Historic Kitchens vs. Modern Kitchens

In this episode today, we look at the differences between a kitchen like this, an 18th century kitchen, and a

modern

kitchen today. Thanks for joining us, there are four or five types of main components in a kitchen, at least the one we think about today. probably the main one is the heating part the stove the oven let's take a look at our stove or oven or our hearth so here is the hearth that we have here in the kitchen game and this hearth is actually based on a German hearth at The Museum of Frontier Culture in Staunton, Virginia, they have a German house there and there's a very similar heart to this one, it's a little bit lower, but that's what we based this particular home on.

This fireplace has a firebrick cooking surface and we. We have an oven that is built into the wall here and this is the stove of the 21st century. Now, of course, we have to cook with wood or possibly sometimes with charcoal, but those are our only cooking fuels that we can use. Of course, nowadays we use gas or electricity almost all the time and that is one of the big differences between the 18th century and the 21st century. Cooking over a fire, cooking with charcoal, which is a little easier, or with firewood, is a constant battle. maintain a regular heat under the cooking surface, a lot of times we want to have this very controllable heat surface and we don't have it in the 18th century, we have to be concerned about this continually instead of just turning a knob. and setting it to three or taking a look at the flame and getting the temperature right was very, very difficult in the 18th century and, oh, I mean, you can't leave something alone, you have to be playing with it all the time. and here we have the oven and we actually have a very similar problem with an oven.

I mean, if you go and use your oven today, you set it to 350 degrees or whatever the equivalent is where you are. you just set that knob and it takes care of everything fine, sometimes you can even have a timer, you can say yes, cook it exactly for exactly one hour and one of the gigantic differences between an 18th century oven and an 18th century oven , you fill it with wood and spend maybe an hour, two or even three hours getting the oven to the right temperature, when you think it's the right temperature, you take out all that fuel, set it aside and put in what you need.

If you want to cook in there you close the door and what happens is the same temperature is not maintained but the temperature slowly decreases over time and it is totally up to your oven how fast exactly 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 happens to the initial temperature and the final temperature, so there is a big difference in baking between the 18th century and the 21st century. The other thing that's happening here is that we've built this thing that I built. this like a German home on purpose high at this level basically to make it very easy, it's authentic but it's also much easier to do a cooking episode with video so I can cook right here at this height and you can You see it very easily, but if you watch a lot of our other videos where we're in other

kitchens

or 18th century style

kitchens

, you'll find that almost all of them have the hearth on the floor, you have to lean all the way down. and cooking on the floor basically it's very difficult to record a video like that and it's not easier to cook like that it's not very very difficult either and you can see in some of our other videos how much of a problem it is to do that I too I want to point out the smoke hood that We have here in the 18th century, of course, we are burning wood, we burn it inside and we have this constant battle of smoke in the kitchen and you would think that from the videos that we don't have any problem with having smoke in the kitchen, but at the same time On the contrary, we have smoke problems all the time, unless the air flow is right, the door is open, the windows open wide, the room fills with smoke and this is also true not only. in this kitchen set, but in other situations other 18th century kitchens have the same type of problem, you need to have a lot of draft to keep the smoke out of the room and they have the same type of problem in the 18th century, some stoves probably benefited from the right chimney, the right draft, they didn't have smoke problems, but I imagine that the majority did have smoke problems and that's another of the best things about a modern kitchen is that the fuels we use, especially electricity, but gas.

Additionally, fuels do not leave a taste in the food itself. In the 18th century, there was always that wood smoke flavor in food and you might think it's great for one or two dishes, but every single thing you eat gets boring after a while and you'll see references to 18th century cooks. who were trying to keep that smoky flavor out of their food, that's another 18th century battle, so next on the tour here is, what are they? We'll do it for cabinets, shelving, and storage, and there's two different types of storage, maybe three different types of storage.

We would think about both equipment storage and food storage itself, so equipment storage in the 18th century kitchen, you know. They probably didn't have as much equipment as we did unless it was a very affluent kitchen, most kitchens, uh, as you see in the pictures, no, they tend to be affluent kitchens, so they tend to be pretty well equipped, but I guess so. most 18th century kitchens don't have that many kitchen utensils lying around and in the picture you don't see as much storage of this equipment, a lot of things are hanging on the wall, um, and you see some shelves like the shelf behind me and Some types of cabinets that you see like this, they are nothing like the cabinets that we have today, of course, you know, our kitchens are lined with cabinets that are full of food, we use them as pantries and full of equipment, but you can see them here.

The kind of things we have in our cabinet here. If you look at most of them, you'll see that I have a lot of them upside down and that's another major difference. I hope there is a difference. here a lot of these 18th century kitchens are overrun with rodents, there are always places where there is food in the 18th century, they have pest problems, rodents and other types of, you know, insect problems in their kitchen, so many times you will see all the bowls and things are turned upside down because that way, if the rodents run around your things, they don't get into them and then you know, they mess them up, okay, so if they're upside down, that doesn't seem to happen. so much and here is the Another thing you don't see in these 18th century kitchens is that there is nothing like a refrigerator that is sometimes found in the 18th century for storing food, especially for storing cold food.

You'll find things in a basement that we don't see many of. photos of but they definitely kept some of their food in the basement where it was cooler and hopefully drier. They also had spring houses where they put especially dairy products to keep them fresh, 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 on the wall, maybe is it being smoked in the chimney or actually sometimes it is smoked only in the upper parts of the kitchen, you will see Some photos of that where they might store cheeses or bread or even meat in their kitchen and well, I don't know how it turned out exactly, but that was one of the only ways they had to store food, so it's basically out there. outdoors and everything else you had to eat right away or it would go bad in about a day.

Another one of these main components is the work surfaces in the 18th century kitchen and as you know, most of the time we have islands in the middle of our kitchen, we have all this counter space, it really isn't too much in the 18th century, we have a little bit of counter space and we have the big work surface, the big kitchen table that's in the middle of the kitchen. Now this work surface is actually made specifically for making videos, so it's a little bit higher, so you can see what we're doing here a little better, but for the most part.

In these 18th century kitchens you see a fairly large and low table in the middle to do all the work of cooking in your kitchen, so what is really missing here? I mean, if you think about the kitchen at home, okay, we don't do that. we have a refrigerator, that's right, but we have a cooking surface or a cooking surface, we have a work surface, we have some storage for things, but the biggest thing missing in this 18th century kitchen is where the sink is, where is the water and that is. One of these main advantages that we have over these people who are in the 18th century is that they have no water except what they bring in buckets and buckets and there is no real place to get rid of it, so washing dishes or just having water to work.

This is much more difficult in the 18th century, if you think about it, we have this tremendous advantage of not only having water but pressurized water both hot and cold and not only that, but the water goes away and we have the sink and it has a drain and everything disappears immediately, they don't have any of that in the 18th century, sometimes they may have a pump inside so they can get regular cold water and pump it by hand in a situation that you very rarely see that is quite rare, but that's one of those things, washing dishes in the 18th century was much more difficult.

You can imagine bringing the water by hand and heating it over the fire to have it at least somewhat warm, lukewarm, then it is. It's always cold again, you have to fight it and washing the dishes must have been very difficult and I can't even imagine it when we cook here, we make a mountain of dishes and then I have to take all of them inside to my house and I wash them from the usual way because I don't want to have to wash dishes the 18th century method and we have a video that talks a little bit about cleaning and making. dishes in the 18th century were much more difficult and another one of these advantages that we may not recognize is simply having artificial light in our kitchens in the 18th century, you had firelight and you had window light. 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 candlelight or a simple oil lamp to light your way in the kitchen, it's very difficult to cook in the dark and you know they had a lot of difficulty with that and today we just turn on the light, so there you have a quick tour of the century XVIII. kitchen and compare it with a modern kitchen, it is really surprising all the advantages we have today compared to what they had in the 18th century.

If you ever have the opportunity to take a class and use an 18th century kitchen, I highly recommend it. I will definitely come home with a new respect for what you have available every day that you are in your kitchen and I want to thank you for joining us on this little journey through the kitchen and for all the incredible support you give us in watching. our videos uh commenting on them thumbs up when you share our videos I really want to thank you for that there are also people who support us monetarily through patreon or by visiting our website purchasing items thank you very much for all your amazing support and thank you for Come and experience this little tour as we tour this 18th century kitchen.

Thank you for joining us today.