Learnings: Cook and Kitchen

A well-preserved iron frying pan / 9th cent.

In poorer and humbler Anglo-Saxon homes, the living room and the kitchen would have been one and the same. However, some wealthy freemen and aristocrats may have had their kitchens in a separate building next door.

Pots and pans like this one were sometimes made of cast iron but were mostly ceramic. Cooking could be done over a hearth, by suspending a pot above a fire, or by placing it directly on the embers. Meat may have been prepared by using a spit to grill it over the flames.