Cookware Across Centuries 

Guest Post by Sara Dahmen —

Everybody eats. 

No matter what period we write in, our characters need to eat and drink. Someone is also cooking and preparing that meal, too.  

But what are they cooking on? With what tools? 

As a cookware manufacturer and the only female coppersmith building copper cookware in America using tools and methods from the 1700s and 1800s, I am uniquely placed to know when certain items were being made and what cookware was available when and where. This matters because our characters are often doing what people do every single day. They’re eating. They’re drinking in taverns. They’re traveling across the miles and cooking over fires. And they really should not be using a type of cookware before it was available in their time and place. 

Pre-pottery cultures relied on organic materials to cook, when or if they cooked at all. Processed hides were used to carry food, as were hollowed out bones, horns or antlers. Pit ovens were often used to cook or smoke meats, but cooking “pots” could be created from leather as well. This would have involved soaking a hide in water, filling it with food, and then suspending it over a fire from poles. Because most of these items have completely disintegrated over time, and there is no written or artistic record of much cooking, much of what we know of ancient cooking tools is inferred from tangential evidence. This means, of course, that we writers get to fill in the blanks quite a bit. But it’s important to note what kind of animals were around and alive during the period and location you’re writing about. Thankfully, the flora and fauna record is robust enough to help with that! 

Next, we move to the invention of pottery. The earliest known examples of pottery used for cooking has been found in East Asia, including China and Japan. Clay vessels caught on from there, and spread across the world, allowing for precise archaeological records when found. You’ll need to do some digging (pun intended!) to discover when archaeologists have dated cooking pottery usage in your period and area. It’s also important to make sure you’re hunting for kitchenware. Clay figurines go back tens of thousands of years, but a heavy-breasted female figurine does not mean a culture was making cooking pots.  

Currently, it is believed pottery vessels for holding and cooking food and drink became part of European human communities in Neolithic times. So, if your story is set in Neolithic Europe or later, pottery may well be appropriate, but check the archaeological record for your specific region. 

After pottery, the next item that became all the rage to use in everything from jewelry to bowls and spearheads was copper, followed closely by its cousin, bronze. The reason copper was used first was because it was either available at surface mining operations and could be formed without heat using hammering alone. Bronze is a combination of copper and (primarily) tin, so the invention of hot furnaces to melt them together needed to happen before bronze could be the go-to metal for that jewelry, bowls and, of course, spearheads. The Copper Age varies slightly depending on what part of the world you’re writing about, but if your book’s setting is between 5000–3000 BCE (Before Common Era), your characters may be using copper items or pottery. The Bronze Age starts roughly around 3000 BCE and goes through 900–700 BCE. 

Pottery, copper and bronze chalices, cups and bowls are all possible eating and cooking vessels for these time periods, but some of you might be wondering when I’ll mention silver and gold. These precious metals are lovely, and certainly were used throughout history and found in multiple graves and burials all over the world. However, both silver and gold are incredibly soft and malleable, and are therefore not conducive for use in cooking pots and kitchen tools.  

As we inch into the past two centuries, the above cookware was still in use all over—pottery, bronze, and copper. How these materials were formed and hammered into different shapes of pots and pans changed mightily as inventions like blast furnaces and new forms of smelting came to exist.  

Iron cookware has been in use for at least the past thousand years, but it rusts, so the archaeological record is sparse on how widespread it was. However, it was difficult to form into cookware, and depended on a very tricky lost-wax casting process. It also required a lot more heat to melt and pour into the casting molds, which were built into the ground. 

One little-known fact about cookware is that copper sheet was actually more available for building cookware before iron. Copper sheet, made from rolls and from there, formed into cookware, roasting ovens, and more, has been documented in Dutch paintings in the early to mid 1600s. Tinplate, which is rolled sheets of steel dipped in melted tin, was also in use in the 1600s. These sheet metals formed the bulk of how kitchen tools and cooking pots were made alongside the pottery and bronze items already in use.  

Tinplate was considered inexpensive, whereas copper and bronze were for those with more wealth. One didn’t have copper cookware unless one had slaves or servants to care for it.  

It’s not until the invention of cast iron sand casting in 1707 that cast iron started to become more widely available and less expensive. At the time of the patent, it was noted that this would change cooking across the known world, as it would finally make metal cookware extremely affordable. This means one cannot have a tavern wrench in 1664 banging someone over the head with a cast iron skillet.  

People eat and cook. Details about how we have done so are what can pull us back in time on the page. Even better, this type of knowledge ties us to the past in a way we can connect with on our own stoves and ovens today!