Historic Kitchens vs. Modern Kitchens

in this episode today we're looking at the differences between a kitchen like this an 18th century kitchen and a modern kitchen today thanks for joining us [Music] so there are four or five sort of major components to a kitchen at least a kitchen we think of today probably the main one is the heating part the stove the oven let's go take a look at our stove or oven or our hearth so here's the hearth that we've got here in the kitchen set and this hearth is actually based on a german hearth at the frontier culture museum in staunton virginia they've got a german house there and there's a heart very similar to this it's a little bit lower but that's what we base this particular hearth on this hearth has a uh a brick firebrick cooking surface and we've got an oven that's built into the wall here and this is just like this is the stove top of the 21st century now of course we have to cook with wood or possibly at times charcoal but those are our only cooking fuels that we can use of course today we're using gas or electricity almost all the time and that's one of the giant differences here between the 18th century and the 21st century cooking over a fire cooking with either charcoal which is a little bit easier or wood it's a constant battle to keep a regular heat going on underneath your cooking surface so many times we want to have this very controllable heat surface and we don't have that in the 18th century we've got to be fussing with this continuously as opposed to just turning a knob and setting it to three or taking a look at your flame and getting just the right temperature very very difficult in the 18th century and you oh i mean it is you just can't leave something alone you have to be messing with it all the time and over here we've got the oven and we have actually a real similar problem with an oven i mean if you go and use your oven today you you set it to you know 350 degrees or whatever the the equivalent is where you're at you just set that knob and it takes care of the whole thing right sometimes you might even have a timer you can say yes cook it exactly for exactly one hour and one of the giant differences between an 18th century oven and that is that in an 18th century oven you stoke your oven full of wood and you spend maybe an hour two maybe even three hours getting your oven up to temperature when you think it's the right temperature you pull all that fuel out and you set it aside and you put the thing you want to cook in there you close the door and what's happening it's not keeping the same temperature but the temperature is slowly declining over time and it totally depends on your oven as to exactly how quickly that happens and that is a real battle and one of the differences between baking in the 18th century and modern it completely changes what's going on your starting temperature and your ending temperature so there's a big difference in baking between the 18th and 21st century the other thing that's going on here is we've built this i built this as a german hearth on purpose up high at this at this level basically to make it very easy both it's authentic but it's also a lot easier to do an episode of cooking episode with video so i can cook right here at this height and you can see it very easily but if you look at many of our other videos where we are on site at other 18th century kitchens or style kitchens you'll find that almost all of them have their hearth on the ground you have to lean all the way down and cook on the floor basically it's very difficult to shoot a video like that and it's no easier to do your cooking like that either it's very very difficult and you can see from some of our other videos how much trouble it is to do that i also want to point out the smoke hood that we've got here in the 18th century of course we're burning wood we're burning it inside and we have this constant battle of smoke in the kitchen and you might think that from the videos that we don't have any problem with having smoke in the kitchen but contrary to that we have smoke problems all the time unless the draft is just right the door is open the windows open just right the room fills with smoke and it's also true not only in this kitchen set but in other situations other 18th century kitchens have that same sort of problem you have to have a lot of draft to keep smoke out of the room and they have the same kind of problem in the 18th century some kitchens probably benefited from just the right chimney just the right draft they didn't have smoke problems but i'm imagining the majority of them did have smoke problems and that's another one of the great things about a modern kitchen is that the fuels we use electricity especially but gas also they don't the the the fuels don't leave a taste in the food itself uh in the 18th century you're always having this wood smoke flavor going into your food and you might think that's great for one or two dishes but every single thing you eat it gets boring after a while and you'll do see references to cooks in the 18th century trying to keep that smoky flavor out of their food that's another battle from the 18th century so next on the tour here is uh what are we gonna do for cabinetry and shelving and storage and there are two different kinds of storage maybe three different kinds of storage that that we would think about both storage of equipment and then storage of food itself so storage of equipment in the 18th century kitchen you know they probably didn't have as much equipment lying around as we do unless it was a very affluent kitchen most of the kitchens uh that you see in pictures no they tend to be affluent kitchens so they tend to be fairly well equipped but i would imagine most 18th century kitchens have not that many cooking implements lying around and you don't in the in the picture see that much storage of this equipment many things are hanging on the wall um and you do see a few shelves like the shelf behind me and a few kind of cabinets that you see like this nothing like the cabinets that we have today of course you know our our kitchens are lined with cabinets that are both full of food we use them like pantries and full of equipment and but you can see here a um the the kinds of things that we have in our uh cabinet here if you look at most of these you'll see i've got a lot of them turned upside down and that's another one of the major differences i hope there's a difference here so many of these 18th century kitchens they're overrun with rodents there's always where there's food in the 18th century they have pest problems rodents and other kinds of you know insect problems in their kitchen so many times you'll see all the bowls and things turned upside down because that way if if rodents are running around your things they don't get inside of them and then you know mess them up okay so if they're upside down that doesn't seem to happen so much and here's the other thing you don't see in these 18th century kitchens is there's nothing like a refrigerator you do find at times in the 18th century for food storage especially cold food storage you'll find things in a cellar which we don't see very many pictures of but they definitely stored some of their food things down in the cellar where it was cooler and hopefully drier they also had spring houses where they would put especially dairy kinds of things to keep them cool but they just didn't have anything like a refrigerator most of the time when you see food stored in an 18th century kitchen hey it's just hanging up on the wall maybe it's getting smoked up in the chimney or it's actually sometimes getting smoked up just in the upper parts of the kitchen you'll see some pictures with that where they might store cheeses or bread or even meat in their kitchen and they well i don't know how it exactly turned out but that was one of the only ways they had to really store food so it's basically right out there in the open and everything else you had to eat it up right away or it was going to go bad within a day or so another one of these major components are work surfaces in the 18th century kitchen and you know most of the time we've got islands in the middle of our kitchen we've got all this countertop space you really don't find too much of that in the 18th century we do have a little bit of countertop space and we've got the large working surface the big kitchen table that's in the middle of the of the kitchen now this work surface is actually made specifically for making videos so it's a little bit higher uh so that you can you can see what we're doing here a little bit better but in most of these 18th century kitchens you do see a fairly large and low table in the middle to do all that cooking work uh in in your kitchen so what's what's really missing here i mean if you think about your kitchen at home it's like okay we don't have a refrigerator that's right but we do have a cooking surface or a cooking surface we do have a working surface we do have some storage of things but the big thing that's missing in this 18th century kitchen is where's the sink where's the water and that is one of these major advantages that we have over these uh folks that are in the 18th century they have no water except what they bring in in pails and buckets and no real place to get rid of it so doing the dishes or just having water to work with is much more difficult in the 18th century if you think about it we have this tremendous advantage of not only having water but water under pressure at both hot and cold and not only that but the water goes away and we have the sink and it's got a drain and it all goes away immediately they have none of that in the 18th century they might at times have possibly a pump on the inside so they can just get regular cold water and hand pump it into a situation very rarely do you see that it's fairly rare but that's one of these things doing the dishes in the 18th century was so much more difficult you can imagine uh bringing in the water by hand heating it up over the fire so you have it at least you know somewhat tempered uh tepid then it's always getting cold again you're having to fight that and getting the dishes done must have been just just so uh difficult and i i can't even imagine it myself when we cook in here we make a mountain of dishes and then i have to take them all inside to my house and and wash them up the regular way because i don't want to have to you know wash dishes in the 18th century method and we do have a video uh talking a little bit about cleaning up and and doing uh the dishes in the 18th century much much more difficult and another one of these advantages that we might not recognize is just simply having artificial light in our kitchens in the 18th century you had the the light from the fire and you had the light from the windows probably an open door just so you could get a draft and not fill your room with smoke and if you're cooking early in the morning which you know happened all the time before the sun came up all you had was a little bit of candlelight or a simple oil lamp to light your way around the kitchen it is so difficult to cook in the dark and you know that they had so much difficulty with that and today we just flip on the light so there you have this a quick tour of 18th century kitchen and sort of comparing it to a modern kitchen it really is amazing all the advantages we have today versus what they had in the 18th century if you ever get a chance to take a class and use an 18th century kitchen i highly recommend it you'll certainly go home with new respect for what you have available to you each and every day you're in your kitchen and i want to thank you for coming along on this little journey through the kitchen here and all the amazing support you give us watching our videos uh commenting on them thumbs ups when you share our videos really i want to thank you for that there are also folks that support us monetarily through patreon or going to our website purchasing items thank you so much for all your amazing support and thanks for coming along and experiencing this little tour as we tour this 18th century kitchen thanks for joining us today

Channel: Townsends

Views: 882,974

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, kitchen, historical kitchen, cooking, modern kitchen, dishes, oven, stove

Id: axFFUdQdyJg

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Reminds me of that American Dad episode where Stan had the old kitchen and Francine had the modern one.