazing roasting fires was deadly. When Pehr Kalm arrived in London from Sweden in the eighteenth century, he found the “coal-smoke” from cooking “very annoying,” and wondered if it was responsible for the high incidence of lung disease in England. He developed a terrible cough, which only abated when he left the city.

Not everyone switched to coal. In the countryside and in the northern counties, the norm remained the old down-hearth wood fire. Meanwhile, the poorest families in both city and country muddled by as best they could with whatever fuel was at hand: handfuls of dry heather, twigs gathered from the hedgerows, cattle dung. Not for them the shiny new patent cookstoves.

It is debatable whether being unable to afford a coal kitchener was a great loss. The closed range in this particular form had many disadvantages and few real benefits over an open fire. Unlike Rumford’s ideal closed hearths built of brick, many early ranges were badly constructed, belching coke fumes. A letter of 1853 to the
Expositor
called them “poison machines,” drawing attention to the recent deaths of three people from inhaling their fumes. And besides that danger, many of the ranges were inefficient. Promoters of American cookstoves claimed they would save around 50—90 percent of fuel compared with an open hearth, but this did not take into account the heat wasted. A good stove needs to insulate heat as well as conduct it. There was a fundamental problem in using all that highly conductive iron, which absorbed vast amounts of heat and then radiated it back out into the kitchen rather than into the food, leaving the poor cook in a furnacelike atmosphere of heat, ash dust, and soot.

The cast-iron kitchen range was one of those curious technologies that became an object of consumer desire without offering much real improvement on what came before. It didn’t save labor—quite the opposite, in many cases. Getting a fire started was no easier in a stove than on a hearth, and polishing and cleaning the range was practically a full-time job, whether for a servant or a wife. As late as 1912, a housewife married to a policeman listed her daily duties relating to the range:

All this work and not a single dish has been prepared; not a rasher of bacon has been fried, not a potato boiled. Unlucky woman. If only she had been born a few years later, she might have been spared it all. She would almost certainly have gotten a gas oven.

 

O
ur domestic lives are all composed of hundreds of small, daily, recurring activities, nowhere more so than in the kitchen. The devices that are truly revolutionary are not the ones that enable us to make entirely new creations—air-drying strawberries or vacuum-cooking rare cuts of venison—but the ones that let us do the things we already do with greater ease, better results, and more pleasure: making family breakfast more speedily for less money and far less trouble, for example. The gas range was a rare breakthrough: a tool offering real progress in the kitchen.

Compared to a coal range, gas was cleaner, pleasanter, and cheaper: it was estimated that for a middle-class English family, the cost of cooking with gas was around 2-½ pence a day, as against 7 pence to 1 shilling for coal. The real joy of gas, however, was the work it saved. The early cooks who learned to prepare meals using gas in the 1880s went into rhapsodies over how much easier life had become. A simple job such as cooking the morning breakfast took far less “time and attention” than under the old system. Mrs. H. M. Young, who wrote one of the first cookbooks to include a section on gas, noted that “a breakfast for a medium family, say, coffee, chops, steaks or bacon, eggs and toast, may be prepared easily in 15 minutes.”

As is so often the case, the innovation was initially met with suspicion and resistance. There was a time lag of nearly a century between the first experiments in gas cookery and its adoption by a wider public. The same cooks who toiled in the tropical heat and filth of a coal-fire range feared that gas was a dangerous form of cooking, which would make the food taste and smell disgusting. Although increasingly happy to light their homes with coal gas—London was the first city to be lit by gas, in 1814—people feared they would either be poisoned or die in an explosion if they cooked with it. Servants were said to be scared senseless by gas ovens.