Life without an Oven
How do you manage? puzzles this author.
What could show more decisively how cooking habits have changed? A hundred years ago a small army of home economists, salespeople, and cookbook authors were laboring away trying to persuade people to use a gas or electric oven.
And that change still hasn’t happened for many Mexicans. I’ve run into lots of family in the villages who use the burners but never turn on the oven. It uses too much gas, they don’t roast, and they don’t make cakes. It’s handy for storage though.
I think I posted about this on book of rai forum way back when. My parents used to use their oven for storage too. They kept paper bags, kitchen towels, etc. in it. There’s no oven roasting or cake baking in Korean cuisine. And yes, they thought it was a waste of gas/energy to turn on an entire oven for one dish.
It always makes me chuckle to think of an oven-baked potato with a topping as an economical meal. But I was startled to learn in the last week or so that cooking makes up a minimal part of household energy use. Something like 4% if I remember. Presumably because Americans use so much for heating and cooling (including the refrigerator) and because they do so little home cooking.
Baking is a traditional method in Greek cuisine, so ovens are essential appliances in households. Village people buy electric or gas ovens, but many of them also retain the practice of constructing a wood oven in the yard of the house. They think the wood fired oven is much more energy efficient than the gas/electric one and the taste of food is incomparable. The electric/gas oven is used when it’s very windy or rainy, but when the weather is nice… yes, it is good only for storage.
Hmm Mariana, Worth thinking about. What kind of wood do they use? Logs? Or furze, small fallen branches? I’d be most interested to know.
Ovens never existed in tropical africa, that I am aware. So, as Ji-Young says, no cakes or bread or etc. However, using a large pot that has water in it and placing another pot inside provides a kind of oven.
This suggests another question: why were ovens invented? Related to most effective ways to cook grain-based products, perhaps? In the ancient Middle East and eastwards (and then westwards) grains became the basic food crop very early on – about 10,000 BC.
By contrast, neither sub-Saharan africa nor (I think) Korea are areas that relied (traditiionaly) upon grain-based crops as primary food crops. Here, root crops – and then bananas and beans as they were introduced from the Americas – were the basic food crop. None of these introduced crops require ovens, either.
Diana, I think it’s a bit more complicated than grain-based or not. But it’s question worthy of a whole post. It’s on my list if you can wait.
I’ve noticed that people who are accustomed to cooking style that makes much use of ovens, as they move into much smaller living units (singles or older couples who eat less,) start using little electric appliances called “toaster ovens” to roast that single serving of anything traditionally cooked in the larger family oven.
Just more evidence of how this has become deeply entrenched. I also notice that American expatriates really yearn for grills as well as ovens. The slowly simmered is vanishing from US cooking.
In the medieval period in Arabic texts you see references to two types of oven, the tannur and the “frankish oven”. The latter is the usual european bread oven. However, the usual european oven wasn’t that usual in many cases. To have a oven was relatively rare in most cases. Raised bread may have been the main starch of europe, but you didn’t make it your self, you bought it if you could.
Adam, so right as usual. The question of why the oven has at least two points of entry historically, sometime around 3000 BC and then again with modern ovens around 1900.
Indian cooking is mostly done on stove top. In the US, myself and many of my south Indian friends preferred gas ovens because they have pilot lights that kept the inside of the oven warm- perfect environment for our rice and dal batters to ferment.
Thanks Ammini. And presumably for yogurt makers it would be similarly useful. How are the demonstrations going by the way?
Interesting post. As Ji Young says, in Indian cuisines there is no place for oven-baked stuff. When we lived in America, we used the oven mostly for storing things.
Its likely to vary from region to region, but in the UK modern ovens were likely to have been introduced a little earlier. This comment is from 1833:
“Closely connected, in demand and manufacture, with the kitchen- range or grate, may be mentioned the metal oven, —an economical fixture, which the conveniences of modern housekeeping, especially in the country, has now rendered almost indispensable; and which the state of the iron-foundery has placed generally within reach of the means of the poorest person who builds a cottage for his own residence. To find a dwelling-house, however small, without an oven beside the fire, would be an exceedingly novel occurrence now-a-days. Previous to the last century, however, before iron had become cheap, and casting common, it was usual, in the poorer sort of cottages, to bake the bread upon a round stone, supported on a trevet over the fire.”
You´right, of course, Adam. But this is a transitional kind of arrangement. When most people think of stoves/ovens they think of a free-standing cooking appliance and that’s closer to the end of the century.
I make my yogurt on top of the cable TV box. (Lacking a gas oven.)
The temperature is perfect. :)
I remember my mother used the pilot light in her gas oven to make a Korean fermented rice drink.
Rachel, in mountain villages woods of beech, oak and walnut trees are extensively used for fuel.
Olive is a fantastic wood for burning, so in olive producing areas the prunings from olive trees are used in fire places and ovens.
In Cyclades islands the natural tree vegetation is sparse, therefore the available fuel for ovens is mainly dried brushwood. However, a Cycladic oven doesn’t demand a large quantity of fuel to burn because the food is baked in a covered pot or a clay baking pot.
I always learn from you Mariana. Olive prunings would be fine for a quick, hot fire. I’m a bit puzzled about why the use of a baking pot reduces the need for fuel. You’re not baking bread so you don’t need such a hot oven? But then you are probably cooking for a long time.
Dried brushwood is a rapid burning, high volume and low calorific value material. Therefore, the islanders adopted cooking methods and pots which were heat efficient. Earthenware pots hold heat and permit slow cooking at relatively low oven- temperatures. Moreover, food is not only cooked in specially clay pots but pot’s lids is also sealed with dough, so the pot- temperature becomes higher. It is often placed in the oven after baking bread, to cook overnight in the remaining heat without extra fuel.
The building materials of the oven (volcanic stones, broken pottery etc) also contribute to its heat efficiency.