High up on the heavy beam over the fireplace stood usually a candlestick, an old lamp, perhaps a sausage stuffer, or a spice-mill, or a candle mold, a couple of wooden noggins, sometimes a pipe-tongs. By the side of the fireplace hung the soot-blackened, smoke-dried almanac, and near it often hung a betty-lamp, whose ill-smelling flame could supply for conning the pages a closer though scarce brighter light than the flickering hearth flame.
By the hearth, sometimes in the chimney corner, stood the high-backed settle, a sheltered seat, while the family dye-pot often was used by the children as a chimney bench.
Many household utensils once in common use in New England are now nearly obsolete. In many cases the old-time names are disused and forgotten, while the object itself may still be found with some modern appellation. In reading old wills, inventories, and enrollments, and the advertisements in old newspapers, I have made many notes of these old names, and have sometimes succeeded, though with difficulty, in identifying the utensils thus designated. Of course the different English shire dialects supply a variety of local names. In some cases good old English words have been retained in constant use in New England, while wholly archaic in the fatherland.
In every thrifty New England home there stood a tub containing a pickle for salting meat. It was called a powdering-tub, or powdering-trough. This use of the word “powder” for salt dates even before Shakespeare’s day.
Grains is an obsolete word for tines or prongs. Winthrop wrote in 1643 that a snake crawled in the Assembly room, and a parson “held it with his foot and staff with a small pair of grains and killed it.”
Spenser used the word “flasket” thus: “In which to gather flowers to fill their flasket.” It was a basket, or hamper, made of woven wicker. John Hull, writing in 1675, asks that “Wikker Flasketts” be brought to him on the Sea Flower.
A skeel was a small, shallow wooden tub, principally used for holding milk to stand for cream. It sometimes had one handle. The word is now used in Yorkshire. Akin to it is the word keeler, a small wooden tub, which is still constantly heard in New England, especially in application to a tub in which dishes are washed. Originally, cedar keelers were made to hold milk, and a losset was also a large flat wooden dish used for the same purpose. A skippet was a vessel much like a dipper, small and round, with long handle, and used for ladling liquids.
A quarn was a hand-mill for grinding meal, and sometimes it stood in a room by itself. It was a step in domestic progress beyond pounding grain with a pestle in a mortar, and was of earlier date than the windmill or water-mill. In Wiclif’s translation we read in Matthew xxiv: “Two wymmen schalen be gryndynge in quern,” etc. This word is also used by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In early New England wills the word is found, as in one of 1671: “1 paire Quarnes and Lumber in the quarne house, 10s.” It was sometimes spelled “cairn,” as in a Windham will, and also “quern” and “quirn.”
Sometimes a most puzzling term will be found in one of these old inventories, one which appears absolutely incomprehensible. Here is one which seems like a riddle of which the answer is irrevocably lost: “One Billy bassha Pan.” It is found in the kitchen list of the rich possessions of Madam De Peyster, in 1774, which inventory is preserved in the family archives at the Van Cortlandt Manor House, at Croton-on-Hudson. You can give any answer you please to the riddle; but my answer is this, in slightly altered verse. I think that Madam De Peyster’s cook used that dish to serve:—
A sort of soup or broth or stew