A lot of 14th century living history groups and reenactors are forced to use anachronistic cooking ranges due to a variety of reasons including modern fire regulations requiring the use of fire boxes, the lack of availablity of the few known period 14th century items and discussions about whether or not tripods where used during the 14th century.

For the most part cooking outdoors is often shown throughout the 14th century illustrations as a person sat next to along spit supported by a couple of Y shaped sticks as they turn, bast and maintain the food on the spit.

It appears that in most illustrations of this type of cooking the cooking is done through roasting the food alongside the fire rather than boiling or frying it in a vessel sat on top of the fire. We, and the customer in question, had been unable to find an image of cooking taking place in a pot hanging from a tripod directly over the fire from the 14th Century illustrations available to us.

Driven by the requirements of modern safety standards and a desire for a historic, metal based solution we continued the search and turned up a great many solutions either side of the 14th century that may have been available during the period but had not come directly from the 14th century evidence. Some of these none period, historic solutions included roasting (as seen above) cooking on trivets with pots, suspending pots with trammels (mostly in households), frying off food in pans and boiling.

Eventually though we stumbled across the following image of a person using what appears to be a fabricted, tripod during the early 14th century


However its is noteworthy that the tripod is still being used as a means to hold a spit to roast food alongside a fire rather than boil pots or similar directly over a fire.

The requirement from the customer was that the item should be as historically accurate as possible, still be able to be used over a fire when they wanted to. Using the image for scale a tripod was created large enough to be used as a spit but also as a pot holder. The hooks are pierced and peened through the legs; finally the brief was for the device to be collapsable (a definite boon for most reenactors).

It is our hope that by giving a summary of this work from concept, through the customer requirements, research and final execution that you will see we will work with you, history and practicality to create exactly what you are require.