pans for frying meats. There were brass chafing-dishes, skimmers, and saucepans, and pans of tin and earthenware for the reception of raw vegetables. There were mortars and pestles of iron, bell-metal, and brass; tin bread-graters, tin, sugar, and hominy sifters, wooden trays upon which the meals were borne from the kitchen to the dining-room; drawing-knives, which were probably the same as voiding-knives, with a slender blade, a keen edge, and a sharp point; chopping-knives, which were long, stout, and heavy, being used in dividing the solid meats both before and after they were cooked; also knives made for cutting cheese, dull and small in size; large flesh-forks which were employed in turning the meats in the pots; powdering-tubs in which beef and pork recently slaughtered were salted; flour-tubs, meal-barrels, tin cullenders, and funnels, butter and galley pots, pepper-boxes, wooden bowls, bell-metal posnets, pincers, rolling-pins, bellows, stillyards, scales, and weights. The oven was placed in the immediate vicinity of the house, being a brick structure in a hole in the ground.[1] The ironing seems to have been done in the kitchen; in the inventory of the contents of this room, box-iron heaters and sad-irons are generally found enumerated.
The utensils in the dairy, or milk-house, as it was usually called, were cedar churns, pails, noggins and pigging, tubs, trays, and strainers; cheese-presses, butter-sticks, and earthen butter-pots.
- ↑ Records of Henrico County, vol. 1688-1697, p. 10, Va. State Library. “Upon the examination of Culpeper (a servant) . . . he confessed that John Green did come to him as he was at the oven about the bread.” Records of Accomac County, original vol. 1632-1640, p. 47. See also Records of York County, vol. 1657-1662, p. 174, Va. State Library. Lessors sometimes bound themselves to repair “the brick ovens” belonging to the houses leased. See Records of York County, original vol. 1675-1683, p. 596.
