The fourteenth volume of the Leeds Symposium on Food History 'Food and Society' series .The theme is the ways we cooked our food since medieval times.David Eveleigh discusses the rise of the kitchen range, from the 19th-century coal-fired monsters to the electric and gas cookers of the early 20th century.Ivan Day, in two essays, talks about techniques of roasting. In the first he tells of the ox roast; in the second he traces the history of the clockwork spit. Peter Brears gives an account of roasting, specifically the 'baron of beef', in early modern royal palaces.