Funny facts about cooking in general and cooking come up when you start to get interested in this section of... historical science, I guess.
I propose a little game - go to the kitchen, look around and think: which of those devices that you use all the time did people have... well, let's say, in the nineteenth century?
Something tells me, I just want to say: stove! Indeed, in addition to gas and electric, there were obviously wood, peat, coal.
Ha! The stove may have been - in the cities. In the villages, stoves with stoves were clearly not folded. There they cooked more and more directly in the oven. And they were in a better position compared to many city dwellers.
Because in the city it is good for those who have a large house and a staff of servants with a cook at the head - they, in fact, could enjoy a lot of gourmet foods. Both on the stove and cooked in the oven.
And residents of cities, owners of tiny rented apartments or rooms in apartment buildings, such happiness did not shine. It was not for nothing that contemporaries wrote that working people and commoners ate very badly, buying provisions in cheap taverns and kitchens.
Massively ovens began to appear only at the end of the nineteenth century. and then how massively... They began to sell the British inventor James Sharp in 1834. In the 1920s, gas ovens were fitted with thermostats and enamelled to make them easier to clean. But not everyone had gas.
The funny thing is, now gas ovens seem like the last century.
Honestly, I won't trade my old electric lady for any gas one.
If only simply because no gas oven gave me such uniform heating. On the contrary, they strove to burn the product on the one hand, and leave it raw on the other.
Fu such ovens to be.
But graters and mandolins (graters with replaceable nozzles) are in vain considered inventions of the twentieth century. The first grater was invented in France in the 1540s by François Boullier, and for a very prosaic reason: it was necessary to somehow eat hard cheese.
Mandolins - shredders with different blades - were first described in the book Opera dell'arte del cucinare, published in 1570 by Bartolomeo Scappi. By the way, in the same book for the first time was shown to the broad educated layers of the population... a fork.
Such are the pies.