Always pioneers in the use of gas, English inventors had been experimenting with cooking by gas as early as the 1830s, but it took the maturing of the gas lighting industry to extend the notion to cooking in America. The Promise of New FuelsĪs the Age of Invention waxed in the 1880s and ’90s, stove manufacturers began a search for heat sources beyond wood and coal, and an unlikely combination of forces led them to gas. In pre-1830s houses, where there might be only a large central chimney and open cooking hearth, whole new kitchen ells were often built just to accommodate the radically different range. While stoves made for cooking as well as heating might be retrofitted to exhaust out an existing hearth and flue, in the best situations they were connected by an umbilical metal stove pipe to a new kind of chimney that was smaller in flue diameter to enhance the draw for the stove.
Whatever their use, old stoves were designed to burn wood, but after the Civil War, coal-burning designs came on the scene. Early metal stoves imported in large numbers from Holland and England came in a variety of boxy designs, but by the 1840s a number of basic stove types-used for laundry, heating, and cooking-had been worked out and were being manufactured widely in America.Ĭastle Tucker in Wicasset, Maine, is an 1807 museum house preserved to show its appearance in the late 19th century, when even an upscale kitchen was little more than a wood-burning cookstove garnished by a few sticks of functional furniture. Cast iron could take the repeated temperature swings of hot and cold, and it was an ideal medium for casting into complex, prefabricated parts, as well as for decorative surface ornament. The growth of American coal and iron mining in the 1820s made cast iron the wonder material of the 19th century and led to a prolific industry in making stoves for cooking as well as heating.
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Cast iron seems to have appeared in later versions for tops and firebox doors, and the same kitchen might also include another Rumford innovation: an iron drum with a door that was built into the hearth masonry and called the Rumford Roaster. The breakthrough idea was a flat top perforated by round ports of different sizes that opened to the fire below, into which the cook would lower Rumford-designed pots and pans, similar to the operation of some institutional ranges of today. Though sometimes connected to the chimney mass, such ranges might also be given their own space. Note the eponymous Rumford Roaster beside the hearth.Ī kitchen equipped according to Rumford’s ideas was dominated by a large range built of brick masonry. Stunningly advanced for 1807, the centerpiece of the Rundlet-May House kitchen in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a Rumford range-a brick firebox with iron top (now gone) and registers to control heat. Better known today as the inventor of the Thermos Bottle and the fireplace that bears his name, Rumford’s particular genius in the kitchen was to take the cooking fire out of the open hearth and put it in a box. Rumford was an engineering pioneer who made the first scientific studies of heat transfer while perfecting methods for boring cannons. Credit goes to Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford, who designed the earliest such cooking devices to scientifically control heat as early as the 1790s. The kitchen of the 1907 Evans House in California is dominated by a 1926 Smoothtop gas range, promoted for its compact cooking surface “that makes possible smaller kitchens.” The two-tone color and oven heat regulators were other breakthroughs for the era.įrom a cooking perspective, the ingredients of the modern kitchen came together only about 200 years ago with the first appearance of a true range-that is, a flat-topped heat source combined with an oven. In fact, one way to understand kitchens of the past, and gain design ideas for an old-house kitchen today, is to examine the development of this remarkable appliance through its changing fuels, construction, and design. In old-house kitchens, ranges are central not only to their function but to their historical ambiance as well. Nonetheless, the kitchen as we know it today has been the heart of the modern house for nearly 150 years, and all through this time the heart of the modern kitchen has been the cookstove or range.
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