Seasoned Advice Asked by Pearl H on March 20, 2021
I’m looking at a couple of recipes from the early twentieth century. One calls for a quick oven. The temperature for that (375 – 400°F) was easy enough to work out, several places online have it, including a 2010 Q&A from this site. The other one, quiet oven, is proving a little more challenging. (If this is a mistake, it was a typo/typesetting mistake in the original article: it is a newspaper article and is pretty clearly ‘quiet’.) I am leaning toward ‘slow oven’, 300-325°F, because it is difficult to imagine anything being cooked at lower temperatures. (It is a sweet potato biscuit if that makes a difference to anyone’s logic process.)
So, any ideas what a ‘quiet oven’ might be?
Well, quiet and quick look similar to an OCR, especially one with a spell-checking dictionary looking at faded and/or poorly forged letterset.
If you have ever reacted buttermilk and baking soda, you know that it is a violent reaction, and one that is not endless. If you want your batter to rise and keep its form, you would use a hot preheated oven to capture the bubbles, a quick oven.
So I am pretty sure that a quiet oven is actually quick.
The only thing that it could possibly be if quiet is really what was meant and an accurate description of the oven, in my opinion, is a stage in the wood-firing of a bakers oven where there are only coals glowing and the oven isn’t making any sound. But that is an assumption that I have no reference for. (And this would probably be a very hot environment, ergo quiet = quick).
Thinking about this some more, linguistically speaking, a ‘quick oven’ might be a shortened form for ‘quick ovening’. This could come from a German baker who anglicized the German: e.g. schnellbacken which is implicitly only possible in a very hot environment, regardless of the oven type. It would also mean that you don’t have time to do errands or chores while the biscuit is in the oven.
Correct answer by Nothingismagick on March 20, 2021
Must be a quick oven. Only thing I can think of as a quit oven. Would be a oven, stove banked down for the night. With the 10 gallon water tank on the side. So you would have hot or warm water in the morning when you got up in that tank. That would be under 200f By morning if cold out 120f. In the kitchen. Ready to stir the coals shake them out & add more wood for heat. Shake the ash out leave the coals to start the new wood burning. A warm place to stand as the kitchen warmed up was near the stove oven. We called it a banked down oven in the cold months. May be wrong her.
Answered by J Bergen on March 20, 2021
Google Books has a number of results calling for a "quiet oven" in older recipes, but it seems to have been such a ubiquitous concept that they didn't feel the need to explain what it meant. The only source I could find that gave any indication at all was this book by Robert Carlton Brown, published in 1955, which indicates that it was an English term for a "moderate" oven. He doesn't say what that specifically means, or when it fell out of favor as a term (I would assume with the advent of electric ovens), but I would posit that it's somewhere around 350-75 degrees, based on modern usage.
Answered by Seanachai on March 20, 2021
I have an old (early 20th century) book with a recipe that also calls for a 'quiet oven' so I'm pretty sure it's not a typo. I'm inclined to agree that it's a moderate temperature (around 350-375F) as I found it in a cake recipe.
Answered by Wendy on March 20, 2021
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