Kitchen Stove

The kitchen stove, or 'cooker' for short, has been a common household appliance for hundreds of years. The general configuration of a kitchen stove has changed little over the years.

The dimensions have changed, they are generally taller and thinner now, whereas older wood burning kitchen stoves usually had the dimensions of today's range cookers.

As stated, the configuration remained the same, a square block at the bottom which houses an oven, and on top of the block a surface of cooking hobs.

The stove oven is a relatively new development in Europe. Cooking was done on open or semi enclosed fires. Only by the eighteenth century was a fully enclosed oven devised.

Where the inspiration for this idea came from we cannot deduce. One of two things occurred. The Europeans evolved from an open fire to a fully enclosed oven over many centuries.

Or they copied the enclosed cooking fires from China, which had developed the technique nearly two thousand years before. The Chinese generally used clay for their oven's, the European used iron.

The benefit of an enclosed fire was it's superior heat retention, which meant that less wood or charcoal was required to keep the fire going.

The first European kitchen stoves used wood burning as the heat source. Over many decades charcoal began to replace wood.

Gas was used a lot longer ago than many would assume. The first gas stove was invented around two hundred years ago. But it took a hundred years before all the kinks were ironed out of the technology.

Today, virtually all kitchen stoves use either gas or electric as the heat source. But, there are still wood and charcoal stoves for sale.