A short-legged breed developed purely to trot inside a wheel that turned the roasting spit over an open kitchen fire, common in English kitchens for three centuries. Cheap clockwork spit-jacks made the job, and eventually the breed itself, obsolete; by 1900 the turnspit dog was extinct.
Turnspit dog no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
500 – 1450
Guilds and the Islamic world's kitchens
As Rome fell, professional cooking survived best where large households still needed feeding: monasteries, and the courts of an expanding Islamic world, whose 10th-century Baghdad produced Kitab al-Tabikh, one of the oldest surviving Arabic cookbooks, with techniques far more advanced than anything written in Latin Christendom at the time. In Europe, cooking reorganized into guilds — Paris's roasters chartered by 1268 — that legally separated one dish from another. Further east, the 1453 conquest of Constantinople gave the Ottoman sultans a palace kitchen that would grow into one of the largest catering operations in history.
What else was happening then
1574
Topkapi's kitchens rebuilt at empire scale
Chief Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan gave Istanbul's Topkapi Palace kitchens the ten-domed form still standing today. Behind its walls, a kitchen staff that had numbered around a hundred under Mehmed II grew past a thousand under later sultans, cooking for the court, the harem and palace guards under a strict hierarchy of named ranks.
1651
La Varenne writes down the new French cooking
François Pierre La Varenne's Le Cuisinier françois broke from the heavily spiced medieval kitchen, favoring the roux, the bouquet garni and the natural taste of ingredients. It is generally considered the first cookbook aimed at professional cooks rather than noble households, and the founding text of what became French haute cuisine.
Where that work lives now
The professional who commands a kitchen brigade under nightly pressure, from Escoffier's Paris to Osaka's sushi counters and Lima's ceviche bars.
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