A very short history of cooking

We recently attempted to recreate a family holiday by the sea, when we first sat on the beach with our children, buckets, spades and a picnic, we did not imagine that twenty years later we would be in the same place sharing beer bought by our eldest son.  This time around we were in a house which was I guess was built just before or after the First World War.  Today the décor seems to been selected to provide a brief sojourn in the lifestyle pages of the Sunday Supplements, but it started life as workman's cottage.  The place was a mini history of cooking, having a range (and a desire on the part of the owners that no one tries to use it), an electric stove (installed with the expectation that no one was going to use it) and a microwave oven.

The size of the rooms was indicative of the way the house was lived in, what was originally the kitchen was the largest communal room, much larger than what is now the living room or parlour as it may have been called.  The old ladies in our family have explained to me that the parlour was rarely used except when the vicar called because family life happened in the kitchen, today, in most homes the living room is just that, the place were you live (or watch TV as it is sometimes known).  Upstairs, only the main bedroom had a small fireplace, the boys bedroom and the girls bedroom were unheated.  I have heard stories about children been sown into their clothes at the start of winter and not been released until spring, this seems like an exaggeration, but maybe there's some basis for it.  The folk memories of our family are that bedroom fires were only lit when mum was nursing new born children or someone was sick.  Thus in many homes the range was the main source of warmth and food.

I have heard a lot about ranges, as girls, the old ladies got the job of cleaning them and as result installed gas and electric stoves in their own homes as soon as the availability of gas, electricity and money allowed.  We have some old school textbooks and manuals of domestic economy which detail the cleaning and operation, which can be summarised as shovelling an rubbing.  Its not hard to see why there are so few surviving examples.  I took the opportunity to poke around this one, the sketch below shows the main components.


The range would be lit most days, even in summer, to provide hot water for tea and washing clothes and bodies.  I'm guessing that the upper grate provided a small fire which provided just enough heat to allow the hot plate to boil a kettle or fry something.  To keep the kitchen warm and make the oven work the lower grate would be used.  The oven is about the same size as that of a modern cooker, my family history suggests that it would be more used to baking bread and pies, than large joints of meat.  By all accounts, it took some skill to cook with a range, not least because of the difficulty of controlling the heat from a coal fire.  Where possible, as much baking was done on a given day of the week where the natural cooling of the oven was the main means of control.  Meat pies and similar items which required long cooking went in first, then as the oven cooled, loaves of bread and finally, small cakes or fancies.

An important job for the range was drying clothing.  There was a horror of damp clothing which was seen as a source of sickness.  I have memories of my mother putting library books in the oven to ward of TB, whilst that seems like strange behaviour, it stemmed from a fear of disease in a time before antibiotics and when doctors charged by the visit.

As with many domestic items made of cast iron, this one has randomly chosen designs, the centrepiece of which is a royal coat of arms.  It not obvious if this is a sign of endorsement, an appeal for loyalty to the crown or just that the maker had the design and felt like using it.

The electric cooker is not that interesting other than where it differs from the range.  Apart from being easy to clean, the first thing about it is that it give instant heat at the turn of a knob thus you don't need to plan the day's eating although if you feel the need, there is a timer.  It has a grill which extends the range of cooking options.  This is more a condemnation of my own cooker, its a lousy space heater.  During the winter, I made bread in the expectation of a warm kitchen not only this, the room was not warm enough for the dough to rise, the result being a cold kitchen and flat bread.

I have limited experience with microwaves, but it seems they to make some contribution to a sustainable energy economy.  It seems that our gas stove consumes between 1 and 5 kw which combined with hot water heating gives an average base load consumption of 10 - 15 kw/day, for not a lot.  Whilst there is no substitute for grasping a frying pan in one hand and a fish slice in the other and cooking over an open flame, a lot of can be done with a microwave.  I've yet to do the sums, but, maybe, it takes 2 kwh to cook an evening meal, could this fall to less than 0.5 kwh if things like carrots can be cooked in 10 minutes in a 600 watt microwave?  And to extend this concept a little further, if a home is equipped with some form of energy storage, much of the cooking could be done using off-peak electricity or from sustainable sources such as wind or solar.

The old ladies would be horrified and my wife is worried, but I am thinking that a range might be just the thing to make our own Edwardian semi as warm and affordable place to live.