What Jeremy Clarkson has in common with a jam jar
ON THE top shelf of my kitchen dresser sits a mysterious object, the size and shape of a soup tureen. Made of shiny brass with scrolled handles, it stands on four lion’s paws and is pierced all over with little star-shaped holes.
Lift the lid, and a secret is revealed: a smaller brass container with two wicks. My starspangled enigma is a Victorian chafing dish — a tabletop device for keeping food warm.
When it comes to kitchen gadgets, we tend to think of our own era as a powerhouse of innovation. The Lakeland catalogue is a bewildering cornucopia of things you never knew you needed, from the Adjustable Wire Straight Cake Slicer to a Hand-Held Spiralizer.
But as Emma Kay reveals in her beautifully illustrated short book on the history of kitchenware, our ancestors were no less inventive when it came to labour-saving devices.
From the mid-1800s to the Sixties, tens of thousands of patents were taken out for items intended to make a cook’s life easier.
Kay illustrates the speed of technological progress with lists of the contents of three domestic kitchens. In 1744, the inhabitants of a weaver’s cottage prepared their meals with utensils harking back to medieval times, including wooden bowls and an earthenware container for jugged hare.
Skip forward a century to 1849, and the essential items recommended by the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer in his book, The Modern Housewife, include a fish kettle, a bain-marie, tartlet pans and a cutlet chopper.
Fifty years later, the list had doubled in size and includes an apple corer, a jelly mould and a mincing machine.
Items that we now take for granted in our own kitchens turn out to have wonderfully exotic origins: the first British ice cream was eaten by King Charles II in 1671. The arrival in 11thcentury Venice of an outlandish pronged implement — a golden fork, part of a bridal dowry — caused its unfortunate owner no
end of trouble. She was publicly denounced by the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, who thundered that God had given her fingers for conveying food to her mouth.
No less intriguing is the story of Yorkshireborn John Kilner, inventor of that indispensable classic, the Kilner jar (pictured). The glass preserving jar, sealed with a rubber ring and a wire clip, is still in use after 150 years on the market (I have one in my kitchen cupboard, containing last year’s sloe gin). Kilner’s greatgreat-great grandson is Jeremy Clarkson.
One could debate for ever as to which man has contributed more to human happiness.
Kay’s book is an unmissable feast of nostalgia. The photo of a Tala icing set — a formidable syringe with a set of interchangeable nozzles — took me straight back to childhood, as did her pictures of vintage biscuit tins. It was my mother’s Huntley & Palmers cocktail biscuit tin, with an endlessly receding image of itself, that gave me, aged seven, my first disturbing intimations of infinity.
It seems almost churlish to quibble, but about one thing Kay is mistaken. She claims people stopped using pie funnels ‘around the 1950s’. Yet one of my most treasured bits of kitchen kit is my grandmother’s green, ironware pie funnel — still going strong in 2017.