Culinary History (Part 20): Turning the Spit
The spit had to be turned, and the job was a dreadful one. It was done by the turnspit, or turnbroach, who was usually a boy. John Aubrey wrote, “In olden times, the poor boys did turn the spits, and licked the dripping pans.”
In the early 1500's, Henry VIII's household had many turnspits in the kitchen. They crammed themselves into cubbyholes beside the fireplace, and it would have been extremely hot. Until 1530, the kitchen staff at Hampton Court worked either naked or in little clothing. Henry VIII addressed the situation by giving the junior staff a clothing allowance, so now they were even hotter.
It wasn't just noble households that had turnspits. In 1666, the lawyers at London's Middle Temple had one “turnbroach”, two scullions, an under-cook and a head cook.
Children worked as turnspits well into the 1700's. John Macdonald (1741-96) was a famous footman, and he wrote about his experiences in service. He was sacked from a job rocking an baby's cradle, and found his next job as a turnspit in a gentleman's house, at the age of only 5yrs.
However, by the time Macdonald was a turnspit, it wasn't all that usual for a child to do the job, for it had been taken over by animals. This change had gradually happened over the 1500's & 1600's. In 1576, a book about English dogs defined a turnspit as “a certain dog in kitchen service”. These dogs were forced to walk like a guinea-pig in a wheel about 0.75m in diameter, suspended from a wall near the fireplace. The wheel was connected to the spit by a pulley.
Some cooks used geese instead of dogs. In the 1690's, it was written that they were better than dogs, because they kept going for longer (sometimes up to 12 hours). In the 1700's Thomas Somerville said that the dogs “used to hide themselves or run away when they observed indication that there was to be a roast for dinner.” So perhaps dogs were smarter, too.
Dogs were still being used as turnspits well into the 1800's. Henry Bergh was an animal-rights activist, and he campaigned against this abuse, along with other things such as bear-baiting. While this gave some stigma to the practice, it didn't change for the better. Several times when paying surpise visits to kitchens to check for dogs, he found that young black children were doing the job instead.
But mechanization ended the abuse of children, dogs and geese in the kitchen (at least in this sense). Inventors had been working on mechanical jacks since the 1500's. Peter Kalm (a Swedish naturalist) said in 1748 that the “meat jack” was “a very useful invention, which lightens the labour amongst a people who eat so much meat.” He claimed that “every house in England” had a simply-made weight-driven jack, but this was unfortunately an exaggeration – inventories show that about only half did. Still this was pretty good.
The basic mechanism of a spit-jack was a weight on the end of a cord, which was wound around a cylinder. The weight descended slowly, and the energy was transmitted to the spit/s, by a series of cogwheels & pulleys. Some jacks rang a bell when the spit stopped. These jacks were sometimes called “gravity jacks” because of how they worked.
There were other types of spit-jacks. Smoke-jacks used the updraught from the fire to power a vane. They were cheap, and didn't need winding up. But they were dreadfully wasteful of fuel – in 1800, it was worked out that 1/1000 of the fuel needed for a smoke-jack could power a small steam engine. Huge amounts of wood or coal had to be kept burning in the fire for it to work.
Spit-roasting was a key part of British cuisine, so much energy and effort was put into spit-jacks and improving them. Water, steam and clockwork were tried. Spit-jacks were the espresso machine of the day – the new technology that many kitchens had, while the rest of the kitchen objects had been around for aeons.
By the mid-1800's, the spit-jack was on the way out, because open-hearth cooking was being superseded by ovens.
