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.

Cowboys and Wind

Opposition to wind farms has joined employment, education, taxes in the collection of issues known as politics.  Whilst I offer no opinion on politicians, I feel comfortable in a system which can accommodate this debate and a willingness to tolerate the outcome of elections (albeit grudgingly).  Oddly, for an enthusiast of sustainable energy, I think I see where the opposition to wind farms is coming from, together with similar technologies they are seen as driving up energy costs with no short term benefits for the consumer.  Added to this is the perception that the renewables sector is becoming part of the financial services industry where investments are fuelled by guaranteed energy prices.  Rooftop PV has been sold as an "investment" with gave rates of return greater than that available for standard saving products.

I would like to see a more integrated approach to renewable energy, whilst the unit cost of energy is the headline grabber, it is the total amount spent on energy which is the bottom line for most people.  Promoting energy management and conservation technologies and targeting them in such a way that some people get cost reductions would go a long way to changing the perception of  the sustainable technologies.  This is not a trivial undertaking, but neither was the development of nuclear energy.  At the household level, a few well sited LED lights have cut our electricity cost and I'm hoping that zoning the heating system next year will do the same for the gas bill.  There are ideas out there for politicians to grasp and some of them might even generate jobs and wealth.

A factor in the opposition to wind farms it that the turbines are seen as industrial machines in a pastoral setting, The railways faced similar opposition during the 19th century as the benefits of things like nationwide newspaper and postal distribution became established, they became accepted.  In the 19th century wind power was a mainstream technology with milling and seafaring being more or less respected trades.

Books pile up in our house and there is only so much space available for shelves.  For a book to be saved from the charity shop it either has to have the sort sentimental value that comes from having being a travelling companion (regardless of the fact it was never read) or that it has earned it's place by having been read more than once. One such book is a history of Texas.  About half way through, the author makes an observation that it was only when wind powered water pumps provided drinking water for cattle on the high plains that ranching expanded.  The Aermotor wind pump is as iconic as the nodding donkeys of the oilfields.  Until well into the twentieth century, wind power was a mainstream technology.  Within walking distance of my home there are the surviving structures of three windmills and street names and pub signs hint at the existence of others.  The Dutch have long used wind pumps to drain the low lying parts of their country, a technology they bought to the fenlands of East Anglia.  Today, wind energy is a growing industry in Texas, I recently read that the state produced about 10% of its electricity from wind (figure not checked).

A large, three masted sailing ship like those engaged in the tea trade between Asia and Europe might have been developing the equivalent of 2,000 and 5,000 horsepower when making 14 knots under full sail.  This level of power is comparable to steam and diesel, however, its availability is seasonal and a high level of skill was needed to coordinate agricultural production, maritime transport and marketing.

Gathering winter fuel (in August)

Last week's blog considered at the how an Edwardian household might have considered energy management, although they would not have used those words, to them it was just housekeeping.  As the twentieth century progressed, housekeeping, for many became less arduous as electric lamps replaced gas mantles and vacuum cleaners sucked filth from carpets which had previously had to be beaten out using things that looked an wickerwork oar.  In the 1970s natural gas displaced coal and probably reduced the frequency of use of vacuum cleaners as gas is a much cleaner fuel than coal.  In our family, the women celebrated the arrival of electricity and none shed a tear for the passing of coal.  Whilst these advances improved many lives, it seems churlish to suggest that the downside was a break with the seasons, today, the seasons are just marked by a bigger gas bill in January.

This picture shows the extensive research that goes into this blog, these bits of insulation blew into my garden during the winter storms.

Managing seasonality is one of the big challenges of a sustainable energy economy.  In my mind, the solution is based on insulation which reduces the demand for energy.  However, this is not a quick fix.  A lot of the UK housing stock was built before 1910 and was drafty by design and what came later until the advent of building regulations that required a high standard of insulation, is not much better.  My perception as the owner of an Edwardian semi is that there are somethings that can be done quickly at an affordable cost such as loft insulation, draft excluders and curtains and maybe, a limited amount of cavity wall insulation.  Anything which would make a significant difference would either change the character of our home, cost more than it would save or both.  A few houses in our area which were built in the 1960s and which were generally regarded as not very nice have been substantially rebuilt to become very attractive buildings, but there are not many of them.   This suggests that the nation's overall domestic energy efficiency will only improve slowly as new homes are built with good insulation, but the older homes, like mine will be an energy embarrassment until it falls down and gets replaced with something different, as I'm fond of my home, I'm attempting to ensure that this is a long time in the future.  A well insulated home which can take advantages of technologies such as air source heat pumps, which my very limited research suggests have a capacity or around 3 - 7 kw.  These devices are not an option for properties which require 20 - 30 kw just to be less cold.  In our case, the solution to rising energy bills and a desire to minimize CO2 emissions is to have a "zoned" system in which only occupied rooms are heated.

The 19th Century was a time when coal was king, if you wander round the older parts of most English towns, you can estimate the number of rooms in a house by counting the number of chimney pots.  The streets in places like Greenwich are punctuated with the covers of coal chutes many of which have intricate patterns rendered in cast iron.  In the same way that North Sea gas displaced coal, coal had started to displace wood two centuries earlier.  Using wood as a fuel requires an understanding of the seasons.  For wood to be a useful fuel it must be dry otherwise much of the heat generated by combustion is absorbed by converting water into steam.  This it was necessary to gather wood during the summer, possibly split the logs and leave it to dry ready for the winter fires.  Sometime back there was a lively debate in the Norwegian press as to the best way to dry logs, was it better to split them and place the split side upwards or place the bark on top.

In recent years, log stores have been appearing in the front porches of many English homes, in part this is due to the appeal of a wood fire.  It's amusing to watch young men in particular light or attempt to light a fire as all sorts of primal instincts and behaviour come to the surface and if girls are present the process becomes a competitive sport.  The main driving force is probably rising fuel prices and as a result wood has become noticeably scarce.  As a regular dog walker, I used to pick up logs on the morning trip to the woods, but since the cold winter of 2010/11, the portable results of any form of woodland maintenance have gone within hours.  Deforestation was a spur to the development of the coal industry in the 18th Century.  Wood is an attractive option, provided only a small number of people use it but it is not substitute for natural gas in urban locations.  Even so, its not unknown for two middle aged dog walkers to glare at each other over a skip containing decking offcuts.  The future is insulation.