http://www.oldandinteresting.com Household antiques in use. History of domestic equipment and furnishings - how people made their beds, churned their butter, ironed their clothes. http://www.oldandinteresting.com Brimstone matches were thin pieces of wood dipped at each end in sulphur, also called brimstone. For anyone using a tinderbox to strike a light they were a great help, even though they seem very inferior to us now in the age of friction and safety matches. After you caught a spark on a piece of tinder...... Fri 4 May 13:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/sulphur-matches.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Old and Interesting's home page has been refreshed again. Click through to find more snippets for quick reading and new pictures. Mon 30 Apr 14:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com http://www.oldandinteresting.com Just letting you know there are some new pictures and snippets of info on the home page - 19th century wicker baby walker, living clothesline instructions from 1840, and more..... Thu 5 Apr 17:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com http://www.oldandinteresting.com If you’ve ever got up on a cold, dark morning and flipped a switch or struck a match, you’ll be glad you’re living after the mid-19th century. Once upon a time, anyone in a northern winter who didn’t keep a fire burning all night had to start the day by clashing flint on steel to make a spark. Or at least..... Thu 5 Apr 13:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/tinderbox.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Think about enamel kitchen utensils today, and you probably imagine something coated all over in enamel. That certainly wasn't the case in the early years. To begin with, cooking pots were lined inside with enamel, but they looked like any other cast iron on the outside. People wanted..... Mon 5 Mar 15:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/enamelware-history.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com The home page has been refreshed, with new snippets of info and pictures, including an object to identify. Sun 19 Feb 18:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com http://www.oldandinteresting.com This message is letting you know about the new home page at Old and Interesting. It now has shorter bits and pieces, including "What is it?" and "Did you know?". It will be refreshed every so often with more magazine-type snippets. Otherwise Old and Interesting will stay the same, with more substantial articles on other pages. The history of enamel cookware is the topic of the next article, coming soon. Thank you for your interest and support. Tues 31 Jan 8:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com http://www.oldandinteresting.com Household antiques in use. History of domestic equipment and furnishings - how people made their beds, churned their butter, ironed their clothes. http://www.oldandinteresting.com We have so many detergents, household cleansers, and steel wool. But what did people use to shift dirt from unpainted, uncarpeted floors before modern technology? How did they deal with burnt food and rust on iron cooking pots? Sand is an important part of the answer, along with stone and brick. Soap was also available for those.....[Click on title to read more] Tue 11 Oct 15:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/scrubbing-stones-sand.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com The Victorians used splendid brass clockwork jacks for spinning roasting joints of meat slowly round in front of a fire. These bottle jacks (named for their shape), or clock jacks, make fine antiques and are interesting to food historians, but we should not end up with the impression that this was the "normal" way of roasting meat in the 19th century.....[Click on title to read more] Fri 12 May 9:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/roasting-jacks.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com This is not just a story of inventions, inventors and their patents. Patents don't tell us enough about the earliest washing machines. We want to know what machines were actually made. Who sold them? Who bought them? Did people like them? Before 1800 not many people had seen a washing machine, let alone used one...... Fri 15 Apr 13:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/history-washing-machines.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com In this photo of a 1790s English kitchen are two different brass containers for warming beer. If you want to try spotting them yourself before reading on, look on the wall to the right of the fireplace and on the mantelshelf. Attractive copper antiques now - but once they were used for warming and mulling ale. Why was beer warmed? And how?..... Mon 07 Feb 21:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/ale-warmers.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Baking bread or pizza in your own wood-fired stone or brick oven is a newly discovered pleasure for enthusiasts in the western world, but it's routine for people in some countries. If they don't have an oven at home, they take their homemade dough to communal ovens or bakehouses, often following the tradition of centuries. The Turkish women in the photo.... Tue 18 Jan 23:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/communal-bread-ovens.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com A tub of hot water, a washboard in a wooden frame with somewhere to rest the bar of laundry soap in pauses from scrubbing - this is a familiar image of how our great-grandmothers washed the laundry. It's not wrong, but it's only part of the picture. Factory-made washboards with metal or glass scrubbing surfaces certainly spread round the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and bars of soap were cheap and plentiful by the late 1800s, but there were other ways of tackling the laundry too. (Apologies to faithful readers who don't need any reminders of all this! ) In the idealised images of early advertising... Fri 01 Oct 14:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/history-of-washing-clothes.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com I was intrigued to discover a medieval version of today's self-heating cans of soup, beans, and coffee. In a Welsh museum is an Anglo-Norman double pot, a smaller cooking pot inside a bigger one, designed for cooking without any need for lighting a fire. In the space between the two pots..... Tue 10 Aug 21:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/fireless-cooking-with-quicklime.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Letting you know about the new page on 18th and 19th century methods for laundering and starching muslin gowns, bonnets etc. In case this message doesn't take you to the right page, click the link at the end of the recently-posted 'history of starch' page. Wed 21 Jul 15:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/starching-muslin.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Laundry starch: from medieval luxury to Victorian mass market - Starch has come a long way: from a sour brew boiling for days to a press-button spray. Manufactured starch that could be conveniently mixed at home..... Wed 21 Jul 12:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/laundry-starch-history.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Once upon a time a metal washboard and bar of hard soap with a tub of hot water was a new-fangled way of tackling laundry, though today it's a common picture of "old-fashioned" laundering. What went before? How did people wash clothes without the factory-made equipment and cleansing products of the 19th century? This is an introduction to the history of washing and drying household linen and clothing over several centuries..... Sun 13 June 21:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/history-of-laundry.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com A linen press often means a big old-fashioned cupboard where you keep household textiles, but it can also mean a screw press for keeping linen smooth and neatly folded. This kind of press was used by the Romans for giving a good finish to new and laundered cloth. Over the centuries presses of this type have been used for smoothing both freshly-washed and recently-used linen, especially table linen..... Mon, 24 May 20:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/screw-linen-press.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Fine table linen was essential for fine medieval dining. In the late medieval period the best tablecloths were as white as possible, ornamented with allover woven patterns, embroidery, separately stitched coloured borders, fringes, stripes, or some combination of these. There were plainer linen cloths for plainer people, and even rough hemp tablecloths on more impoverished tables..... Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/medieval-tablecloths.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Hot metal pressing irons are so common that we may forget how widespread wooden mangling boards once were. People who have heard of mangle boards may know they were traditional courtship gifts carved by young men in Scandinavia or the Netherlands. They were found further afield too, and were a standard way of smoothing linen from Russia to France, from Iceland to Bosnia. We know they were in use before 1600 and in some places were still familiar in the 20th century. How do they work? Fri, 8 Jan 2010 18:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/mangle-boards.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Why discuss knitting tools on a website about housekeeping, chores, and traditional "women's work"? Today we see hand-knitting as a hobby, a creative craft practised in our leisure time, but it used to be an ongoing task, to be fitted in amongst all the other chores. Families had to be kept supplied with socks, hats, and warm clothing. Some households stretched their income by making items for sale as well. Many women (and in some places, men) had to work at it every day. And they couldn't always have the luxury of sitting down to knit. They knitted while walking to market, or fetching..... Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/knitting-sheaths.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com A hole in the roof is a rough and ready way of ventilating a small home with a central fire. Smoke will linger in the room. Everything will be smelly and dirty. Sweeping and scrubbing will make only a brief impact, and clean laundry...... Tue, 3 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/hanging-chimneys.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com OldandInteresting has mentioned before that it's difficult to get a detailed picture of regional differences in the names for simple domestic items - let alone differences from one English-speaking country to another...... Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/laundry-ponches-punches.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Do you tackle dust in your home by watering the floor? No, me neither - but perhaps we would if we lived in a house with rushes spread like carpet on a stone or earthen floor. The replica 15th century English watering pot in the photographs is the kind used in that period to dampen floors and keep dust from being irritating. Rushes or ..... Fri, 3 Jul 2009 13:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/medieval-watering-pot.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Peat fires may seem like a wintertime topic, but in fact summer is the time for cutting turves of peat, drying them, and stacking them. There used to be many areas of northern Europe better supplied with peat bogs than with trees. Peat, also called turf, was a convenient household fuel when there wasn't much firewood around. Some regions of North America made use of peat for domestic fires..... Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/peat-fire.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com This meat hastener was used in front of an open fire to reflect heat back onto a joint of meat hanging from the hook. The hook is joined on to a bottle jack - a contraption which had to be wound up on a spring to..... Thu, 28 May 2009 11:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/meat-hastener.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Until Victorian inventors figured out a way to get sugar to the grocer's shop in ready-to-use granulated form, it was always transported in large cone-shaped sugar loaves. Households could buy a whole sugar loaf or a lump broken off and sold by weight. But then what? How did people..... Thu, 14 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/sugar-nippers.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Tallow candles don't sound good to us - a sooty wick burning in animal fat - but for centuries they were a reliable way of having some light after dark. In a small home the fire..... Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/tallow-candles-snuffers.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com Flat bread cooked on a metal plate over a fire may seem like a simple style of baking, but there are some even more basic ways of turning flour into bread. Ancient alternatives include laying the dough on hot embers, or even in amongst the ashes. You can also bake dough on a hot stone placed by an open hearth or...... Wed, 1 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/bannock-flat-bread.aspx http://www.oldandinteresting.com 'Covering floors with woven, hooked, braided, prodded, or crocheted strips of cloth' - Sometimes it's hard to be precise about the history and origins of simple domestic crafts and equipment. Writers weren't usually interested in recording the details of everyday housekeeping and low-status domestic crafts...... Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:00:00 GMT http://www.oldandinteresting.com/history-rag-rugs.aspx