The tripod which held the cooking-vessel over the wood flame, among the former inhabitants of Britain, has not been entirely effaced.  It is yet to be seen here and there in out-of-the-way corners and places; and in India they use one constructed of clay, and differently contrived.  The most primitive pots for setting over the fire on the tripod were probably of bronze.

The tripod seems to be substantially identical with what was known in Nidderdale as the kail-pot.  “This was formerly in common use,” says Mr. Lucas; “a round iron pan, about ten inches deep and eighteen inches across, with a tight-fitting, convex lid.  It was provided with three legs.  The kail-pot, as it was called, was used for cooking pies, and was buried bodily in burning peat.  As the lower peats became red-hot, they drew them from underneath, and placed them on the top.  The kail-pot may still be seen on a few farms.”  This was about 1870.

The writer is doubtless correct in supposing that this utensil was originally employed for cooking kail or cabbage and other green stuff.

Three rods of iron or hard wood lashed together, with a hook for taking the handle of the kettle, formed, no doubt, the original tripod.  But among some of the tribes of the North of Europe, and in certain Tartar, Indian, and other communities, we see no such rudimentary substitute for a grate, but merely two uprights and a horizontal rest, supporting a chain; and in the illustration to the thirteenth or fourteenth century MS., once part of the abbatial library at St. Albans, a nearer approach to the modern jack is apparent in the suspension of the vessel over the flame by a chain attached to the centre of a fireplace.

Not the tripod, therefore, but the other type must be thought to have been the germ of the later-day apparatus, which yielded in its turn to the Range.

The fireplace with a ring in the middle, from which is suspended the pot, is represented in a French sculpture of the end of the fourteenth century, where two women are seated on either side, engaged in conversation.  One holds a ladle, and the other an implement which may be meant for a pair of bellows.

In his treatise on Kitchen Utensils, Neckam commences with naming a table, on which the cook may cut up green stuff of various sorts, as onions, peas, beans, lentils, and pulse; and he proceeds to enumerate the tools and implements which are required to carry on the work:  pots, tripods for the kettle, trenchers, pestles, mortars, hatchets, hooks, saucepans, cauldrons, pails, gridirons, knives, and so on.  The head-cook was to have a little apartment, where he could prepare condiments and dressings; and a sink was to be provided for the viscera and other offal of poultry.  Fish was cooked in salt water or diluted wine.

Pepper and salt were freely used, and the former must have been ground as it was wanted, for a pepper-mill is named as a requisite.  Mustard we do not encounter till the time of Johannes de Garlandia (early thirteenth century), who states that it grew in his own garden at Paris.  Garlic, or gar-leac (in the same way as the onion is called yn-leac), had established itself as a flavouring medium.  The nasturtium was also taken into service in the tenth or eleventh century for the same purpose, and is classed with herbs.