Had much ado to bear ’em.
A twi-crook was a double hook.
Other terms were gallow-balke, for the lug-pole, and gallow-crookes for pot-hooks. These were Yorkshire words, used alike in that county by common folk and gentry. They appear in the inventory of the goods of Sir Timothy Hutton, and in the farming-book of Henry Best, both dating to the time of settlement of New England. A recon was another Yorkshire name for a chain with pot-hooks. They were heard but rarely in New England.
The “eetch-hooke” named by Thomas Angell, of Providence, in 1694, with his “tramils and pot hookes” is an unknown and undescribable form of trammel to me, possibly an H-hook.
By these vari-named hooks were suspended at various heights over the flames pots, kettles, and other bailed cooking utensils.
The lug-pole, though made of green wood, often became brittle or charred through too long and careless use over the hot fire, and was left in the chimney till it broke under its weighty burden of food and metal. And as within the chimney corner was a favorite seat for both old and young of the household, not only were precious cooking utensils endangered and food lost, but human life as well, as told in Judge Sewall’s diary, and in other diaries and letters of the times. So, when the iron crane was hung in the fireplace, it not only added grace and convenience to the family hearth, but safety as well. On it still were hung the pot-hooks and trammels, but with shortened arms or hangers.
The mantel was sometimes called by the old English name, clavy or clavel-piece. In one of John Wynter’s letters, written in 1634, he describes his new home in Maine:
The chimney is large, with an oven in each end of him: he is so large that we can place our Cyttle within the Clavell-piece. We can brew and bake and boyl our Cyttle all at once in him.
The change in methods of cooking is plainly evinced in many of our common kitchen utensils. In olden times the pots and kettles always stood on legs, and all skillets and frying-pans and saucepans stood on slender legs, that, if desired, they might be placed with their contents over small beds of coals raked to one side of the hearth. A further convenience to assist this standing over coals was a little trivet, a tripod or three-footed stand, usually but a simple skeleton frame on which the skillet could be placed. In the corner of a fireplace would be seen trivets with legs of various lengths, through which the desired amount of heat could be obtained. We read in Eden’s First Books on America:—
He shulde fynde in one place a fryingpan, in another chauldron, here a tryvet, there a spytte, and these in kynde in every pore mans house:—