Domestic Utensils

Domestic utensils may be classified into those used in the preparation of food and those used in the cleaning of clothing and household furnishings. For many years after the settlement of Canada, household utensils were made by local craftsmen and Blacksmiths. By the middle of the 19th century more sophisticated devices were in use, most of them imported from Britain or the US.

Kitchen Utensils

Much of the preparation of food (eg, peeling and slicing of vegetables, cutting of meat) was done with simple knives. Sausages were popular because they could be preserved, but it was necessary that the sausage meat be well minced and thoroughly mixed with the spices and seasoning that provided flavour and preservation. Cutting and mixing could be done in a wooden bowl, using a knife with the handle behind the blade rather than at one end. Patented chopping knives appeared late in the 19th century, with multiple or removable blades.

Mechanical devices for chopping or grinding meat and vegetables were imported from about 1860. These implements were hollow iron cylinders containing rotary shafts with teeth. By the end of the century they had evolved into the familiar food grinder, in which a screwlike revolving shaft cut the meat and forced it through a perforated end plate, with or without cutting edges. A grinder of this type, identical with those still in use, was patented in Canada by L.T. Snow in 1897.

The ground sausage meat was usually wrapped in cloth bags and stored in a cool place until needed. Settlers of German origin preferred to make sausages in the familiar "links" by forcing the ground meat into a case (length of washed intestine) with a "sausage gun," ie, a metal cylinder with a narrow spout at one end and a wooden plunger at the other. More elaborate stuffers used a piston and lever; some were of wood and were made locally, but cast-iron stuffers appeared about 1850 with either a lever or a screw for applying pressure. The full case was tied at intervals into the sausage links.

Slicers were used with vegetables, most commonly with cabbage used for sauerkraut. They included the shredding board, which had a diagonal slot over which a cutting blade was mounted. The cabbage head was pushed down the board, and slices were cut off by the knife and fell through the slot into a pan. Plastic slicers of this design are still in use.

Apples were widely available in 19th-century Canada and were commonly preserved as dried slices. This method of preservation required paring, ie, removal of the skin. Paring could be done by hand with a sharp knife, although this technique was slow, and semimechanical parers came into use at an early stage. Such implements might consist of a fork (on which the apple was impaled) turned by a handle or pulley. The knife edge was held against the revolving apple.

By 1803 an apple parer with a knife mounted on an arm with a universal joint had appeared. Parers of this type were being made and used in Canada about 1840. Beginning about 1849 a host of mechanical metal parers appeared in the US and were soon in use in Canada. The cutting blade was attached to a threaded shaft or a set of gears, which caused the tool to travel across the surface of the apple as it was rotated by a hand crank. These utensils were later elaborated with the addition of a coring attachment and an arm to push off the pared apple.

Until about 1830 cooking was almost always done in an open fireplace. One of the problems of this was providing stability for the cooking utensils. Pots for stews or tea water had curved handles by which they were suspended from a swinging bar called a crane. A more reliable means of support was the trivet, an iron ring large enough to hold the pot and having 3 vertical legs that could be set in the fire. The trivet could be combined with the frying pan or skillet by attaching legs directly to the pan bottom; this combination was called a spider. Cooking pots were also made with permanently attached legs.

Meat could be cooked on a grill, an arrangement of parallel iron bars spaced close enough to support the meat but far enough apart to provide exposure to the flames. In some grills, the bars were little troughs along which juices from the cooking meat could flow to a collecting cup at one end of the grill. Grills were usually supported on their own 4 legs.

Roasting meat over the open fire was usually done on a spit, a horizontally mounted iron rod which was thrust through the meat and supported on each side of the fire. The spit had to be turned to ensure uniform cooking; hence, the rod projected at one end beyond the heat of the fire, terminating in a handle or a pulley wheel. Meat could also be roasted by being suspended over the fire on a hook from the crane. To ensure uniform cooking a clock jack, ie, a powerful clockwork motor housed in a brass cylinder, might be used. Meat suspended below the jack was rotated back and forth automatically.

Introduction of the cooking stove in the 1830s fundamentally changed culinary techniques and utensils. Pots, pans and skillets now had a solid base on which to rest. Degree of heat could be controlled by the position of the vessel on the stove top. If open flames were required, the lid could be removed from one of the pot holes and the vessel placed directly over the fire. The skillet without legs, renamed the frying pan, needed only a solid handle. Handles were made for lifting rather than for suspension. Grills and toasters could be placed directly over an open hole. Kettles were adapted by having the perimeter of the base recessed to fit into the pot-hole rim.

The most fundamental change was the replacement of the fireplace oven by the stove oven. To heat the former, a fire had to be built in the oven, then removed, and the food introduced. The stove oven derived its heat directly from the firebox, which allowed for shorter cooking time and better temperature control. Cakes, pies and biscuits could be baked as well as bread; special baking pans and plates came into use. Roasting of meat could also be done in the oven, in large covered roasting pans.

In early years cooked food was usually served on plates of Pewter, which is an alloy of lead and tin. Pewter, as preserved today, has the dull grey tarnish of time, but in the days of its use it was kept highly polished by scouring with wood ashes. Pewter spoons were cast in iron molds. Knives and forks were made of steel, and they had firmly attached wooden handles. Table knives were wiped on an abrasive scouring brick (a block of baked clay) to keep them free of rust or tarnish.

Laundry Utensils

The change from fireplace to stove also altered the methods and utensils used in washing clothes. The large amounts of wash water needed could be heated on the stove in a washboiler, ie, an oval tub of sheet metal with a removable lid. The soiled clothes and the soap were dropped into the boiling water and stirred with a wooden stick or tongs.

The actual washing was done on a low table in a circular tub, usually made of sheet metal but possibly of the lower half of a barrel. The traditional washboard was used, a corrugated surface on which the wet clothes were rubbed vigorously. After washing, the clothes were rinsed in clear water in the same tub.

Such scrubbing was one of the more tiring operations in laundering clothes. It was easier to use a plunger, an inverted sheet-metal funnel at the end of a wooden rod. Working this plunger up and down in the submerged clothes forced the hot soapy water into and out of the fabric. Improved plungers, eg, the double model, were patented in the 1880s.

An ingenious version was invented in 1890 by Isaac Shupe of Newmarket, Ontario. In Shupe's plunger the conical head was extended upward as a tube, which contained a spring-loaded piston with a valve. Soap was placed in the tube and, when the plunger was pushed down, the valve closed and water was squeezed through the clothes. On the upstroke the valve opened, releasing soap.

More elaborate washing devices combined a tub and manipulator, eg, a swinging set of slats, as in the Raulston (Ontario) patent of 1884, or a reciprocating rotary agitator, as in the Cadran (Québec) patent of 1885. The latter arrangement has been retained in the modern automatic washer.

Before drying, washed clothes were wrung out, ie, squeezed free of excess water. Early in the 19th century, the old method of twisting by hand was replaced by the use of a set of rollers between which the saturated clothes were squeezed. These wringers persisted well into the time of the electric washing machine.

Ironing underwent an interesting development during the 19th century. In the fireplace era, the irons could not be heated directly without soiling the contact surface; therefore, they were hollow, with a removable core that could be heated separately and then placed inside the iron. Irons heated on a stove top could be solid, but this raised the problem of a handle too hot to hold.

The difficulty was resolved in 1871 by Mrs Florence Potts of Iowa, who had already invented the double-pointed iron. The handle of the Potts iron was of wood, semicircular in shape, with a metal device at the base which could be latched or released on the top of the iron by lifting a small knob. Potts irons were manufactured in various Canadian foundries. Other irons with detachable handles were patented in the late 19th century, but the Potts iron outlasted them all.