ISSUE 77, BEGINNINGS, Part 3: The Coming of the Cook Stove
The Coming of the Cook Stove
We’ve all heard of Benjamin Franklin’s invention of a stove. Perhaps you presumed that the device he created was intended for cooking. No—it was a heating apparatus, a metal lined fireplace that consumed fuel more efficiently that an open fireplace and projected heat into rooms. The metal cook stove did not emerge until the 1830s in the United States, and when it did it caused a seismic change in home cookery.
For centuries home cooks had prepared meals in hearths using embers and cast iron cooking vessels—skillets, Dutch ovens, spiders—and over hearth fires with cauldrons and jacks that operated as rotisseries. Because of the ways hearth fires waxed and waned, temperature control was approximate. Frying risked scorching. Boiling could be relied on more than baking, in which underbaking or overbaking took place all too commonly.
Some great houses in North America had brick stoves on the French or English big house model with compartmentalized brick fireboxes. If one used charcoal, a good deal of temperature control could be attained. Monticello’s brick French “stew stove” unearthed in the Granger/Hemings kitchen excavations by Frasier Nieman Jr. exemplifies the exceptional sort of the kitchen technology that enable elite fine dining. The degree of control available to the cooks at Monticello would not come into the hands of the American public until the mid-1830s.
With great rapidity and force in the 1830s inventors introduced cook stoves for the dual purposes of heating and cooking. The best of these—those of Eliphalet Nott of Schenectady New York, and S. Pierce’s “Kitchen Range”—were coal rather than wood fired. The internal direction of heat enabled fine control of certain of the cooktop openings—sufficient to maintain steady low heat requisite for sauces and emulsions, for butter poaching fish, or simmering stock for hours. Yet the greatest recommendation for the new stoves of the 1830s was that their venting, shielding, and heat control. Customers never experience the great affliction of stoves since the days of Franklin: they often made rooms too hot and their iron bodies would not abate that heat quickly.
One might think that the benefits of the cook stove—control, fuel efficiency, effectiveness in heating—would have won it immediate and universal approbation. But there were liabilities. As Prof. R. Hare noted in the March 1, 1839 issue of The Journal of the Franklin Institute, “Stoves are objectionable when they are used for cooking, on account of the annoying fumes . . . not being generally carried up the chimney” 145. In hearthside cookery all the fumes, smoke, and odors escaped up the flue of the fireplace. In many free standing stoves only the fire box had an exhaust pipe, and no hood stood above the cooktop to vent odors. Yet there was one sector of the consumer public that embraced the stoves, liabilities and all—galley cooks on ships. The safety of a metal enclosed cooking and heating fire made it necessary.
The 1840s cemented the cook stove in the American household. Poems were written about it, meditations on the reeducation of older cooks appeared in newspapers, and actual changes occurred in American cookery. The most consequential? Not the sudden wholesale embrace of French sauces. Rather it was in the cooking of sugar. Sugar had become cheap in 1825, now the cook stove permitted the kind of temperature precision that enabled candy-making, the creation of icings and caramel. The berry pie became something doable for even average cooks. It is no great mystery why Eleanor Parkinson published her landmark The Complete Confectioner (Philadelphia) in 1846. It was the first decade when the middling householder had the technology to be a capable confectioner.