Oven Cookery

Oven cooking and baked meats have always been a feature of good English cookery, from the days when an oven was dug in the ground and lined with stones to keep the earth from falling in, and heated with wood, seaweed, etc., along through the ages of public ovens to the oil, gas, and electric ovens of to-day.

The Manor Oven or as it used to be called the Town or Parish Oven was a prominent feature of domestic economy. It was not uncommon for the lord of the manor to provide a large oven for the baking of bread of the inhabitants of a parish, the ownership and charges for its use being reckoned amongst his manorial rights. In 1307 Melton Mowbray had one of them. When the oven was ready for baking a man paraded the streets blowing a horn.