Introduced in 1930 by Lionel Corp.—better known for its electric model trains—the fully functional toy stove shown at top had two electric burners and an oven that heated to 260 °C. It came with a set of cookware, including a frying pan, a pot with lid, a muffin tin, a tea kettle, and a wooden potato masher. I would have also expected a spoon, whisk, or spatula, but maybe most girls already had those. Just plug in the toy, and housewives-in-training could mimic their mothers frying eggs, baking muffins, or boiling water for tea.
A brief history of toy stoves
Even before electrification, cast-iron toy stoves had become popular in the mid-19th century. At first fueled by coal or alcohol and later by oil or gas, these toy stoves were scaled-down working equivalents of the real thing. Girls could use their stoves along with a toy waffle iron or small skillet to whip up breakfast. If that wasn’t enough fun, they could heat up a miniature flatiron and iron their dolls’ clothes. Designed to help girls understand their domestic duties, these toys were the gendered equivalent of their brothers’ toy steam engines. If you’re thinking fossil-fuel-powered “educational toys” are a recipe for disaster, you are correct. Many children suffered serious burns and sometimes death by literally playing with fire. Then again, people in the 1950s thought playing with uranium was safe.
When electric toy stoves came on the scene in the 1910s, things didn’t get much safer, as the new entrants also lacked basic safety features. The burners on the 1930 Lionel range, for example, could only be turned off or on, but at least kids weren’t cooking over an open flame. At 86 centimeters tall, the Lionel range was also significantly larger than its more diminutive predecessors. Just the right height for young children to cook standing up.
Western Electric’s Junior Electric Range was demonstrated at an expo in 1915 in New York City.The Strong
Well before the Lionel stove, the Western Electric Co. had a cohort of girls demonstrating its Junior Electric Range at the Electrical Exposition held in New York City in 1915. The Junior Electric held its own in a display of regular sewing-machine motors, vacuum cleaners, and electric washing machines.
The Junior Electric stood about 30 cm tall with six burners and an oven. The electric cord plugged into a light fixture socket. Children played with it while sitting on the floor or as it sat on a table. A visitor to the Expo declared the miniature range “the greatest electrical novelty in years.” Cooking by electricity in any form was still innovative—George A. Hughes had introduced his eponymous electric range just five years earlier. When the Junior Electric came along, less than a third of U.S. households had been wired for electric lights.
How electricity turned cooking into a science
One reason to give little girls working toy stoves was so they could learn how to differentiate between a hot flame and low heat and get a feel for cooking without burning the food. These are skills that come with experience. Directions like “bake until done in a moderate oven,” a common line in 19th-century recipes, require a lot more tacit knowledge than is needed to, say, throw together a modern boxed brownie mix. The latter comes with detailed instructions and assumes you can control your oven temperature to within a few degrees. That type of precision simply didn’t exist in the 19th century, in large part because it was so difficult to calibrate wood- or coal-burning appliances. Girls needed to start young to master these skills by the time they married and were expected to handle the household cooking on their own.
Electricity changed the game.
In his comparison of “fireless cookers,” an engineer named Percy Wilcox Gumaer exhaustively tested four different electric ovens and then presented his findings at the 32nd Annual Convention of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (a forerunner of today’s IEEE) on 2 July 1915. At the time, metered electricity was more expensive than gas or coal, so Gumaer investigated the most economical form of cooking with electricity, comparing different approaches such as longer cooking at low heat versus faster cooking in a hotter oven, the effect of heat loss when opening the oven door, and the benefits of searing meat on the stovetop versus in the oven before making a roast.
Gumaer wasn’t starting from scratch. Similar to how Yoshitada Minami needed to learn the ideal rice recipe before he could design an automatic rice cooker, Gumaer decided that he needed to understand the principles of roasting beef. Minami had turned to his wife, Fumiko, who spent five years researching and testing variations of rice cooking. Gumaer turned to the work of Elizabeth C. Sprague, a research assistant in nutrition investigations at the University of Illinois, and H.S. Grindley, a professor of general chemistry there.
In their 1907 publication “A Precise Method of Roasting Beef,” Sprague and Grindley had defined qualitative terms like medium rare and well done by precisely measuring the internal temperature in the center of the roast. They concluded that beef could be roasted at an oven temperature between 100 and 200 °C.
Continuing that investigation, Gumaer tested 22 roasts at 100, 120, 140, 160, and 180 °C, measuring the time they took to reach rare, medium rare, and well done, and calculating the cost per kilowatt-hour. He repeated his tests for biscuits, bread, and sponge cake.
In case you’re wondering, Gumaer determined that cooking with electricity could be a few cents cheaper than other methods if you roasted the beef at 120 °C instead of 180 °C. It’s also more cost-effective to sear beef on the stovetop rather than in the oven. Biscuits tasted best when baked at 200 to 240 °C, while sponge cake was best between 170 and 200 °C. Bread was better at 180 to 240 °C, but too many other factors affected its quality. In true electrical engineering fashion, Gumaer concluded that “it is possible to reduce the art of cooking with electricity to an exact science.”
Electric toy stoves as educational tools
This semester, I’m teaching an introductory class on women’s and gender studies, and I told my students about the Lionel toy oven. They were horrified by the inherent danger. One incredulous student kept asking, “This is real? This is not a joke?” Instead of learning to cook with a toy that could heat to 260 °C, many of us grew up with the Easy-Bake Oven. The 1969 model could reach about 177° C with its two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. That was still hot enough to cause burns, but somehow it seemed safer. (Since 2011, Easy-Bakes have used a heating element instead of lightbulbs.)
The Queasy Bake Cookerator, designed to whip up “gross-looking, great-tasting snacks,” was marketed to boys. The Strong
The Easy-Bake I had wasn’t particularly gendered. It was orange and brown and meant to look like a different new-fangled appliance of the day, the microwave oven. But by the time my students were playing with Easy-Bake Ovens, the models were in the girly hues of pink and purple. In 2002, Hasbro briefly tried to lure boys by releasing the Queasy Bake Cookerator, which the company marketed with disgusting-sounding foods like Chocolate Crud Cake and Mucky Mud. The campaign didn’t work, and the toy was soon withdrawn.
Similarly, Lionel’s electric toy range didn’t last long on the market. Launched in 1930, it had been discontinued by 1932, but that may have had more to do with timing. The toy cost US $29.50, the equivalent of a men’s suit, a new bed, or a month’s rent. In the midst of a global depression, the toy stove was an extravagance. Lionel reverted to selling electric trains to boys.
My students discussed whether cooking is still a gendered activity. Although they agreed that meal prep disproportionately falls on women even now, they acknowledged the rise of the male chef and credited televised cooking shows with closing the gender gap. As a surprise, we discovered that one of the students in the class, Haley Mattes, competed in and won Chopped Junior as a 12-year-old.
Haley had a play kitchen as a kid that was entirely fake: fake food, fake pans, fake utensils. She graduated to the Easy-Bake Oven, but really got into cooking the same way girls have done for centuries, by learning beside her grandmas.
Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the December 2025 print issue as “Too Hot to Handle.”
References
I first came across a description of Western Electric’s Junior Electric Range in “The Latest in Current Consuming Devices,” in the November 1915 issue of Electrical Age.
The Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, N.Y., has a large collection of both cast-iron and electric stoves. The Strong also published two blogs that highlighted Lionel’s toy: “Kids and Cooking” and “Lionel for Ladies?”
Although Ron Hollander’s All Aboard! The Story of Joshua Lionel Cowen & His Lionel Train Company (Workman Publishing, 1981) is primarily about toy trains, it includes a few details about how Lionel marketed its electric toy stove to girls.
Reference: https://ift.tt/54JS0zM
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