Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 160, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1913 — IN THE OLD-TIME KITCHEN [ARTICLE]

IN THE OLD-TIME KITCHEN

Cooking Areas Then Were Large and Equipped With Queer Culinary Contrivances. The kitchens of olden times seem to .have been of extraordinary size, judging ' from the investigation recently made by an English historical society, remarks Harper’s Weekly. At Hurstmonceux, for example, there was a kitchen 28 feet high, with three huge fireplaces and a bakehouse with an oven 14 feet in diameter. There is an old Welsh kitchen near Llandudno, dating from the fifteenth century, which has many primitive culinary contrivances, now obsolete or superseded by modern devices. Among these curious old devices may be mentioned a meat jack with a fly wheel, a steel toasting stand and a fan bellows. At Battle Abbey there is a curious old kitchen containing much of interest to the antiquary and a kitchen at St. Mary’s hall, Coventry, is remarkable for the famous “knaves’ post,” •to which, it appears, refractory scullions were temporarily atached by way of punishment. There is a mediaeval kitchen at Westminster abbey, although little remains by which to identify it aside from the rubble flooring, the buttery hatch and an adjoining cellar. Hampton court palace shows its great kitchen,” with vaulted roof and sets of antlers on its walls. Englishmen of other days full recognized the advantages of a large kitchen. There is extant an order, dated April 19, 1206, wherein Hugh de Nevill is commanded to have the king’s kitchen at Clarendon roofed with shingles and to cause two new kitchens to be erected,.one at Marlborough and the other at Ludgershall, in which “to dress” the royal dinners. In thiß order.it is stated that “it is particularly directed that each kitchen shall be provided with a furnace sufficiently large to roast two or three oxen.”