Imagine yourself as a weary traveller in the 18th Century arriving, after a long and hard day’s journey, at your inn for the night. What could be more welcome than a decent piece of roast beef or pork? The inn keeper would of course want to offer this to his guests but roasting large hunks of meet in those days was hard work. It all needed to be spit-roasted over an open fire, turned throughout the cooking process to ensure an even result.
A big piece of beef could take up to three hours to cook which was hard and boring work for someone, unless of course the inn keeper had a turnspit dog. Instead of paying some poor sod to stand for hours on end turning the spit, many inns had a dog that was trained for this purpose. The dogs, usually of a Dachshund type, would run for hours on a treadmill that was mounted on the wall and connected by levers and gears to the spit to keep the meat turning.
The Turnspit Dog
By all accounts these were not happy dogs. They spent most of their time hiding from the cook and trying to avoid being put to their arduous work. How then did you train the dog to do it? The answer is: with a fair degree of cruelty.
To teach the dogs how to turn the spit, they would be put into their wheel with a hot coal. The hot coal would burn their legs and make them run to get away. If they ran too fast then the coal would chase them and burn them again but, after much pain, the dog would eventually find the perfect speed at which to run to keep the coal away. Thus trained, they had a lifetime ahead of them of running on the wheel for hours each day.
The fan oven, then, was a big step forward in animal rights.