Home Fires
Hearth kitchen at Dubois Fort, Historic Huguenot Street.
What’s the best place for a cooking fire?
Europeans saw “hearth and home” as one and the same. Kitchens like this one combined warmth, light, and cooking equipment, despite often being dark, cramped, and poorly ventilated. Using the versatile technology of the hearth, cooks can roast meat in ovens facing the flames and perch bake kettles atop hot coals. From a crane (crossbar) or trammel (adjustable hook), cooks can hang griddles to make pancakes or pots to boil water, simmer stews, and fry doughnuts. Safely orchestrating so many processes (often while watching children) was the daily challenge of an enslaved or European cook.
Reflecting Oven
HHS Permanent Collection
gift of Jesse Elting
Just as versatile, Esopus kitchens had indoor and outdoor fire pits with grills, roasting spits, hanging pot hooks, and stone platform hearths for slow-cooking tubers. They kept huge wooden mortars and pestles, storage baskets, bark boxes, wooden bowls, ladles and spoons, gourd containers, and clay pots in the wiikwahm or house. They dried thin-sliced meat, fish, and young squash on wooden racks, and in summer, smashed berries into cakes and dried them on twined rush mats. Deep cellar pits inside and outside the home provided long-term storage.
Iron and Brass
As they increasingly lost access to traditional tools and materials, Esopus people adopted metal cookware sold by European traders. Iron and brass pots tolerated higher temperatures than clay, cutting down the processing time of flint corn by several hours.
Kettle
HHS Permanent Collection
Anne C. Bienstock Collection
Skimmer and Kitchen Fork
HHS Permanent Collection
Anne C. Bienstock Collection
Ladle
HHS Permanent Collection
gift of John E. Deyo
Bake Oven
Missing the old country’s professional bakeries, Europeans built bake ovens right into their homes. Once or twice a week, an enslaved woman or housewife packed the oven with firewood, let it burn down, and then swept out the coal and ash. The hot bricks radiated heat back out for hours. Cooks used the hottest oven to bake bread, then warmed casserole-style dishes, and used the last fading of heat to dry fruits and vegetables.
Europeans loved breads, and it showed in the variety of buns, pastries, and cookies they saved in receipt books. Indigenous people grew to love them, too—so much that they sometimes bought out the supply before European customers got to them. A 1649 law in New Amsterdam (now New York City) forbade “selling to the Natives any fine boiled or white breads or cakes,” while in 1653 a baker in Beverwijck (now Albany) was fined when a Native person left their house “carrying an oblong sugar bun.”