For thousands of years, bakers have moved loaves in and out of hot ovens with a peel, a utensil resembling a long-handled shovel with a flat head. The basic design hardly changed.
There are frescoes in Rome that depict an ancient baker using his peel in the same way settlers would have used them. Only the material used in manufacturing the peel evolved.
Originally, they would have all been wooden, but by the 19th century many were being made of iron.
The immigrants who settled in the area valued bread as an inexpensive food item that could be made with whatever grains could be harvested from their fields and which could sustain the family when other foodstuffs were hard to come by.
Bread could be baked indoors or out, but there were inherent drawbacks with baking bread indoors.
There was always the risk of fire, of course, and in the summer the housewife would have to endure a house made unbearably hot.
As a result, most 19th century homes had an outdoor summer kitchen with an oven made of brick, stone, or clay and made use of it whenever weather allowed.
Baking bread was time consuming. A fire was kindled inside the oven and kept burning for two or three hours before it was to be used.
When the dough was ready, the coals were raked out of the oven with a scraper and broom. The lady of the house then tested the temperature by placing her hand on the oven. If it was too hot to keep her hand there for 10 or 15 seconds, that meant the oven was ready for use.
The lady then shoveled the dough into the oven using the peel—its long handle necessary to keep her hands from burning—and placed it on the oven floor to bake.
Bread would take about two hours to bake completely. When the batch was done, the peel was used again to draw the bread out.
Of course, peels weren’t just used by settlers’ wives. Hotels went through great quantities of bread to feed their guests, and towns of any size had commercial bakeries.
Unlike many tools used by the region's first generation, the peel never completely went out of use. It remains in use by bakers and at pizzerias today, little changed over the decades and centuries.
