What's In Early American Kitchens? - Colonial Cookware

[Music] cookware in the 18th century is so different than cookware that we have today it's made out of different things it's designed differently we're going to be talking about 18th century cookware how it's different from cookware today we've got this wonderful guest here michael dragoo who's been on the channel many many times and he loves collecting 18th century cookware so he's brought much of his collection in here thank you michael for bringing all this wonderful stuff in what are we starting out with so we're going to start today with trammels trammels would have held the bulge pots and all the other cooking implements that were used in all three of these cases there would have been a lug pole about yeah big in diameter green wood and it would have been put up and behind in front of the fireplace there are smaller versions of all of these and they would have been used on a crane you've seen those in in fireplaces they're hinged on one side or the other a triangular manner and you can position your your vessel over whatever fire source you've got interesting thing about these particular pieces that you've got here is that they're huge these things are big we got to think about what's going on with cooking in the 18th century their hearts were giant we think of little fireplaces and houses today and they're only you know maybe this high a fireplace in the 18th century might have its hearth at my head height of the the mantle piece so they're giant and we we might have very large outdoor cooking things too right so we need big dremels and s-hooks so uh one of the things we carry is just a simple small s hook that doesn't it's not very useful when you've got a giant pot or a huge you know tall fireplace so there's a lot of different things that we use to you know keep things up off the fire in the 18th century we don't need those much today do we this is a hook and chain it's the most a universal you would bring it around the the lug pole and then bring it through your your bail or hook it directly to the bale it could hang more than one vessel at a time the next one is a sawtooth this would have been either in a summer kitchen or in a barn or outside if you're doing if you're reducing animal of fats or you're making apple butter or something where you've got a large pot and you need a lot of a lot of space and then you're adjusting by just by moving this up or down [Music] and as your fire is going you're wanting to sometimes simmer or boil so as things happen in the pot you're just wanting to without having to change the fire source you're removing you're bringing the pot away from the fire source a little bit yeah you need a lot of adjustability in the 18th century because you are working with a wood fire and it's going up and down in heat all the time so you have to have this very adjustable way to move your pots up and i need help my largest bulge putt is probably five or six gallon and i can't lift it with one hand and adjust this with my other two hands i need to help then they needed help in the kitchen and the third one is called a lug and hole this is a very primitive one it's um i i would call it farm forged someone needed one bad enough and they didn't care what it looked like it's been roughly punched it's been roughly put together with several pieces but the gist of it is very much like the sawtooth this thing is going up and down you're pulling this out and you're raising your lowering and you're popping in a hole whatever height it's the easiest one for me to work with and when i'm on location i bring these others to show but i use this one this is the easiest for me some of the things that we're going to be looking at today are cast pieces cast iron these are forged so blacksmith is going to be making these and we can see wonderful welds that these were put together they didn't have one long strip of metal it was exactly the right length so they had to weld this thing together and then punch the holes a lot of work even though it seems like a pretty crude piece and they're they're they're not going to the local big box store and buying pieces of iron they're re-manufacturing things if something's broken and can't be repaired it turns into something else i we're not i didn't bring it today we're talking about that type of thing but i've got a chopper that used to be a wood file um the iron file got dull they didn't have a way to sharpen it and so they turned it into something else they needed worse and and you can imagine that that this piece may have come from something on a wagon or something this these pieces may have been from something else the guy needed a trammel and he created one this one's a great example this particular trammel in that even the metal they used is different than what we would do today any blacksmith today is just going to grab a nice piece of mild steel and work it and it's really this works like butter compared to the steel there or the iron they were working with in the 18th century this is wrought iron and you can almost see it it's like a grain like wood but wonderful uh to see these old pieces made out of the metal they used in the 18th century if you're interested in wrought iron and how it works and how it's different i had a great interview with jamie tyree and it's a great one to reference for what how wrought iron really works and how it's different trivets yeah trivets many sizes many shapes virtually the same usage you're trying to keep your vessel off the fire in this case we're not hanging from above we're supporting from below we're gonna bring our coals or a fire source our heat source into a front and we're going to put use a variety of things to keep a variety of differently shaped vessels off the fire there are also trivets that aren't necessarily for keeping things up off the fire but just off of up off of hot surfaces so if we're using a dutch oven and we want to bake a pie in it then we need something to take our pie plan and bring it up off the bottom of that or else it'll burn our pie in the bottom so we always use a nice small trivet like this one that goes underneath our pie pan just holds it up off the surface and gives us like convection heat all the way around without burning the bottom so we've got you know low trivets we got high trivets you might have several different ones uh for kind of heat sources when i'm using my brazier sometimes i want it higher than the baser you you can use these a variety of different ways and these are triangular because in a round pot it's always you can always find a center we've got grid irons here and similar pieces how do we cook we're either on the fire we can use them as a trivet or we can cook meat right on the fire you've got a lot of different designs here we've got a rotating one so obviously this is probably used a lot more for cooking meat right on the fire so you can rotate it around get an even cook plus if your radiant heat is here you're right and you've got a vessel here you're turning it so it's evenly exactly once again it's very flexible these two are good examples of a variation so this one is something you'd find in the household it's got rigid handles and everything where you've got lots of space in one that that works and you you can store it but if you're traveling this is a this is a replica of the george washington grill so we have in the museums his whole cooking outfit and you can see it folds up it does exactly what that one does except we can put it into a small space when i look at period pieces or older pieces uh i i love when we find the wear and tear on one and we can see the age in it this one's fun because it you know it's done a lot of rusting over the years you know it's not new uh we have a lot of pitting on it so we know it's an older piece and how it would be constructed they wouldn't they don't construct things the same way today as they constructed them in the 18th century this isn't a bolt this is a rivet that was welded into place we can see the individual welds and how they got these these bars to stay in place today you would use um you would use a welder that is like us you know an electric welder or a gas welder in the 18th century they had this on the forge had to heat these two things up to white hot metal and you know hammer them together and that's hard to do griddles could come once again in any shape and any size we've got a couple of them this is a really old griddle and this is a little newer this one is going to sit on a trivet or something rocks brick something holding it off the fire and this one has its own legs but you can also hang it this one reminds me of uh how they would cook you know griddle cakes oat cakes in say scotland uh this piece is i am really it's hard to say it's it's old enough that it's you know so rusty that's it's hard to understand exactly how it was made but i believe it's probably cast iron cast like they like they cook they're like they cast fire backs in the 18th century uh although the handle looks like it might be welded on but i think this is just so that had extra strength here this these little bosses but this is an incredible piece i love this one nothing runny i'll take it that's something with more bodies right right but you know pancakes and all those things you can cook right on these uh this one we're starting to get a little ridge to it yeah it's an earlier one it's these they were coming up with these things um up through victorian times i probably in the 1910s i could have purchased one but this is just the way it's constructed is a little older um just the way they forge these together in the simple castings they aren't complex casting so that's kind of how you date these things it's a drawn piece of iron instead of a piece of wire and this time period they don't have steel wire they're drying they're taking a piece of iron and they're heating it and they're drying it out wafer irons waffle iron everything from under under the sun any shape any floral or design pattern these can be communion wafers they could be just any kind of wafer but a wafer is paper thin i've done these on demonstrations a couple years now um and i get three out of every five or six they are easy to burn you're buttering it each time you're putting a little bit of stuff in you're pressing it together you're heating both sides hot and neck and then you're just for a short period of time when it starts to look brown the outside you pop it out and you've got a nice wafer this is a waffle iron and it's a totally different item right so instead of a really thin crisp little cookie thing this is going to make a waffle like we think of waffles today this one's a beautiful handmade waffle iron a lot of these would have cast pieces this is a cast on forged handles these are little cast pieces on forged handles this is actually forged all the way uh so it's kind of a rare piece in that usually you would actually see this as a cast piece even the waffle irons but this one somebody went to went to the effort to make a forged one which is pretty neat i think they were just showing off their skill it's i would still call it farm forged it's not a professional person doing it but someone had enough talent to take a piece of iron and shape it accordingly and then they're rolling this up into as close to circle as they can they're taking this piece and gouging and then cutting it or forming it to fit there's a handle attached this one has one or two attachments for its handle it's in empty parts and it's got a what's going to rivet this is all it's not like something i can unscrew to take apart it's all it's staying together and these are all used very similarly you just basically set these in the coals and wait for them to bring it up to heat now these you don't get too hot you don't get the red hot but this this is our salamander this you would get red hot you bring this this is an actual cooking method to heat something that you wanted to sort of broil the top of so today in a fancy restaurant they might do it with a blowtorch they come in and heat up the top of the the item you're cooking a lot of times desserts or whatnot and caramelizes sugar on top in the 18th century you would use a salamander you get this red hot in the fire and then bring it over and cook the very top just before you put it on the table and this one also reminds me of the the connection with hoe cakes so we did a couple of uh whole cake episodes and sometimes there's the thought that oh hoe cakes were cooked on hoes and it turns out that there is an item a cooking item in the 18th century that was called a cooking hoe that resembled a hope but actually it was almost exactly like a salamander except it tended to be have the handle bent a little bit and they resembled a hoe but they were intended for cooking and you could cook on top of a salamander too you wouldn't get it as hot but you could make very very small sort of pancake items use them like a tiny griddle some of these recipes will refer to your um your fireplace shovel as well these were much and and that was something that was moving coals around in the like and you'd clean it off heat it up and put your whole cake or whatever right on it yeah and then we've got these um guys they're toddy irons or they have umpteen names many sizes sometimes it's a large ball depending on if it's a uh a bowl of of an adult beverage or if it's just a a small personalized vessel but you heat this up you've got your mixture of sugars and and um and spirits and it's plunged in and immediately the sugars surrounding it are caramelized and it's a taste like you can't get unless you do that right um yeah if you've heard of loggerheads like people are at loggerheads a longer head is a larger version is the same thing and people at log heads are fighting what would be people with two different ones imagine this but you know three or four times bigger they're trying to hit each other yeah if you're longer heads of somebody you're right you're fighting with a larger you're very dense you have a dense skull there are times when we just want to roast meat over the fire we have a couple of different items that we use for that but they're generally called spits so we're going to use a spit this is a hanging spit it's a very small one we have a a square rod here not a round one and the reason for that is if we had a round rod and we were trying to rotate it the meat will slip on that and rotate around and we can't we can't heat it properly we can't cook it so we use a square one and then many times we'll use these little spit forks that come in from the side they're made so that they can't rotate on that and the meat stays where it needs to be and in this case we have a special hanger for it or we might have hangers that come down from the top uh to do the the uh spit to hold it up or we could even have a whole piece that comes up from the bottom sort of like a trestle that holds up our spit they had mechanics clock mechanics turning these things huge pieces i think your oven your your reflective oven could very well have that in it and then we have a simple hanging spin you might be smoking something this thing may weigh up in the chimney it could be down roasting meat can be more difficult because the top side of the meat doesn't get cooked as well and so you have to take it off of the spit and then hook it back on another direction but they are a simple and versatile thing we have to hold the the vessels up in some manner once again they weren't producing wire per se if they needed a piece of wire they're going to have to take a hunk of of iron heat it and just continually draw it out until it's thin enough to use it's much easier to just have one of these pot lifters i've got four or five of them and then my collection they can be really long they can be really short but you're taking this thing and you're hooking it in the ears which is what the ears are for you can hang it on your crane or any s hooks anything you care about hanging on and i use these exclusively when i'm at events i either have a tripod or a rig up a lug pole and i i only use these to hang them i brought another item with me it's made of iron it's kind of crude and yet it's kind of elegant in its simplicity someone needed a a lifter of some type i'm guessing it was for our wood stove which is out of my time period but i it needed love and i brought it home and added it to the collection but what it's showing is that whether they started with many pieces of iron and then brought them together at each end or started with a large piece of iron split them did this decoration and then brought them back together somebody just took the time to and it's a heat sink kind of it's not really it's still hot but it's just pretty and someone went to the trouble took the time to go to the trouble and and not just create a quick tool that was handy but to give it some of their own personal touch so you see that over and over again it might be some simple end to a handle or some just decorative bit on a leg something that nobody you see but somebody wanted to just put themselves in that piece and i'll tell you 100 200 300 years later when i'm using these things it's that's so cool to just be a steward and the pass he's on when i'm done with them mortar and pestle these things have been used since 800 700 yeah 80. um and and i know before that that's when i start seeing it in writing um it can be out of a variety of things we've got large ones out of wood depends on what you're reducing you know you can reduce uh meats to get them fibrous um using a wooden mortar and pestle but if you're talking about grains seeds some spices you're going to need to get into something this is going to be a very fine grind and this is going to be a little coarser these are the food processors of the 18th century we want to you know turn something into a mush we're going to break it down into the smallest possible sort of components we might even want to turn something into a paste we're going to do a mortar and pestle they haven't figured out the cylinder and the screw yet to be able to reduce it to be hamburger if i wanted a hamburger i'd have to mince it and then put it in here and and reduce it further till it's fibrous and we found on that um meeple a video we did ages ago um that was two or three different meats one of them was a smoked ham a cured ham of some type and that does not want to behave it needs to it just wants to be little bitty pieces so you've got to turn into fibers to have it connect with other other things and you'll see in early painting 17th century and 18th century mortar and pestles are giant so you'll see marble ones that are this big around that you can really work on large pieces at once they're amazing pieces and just don't see them used in cooking too much today i mean we'll see small ones like this for kind of grinding up spices and herbs but you don't use them that much today and we've seen on the different places we've gone our native settlements you'll see a um a larger stump yes that's been a burnt you know controlled charcoal burnt down and it's hollow and now they've got a something else that they're just reducing the corn with now we got to the amazing collection here of all these cooking vessels per se tell me about what we got well uh to your right um we have um skillets in a variety of forms and that's that's just a couple of the ones yeah and from different time periods uh these are posnets in brass but mostly iron and then these are bald spots or cauldrons or cola much you will and i've like i said before i've got i think it's like a six gallon one which i can hardly lift all the way down to these little guys we've got some really interesting things going on with a lot of these now the fun thing i like about the posnets is because they're used on a fireplace and if we if we look at a lot of them especially the earlier they are look at this one it really shows off what's going on yeah you you you put this on your brick hearth right and you're cooking in it and you're done you drag it back to where you're working because it's hot you don't lift it up and the feet on the front always get sort of ground off and so they all sort of and the older they get the more they tip forward so we can see them get used over and over early early they're made out of brass same thing is true for these guys uh the pots from the 16th century in the 17th century were made out of bell metal or brass um actually a bit more like bronze and they're not actually as healthy you can poison people with them so to to make them less expensive easier to produce and safer for to use they moved into cast iron as time went on so this brass one is probably a little earlier than these iron ones which get popular in the late 18th century and very very popular in the 19th century um that's um called a gate right um where the metal is entering the uh the form and once again the fewer that's kind of how you date it um in the time period they're not it's very sophisticated with their tempering and we're talking about iron here not steel per se and so there's nothing as hard as this as this it's like trying to grind or file a diamond with a diamond or file a piece of wood with a piece of wood um so they're not finished right the the casting is broken off and it's just and these these feet aren't one piece they've been welded on well roughly the feet are actually cast separately and then set into the mold and then cast around them yeah yep and so you see these time and time again are these these rough unfinished edges and as someone who sells a current version of these kinds of pots uh they are amazing work because of the thinness of the metal so most foundries today don't want to cast anything nearly as thin as these pieces were done in the 18th and 19th century the problem with them as they cast a very thin is there's a bunch of pieces that just don't work out it's like well that one will throw out so maybe half of the ones they cast were no good but since it labor was inexpensive they didn't have a problem with that when labor gets expensive then well every single one has to turn out so we'll increase the the thickness of the wall so that we get 95 of them to turn out every time so you can tell an old one every time they're super thin and this one he was just talking about the wear of the legs i've got a couple this one this one is so thick not unlike its owner pot belly the legs have been drawn so many times it's starting to rub on the bottom it doesn't sit on its legs anymore actually one we just used in a video earlier this guy right here can you move that guy interesting um the the metal may have been softer or just for some reason but look you can see how that's sitting at an angle um and that's that's what he's talking about these things are used so often over and over again pulling pulling pulling hundreds of years in some cases so these can look like they're almost exactly the same thing but uh these are related to frying pans they're skillets and the posnets are really the ancestor to saucepans they have a much higher top to them and unlike today's saucepans they generally had a rounded bottom exactly why they had around the bottom instead of a square bottom maybe it's because you know we don't want it's harder to make a round potting pan today we don't need that because we're putting them on burners but these were always made to use over the fire so they tended to have this rounded bottom so michael all these pieces you brought in have are beautiful in that they're wonderfully seasoned yes so when we're using cast iron in the 18th century people still use cast iron today uh this is as close as you can get to a teflon pan a silver stone pan they're non-stick surfaces that if they aren't seasoned you could not cook it right they're terrible so um tell us about your seasoning well i think i think i do the same way you do i i'll i'll set my oven um the home oven to 550 there abouts as hot as your oven will go and um i'll put the piece in and let it get too hot to the touch but not that high a temperature i'm trying to get the molecules of the iron to just expand a little bit and then i pull it out and um i put it on top of the stove where it's not going to burn my countertop and i'll take some some crisco um if i can mention name brands it's just it's a purified fat and i use a paper towel and i'll just coat the entire surface and then i'll take more paper towel and i'll remove as much as that as i can i don't want anything puddling otherwise i'm going to have troubles down the road so i'm just completely covering it completely removing it i turn it upside down and put it in the oven and i don't touch it again i leave it at 550 till it stops smoking you're trying to carbonize that oil you want this finish you don't want something sticky you should know oh i'm gonna get letters probably there are lots of ways of seasoning and and the way that doesn't um foul the iron and doesn't go rancid is to carbonize some kind of fat and i try to go for the pure fat because i don't want impurities in mine right uh flaxseed oil is one of the lowest temperature ones that happens so flax seed oil can work well a lot of different oils work well and there are probably 10 or 20 different ways to season and there you know a lot of controversy no this is the best way to season and that's the best way i say whatever works for you is what works for you on seasoning but it seals the iron and it makes it non-stick right there's it keeps it from rusting there's just so many reasons why let's look at the inside of that yeah there's some rough there yeah this one's super rough on that i've seasoned that about three times i'm ready for the next season it's super rough it was full of rust and it's it's not going to stick um so but what's the what's the killer on on seasoning what's going to ruin your seasoning the fastest mr spatula is gonna is the arch nemesis of seasoning and that's all they had to work with you know they weren't having plastic um you would use wood um and i use wood uh very rarely will i use this but um that's on this kind of stuff that'll ruin if yeah you've got to go back and reseason because if you don't you're going to have sticking food right just like today yeah you don't use animal fat and then put it in your drawer because it'll go rancid and then the iron you have that rancid taste from the iron it's just like if you went nuts and started scrubbing and using a soap scrubby i use um i use my scrubby's a make out of broom straw and and i use water and i'll let things soak but once i'm done scrubbing it it's all off right i'll dry it and then i turn it upside down on my burner on my stove and just try to get all that water off yeah just to get that water off right let's do that once again forever they've lasted 300 years over right and and this does it goes right down into the pores of the iron to seal it so that it won't rust and it's easy to clean yeah thank you so much michael for bringing all these amazing pieces in these many of these pieces are 150 years old 250's and it's it's incredible to see how you know they're still useful we still can enjoy them we cook in them many times we're doing a cooking episode you bring in an old piece we're cooking in that so i always find it uh really fun to use these old pieces and you know compare and contrast them with you know modern pieces that we would use today how much different these are and you know we can still enjoy them so i really like that it's my pleasure thank you so much you're welcome i am it's a kick to just be the caretaker for a while to bring them back and lovingly use them and then pass them on right it's such a thrill they'll still be useful in another 150 years thanksgiving just incredible so if you're interested in more where we kind of pick apart something that's old and old piece and try to understand it make sure to check out this episode where brandon and i look at an old set of bellows so that we can understand them so we rebuild them thanks for watching

Channel: Townsends

Views: 355,492

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, cast iron, cast iron cooking

Id: zH8xnJQKQVc

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022