Dishwashing and Cleaning Up

In cleaning up after cooking, sanitation is the major concern, but food that is stuck on pans also interferes with cooking. Useful patinas on cast-iron wares, deliberately and slowly built up from grease and carbonized food, act like a Teflon coating. For centuries, until the 1850s or so, most cooking fat and grease was saved to make soap. Farm wives scraped plates into slop jars to feed their pigs well into the twentieth century.

Along with dishpans, dish mops, and drainers, tools included scouring sands, brushes, scrapers, and chain cloth pot cleaners. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, knives were placed on long scouring boards so that fine polishing grit could be rubbed on the blades. Cranked knife cleaners came in the 1860s. Clamshells were used as early pot scrapers; by the 1880s scrapers were made of metal in odd shapes so that corners fit the contours of different pans.