Understanding the Victorian Kitchen: Victorian Kitchen Appliances
A well-equipped Victorian kitchen might include dozens of appliances, large and small. Some would be familiar. Meat grinder, coffee mill, mixer, blender, slicer, ice cream maker, and butter churn may still be found in a modern kitchen.
The difference would be the power source. Modern appliance largely run on electricity. Victorian appliance on elbow grease.
The most important appliances, however, and the appliances that had the most effect on the eventual development of the modern kitchen, were the kitchen stove and the icebox.
Neither were modern appliances, but they are both the forerunners of the modern appliances that replaced them.
Victorians pushed both of these fledgling technologies as far as they could be pushed before the widespread availability of electricity and natural gas.
The Victorian Kitchen Stove
The kitchen stove was invented by Benjamin Thompson the Reichsgraf von Rumford (1753-1814) in the waning years of the 18th century.
His contributions to the fledgling science of thermodynamics were many, including his numerous and very practical innovations such as the Rumford fireplace, the thermos bottle, and, most importantly, the kitchen stove.
His stove did not look like anything a 21st-century American would easily recognize as a kitchen stove. It looked more like a fireplace on steroids, but it is generally credited as the direct, if remote, ancestor of the modern kitchen range.
Born in Massachusetts Colony, Thompson remained loyal to King George III during the American Revolution.
He served as a spy, counter-spy, and lieutenant colonel in the King's American Dragoons which he organized in 1782, very near the end of the war.
His Dragoons saw an undistinguished wartime service on Long Island that included participation in no battle of any note. Nonetheless, the king knighted Thompson in 1784 for his services to the Crown.
After the surrender of the British Army at Yorktowne, he removed to Canada and then to Great Britain to avoid being hanged by the victorious Americans.
In 1785 he was hired by Karl Theodor, the Prince-Elector of the German state of Bavaria to reorganize the Bavarian army.
While in Bavaria, he designed and built the Englischer Garten (English Garden) in Munich along the Isar river.
At 1.4 sq. miles, it is one of the largest (larger than Central Park, 1.31 sq mi.) and most beautiful urban parks in the world. [1]
For his accomplishments, Thompson was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, taking the title Reichsgraf von Rumford in 1791 after Rumford, Massachusetts (Now Concord, New Hampshire), a town in which he had once lived.
It is under the name "Rumford" that Thompson is best remembered by history.
Rumford was a self-taught physicist and something of an an expert in thermodynamics – the science of how heat moves. His experiments often challenged many of the widely accepted principles of the discipline in his day.
Stove or Range
Which is Correct?
Not today.
In America, both terms now refer to a cooking appliance composed of burners on a flat top surface and one or more ovens or broilers below.
But in the Victorian period, there was a difference between the two.
A range was an appliance designed to be built into a fireplace as an insert. The stove was a stand-alone fixture that vented torough its own dedicated piping.
The Open Range
The earliest "open range", appearing about 1780 in England, was an iron box with an open top. A fire in a compartment at the center of the box heated an oven on one side and a tank of water on the other.
It exhausted smoke through the open top directly into the fireplace chimney.
These used an enormous amount of fuel and made the kitchen very hot but were a terrific improvement over the old hearth and kettle.
The Closed Range
Beginning about 1840, the "closed range" appeared. It had an iron plate covering the top with rings for pots and pans to sit on. Smoke was exhausted through a flue that directed it to the chimney.
Various flues and dampers permitted the heat in the range to be directed more precisely to where it was needed, so less heat was needed for cooking and less fuel was used.
America vs. Britain
Ranges were popular in Britain where there were a lot of old houses to be retrofitted. They were also manufactured in America. (The A. C. Barstow & Co. of Rhode Island, for example, advertised its wares to include "Ranges, Stoves and Furnaces.") But, they never caught on to any significant degree., The stand-alone iron stove was preferred for the new houses being rapidly built to house this country's burgeoning middle-class population.
He was also a prolific inventor.
His inventions included the Rumford fireplace, still considered the most efficient open fireplace design, the percolating coffee maker, thermal underwear, and the thermos bottle as well as the first cookstove.
Rumford is also credited with having discovered the sous-vide method of cooking food in a vacuum container which he described in an essay.
His Loyalist transgressions evidently forgiven, he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1789.
He endowed the Rumford Medal, awarded by Britain's Royal Society biannually since 1800 for "an outstandingly important recent discovery in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter made by a scientist working in Europe."
The Rumford Stove
Rumford's stove took the cooking fire out of the fireplace and enclosed it in a masonry box where the flames could be more easily regulated using dampers and flues to direct heat and control temperature.
His stoves were made of brick or stone with cutouts in a flat top into which specially designed pots could be inserted and heated individually to different temperatures.
It was much too heavy and cumbersome for most home cooking but found a welcome place in institutional kitchens.
The Iron Cookstove
Iron stoves were not new in the early 1800s. They had been around for several decades for heating, including a stove invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1742 and subsequently redesigned by David Rittenhouse to improve its smoke ventilation.
No one person was chiefly responsible for converting Rumford's masonry monster into an iron cookstove that could fit in a home kitchen.
It was an incremental process as the dynamics of heat transfer became better understood and ironworking moved from blacksmith shop to factory where steam-powered machinery took over the forging of larger and more complex components.
J. L. Mott Iron Works
One seemingly important contributor was industrialist Jordan Lawrence Mott and his J. L. Mott Iron Works founded in New York City in 1828 in an area of the Bronx still known as Mott Haven. It ceased business around 1920 after relocating to Trenton, New Jersey.
The company was known for its iron cookstoves, furnaces,ornamental ironwork; enameled cast-iron plumbing fixtures, and heavy nickel-plated faucets
It is credited with marketing the first practical coal-fired cookstove with a built-in oven.
Mott had been manufacturing heating stoves to supplement or even replace the traditional fireplace since the early 1800s.
The transition to making stoves that a homemaker could use for cooking as well as heating was an obvious next step, but Mott approached it slowly and methodically, perfecting one innovation before moving on to the next.
Mott designed his stove for the ordinary middle-class household. It efficiently burned anthracite coal, the "miracle fuel" of the age.
Its self-feeder permitted the cook to load a hopper with coal which would be automatically fed into the fire as additional fuel was needed.
The hopper was designed to use cheaper small bits and pieces of coal commonly called "nuts" or "fines" and to burn them efficiently. It not only did not need the more expensive larger coal pieces called "lumps" but was designed so they could not be used.
The Mott stove is small: 21-1/2" wide x 17" deep x 23" high. It was designed around a firebox at the rear of the stove which permitted a small oven in front and a single boiling hole on top into which a specially-designed pot could be fitted.
When not in use, the boiling hole was covered by an iron plate.
Most foods were cooked on the heated iron stovetop rather than in the boiling hole which allowed direct access to the flames for rapidly boiling water.
Later Iron Stoves
Later stoves, including Mott's subsequent models, were larger.
By the 1850s, iron cookstoves with four and six "boiling holes" had become a common feature of kitchens in American middle-class homes. Many, like the Findlay Bros. stove on which the modern Heartland Stove is modeled, had multiple ovens and often a reservoir that held heated water.
Very late in the Era, stove manufacturers such as Weir Stove Company, producer of the Glenwood stove, began to enamel their iron stoves.
Enamel was easier to keep clean and eliminated the need for the dreaded weekly blacking the Victorian Stove.
Some models, particularly in rural areas, burned wood as fuel. But coal-fired stoves were more common in urban areas, particularly after the Civil War when the nation's newly expanded railroad system made transporting anthracite coal from mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to the ultimate consumer easier and cheaper.
Coal was not only less costly than wood, but it also did not require the homeowner to fell trees and split logs for fuel.
It was delivered by the local collier (who was often also the local iceman) through a coal door built into the side of the house into a coal bin in the basement. From there it was distributed by household members in buckets to feed the coal furnace and kitchen stove.
Ashes were placed in bags or cans. Most were carted off with the trash, but some were saved to be spread on icy sidewalks and steps in winter. It worked as well as, and often better than, rock salt, and it was free.
Pots and Pans
Pots, pans, and kettles needed a radical redesign for use on the stove.
Traditional round bottom pots and kettles supported by legs worked very well in a hearth where the pot or kettle was in direct contact with the flames.
For use on a stove, however, the bottom needed to be flat for contact with the heated surface of the stove.
These new types of pots and pans were called "Hollowware" (or holloware) and were made by foundries like Sidney Hollow Ware, Piqua Ware, Springville Stove & Hollow Ware Works, and Columbus Hollow Ware.
Often these same foundries also made cast iron stoves and many sold the stoves with a set of pots and pans especially designed for the stove.
For a comprehensive list of vintage Hollowware manufacturers, check out the Cast Iron Collector website.
Vintage Hollowware in good condition is collectible and can sell for several hundred dollars.
Some specialty rimmed pots were designed to sit down inside a circular cutout on top of the stove for direct contact with the fire inside. Direct contact was the fire was the fastest way to boil water – hence the name "boiling hole" by which the cutouts were often known.
"Blacking" the Stove
Excerpt From Barnsley and Family, a blog about one family in Barnsley and the town itself in Yorkshire, England just north of Sheffield. Unfortunately, the author is never identified except as "Mary", which is a shame as we would love to give personal credit for this excellent bit of descriptive writing from a wonderful and endearing blog.
Before I started writing this, I was looking around our home and my mind was cast back to the days when everything was such hard work. Today, if the house is cold, we can be warm within minutes by the flick of the central heating switch, or the press of a button for the gas fire to be ignited, instant warmth is available and maybe it is taken for granted by those who have grown up with these modern conveniences … My mother and grandmothers would not believe how easy it has become to look after a home.
My least favorite day of the week was Saturday, this was the morning that the oven range had to have a thorough clean-out. This was a filthy job. The room would be freezing cold, especially in winter and we would sit huddled in our coats. Before the fire could be lit, the flues and the ventilators had to be thoroughly fettled. The flue brush was a strange-looking object, the handle being made from twisted wire, the actual brush head was long and narrow so that the fire back could be reached. Cleaning this was a long, laborious process, then the coal rake was used to rake all the debris which had loosened and collected.
If the flues were not cleaned every week baking day would be a disaster as the oven would not be hot enough. The coal oven was part of the range, and this was the only means of baking or roasting.
After the ashes, cinders, and soot had been shifted, the hard work would really start.
My mother would spread newspapers on the hearth and around the fireplace, and out would come the black lead. She would wash the fireplace, to remove the ash and soot, wait for it to dry, which seemed to take forever, as we were still shivering, black lead was spread over all the fireplace with special brushes and she would rub and rub until she could see her face in it.
The brass hinges on the oven door would receive the same treatment, next the fender would be polished.
Then, thankfully, the fire could be lit. If my mother didn't have any sticks (she couldn't afford to buy firelighters), she would set us on making "paper sticks" from the newspaper she had placed around the fireplace. We were only too eager to do this, as it meant the dreaded black lead ritual was coming to its end for another week.
When not in use the holes were covered with an iron plate and Hollowware was set on the plate to heat up through direct contact with the hot plate.
Most Hollowware was made of cast iron. Even kettles were cast iron.
Vintage cast iron Hollowware is typically smoother and thinner than current ironware. It was was cast by pouring molten iron into ceramic molds that produced a smooth surface. Modern ironware is cast in sand molds which produce a rougher surface.
Cooking on an Iron Stove
The iron stove fundamentally changed the way meals were prepared.
Cooking over a hearth was at best tedious and often dangerous.
Lifting and hanging heavy iron cookware over an open fire was followed by hours of careful watching to ensure the food did not burn or boil over, ruining the meal.
Dishes could only be prepared one at a time (although some larger hearths accommodated multiple kettles).
The risk of catching billowing ladies' petticoats on fire was a constant and real hazard and the leading cause of accidental death and serious injury among married women in England. (The U.S. did not keep such statistics at the time).
A cookstove was safer and more versatile.
Using adjustable dampers, the heat from the fire chamber could be distributed to the cooking surface and one or more ovens at the same time.
The temperature of each item cooking on the stove or in an oven could be individually regulated so several dishes could be cooked or baked at once, making elaborate, multi-course meals possible.
Heat could also be sent to a warming oven or to a tank that stored hot water for bathing and washing up.
The iron stove used far less fuel than an open hearth did not spit out dangerous embers to start the house on fire, blacken kitchen walls with soot, or foul the air with smoke and ash.
It also eliminated the risk of soot and ash falling into the cooking food and could warm a kitchen in winter more efficiently than a fireplace, producing more heat with less fuel.
But while iron cookstoves made women's lives easier, they did not eliminate all the drudgery of cooking.
The fire had to be started, or at least stoked, each morning and fueled several times a day – requiring about 50 pounds of coal daily. Ashes needed to be emptied at least once a day, and usually twice.
Controlling the heat with dampers was a tricky business that required considerable experience and a delicate touch.
The entire surface of the stove was hot and could produce a severe burn if touched accidentally. The heat radiating contiuously from the stove added to the misery of hot summer days, often raising kitchen temperatures to dangerous levels.
Cleaning and Mmaintenance
The stove had to be cleaned almost daily to avoid offensive odors from burned-on food or a fire from spilled oil.
It needed periodic waxing with a special heat-resistant, lead-infused black wax to prevent rust. This "blacking" of the stove was one of the dirtiest and most despised jobs in the home (See sidebar: Blacking the Victorian Stove).
All in all, just tending to the stove might require an hour or more a day and be so complicated that the most widely read home economics book of the day, Catherine Beecher's The American Woman's Home devoted an entire chapter to the "The Construction and Care of Stoves, Furnaces and Chimneys".
Natural Gas
James Sharp patented a gos stove in England in 1826 and started manufacturing the stoves in 1836.
However the gas stove did not become a commercial success until a supply of piped gas was available. In Britain that occurred in the 1880s, in the U.S. and Canada, not until the 1900s.
Gas companies and sold early gas stoves to increase the number of customers for gas. A trade group, the American Gas Association, funded the development of gas cookstove, water heaters and furnaces. Gas cooking, however, was originally more expensive than cooking with wood or coal.
Early gas stoves were iron, the accepted stove material of the day. By 1900, however, lighter and less unwieldy stoves in enameled sheet steel had begun to appear – stoves that elimminated the dreaded "blackning" and were much easier to clean.
Coal gas [2] and later natural gas ranges were promoted by gas companies to create additional demand for their product which was already widely used for illumination but being challenged by that upstart – electric lighting.
The invention of a reliable oven thermostat in 1915 added to its ease of use and cemented the gas stove's place in the home. By 1930 most new urban cookstoves were gas-fired, with wood and coal relegated to rural areas where gas was not readily available.
The electric range did not come into widespread use until the housing boom following the 2nd World War, not because electricity made cooking better or easier (just the opposite, professional cooks favor gas stoves) but because it was cheaper and much faster to run overhead electric wire than it was to lay gas pipe underground,
During the frenetic Post-War building boom, speed was everything (See Post-war Housing Styles: Cape Cod, Colonial, and Ranch for more detail).
The Victorian Icebox
A century before there were electric refrigerators with computer-controlled temperature and an LED display to tell that you're almost out of milk, there was the humble icebox – literally, a box containing ice that at its most efficient could keep food chilled for days and even weeks.
By the 1880s, the icebox had become a feature of most middle-class American kitchens and it stayed a fixture in many kitchens until well into the 1950s when the national electric grid finally reached almost every kitchen and electric refrigeration became nearly universal.
The Icehouse
It had been well-known for millennia that food would last longer if it was chilled. The problem was not a lack of understanding. The problem was a lack of ice – especially in summer when the need for food preservation is most pressing.
Ancient Persian kings solved the problem using relays of fast horsemen to ferry ice from mountaintops to cool their lowland palaces. Relays of fast horsemen, however, were a little outside the budget for most middle-class American households. Nor were mountaintops always conveniently located.
Nebraska's Ice Industry
Exerpted from" Anonymous, "Cool Off with Nebraska's Ice Industry", History Nebraska, undated.
For many years the cutting of ice from rivers and lakes was an important winter industry, especially in eastern Nebraska. Large quantities of ice were needed for the meatpacking industry, for railroad refrigerator cars, and for home use.
The refrigerator car transformed the cattle industry. But the cars needed ice and lots of it.
The only practical way to get ice was to harvest it during the winter from lakes and rivers. A manmade lake of about 100 acres was filled each fall from Silver Creek. Harvesting began when the ice was eight inches thick. It was used in refrigerated railcars and meatpacking plants and was sold to businesses in eastern Nebraska. Approximately 100,000 tons of ice were harvested in 1899. It was common to ship 100 or more railcars of ice each month during the summer.
The Armour and Company Icehouse, completed in 1898 near Memphis, Nebraska, was one of the largest icehouses in the country, measuring approximately 180 feet wide, 700 feet long, and 52 feet high.
Crete Mills built one of Nebraska's major ice operations in its home city. At first, ice was cut from the Big Blue River, but as the demand increased, two lakes were constructed on the west side of the river and a large icehouse was built in Crete. Most of the Crete ice was sold to the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad (now the BNSF), which shipped the freshly cut ice in specially-designed "ice service" cars to various icing stations along the railroad. As many as 100 cars of ice were shipped daily from Crete during the ice-cutting season.
By the turn of the century, mechanical refrigeration was becoming more practical, and Chicago meatpacking plants adopted ammonia-cycle refrigeration. In Nebraska, the Valley Ice Company of Lincoln began manufacturing ice in 1901. The ice was clear and pure and desirable for home use – fit for a cool glass of lemonade – but "harvested ice" was still cheaper for railroad use.
Despite advancing technology, harvested ice remained common into the 1950s, when mechanically refrigerated railcars began to replace ice-based cars. Today little physical evidence remains of the big railroad ice houses of the past.
He very soon had competition. By 1855 twelve companies were shipping ice from Boston alone, and American ships carried more tons of ice than any other commodity except cotton.
Tudor's network extended up and down the East Coast, into the Caribbean, and as far as Europe and parts of Asia. He eventually owned ice houses in Charleston, Havana, India, Jamaica, Mobile, New Orleans, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
After he died in 1864, other entrepreneurs continued to expand the ice network into the Midwest and onward to California and the West Coast. By the end of the 19th century, it was nationwide and extended well into Canada and parts of Mexico. Anywhere the railroads went, there was ice.
Ice houses prevented the ice from melting by keeping it well-insulated, commonly with sawdust. Up to 12" of sawdust lined the floor. After the blocks of ice were placed in the house, sawdust was poured around and on top of the blocks to add more insulation. The process was so effective that insulated ice cour be shipped as far away as South Asia.
The expansion of the ice network was greatly helped by the introduction of steam-powered ice-making machines soon after the Civil War. Artificial ice could be produced anywhere. It was not limited by geography, climate, or the vagaries of seasons or weather.
The first artificial ice in the U.S. was produced in San Antonio, Texas due to efforts by two Frenchmen and a fellow from Kentucky.
Ferdinand Carré, a French engineer, invented a steam-powered ice-making machine using ammonia and water as a refrigerant. He patented the machine in the U.S. in 1860.
Daniel Livingston Holden, formerly of Kentucky, installed a Carré machine in San Antonio in 1865 (or 1866, accounts vary). He did not like his first results and tinkered with the machine until it produced crystal-clear ice. He later patented his improvements.
He was followed in 1867 by Andrew Muhl, a Frenchman who had immigrated to Texas via Mexico. Muhl constructed a commercial ice machine of his own design using ether rather than ammonia as the refrigerant to get around Carré's patent.
Manufactured ice was soon preferred by homemakers and plants to make ice spread quickly, especially in the South. It was colder, clearer, and cleaner than natural ice and did not contain fish, tadpoles, weeds, or insects as pond-harvested ice often did.
By the end of the 19th century, natural ice had largely disappeared from the nation's iceboxes and rare was the city or town that did not boast at least one ice house with commercial ice-making machinery.
The Icebox
The icebox had very humble beginnings as a way to keep butter from spoiling.
The patent for this early icebox (today we would call it an ice chest or cooler) was granted to a Maryland farmer and dairyman named Thomas Moore in 1803. Mr. Moore, like many of his generation, including Thomas Jefferson, was a jack of many trades, including inventor, surveyor, engineer, and businessman.
He invented his icebox out of necessity to keep his butter from spoiling while being transported to market in Baltimore.
His idea was simple. Put a tin box full of butter inside a larger cedar box filled with ice, and wrap rabbit fur around the whole thing to insulate it. (Fortunately for the rabbit population of rural Maryland, better insulation materials were soon discovered.)
By the 1840s, iceboxes were being manufactured by local carpenters in a variety of sizes and shapes.
After the American Civil War ended in 1865, they began to be mass-produced in factories by companies such as Champion, White Clad, and Gibson.
Many box-makers were local carpenters or cabinetmakers associated with an ice house that sold inexpensive home iceboxes as a way of growing the market for ice.
Iceboxes had hollow walls that were stuffed with various insulating materials such as cork, sawdust, straw, even seaweed.
They were commonly made of oak or a local hardwood for ease of construction and because they were considered furniture. Most were well-finished with handsome brass or nickel-plated steel hardware.
A tin- or zinc-lined compartment at the top of the box held a large block of ice. Cold sir circulated downward to keep food cool.
The small compartment just below the ice chamber, always the coldest part of the box, stored milk. Uncooked meat occupied the other lower compartment. Fresh vegetables and fruits that did not require very cold temperatures were kept on the top shelf.
While a boon to food safety, iceboxes had definite drawbacks.
Opening the door to the icebox let in warm room air that hastened melting, so door-opening was carefully rationed. Children were usually banned from using the appliance unless under direct parental supervision.
Early models were not easy to keep clean.
A zinc or tin lining helped but in the early days of the ice industry when ice was harvested from ponds and lakes, it often contained vegetation, natural sediment, even dead fish and tadpoles, which made a mess.
Rarer but much more annoying, the ice compartment might be infested with midges or caterpillars that were frozen in the ice but revived once the ice melted.
Later versions featured more sanitary porcelain steel liners rather than zinc and were cooled by manufactured ice from ice plants. It was free of sediment and aquatic creatures, making upkeep of the icebox much easier.
Ornate Ice Box
An ornate, elaborately carved icebox from the late 1880's, probably made by a local cabinetmaker. Boxes like these, in good condition, sell for upwards of $5,000 at antique auctions. Even ordinary iceboxes common fetch prices of $1,500 and more.Still, food odors could permeate the wood inside the box and sometimes even migrated into the insulation. Once this happened the icebox was ruined and simply had to be discarded – there was no cure.
The ease with which wood retained food odors was one of the primary reasons for the growing preference for porcelain-on-steel iceboxes by the turn of the 20th century.
As the ice melted, water accumulated in a drip tray that had to be emptied at least once a day. Sometimes this was done by the iceman when he loaded fresh ice but more often was simply one of many kitchen chores to be performed by homemakers.
Premium models featured a spigot through which the drip tray emptied into a bucket, and some later versions discharged the meltwater outside using a pipe or hose through a wall.
The Iceman Delivereth[4]
Ice was delivered every two or three days in up to 50 and even 100 lb. blocks (a cubic foot of ice weighs 57 lbs.) by the leather-aproned iceman in his horse-drawn insulated ice wagon.
An ice card placed in a front window indicated the amount of ice wanted that day.
It was hard work and not particularly well rewarded.
By the end of a busy day, an iceman might carry as much as two tons of ice into houses and apartments up as many as five flights of stairs.
Red Grange, the famous football star in the 1920s known as the "Galloping Ghost" worked as an iceman in the offseason to stay in shape.
During summer months, urban areas like New York City used ice not just to keep food fresh, but to cool buildings. According to one contemporary source,[5]
"Madison Square Garden fed several tons of ice per event into cooling systems that relied on a maze of ductwork, ice blocks, and fans. Even mortuaries relied on ice before electric refrigeration. Manhattan and Brooklyn alone melted their way through at least 1.3 million tons of ice per year.
Ice made in ice plants was what is called "hard ice," frozen to a very cold temperature. It could last in a well-insulated icebox for up to a week.
Hard ice is still available where iceboxes are in common use, such as in Amish communities But, most commercial ice available today is the warmer "soft ice", frozen to just below the freezing point of water – it melts quickly. As anyone who has dragged an ice-filled cooler to a Big Red game soon finds out.
The iceman was usually an independent contractor who bought standard 320 lb. ice blocks from an ice house, sawed them into smaller blocks to fit home iceboxes, and sold them to an established route of customers.
For a day of hard labor, he made between $2.00 and $3.20 per ton of ice delivered. There was often considerable wastage from melting, especially in Summer, so a ton of ice purchased seldom resulted in a ton of ice delivered.
At the end of the Civil War in 1865, two of three households in Boston had iceboxes, and other American cities were quickly catching up. A survey just after the turn of the 20th century found that 81% of New York City households owned or at least had access to an icebox.
Victorian Small Kitchen Appliances
If you think the number and variety of small appliances in a modern kitchen is a unique feature of our century, you'd be wrong. The Victorians had as many if not more kitchen gadgets than we have now.
Victorians were irredeemable tinkerers. If there was a need, Victorians tried to figure out a device to take care of it. Which goes a long way to explaining the abundance of the labor-saving small appliances available for a Victorian kitchen.
Need to chop veggies for dinner or sqeeze juisce from fresh orages for breakfast, the Victorians had fruit presess and food processors to do just that. They did not work like our juicers and food processors because the Victorians did not have electricity. But it did the job of juicing, chopping, dicing, and mincing very well and with minimal effort.
Want to bake cookies or a cake, the Victorians had a device that blended all of the ingredients to make a smooth batter in just a few moments.
Intend to poach an egg, the Victorian had an egg cooker that would do as quickly as that electric gizmo you use.
In fact, there is probably nothing in your kitchen that the Victorians did not have in some form or another except the microwave and dishwasher. Blenders, mixers, juicers, mincers, grinders, toasters, coffee mills; they had all these. And they had appliances you probably don't have. Where, for example, is your compact butter churn to whip up a nice batch of farm fresh butter before breakfast? Don't have one? Uh-huh! Told you!
KitchenAid, Hamilton Beach, and Sunbeam are the familiar names in small appliances. For the Victorians it was commpanies like Landers, Frary & Clark of New Britain, Connecticut founded by George M. Landers and Josiah Dewey in 1842.
Landers, Frary & Clark manufactured products to make life easier for the Victorian housewife. Food scales, coffee grinders, cake mixers, bread makers, coffee pots, and percolators along with tableware of every description were all in continual production until the company ceased business in the 1920s.
Many of Landers' original patents and the "Universal" brand name were purchased from GE in 1984 by Universal Housewares, Inc. Some of the Victorian-era Landers appliances are available new from Universal as well as some more recent designs the original Landers company would have never imagined – the Wheatgrass Juicer, for example. Wheatgrass in Victorian times was eaten by cows, not people. The appliances are no longer made in New Britain, however. Most are manufactured in China.
Available today from a variety of retailers are at least two versions of the Universal cast iron coffee mill: gourmet and regular; pre-seasoned cast iron Hollowware including a variety of dutch ovens and skillets, several styles of meat grinder, a nut mill, apple peeler/corer, and a food strainer (and tomato saucer).
Landers Gourmet Coffee Mill
Pre-ground coffee was available during Victorian times, but homemakers preferred to grid their own for fresher flavor and because factory-ground coffee was often adulterated.
In consequence, nearly every household owned a hand-cranked coffee mill.
Grinding coffee took almost no time at all. Hand-cranking was smooth and virtually effortless and very satisfying. And, it was quiet. No piercing shriek to disturb the pre-breakfast calm like the horrid little electric grinders we use today.
Landers' Universal® Mixer/Blender
Kitchen-Aid® may have marketed the first electric countertop mixer in 1919, but many manual mixers in a Victorian kitchen did the same job easily and efficiently without electricity.
The mixer illustrated is the "Home Cake Maker" identical to one that my grandmother owned and used regularly.
Sold by Landers, Frary & Clark under the Universal
brand name, it predated the Kitchen-Aid mixer by almost three decades.
It did not knead bread dough, however. For that task, a separate dough kneader was required. There were several.
Starrett "Hasher" Food Processor
Contrary to what you may have been told, Cuisinart did not invent the food processor.
It was invented by Leroy S. Starrett of Massachusetts and patented in 1865. He called it the "Hasher".
The machine rotated its container a few degrees at a time using a ratchet while a knife blade operated by a beam and crank mechanism moved up and down to chop the contents. The longer it was operated, the more finely chopped the result.
It was made in two sizes, one with an 8" bowl and the second with a 10" bowl. The entire mechanism was mounted to a wooden base to ensure that all of its various parts were kept aligned.
It was advertised as "[o]ne of the most useful and greatest labor-saving inventions." No homemaker, according to the ads, could "afford to be without one, while for hotels, restaurants, boarding houses and bakeries they are absolutely indispensable."
Starrett claimed that the device reduced the time to make a batch of mincemeat from three hours to 15 minutes. Even a child of six, according to the company, could do it in "5 to 15 minutes with the greatest ease."
Starrett went on to have a storied career. He patented the combination square for machinists in 1978. The tool is now standard equipment in every machinist's toolbox and has been for over a century.
He founded L. S. Starrett Company in 1880 to manufacture the square and other measurement and layout tools, most of which he invented.
The company is now a multi-million dollar global business, publically traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Starrett's precision products are generally considered as the standard against which all other measurement tools are compared.
Universal® Food Choppper
The food Chopper was first sold by Landers, Frary & Clark under its Universal® brand in 1897, and was so popular that the company was still making it over sixty years later.
Nearly every Victorian household owned at least one, so vintage choppers in good condition are fairly easy to find.
Starrett's "Hasher" was a food chopper. The Lander's "chopper," despite its name, was more properly a grinder or mincer.
But even those terms do not completely describe the range of the device.
Clamped to the edge of a table or countertop, it made bread crumbs our of dry bread scraps, nut butter out of whole nuts of any kind; hash in great varieties, and ground beef, pork, or lamb out of leftovers.
It even pureed fruits and vegetables for feeding baby (a boon to new parents until Gerber introduced its factory-pureed baby food in 1927).
The company claimed that leftovers "could be turned into hashes and casseroles with ease..."
The device worked by feeding whatever was placed in its hopper to a hand-cranked auger that forced the ingredients through a "knife" to produce the desired results. Various grinder knives were available, the most commmon were a dicer, mincer, bread crumber, and nut-butter maker.
Victorian hoemakers were constantaly finding new ways to use the chopper and new dishes to make with it.
Butter Churn
This Made-in-France butter churn whipped up a batch of farm fresh butter from heavy cream is about five minutes.The No. 2 chopper was the most popular size with homemakers beating the No. 1 by no more than a whisker. The larger No. 3. was intended for heavy-duty institutional and commercial use. Nos. 00 and 0 were smaller, specialized mincers.
Cast in iron with a nickel plating, many of these rugged appliances survive and are still in regular use.
See the chopper in use at Craft Revue.
Butter Churn
Kids getting rambunctious and fidgety? Put them to work making butter.
No running out of butter with this handy table-top French butter churn in the cupboard.
Add chilled heavy cream and salt (if desired). Turn the crank until butter forms: 5 to 10 minutes. Makes about 2 lbs. of fresh, creamery butter.
Pour off any leftover buttermilk and save, great for baking. Unscrew the churn from the jar and screw on the cap.
Store in the icebox until needed for pancakes, French toast, etc.
Bread Mixer & Kneader
Universal Bread Machine
Image Credit: Rubylane.com
Landers, Frary & Clark No. 8 Universal Bread Maker with dough hook.Commpany advertising claimed that it reduced 20-30 minutes of hand kneading to amere three minutes.
The instructions called for pouring the mix's liquid in first, the adding the flour all at once. Then
"… turn the crank for three minutes or until the dough is rolled around the kneading rod in a smooth compact ball."
The machine came with a booklet of recipes for making various kind of bread using the Bread Maker.
Griswold Fruit & Lard Press
Manufactured by the Griswold Manufacturing Co. in Erie, Pennsylvania, the cast-iron Fruit and Lard press in various sizes from 1 to 6 quarts was used to render lard and to extract juice from fruits and vegetables.
Griswold Fruit & Lard Press
Griswold No. 1 two-quart fruit and lard press.Griswold Manufacturing still has a world-wide reputation for high-quality cast-iron cookware and kitchen appliances.
It was the mmanufacturer of the cookware sold under the Puritan® and Merit® in-house brands by Sears & Roebuck.
Today, Griswold pieces are collectors' items selling for up to $450.00 for a single skillet in good condition and a complete set of matching pans for $2,500.
The distinctive Griswold cross & double-circle logo embossed on every Griswold product is a widely recognized assurance of faultless manufacturing. An enameled cast-iron Griswold frying plan made circa 1956 is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art
The company's stove-top waffle iron was probably its most popular appliance, but the fruit and lard press was not far behind.
Lard was the preferred cooking fat in America until the growing concern over saturated fats banned it from most kitchens beginning in the 1960s.
In cities it was commonly bought in waxed-paper-wrapped bricks from the neighborhood grocer. But, being thrifty, most households also extracted the additional lard that might be available from pork scraps.
The pork was heated until the lard liquified. The scraps were then placed in the press and the crank turned until the pork had released avery last dromp of lard through a perforated plate then out a spout at the bottom of the press.
Presses were also used to extract juice from fruits and vegetables. Apples, grapes, peaches and, when available, oranges, limes, and lemons were no match for the crushing power of a Griswold press.
Our experience is that it extracts fruit juice as well as most modern electric juicers, with a lot less noise.
Before the invention of Kool-Aid® in 1928 and the widespred popularity of carbonated drinks like Coca-Cola®, fruit juice was the preferred soft drink for adults and children alike. In summer, as fruit ripened, a lot of juice was pressed, refrigerated in the ice box, and consumed to offset the heat of the season.
Victorian Food: Preservation, Safety, and Scandals
The Victorians developed almost all of the methods of commercial food preservation still in use today, and this development changed kitchen work dramatically, as it did our concept of how to design and organized a kitchen.
Technologies such as indoor plumbing, the kitchen stove, and the icebox had an enormous influence on kitchen work and on how kitchens were designed and organized, but so did advances in food preservation that permitted food to be stored for days and … (Continues)
Footnotes:
Rev. 11/03/23