Cooking with Gas

I am a great reader and collector of old cookbooks. Recently, a friend dropped by two bound volumes of a Parisian cooking journal, what passed for a magazine in those days, one from 1900 and the other from 1901.

I didn't have a whole lot of time to start reading, but I did leaf through them a bit and after getting through a few months of journals, something struck me. Each month, there was a column entitled Cuisine au Gaz or Cooking with Gas in English.

It's very hard to remember in this day and age that cooking with natural gas (or more likely methane?) was a new technology in the Paris of 1900. Think about that next time you turn on the stove!