Every house must have one

This afternoon, wanting to know what its proper name was and being too idle to go downstairs to take a look, I had occasion to look up the Boston Cook Book, that is to say reference 1.

This took me to Wikipedia which included the snap above. Ever curious, I wondered what on earth it was and asked Google Image Search. This turned up the very same snap, but also a snap of something similar involving oil and called perfection.

Another few clicks and I got to the next snap. Which while not identical to the first is pretty close. I suppose that in a large country where the coverage of town gas was not that great, an oil fired domestic cooker had its points. Not least, most of the convenience of gas. No messing around with some great iron range with its fire, ash and dirt. Quite possibly, as far as the heating element went, rather like the (wicked) Aladdin paraffin fires of our day, noticed at reference 2. The tops of which were quite hot enough to cook on, and while I was not sure whether we ever did, BH thinks that I thought we ought to give it a go and warmed up some lentil soup on one, in our flat roofed extension out back, here at Epsom, which can get quite cold.

One wonders when these Perfection cookers were popular and how expensive they were.

It would be rather fun now to have one in working order which one could show off when one had people round. It would also be proof against the gas and electricity cuts which might lie ahead. But I think I would need more space and more money before it really seemed like a good idea.

PS: this cook book used to share the honours with the Radiation Cook Book in my mother's kitchen. We also have both of them - neither of them her copies - and while they are both regularly used, there is plenty of competition from books by celebrities and books with lots of coloured pictures. Our copy of the Boston Cook Book dates from 1931, when it was part of a print run which took the total to 1,536,000 copies.

References

Reference 1: Boston Cooking School Cook Book - Fannie Farmer - 1896.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/derby-action.html.