Over a Red Hot Stove E-Book

Ivan Day

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

The fourteenth volume of the Leeds Symposium on Food History 'Food and Society' series •The theme is the ways we cooked our food since medieval times.David Eveleigh discusses the rise of the kitchen range, from the 19th-century coal-fired monsters to the electric and gas cookers of the early 20th century.Ivan Day, in two essays, talks about techniques of roasting. In the first he tells of the ox roast; in the second he traces the history of the clockwork spit. Peter Brears gives an account of roasting, specifically the 'baron of beef', in early modern royal palaces.

Leseprobe

Frontispiece. 1806 advertisment for Henry Marriott’s patent jack. This mechanism is set up here to run two horizontal spits and three dangle-spits. Despite its name, no patent exists for Marriott’s jack. Sarah Sophia Banks Collection, BM 85.95. Photograph courtesy of the British Museum. See pp. 99–124 below.

First published in 2009 by Prospect Books, Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes, Devon TQ9 7DL.

Based on papers from the nineteenth and twentieth Leeds Symposia on Food History, April 2004 and April 2005, ‘Open Hearth Cookery’ and ‘Baking: from Cereal Crops to Oven-baked Goods’, with two additional chapters. This is the fourteenth volume in the series ‘Food and Society’.

© 2009 as a collection, Prospect Books (but © 2009 in individual articles rests with the individual authors).

The authors assert their right to be identified as the authors of their several pieces in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA: A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-903018-67-5 ePub ISBN 978-1-909248-18-2 PRC ISBN 978-1-909248-19-9

Typeset by Tom Jaine.

Printed and bound by the Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge, Wiltshire.

CONTENTS

Illustrations and Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Foreword

C. Anne Wilson

Introduction

Ivan Day

Chapter 1

Cast Iron Progress – The Development of the Kitchen Range

David J. Eveleigh

Chapter 2

Ox Roasts – From Frost Fairs to Mops

Ivan Day

Chapter 3

The Roast Beef of Windsor Castle

Peter Brears

Chapter 4

The Clockwork Cook – A Brief History of the English Spring-jack

Ivan Day

Chapter 5

Barms and Leavens – Medieval to Modern

Laura Mason

Chapter 6

Baking in a Beehive Oven

Susan McLellan Plaisted

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece.

1806 advertisment for Henry Marriott’s patent jack (British Museum)

A typical eighteenth-century roasting range from Powell’s

Complete Book of Cookery

,

c.

1770

Kitchen grate with cast-iron uprights and adjustable cheeks from Heathfield Hall, Handsworth, Birmingham

A close-up view of the large roasting range dating from 1809 at Bucklebury Manor, Berkshire

In the kitchen at Betchworth House, Surrey

Cast-iron oven made by the Benthall Foundry, Coalbrookdale, Shropshire

Trade card of Underwood & Co., furnishing ironmongers in Bristol from

c.

1812–1828

The stewing stove from Sir John Vanbrugh’s ‘Designs for Kings Weston’, Gloucestershire, 1717 (reproduction is courtesy of Bristol Record Office)

Thomas Robinson’s patent range and oven, 1780

An open range from an undated catalogue probably dating to the 1840s of the Coalbrookdale Company, Shropshire (photograph by courtesy of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library)

William Nicholson’s ‘Newark Cottage Range’ of 1848

The original range in the kitchen of Sir John Soane’s house, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London (photograph by courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum)

An open range in a cottage near Congresbury, North Somerset supplied by Harris & Kingdom, Bristol ironmongers from 1885 to 1944

Plan and elevation of the brick stove designed by Count Rumford and fitted in the kitchen of the Baron de Lerchenfeld, Munich in about 1794

A typical closed range with a single oven and boiler from a Coalbrookdale catalogue of 1875 (The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library)

A closed range with oven, boiler and hot closet from J.H. Walsh’s

Manual of Domestic Economy

, 1857

A convertible range from the Coalbrookdale catalogue for 1875 (The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library)

A very typical large range of the 1890s – the ‘Swinton’ – a convertible range patented by Hattersley in 1890

The ‘KB’ range by Coalbrookdale, 1911 (The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library)

The ‘Cosmopolitan Cooking Range’

The ‘Yorkshire Gas Kitchener’, a combination range for coal and gas, manufactured by Beverley and Wylde of the Leeds Gas Stove Works, 1882

An ‘Eagle Range’ with its unmistakable strap work ornament and eagle trade mark

The ‘Gem’ portable range manufactured by Brown and Green 1882

A closed range of 1892 made by J.D. Young & Son

An open range from the undated Coalbrookdale catalogue of

c.

1840–50 (The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library)

A typical north-country range at an unknown location in Cumbria, photographed

c.

1900 (Museum of English Rural Life)

A ‘Yorkshire’ open range from the Coalbrookdale catalogue of 1875 (The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust Library)

Kitchen at Rookhope, Stanhope, Durham, late nineteenth century (Beamish, The North of England Open Air Museum)

Land army girls sitting by a Cornish range in 1918 (Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro)

A tin bath and bucket in front of an open range at Brierley Cottages, Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire (courtesy of Nottinghamshire Local Studies and www.picturethepast.org.uk)

Detail from a contemporary broadside illustration of the 1714/15 London frost fair

Detail from a broadside illustration of the 1683/84 London frost fair (British Museum)

Detail from a broadside of the 1683/84 London frost fair (British Museum)

Jan Griffier the Elder,

The London Frost Fair

of 1683/84 (whereabouts unknown)

George Cruickshank,

London Frost Fair

, etching, 1838 (British Museum)

Nikolaus Hogenberg,

Ox being roasted in the streets of Bologna during the coronation procession of Charles V

, etching, 1530 (British Museum)

Detail from printed broadside, 1814 (British Museum)

Ox roast at Batley Carr, Yorkshire, celebrating the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897

Plate used at Batley Carr ox roast, 26 June 1897

Plate used at an 1885 ox roast to celebrate the royal assent for the Manchester Ship Canal Bill

Ox paraded on a cart on its way to being roasted in the town of Patricroft in 1885 (courtesy of Salford Library)

The Oldham miners’ strike medallion of 1858 (photograph courtesy of Mark Smith)

Ox roast in Tamworth at a town pageant in 1913

Oxen roasting at a hospital thanksgiving day at Windsor in 1872

Postcard of a bullock being roasted at a mop fair in Stratford-upon-Avon

Postcard of an early twentieth-century mop fair ox roast in Stratford-upon-Avon

A postcard illustration of an early twentieth-century mop fair pig roast in Stratford-upon-Avon

Detail of a postcard illustration of two butchers carving a roast ox at an early twentieth-century Stratford-upon-Avon mop fair

A three-hundredweight baron of beef and sixty fowls roasting in the London Guildhall kitchen for Lord Mayor’s Day, steel engraving from

The Illustrated London News

, 13 Nov. 1887

The bringing-in of the baron, steel engraving from

The Illustrated London News,

13 Nov. 1887

The Lord Mayor’s baron is carved in ritual fashion, steel engraving from

The Illustrated London News

, 13 Nov. 1887

A full baron of beef being roasted with a mechanical dangle-spit for the 1903 Christmas dinner at the Constitutional Club in London,

Illustration,

Paris, 26 December 1903

Roast goose day (29th September) at the Old Men’s Hospital in Norwich, steel engraving from

The Illustrated London News

, 8 Oct. 1859

The roasting ranges at Hampton Court,

c.

1530, and Kew Palace,

c.

1735? (drawings by Peter Brears)

The great kitchen, Windsor Castle, from a watercolour by J. Stephanoff,

c.

1820 (drawing by Peter Brears)

The kitchen of Windsor Castle in 1856, from the west

The kitchen in 1857, from the west, with the roasting hearth on the east wall (drawing by Peter Brears)

A baron of beef in the western roasting hearth of Windsor Castle kitchen, after a painting by Frank Watkins, 1870s (drawing by Peter Brears)

Illustration of roasting range in Windsor Castle kitchen from the

Pictorial World

, 2 January 1875

The Windsor Castle kitchens in 1894, from the east

The western roasting range with Christmas roasts, 1894

The western roasting range, with its smoke hood and roasting screen, after a photograph of 1898 (drawing by Peter Brears)

Anatomy of a common weight-jack: (a) woodcut illustration from Joseph Moxon,

Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-Works

(London, 1678); (b) a two-spindle English iron weight-jack dating from the late eighteenth century (photograph courtesy of David Hansord)

Detail of an advertisement for John Joseph Merlin’s

Rotisseur Royal

of 1773 (Courtesy of Science Museum)

An early illustration of a weight-jack from John Wilkins,

Mathematical Magic

(London, 1648)

(a) An English weight-jack with a brass fore-side engraved ‘THO:/WILLS/ST AUSTLE’ (drawing by Peter Brears); (b) illustration of a French weight-jack, Antoine Gogué,

Les Secrets de la cuisine Française

(Paris, 1856); (c) pulley system for a common weight-jack, Thomas Webster,

An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy,

New Edition (London, 1847); (d) a detail from the trade card of T. Ward, Ironmonger of 25 Newgate St., London,

c.

1782 (British Museum)

Roasting range formerly in the kitchen of Chatsworth House (© Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees)

Steam roasting-jack 1806 (photograph courtesy Intellectual Property Office)

(a) Advertisment of Edmund Lloyd, ironmonger, 1801 (British Museum); (b) smoke-jack formerly in the kitchen of Lowther Castle (photograph Private Collection)

Handbill advertising Joseph Merlin’s inventions 1781–3 (photograph courtesy of Science Museum)

Advertisement for Joseph Merlin’s

Rotisseurs Royal c.

1773 (British Museum)

(a) Joseph Merlin’s ‘ventilator movement’; (b) Joseph Merlin’s flywheel with meat hooks; (c) a design for a smoke-jack by Joseph Braithwaite (1795) (Intellectual Property Office)

Joseph Merlin’s

Rotisseur

movement (Intellectual Property Office)

(a)

Molinello con tre spedi,

from Bartolomeo Scappi,

Opera

(Venezia, 1570); (b) a Dutch spring-jack; (c) a

molinello

in use in a Renaissance kitchen, from Bartolomeo Scappi,

Opera

(Venezia, 1621)

Anatomy of a Renaissance spring-jack: (a)

Machina

da voltar

, from Pietro Zonca,

Novo teatro di machine ed edificii

(Padova, 1607); (b) a late seventeenth-century Italian

voltaspiédo

with a mainspring/fusee movement

William Lane’s design for the movement for his improved spring-jack of 1821 (Intellectual Property Office)

John Pearse’s improved spring-jack of 1822: (a) Pearse’s original design (Intellectual Property Office); (b) in later versions of his jack, Pearse’s spit took this form (drawing by Peter Brears); (c) a version of Pearse’s jack with two spits, Elizabeth Hammond,

Modern Domestic Cookery,

sixth edition (London, 1824)

A horizontal spring-jack and screen, Eliza Acton,

Modern Cookery

(London, 1845)

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

PETER BREARS was formerly Director of Leeds City Museums. He is one of Britain’s leading social historians of food and as consultant to the National Trust and other bodies has supervised the restoration of many of Britain’s most important period kitchens, including those of Petworth and Belvoir Castle. His publications include Great Food in Yorkshire 1650–1750, The Old Devonshire Farmhouse and Cooking and Dining in Medieval England.

IVAN DAY is a food historian with a special interest in re-creating the food of the past in period settings. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of London, the Getty Museum, the Bard Graduate Center, Waddesdon Manor and Hillwood Museum, Washington DC. He is the author of Cooking in Europe 1650–1850. He lives and runs practical courses on period cookery in the English Lake District.

DAVID J. EVELEIGH is the Curator of the Black Country Living Museum. He was formerly Curator of Social History at Blaise Castle House Museum, Bristol and is the author of several books, including Firegrates and Kitchen Ranges, Old Cooking Utensils and A History of the Kitchen.

LAURA MASON is a food historian and regular contributor to the Leeds Food Symposium. Her publications include Traditional Foods of Britain (with Catherine Brown), Sugar Plums and Sherbet and Farmhouse Cookery.

SUSAN McLELLAN PLAISTED is the proprietress of Heart to Hearth Cookery, a food history business in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She is the coordinator of the foodways programme at Pennsbury Manor, the re-created home of William Penn. Through her business she offers courses in hearth cooking and baking, and provides lectures, demonstrations and programme sat many historic sites in the USA. She was a contributor to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

FOREWORD

C. Anne Wilson

This book was inspired by two one-day symposia of the Leeds Symposium on Food History held in York in 2004 and 2005 and titled ‘Open Hearth Cookery’ and ‘Baking: from Cereal Crops to Oven-baked Goods’ respectively. Four of the chapters are based directly upon talks given at those two meetings. Of the remaining two, one has been contributed by Peter Brears and the other, on the subject of outdoor ox-roasts, has been added by Ivan Day himself.

At our Symposium on 24 April 2004 we also heard Sally Grainger speak on Roman cookery carried out over hot ashes, and in the afternoon she gave us a practical demonstration in the courtyard of nearby Fairfax House. In an adjacent area John Hudson showed us how to recreate some historic English recipes cooked over a chafing dish; while at our indoor venue Ivan offered us hands-on inspection of original spits and other hearth furnishings from earlier centuries.

At our Symposium on 16 April 2005 the first speaker was John Letts who told us about the wheat varieties of late medieval England, some of which are still grown in remote parts of Spain and Turkey. He had sourced seedcorn from there, and now cultivates the same cereals in southern England and tests the resultant flour in baking. Later, Malcolm Thick spoke about the types of bread in regular use in eighteenth-century England; and we also heard the talks by Laura Mason and Susan McLellan Plaisted, on which their chapters in this book are based, and another one by Ivan Day entitled ‘Pies, pasties and pastry.’

Previous volumes in this series ‘Food and Society’ have been issued as follows:

‘Banquetting Stuffe’: the Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1986 Symposium), 1991.

The Appetite and the Eye: Visual Aspects of Food and its Presentation within their Historic Context

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1987 Symposium), 1991.

Traditional Food East and West of the Pennines

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1988 Symposium), 1991.

Waste Not, Want Not: Food Preservation in Britain from Early Times to the Present Day

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1989 Symposium), 1991.

Liquid Nourishment: Potable Foods and Stimulating Drinks

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1990 Symposium), 1993.

Food for the Community: Special Diets for Special Groups

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1991 Symposium), 1993.

Luncheon, Nuncheon and Other Meals

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1992 Symposium), 1994. Now republished in paperback as

Eating with the Victorians

(Sutton, 2004).

The Country House Kitchen,

1650

–

1900

: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning

, ed. P.A. Sambrook and P. Brears (double volume for 1993 and 1994 Symposia), 1996.

The Country House Kitchen Garden,

1600

–

1950

: How Produce was Grown and How it was Used

, ed. C.A. Wilson (1995 Symposium), 1998.

Feeding a City: York

, ed. E. White (double volume for 1997 and 1998 Symposia), 2000.

Food and the Rites of Passage

, ed. L. Mason (1999 Symposium), 2002.

The English Cookery Book

, ed. E. White (2001 Symposium), 2004.

The English Kitchen

, ed. E. White (2003 Symposium), 2007.

The first six volumes were published by Edinburgh University Press and are now out of print; the following three by Sutton Publishing (two of them in association with The National Trust); the volumes from no. 10 have been published by Prospect Books.

INTRODUCTION

Ivan Day

This book is based on papers presented at the seventeenth Leeds Symposium on Food History, but also contains two supplementary essays. In addition to the lectures, the day’s activities included a handling session of period cookery equipment kindly made possible by the staff of the York Castle Museum. A number of original period spitjacks, spits and other objects relating to hearth cookery were examined at close quarters.

Before the television set usurped its role during the mid-twentieth century, the kitchen hearth was the main focus of family life. It was not only the place where food was cooked, but also the main gathering point where tales were told, clothes dried and cold hands warmed. It is too easily forgotten that the Latin word focus means ‘hearth’ or ‘fireplace’. Human beings have been drawn to the ‘focus’ since the very earliest times as a centre for the exchange of ideas. Without it, our development as a social species would not have been the same.

In terms of food preparation the hearth was a converging point for countless activities. Not only were meat and fish broiled over the embers and roasted in its radiant heat, but dough was proved in its warmth and bread toasted in front of its flames. Generations of nameless cooks have toiled in the heat of the fireplace and it is from their almost infinite pool of experience that the art and technology of cookery emerged.

In the papers given here, David Eveleigh sets the scene by considering the development of the kitchen range. From the early modern period to the rise of gas and electricity he shows how the range allowed the key cooking activities of roasting, boiling and baking to be carried out in a single place. He demonstrates how the evolution of the range reflected that of the wider industrial revolution. Early ranges were designed and made by artisan blacksmiths, but as the Enlightenment unfolded, important inventors, master iron founders and cooks turned their attention to improving this essential domestic appliance. His paper is illustrated with numerous photographs and images, many of them published here for the first time.

Perhaps the most archetypal ‘focus’ of all is that of the outdoor bonfire. Food cooked by the heat of an open air blaze is an elemental form of cookery enjoyed by all. Camp-fire cookery still retains its powerful appeal as a kind of culinary ancestor worship in the guise of the modern barbecue. One heroic type of outdoor cookery formerly used to celebrate key local and national events was the roasting of entire oxen. Ivan Day examines this ancient tradition and traces its roots to charitable events and fairs where very large numbers of people required feeding. He considers its social history and shows how a material culture emerged as the practice was used in the nineteenth century, not just for celebrating occasions like royal jubilees, but also for canal openings and even miners’ strikes. His essay is illustrated with many rare broadside woodcuts, early photographs and objects that have never been published before.

Peter Brears moves our attention from the ox roast in the street to the culture surrounding the royal baron of beef in the palace kitchen. He focuses on the kitchens of Windsor Castle and illustrates the development of the royal roasting ranges from the time of Edward II to the Great War. By the middle of the eighteenth century the ‘royal baron of beef ’ had become a sacred symbol of national unity, and the English roasting cook treated this gargantuan cut of meat with the reverence it deserved. Cookery on such a vast scale required a specialist technology and a highly organised kitchen staff. The smoke-jacks at Windsor and the skilled cooks who used them were second to none.

Proceeding from this, Ivan Day turns his attention to the clockwork devices once commonly employed in this country for open fire roasting. These ‘culinary robots’ were among the first labour-saving devices to appear in the early modern period kitchen and transformed the working lives of many kitchen servants. He offers a basic taxonomy of the various kinds, but examines in detail the evolution of one type in particular, the wind-up spring-jack. Like the development of the kitchen range, the story of this device demonstrates the increasing ingenuity of inventors, clockmakers and entrepreneurs as the early Industrial Revolution unfolded. Once an expensive item found only in the kitchens of the wealthy, cheap springdriven jacks eventually made roasting technology possible even in the humble cottage kitchen.

If the Roast Beef of Old England was the chief celebration dish of a nation of cattle farmers, wheaten bread was its principal staple. To make good bread, the baker needed yeast, which we now know to be a living organism, but which our ancestors saw as a mysterious substance with almost supernatural powers, thus one of its early names, ‘Godes good’. Laura Mason addresses the history of barms and leavens and illuminates how these essential ingredients were strongly linked to that other important British domestic activity, the brewing of malt liquors. She traces the history of leavening agents, from the Anglo-Saxon beorma skimmed from the surface of fermenting ale, to nineteenth-century chemical substitutes, such as pearl ash and hartshorn.

Once the dough had been been proved, preferably in a warm place near the hearth, there would be no bread without an oven. In the final chapter, Susan McLellan Plaisted discusses some of her own practical experience of baking in historic wood-fired ovens in the United States. One of the first ovens to be used in America was a clay oven brought from England by the early Jacobean settlers of Jamestown. She goes on to show how other equipment, techniques and baking recipes from the Old World influenced the baking practices of early colonists .

Time and space did not allow an examination of many other facets of hearth cookery and this publication cannot pretend to be a complete guide to what is an enormous subject.

Figure 1. A typical eighteenth-century roasting range from Powell’s Complete Book of Cookery, c.1770.

CHAPTER ONE

CAST-IRON PROGRESS – THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE KITCHEN RANGE

David J. Eveleigh

The cast-iron, coal burning cooking range was the essential Victorian kitchen fitting but it was always more than just a cooker. The range was a vital part of the home: a source of warmth and comfort and a favourite place to sit by. It was usually the only source of hot water and the obvious location in many households for the weekly bath. Laundry irons were heated on the range, and in the countryside, in harsh weather at lambing time, near-dead lambs could be revived by its warmth. The range is often fondly remembered for the warm cosy atmosphere it created in the kitchen and the cheerfulness of its fire. But not all memories are so favourable. There was the unavoidable dirt involved in lighting the fire and of even more when it was routinely cleaned. Clearing the soot from the flues, which might be a weekly task, and the chore of polishing the range with black lead is recalled by some as ‘a nightmare’. Then there was the frustration of oven flues that would not draw – of smoky chimneys – and the discomfort of encountering a range in use on a hot summer’s day.

Whilst the kitchen range might be associated in the popular mind with Victorian Britain, its origins stretch back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its development was shaped by two materials which underpinned eighteenth-and nineteenth-century technology, coal and cast-iron. In 1861, Isabella Beeton (1836–65) stated, ‘without fuel a kitchen may be pronounced to be of little use’.1 Fuel was critical. Virtually everyone cooked by a fire and it was the choice of fuel that determined the type of fireplace. Wood or turf could be burned directly on the open hearth but coal required an iron container – a grate – if it was to burn effectively. By the early 1600s, some kitchen grates were already termed ‘ranges’. These were simple structures of wrought iron, but all later ranges – from the late eighteenth century onwards – were made largely of cast-iron. Much of the subsequent development of the range was shaped not by those who had to cook by them but the men who made them, the iron founders.

The relationship between coal and the grate is confirmed in several different types of records. The most compelling evidence survives in the thousands of surviving probate inventories which indicate that where coal was cheap and easily available, grates soon replaced the open hearth. As early as 1568, the Yorkshire inventory of the goods and chattels of Thomas, Lord Wharton of Healaugh records that he had ‘20 lode’ of coal in his ‘wodyerd’ and ‘2 iron chymneys’ in the house – one in the hall and the other in the kitchen. In 1637, Robert West of Knaresborough had coals in his coal house and ‘one iron rainge’ in the hall.2

Across the country, in south Gloucestershire, coal was mined locally and, again, inventories suggest this led to the widespread adoption of grates. In the published inventories for Frampton Cotterell and district covering the period 1539–1804, the earliest record of a grate occurs in the 1618 inventory of Thomas Gyles, a husbandman of Winterbourne. The series reveals that by the end of the century grates were common in the area.3 The published inventories for several Shropshire parishes around modern-day Telford show the same close relationship between the availability of locally mined coal and the use of grates.4 In towns the shortage of wood – and, therefore, its expense – encouraged the use of coal. By the seventeenth century, seaborne coal from Newcastle was widely used in London. Coal smoke was a feature of life in London by the time of the Restoration, when we find Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) recording improvements to his range in 1661:

And so home – where I find all clean and the harth and range, as it is now enlarged, set up; which pleases me very much.5

Where wood or turf remained the usual fuels, then the open hearth remained general. This is borne out by the series of inventories for Writtle in mid-Essex where grates are only recorded five times in the period 1635– 1747. The dependence on wood fuel in mid-eighteenth century Essex is corroborated by Pehr Kalm, a Swedish botanist who visited England in 1748. Heading towards Essex, he noted that although coal was the common fuel in London, it gave way to wood no more than fourteen miles outside the city.6 Forty years later in August 1788, another keen observer of ordinary things – this time an English aristocrat – the Honourable John

Figure 2. Kitchen grate with cast-iron uprights and adjustable cheeks from Heathfield Hall, Handsworth, Birmingham, built by James Watt in 1790. It is just over 40 inches wide.