The Portsmouth tour, "A Tale of Two Kitchens," is part of Historic New England's 2009 Year of the Kitchen. One stop on the tour is the 1807 Rundlet-May house, built for merchant James Rundlet and his family. There you can see the Rumford system, named for Count Rumford (born Benjamin Thompson), which was then an innovative approach to cooking. It's centered around a fireplace, with a round iron door set into the wall on the left, and a series of burners hidden beneath a wooden board on the right. This was one of the first kitchens to separate chambers for different cooking techniques. Ordinarily, people cooked inside one fireplace, hanging heavy pots on a metal arm that swung in and out, or heaping hot coals around pots set on a brick hearth. The Rumford kitchen's iron door opens into a primitive two-shelf roasting oven, fueled by its own firebox underneath. Three burners, each fueled by fireboxes, were designed for stew pots.
"Rumford was an expert at making cooking more efficient," says Carlisle.
The Rundlet-May home contains one of the best-preserved Rumford kitchens in America. "We think of old homes as stagnant places, but this shows us that someone was thinking about the latest technology at the time."
The home, which in its early days housed 13 children and several servants, also had the latest technology in its scullery kitchen. Some of the water was supplied by Portsmouth's early aqueduct system. A special set-kettle heated water just for laundry.
"The servants who lived here were probably the happiest in Portsmouth because they had access to all these luxuries," says Elizabeth Farish, who oversees tours of the Rundlet-May house for Historic New England.
Also on the tour is the Wentworth-Coolidge mansion, former home of Benning Wentworth, who served as Royal Governor from 1741 to 1766. The 40-room home overlooks windswept Little Harbor. Its French-style kitchen is probably the first of its kind in New England, says Carlisle. (Thomas Jefferson installed a similar kitchen at Monticello in Virginia.) A waist-high brick structure has two deep holes in the top designed for stew pots, each fueled by charcoal that burned underneath.
