Thursday, March 07, 2013
Close but no spit
An 1835 article on the first demonstration of cooking with gas:
The description is a bit unclear, but the burners are perfectly familiar. "A circular burner ... pierced with numerous small apertures." Still the same 180 years later.
Everything else was weird. Each burner had a vertical spit coming up through its center, like the gadget used in cooking Gyros. There was no provision for pans at all. Instead you had to put food into a tin boiling compartment mounted on the side of the smokestack! How would you get the food out of that compartment, and how would you wash it? Why didn't they immediately think of a grate to hold ordinary pots and pans directly over the burner? The coal stove with four pan-holes on top was already common in 1835, so the pattern was well-known.
¶ 5:06 AM 
The description is a bit unclear, but the burners are perfectly familiar. "A circular burner ... pierced with numerous small apertures." Still the same 180 years later.
Everything else was weird. Each burner had a vertical spit coming up through its center, like the gadget used in cooking Gyros. There was no provision for pans at all. Instead you had to put food into a tin boiling compartment mounted on the side of the smokestack! How would you get the food out of that compartment, and how would you wash it? Why didn't they immediately think of a grate to hold ordinary pots and pans directly over the burner? The coal stove with four pan-holes on top was already common in 1835, so the pattern was well-known.
¶ 5:06 AM
