If you are over 60 or grew up in the country you might have experienced cooking on a wood burning stove. Either from necessity or choice cooking this way has it’s benefits. Saving money on fuel or when the power is out; the ability to produce a meal for the family is very satisfying. Plus having a wood burning stove provides heat when other means are not working. Even though we gradually obtainer other means of heating the house we always kept the wood burning stove available and wood on hand to use it.
If you grew up this way just the coziness of a wood fire, the smell and the knowledge that you can stay warm are quite satisfying. I learned how to use a wood burning stove living on our farm in southern Missouri in the early 50s. We had moved there after dad and mom decided they didn’t want to live in the city. The small rural subdivision we lived in was being incorporated into the Iowa city we lived near and dad didn’t want that at all. We found ourselves overnight; having to learn a whole new way of life, from city kids to country kids. From close family to no family, hanging around and running the neighborhood to daily farm chores and being considered farm workers.
Being the oldest and a girl meant that I needed to learn to take on the responsibly of the kitchen and household. One of those responsibilities was learning to use a wood burning stove. Mom or dad started the fire but I was to be sure it kept going and to have wood ready to keep it burning. That was keeping the wood box full and the stove, stoked as we called it, or filled with the right amount of wood. If there wasn’t enough the stove wood not put out enough heat to warm the room or cook a meal. We had a cook stove in the kitchen that did double duty of heating the kitchen where we ate and being used to cook the family meals.
The next room was a kind of seating room where the stairs to two bedrooms were. In the winter we didn’t use the big living room as it was too hard to heat. We had a large stove in the family room which provided heat that went up the stairs to the bedrooms. It was also where we got dressed each day that it was too cold upstairs. Dad would get the stove good and hot then we would grab our close that we kept under the covers with us and run downstairs to put them on next to the stove.
Mom taught me how to prepare meals on the stove in the kitchen, which was an art in itself; mom was learning how as I was so the process was a learning experience for both of us. Once you got the basics of cooking on a wood burning stove it was a simple procedure of moving pans to different parts of the cook top to keep the food from being over or under cooked. The neighbor lady took piety on us and gave us much needed lessons on this process as well as how to maintain the cast iron that the stove and pans were made of. After a while we even got good at baking. It became my job to have enough cookies made to supply school lunches until the school started providing meals for us.
Now many decades later I find myself needing to remember the process. I am helping a friend restore a wood burning cook stove and cast iron cookware. With the emergence of off the grid living and cooking, cast iron has a new popularity. The hard part is removing rust from older pieces. Most stoves and cookware were regulated to barns, sheds or basements and not maintained for constant use. You can buy new but it is very expensive, cast iron will last well over 100 years if maintained. Once the rust is removed you must re-season the cookware to be useable for humans. There are numerous Utube videos that will show you this labor intensive process but the end result is beautiful, long lasting, useable cookware.
The skills learned in childhood can be a useful camodity. It might take a bit of research to jump start the old memory but it is always in there to be brought to the surface.
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