Woodstove Cookery

Women used to prepare all of their family's meals on and in "wood cookstoves". My grandmother used one, but - like every other woman of her generation - happily switched to the new-fangled coal, then gas and finally electric counterpart as they became available.

In the stove pictured here, the larger white door is the oven; the smaller one a second oven; the lower left-hand door is the firebox. There was a water reservoir (seen here on the right side of the stove). The compartment above the stove was for storage and for keeping things warm. Bread might have been placed up there to rise.

The cast iron top of the average kitchen stove had six "burners", varying in heat level by where they were located relative to the fire burning below them or the path by which smoke and heat exit to the chimney pipe. (You've all heard of putting it on the back burner - the cooler place where things simmer rather than boil). The chimney pipe doesn't show in this picture, but it would connect to the back of the stove just above the level of the burner top.

There is something romantic and wonderful about having a wood cookstove. Their heat is even, they warm the house as well as the food, and you feel connected to the generations of women before your time for whom this appliance was "modern". On the down-side, cookstoves take up a lot of space, eat a lot of finely split wood, and the dirt and bark bits falling off that wood constantly litter your kitchen. This appliance becomes damnable in the heat of summer.

I don't have a cookstove, but my house is heated by a woodstove (pictured in the previous post), and I can cook just about anything on top of it. The heat is even, and by placing a pan either directly on it's flat top or on one of three trivets of varying height, I can vary the cooking temperature. Like the old cookstove, the front of my stove is hotter than the rear. An oven is created by placing a large kettle upside-down over the pot and trivet, or by creating an aluminum foil tent of suitable size and shape to cover what you want to bake. I favor cast iron frying pans, and they are right at home on the woodstove top; the tea kettle boils quickly on a cold winter day.

One January several years ago we experienced The Great Ice Storm of '98 that left us without power for nearly two weeks. When power crews finally restored our electricity, we chose to leave it off. A friend had joined us, and we were just sitting down to our woodstove-cooked meal by candlelight: Mediterranean halibut, humus, tabouli and a salad. I had even baked brownies to enjoy with the ice cream from its frozen place on the front porch.

These last two photos are of that meal, a meal that was delicious and still the source of a warm memory.