Elizabeth Craig wrote a cookery book especially for use with an electric cooker, and for cooks who also had other electric tools and implements, The Way To A Good Table – Electric Cookery. This was in 1937, and I was surprised at the amount of electrical equipment ordinary households had to save time and physical energy! As Mrs Craig says in her introduction, in the chapter titled ‘Electrifying the Kitchen’, ‘If you want to reduce the work in your kitchen to a minimum, electrify your kitchen’. We take so many devices for granted these days, but over seventy years ago, cooks like us were able to do the same.
Mrs Craig was born in 1883 and before she was thirty she had published cookery books; she was over fifty when she electrified kitchens across the country, and seems a very forward thinking woman, as well as an excellent writer and journalist.
The main thing in a kitchen is a cooker, and in this chapter Mrs Craig discusses the installation of cookers; cookers were bought on hire purchase, were rented for weekly, monthly or quarterly payments, and apparently in some housing schemes, a cooker was included in the rent (also kettles, irons and boilers) I didn’t realise that domestic refrigerators were commonly available before the war – we didn’t have a fridge until the 1960’s, and when I was a student in Manchester, and then working there, we didn’t have one until the 1980’s!
Mrs Craig lists some other small electrical equipment, should the reader wish ‘to go all electric’ as she did ‘when transforming an old-fashioned kitchen:
- electric toaster – one which toasts two slices of bread simultaneously
- electric kettle – one fitted with an automatic device for switching off the current should the kettle boil dry
- electric coffee percolator – one fitted with a device which protects the percolator should it boil dry or be switched on without water
- waffle iron – with a long flex so that waffles can be cooked on the breakfast table
- electric mixer – invaluable for those who cater for a large number of persons
- sandwich toaster – invaluable for those who cater for a large number of persons
I didn’t realise that waffles and toasted sandwiches were popular in Britain so early, nor that there were electric waffle and sandwich makers over seventy years ago!
As Mrs Craig of all-electric kitchens says: “If you’re a housewife you’ll have more time to yourself if you have one. if you’re a business woman you simply can’t do without one in these days when time is money’!
Lois Elsden 