Modern kitchen technology is wonderful, especially at this time of year. I was reminded of this yesterday when reading this very tragic story on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer of Dec. 26, 1909:

Miss Bessie Ziv, aged 17 years, had already spent several hours with her mother in the kitchen of their home at 2553 East Clearfiled Street in preparing the Christmas dinner, when she opened the oven door to baste a turkey that was slowly turning a tempting nut brown.

“Is not the turkey cooking nicely?” she remarked to her mother as she poured the drippings in the pan over the big bird with a spoon. She leaned too near the open coal fire in the range and her apron caught fire. From an open window a gust of wind fanned the first sparks into flames that quickly enveloped her.

The story goes on to say that Miss Ziv’s injuries were probably fatal; those of her mother, who used her hands to put out the flames, were serious. It reports a similar case of a woman badly burned the same day elsewhere in the city when cooking her turkey to “a requisite degree of brownness.”

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