What did our grandmothers do before double ovens?

amother

Cobalt

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 3:09 pm

Wow I must be from last century and really treif
I use one oven for both. Clean it out very well, highest number for 15minutes and that's it. Milchig to fleishig to pareve and backwards.
This is done per my father's instructions (he is a major (chassidish) posek)
Seriously, we've become frummer than our holy grandmother's! Sometimes im wont to agree with the sarcastic line "when mosiach will come he will say we are frummer than him"....

amother

Crimson

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 4:05 pm

If this is a serious question, the answer is that they cooked everything in one oven and were thankful to have an oven that didn't require chopping wood. It wouldn't have been in their mind to worry that an oven that was used to cook meat could not be used to cook lokshen kugel at a different time without decontamination. LOL

They also had one sink and were thankful for hot running water. Heck my great grandmother on the Lower East Side was thankful for cold running water.

It seems as though people are imposing increasingly stringent restrictions based on technology because a kosher Balabusta in the 1950's would never have been able to exist in this manner. People rarely used disposable products and cleaning an oven was a horrendous procedure done with dangerous lye based chemicals - just as an example.

Do you think all of these people were less religious or less observant because The realities of their physical surroundings made it impossible to be so stringent.

shabbatiscoming

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 4:36 pm

amother wrote:

Assuming our grandmothers and great grandmothers (and continue to go back many generations) didn't have a double oven in their kitchen--how did they cook both meat and dairy? Did they really kasher their oven between cooking meat and dairy each and every time, or have the rules of kashrut become more stringent in recent years?

I havent read any replies. Every single place I have lived, in american and now in Israel, there have only been ingle ovens. I have never lived anywhere where there was a double oven.
We heat up the oven on broil for a specific amount of time, if the thing being cooked was open. If it is closed, then there is no problem and meat and dairy can be cooked after each other. Thats how I learned it.

Raisin

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 4:51 pm

In chabad everyone I know has 2 ovens or only cooks meat or dairy in their oven, not both. To be honest I never knew you could use for both uncovered. For a time I only had one oven and I used it for milk, and just cooked all meat in pots on the stove.

I would definitely find it a pain to only have one, especially erev yom tov and shabbos when cook big meals. It makes life a lot easier to make pizza while cooking shabbos food. I could never do that with one oven. Also how do you keep track of what the oven is? Especially people with lots of teens in the house, heating up pizza and chicken nuggets.

Just like lots of non Jewish people have those big fancy range ovens with 4 or 5 separate oven compartments, so they can cook different types of food simultaneously.

pause

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 5:49 pm

I was also told that the oven should not be a ben yomo (24 hours since last use), placed on highest temp for an hour and then it's good to go. I used to switch only from fleishig to pareve and back. (For milchigs I have a toaster oven.) Then I found myself forgetting what the status of the oven was. I wanted to bake cake (to be drunk with milk) or challos (which can be used for milchig french toast motze shabbas) and I found myself stuck with a maybe-fleishig-maybe-pareve. Also, sometimes the chicken dripped and I wasn't sure if it was cleaned out/burned out well enough.

So I just stopped doing it on a constant basis. My oven is pareve. Any fleishigs gets double-wrapped. I never make fleishigs that needs to be uncovered.

pause

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 6:04 pm

gp2.0 wrote:

Also I'm not sure what kind of double oven were talking about here, but I learned that double ovens that (usually) share a vent count halachically as the same oven as steam travels through both ovens.

Yes, so the bottom can be pareve and the top can be fleishig or milchig. That's how most ppl I know do it.

Ema of 5

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 6:22 pm

shabbatiscoming wrote:

not everyone did. I seriously know of maybe two families that have a double oven.
And they have it because their house was bought that way, not BECAUSE OF kashrut.

Or (like us) they redid the kitchen and made it bigger, so there was ROOM for a double oven.
Or like my mother, they have a really old oven that is an oven, a stove, and then a smaller top oven.

vintagebknyc

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 6:30 pm

Maya wrote:

If you think about it, it's not so surprising that the OP thinks everyone must have two ovens. It seems we're moving towards a time when a kitchen without three sinks will be considered a treif kitchen, so it makes sense that use of only one oven will be totally assur. Smile

Nothing like Imamother to make you feel totally lousy about your life choices.

MagentaYenta

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 6:39 pm

gp2.0 wrote:

I find this interesting. I've owned two gas stoves that both had a smaller oven over the burners and one below the range top. None had venting no less shared venting.

gp2.0

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 6:56 pm

MagentaYenta wrote:

I find this interesting. I've owned two gas stoves that both had a smaller oven over the burners and one below the range top. None had venting no less shared venting.

I don't get it. There was an oven on the bottom, a gas range on top of that oven, and another oven on top of the gas range? How does that work? Maybe you could find a pic? Smile

By vent I mean those holes that are on the back of every oven. Every oven has a vent...I don't mean those fancy hooded exhaust things. With double stacked ovens the heat from the bottom oven rises to the top oven's vent. It doesn't necessarily go through the oven but as we know, air doesn't really travel in a straight line so the air from both ovens likely mixes together while one or both are cooking. Therefore they count as the "same" oven.

ra_mom

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 7:07 pm

MagentaYenta wrote:

I find this interesting. I've owned two gas stoves that both had a smaller oven over the burners and one below the range top. None had venting no less shared venting.

My mom has one like that. Goes years back.
The ovens are totally separate. Venting g is separate. You don't realize there are vent hole but there are.

gp2.0 is referring to newer modeled double ovens. Neither of the ovens are full size as they both fit below the standard range, one on top of the other (one piece range, same size as a standard range). Some of those ovens share Venting holes and can cause a halachic problem if one wants to designate one for dairy and the other for meat. While others do have separate vent holes and the ovens can be designated halachicly however it is convenient.

tigerwife

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 7:09 pm

OP, Aylor, or better yet, learn the halachos. Some people are quick to say assur because they want to be on the safe side. But you can't brush aside chumros unless you actually know they are a chumra. I learned there are three opinions- waiting 24 hours and then burning out, just burning out, or just making sure the oven is clean. Ask which one your community follows.

We always had one oven but it got tiring to do the burning out thing (we also wait 24 hours). We found that using an upgraded toaster worked very well for baking dairy.

MagentaYenta

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 7:14 pm

gp2.0 wrote:

I don't get it. There was an oven on the bottom, a gas range on top of that oven, and another oven on top of the gas range? How does that work? Maybe you could find a pic? Smile

Think of your regular drop in stove with 16" of overhead clearance above the burners and then a smaller oven. Even on the new double ovens like a GE Profile where there is one large oven the venting is at the burner height and directed via two different exhaust channels.

ETA: Passive venting doesn't mix steam inside of an oven or ovens. The hot air has to escape before it can be mixed.

Last edited by MagentaYenta on Mon, Nov 30 2015, 7:22 pm; edited 2 times in total

zaq

Mon, Nov 30 2015, 7:19 pm

I don't know whether to laugh or be insulted. Your GRANDMOTHER? OP, I may be old enough to be your mom but no way am I old enough to be your grandmom in the normal way of things. The only person I know with a double oven spent big money to renovate her kitchen about 10 years ago. Neither my niece nor my dd or dil has a double oven, and none of them is old enough to be your mother or grandmother, either

Now if you had asked how they managed with no oven, period, this would be a kashe. Answer: depends on where and when you're talking about. In some places there was a communal oven shared by everyone. In some places they used a clever device resembling a tube pan, called a Seer Peleh or Wundertopf, that allows baking atop a stove. I happen to have one and use it all summer when I want to bake but don't want to heat up the house. This is real baking, very different from microwaving. This device evolved from earlier gadgets were used for baking atop a log fire.

In the American colonial era, you took some coals off the fire, scattered them on the hearthstone, and placed over the coals an iron pan with legs and a domed lid that contained your cake pan or bread dough or whatever. In other places, you built a fire in a pit in the ground, and when the fire was down to glowing embers, you buried your covered pot in the pit. Sometimes you built another fire on top of that. Hours later, you unearthed the pot and your food was done. Needless to say, this kind of baking took considerably more skill and supervision than popping a pan into a steel box, punching in 350 degrees and 60 minutes and sitting back waiting for the timer to ding.

Many of the things people said before are also true, such as not baking actual milchik foods, letting an oven stand cold for 24 hours between different denominations, and so on.