5/18/2023 0 Comments Kitchen gaget sitesThe rod and hook techniques could only be used to move a pot up and down, whereas the chimney crane could move a pot through three dimensions. The chimney crane was perhaps the most elegant of these devices. Another technique used a chain wrapped around a rod so it could be rotated. The most basic technique used a series of pothooks or hangers of varying lengths. One of the more common devices was the hearth toaster, a long-handled piece of cast iron that held the bread between small arches that could be swiveled to toast both sides of the bread.īoiling and simmering called for some arrangement to regulate temperature by shifting pots closer to or farther away from the fire. Hearthstones, a variety of toasting forks, and hinged devices mounted on the side of the hearth were all used to toast bread. Tin roasters often incorporated that other essential roasting gadget, a windup or bottle jack.Īnother common kind of hearth-front gadget was the toaster. The tin roaster consisted of a tin enclosure to reflect heat back onto the meat, a dripping pan, and a door on the front through which the cook could baste and otherwise attend to the meat. This arrangement evolved into a small and elegant device that only occupied the width of the fire bars. In its earliest form, a piece of wood lined with reflective tin was placed next to the meat to reflect the heat back and increase cooking efficiency. The most popular kind of jack was the windup or spring jack, which the Swedish botanist and noted traveler Pehr Kalm observed in almost every English home he visited in 1748.Īnother kitchen implement from this era was the tin roaster. Geese were considered a better source of power, as dogs quickly became bored with the work and were far craftier than geese at shirking their duties. Perhaps the most unusual were the animal-powered jacks, which relied on animals, such as dogs or geese. The force of air and smoke rising in the fireplace chimney powered this kind of jack. Another early form of jack was the smokejack, first imported into England from Germany in the second half of the sixteenth century. The earliest jacks relied on a system of weights akin to those in a weight-driven clock for their slow and steady movement. A great variety of techniques for spit rotation were designed over the years. A jack is a device that rotates the roasting spit without the constant attention of the cook. Roasting spits, also known as "broches," "peakes," or "flesh pikes," were mounted in the fireplace. The jack was one of the most useful Victorian aids. A number of devices were designed to assist the pre-Victorian cook with each of these kitchen tasks. It is well established that, apart from the kitchens of the aristocracy, pre-Victorian cookery, at least in the British Isles, was almost entirely a matter of boiling in a pot, cauldron, or kettle baking in an oven or on a bake stone and roasting on a spit. ProvidingĪn account of early kitchen tools is difficult as such items rarely made their way onto household inventories. Gadgets may be displayed as items that represent taste, newness, or status.Īlthough the term "gadget" originated in the late Victorian era, it is often used retroactively to refer to pre-Victorian forms of specialized kitchen equipment. Another aspect of the gadget is its symbolic character. As the usage in the Good Housekeeping Home Encyclopedia indicated, gadgets may be the kinds of products that accumulate in the back of kitchen drawers until they are discarded. It is often used to refer to novelty items, gimmicky and cheap kitchen equipment that purports to ease the burdens of homemakers. In modern usage the term "kitchen gadget" also may be pejorative. As such, it can be distinguished if only in a general sense from the broader term "kitchen utensil," which would include multipurpose and essential kitchen equipment, such as chefs' knives and large appliances like ovens and refrigerators. A kitchen gadget may be a specialized artifact used for the preparation of a single kind of dish or for performing one specific function across a variety of dishes. Terms like "gadget," "utensil," "accoutrement," "tool," and "appliance" overlap. It is unclear when the term first entered kitchen parlance, but the Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest use of the expression "kitchen gadget" as 1951 in the Good Housekeeping Home Encyclopedia, which remarked that kitchen gadgets are often discarded because it takes too much time to clean them.Ī popular contemporary taxonomy of kitchen technology must account for the essential ambiguity of the term. One of the earliest recorded uses of the term "gadget" was in 1886 as a nautical term referring to a small, somewhat specialized contrivance.
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