The Dutch oven is named for a Bristol man's trip to Holland
Around 1704 an English brass maker named Abraham Darby travelled to the Netherlands and saw Dutch craftsmen casting pots in moulds of sand. Back in Bristol he tried the trick with cheaper cast iron and patented it in 1707. The heavy lidded pots that resulted have carried the Dutch name for over 300 years.
In 17th-century England, brass was the favoured metal for kitchenware, and the Dutch made it more cheaply than anyone, though it was still costly. Darby, a partner in a Bristol brass works that made malt mills for brewers, noticed that Dutch sand moulds gave a finer finish than the traditional loam and clay. He opened a new mill in 1706 and reasoned that iron pots would sell in greater numbers. His first attempts failed, but with help from a Welsh worker, James Thomas, he succeeded, and the name was in use by at least 1710. It was loosely applied: a legged iron pan, an open-sided roasting box and a brick-hearth baking compartment were all called Dutch ovens at one time or another.
In colonial America the design shifted. Pots became shallower, grew legs to stand over the coals, and gained a flanged lid that held embers on top while keeping ash out of the food, improvements credited to Paul Revere. One pot could handle baking, frying, stewing and roasting alike, and such pots were valuable enough to be named in wills. Mary Ball Washington's 1788 will split her iron kitchen furniture, Dutch ovens included, between a son-in-law and a granddaughter.
The pot then went west. Lewis and Clark carried one between 1804 and 1806, mountain men and cattle-drive chuckwagons relied on them, and a Salt Lake City monument to Mormon handcart pioneers shows one swinging from the cart. Texas, Utah and Arkansas have each made it their official state cooking pot. The camp version has three legs, a wire bail handle and a rimmed lid, so coals above and below turn the inside into a true oven.
Relatives exist worldwide. South Africa's potjie has a rounded bottom like a cauldron, Australia's steel Bedourie oven was built to survive where cast iron cracked, and in the Netherlands the everyday version is an enamelled steel braadpan, introduced in 1891.
Source: Dutch oven
