Chapter 5 The Kitchen Fire (Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century)
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Abstract
The technology of fire management, which is an essential aspect of food transformation, is still largely understudied. An analysis of eighteenth-century cooking books, dictionaries, and discussions of fuel, showcases the knowledge of heat degrees, the possibility of choice among sources of fuel, the technical gestures and manipulations used to control fire – a task which appears to have been of primary importance. The eighteenth-century cooking practice is marked by the transition from the fire of the hearth of the fireplace to the fire enclosed in the metallic structure of the stove and the oven. The study of the projects of “cooking machines” submitted to the Paris Academy of Sciences displays some of the key steps leading to a “domestication” of fire – a process in which the innovation of heating systems and steam engines had an equally relevant place. All these efforts aimed in fact at finding a better way of using fire and economizing fuel, as a solution to the wood shortage that endured throughout the eighteenth-century. The projects for a new technology of fire also reveal the need of saving time and rationalizing food preparation, which is connected to the emergence of a bourgeois idea of cooking at the turn of the nineteenth century.