Answers to Questions about the Montgomery Ward Economy Cookstove

I've received a couple of comments from readers who have Montgomery Ward Economy Cook Stoves just like the one my brother has.  One stove is missing the oven cleanout door, and the other's grates are disassembled.  Thus, I've had requests for pictures of Kevin's stove.  

The first picture that you see is the inside of the firebox with the left side of the stove at the top of the frame.  You can see all four of the firebox liners win place as well as the dump grate.

The next picture is taken while standing at the front of the stove to provide a better view of the rear firebox liner.

The picture below is taken from behind the stove and shows the front firebox liner.

This picture is also taken from the rear of the stove so that the flue path is on the left.

Below, you see what is behind the firebox door.  Kevin's stove does not have an ash pan, but I imagine the stove originally had one.  You can also see how the central pin on the dump grate rests in the frame.

Now, the pictures below show the door that covers the oven cleanout.  The first picture is a sideview which shows the lower part of the door.  The door is made of cast iron, and the weight of the horizontal lower portion is what holds the door in place when it is in the opening beneath the oven door.

This is a view of the front of the door.  This is what is visible when it is in place on the front of the stove.

The final picture is of what the back side of the door looks like.  All of this is inside the stove when it is in place.

You can see more pictures of this stove at this post, and you can see it in use in this post and this post.

I hope this helps!

Using My Brother's Vintage Montgomery Ward Cookstove in Our Summer Kitchen

So, way back in 2013, I blogged about my brother's new-to-his-family cookstove in this post, and for nearly seven years, I've been looking forward to hauling this little cookstove over to our place and hooking it up in our summer kitchen.  Since we moved the summer kitchen much closer to the house last spring, we had disconnected the Riverside Bakewell cookstove that was in it.  I wanted to perform a little cookstove rotation anyway, so this was the perfect time to try this little baby out.

When I say "little baby," I mean it.  With the cast iron eyes and "T" removed from the cooktop, I am able to carry it by myself.  Kevin was surprised to find that I had carried it out of the loft of his shed without assistance.  This stove is 26" wide by 21" deep, and it is a back-breaking 25" tall, but don't let its diminutive size fool you.  This stove performs very, very well.

As I have mentioned before, there is no joy in cooking with a wood fire for me unless the stove I'm using has an oven, so I was particularly interested in how this stove would bake.  At first glance, the oven seems tiny, measuring 17.75" deep, 13.5" wide, and 9.5" tall.  In the picture below, I tried to give you a little perspective by holding my spread hand in front of the oven door.  I'm not sure it was the most effective photography technique, though.

Also, it is the first oven on a woodburning cookstove that I have used to be heated using a configuration similar to the one illustrated in the bottom drawing below.  The oven damper is operated by a small lever near the upper right hand corner of the oven door.  For kindling the fire, the damper is turned to the right.  For baking, the lever is turned to the left and thereby diverts all of the smoke and heat from the fire around the oven box.

Well, the stove was installed in our summer kitchen from June 5th to June 12th.  During that time, I did absolutely all of our cooking on it, and I was thoroughly impressed.  You can see from the pictures below that baking was no problem at all.  I did rotate a few things, but this is not uncommon in wood cookstove cookery, and I was pleased and surprised to note how well the bottoms of things had cooked (this can sometimes be a problem on some wood cookstoves).  

The first thing that struck me about the operation of this stove is how quickly it heated.  With the first fire I built, I had the oven temperature up over 400ºF within 15 minutes.  The firebox is small, but not overly so, and during the whole time that the stove was in use, I only used small sticks and wood chips picked up from the floor of the shed where we keep the wood splitter.  Even though the stove is nowhere near airtight, I would say that it was remarkably efficient as I was surprised at how much cooking I could do on so little fuel.

While the stove was in service here, I baked sweet potatoes, sweet potato casserole, bread, hot dog buns, a sour cream cake, a meatloaf, and brownies.  The only thing that didn't turn out well was the brownies--and that was due to a little nephew messing with the timer, not any problem with the stove.

The size of the oven was not as limiting as I thought it would be.  The brownie recipe calls for them to be baked in a 10" x 15" pan, and it fit and worked perfectly.

I have already blogged about cooking our supper of shrimp scampi and capellini pasta, but that was a supper for only two people.  

Our supper of shrimp scampi and capellini pasta
cooking on the tiny Montgomery Ward Cookstove.

I wanted to stretch the capacity of this little stove a bit, and since my young nephews claim the stove as theirs, I wanted to teach them how to use it, too.  Thus, we invited my brother and his family over for supper and therefore served supper for eight cooked on this tiny cookstove.  We had Lamb Loaf Supreme (a recipe out of a vintage pamphlet from the Martin Meat Market which used to be in our hometown--I wasn't impressed, so you won't get to see the recipe here), mashed potatoes, and fried cabbage.  As you can see from the picture below, we had sufficient room on the stove to have been able to cook more food if we had wanted to.

The one characteristic of this stove that I didn't care for was the fact that the sliding draft on the left side is located at the same level as the grate so that when you rake the ashes down or maneuver the dump grate, ashes jump out of the stove onto the floor--a minor inconvenience but worth mentioning.

Overall, the experience of cooking on this stove was fantastic.  Its ease of use and fuel efficiency were quite impressive.  If given the choice between this stove and no wood cookstove at all, I would be glad to have this Montgomery Ward Economy Cookstove.  

One thing I couldn't help but wonder about was its room heating capacity. Our summer kitchen is only 10' x 12', and the weather was hot here the whole time the stove was in use, so I have no idea how warm it might keep a home in the winter.  My romantic side thinks it would be fun to test this stove in some kind of small cabin in the middle of a blizzard, but that will only happen in my imagination.

If you are local to the greater Omaha area, an identical stove is currently for sale on Craigslist at the following link: https://omaha.craigslist.org/fuo/d/valley-antique-black-white-cast-iron/7133461955.html

After supper with my brother's family, we let the fire go out and exchanged this little cookstove with the Hayes-Custer that I brought home in March of 2018 (more on that stove will be coming).  The next day, I gave my brother's little stove a coat of stove black to retard rust, and he has taken it home now.  I feel better knowing they have it back.  In the event that some humongous disaster occurs, I know that they will be able to stave off starvation with this little marvel.

Tonight's Supper: Shrimp Scampi on Capellini Pasta

I don't have a single drop of Italian blood in me, and this landlocked Iowa boy would take beef, pork, or poultry over anything from the sea most every time, but I do have a weakness for shrimp.  The last time Nancy and I were in the grocery store together, which we think was sometime in March, Nancy put a bag of frozen shrimp in the cart, saying that we would use them as some kind of treat during the Covid-19 Quarantine time.  The bag was put in the freezer in the basement, and Nancy forgot about it. When she went down to retrieve her ice cream yesterday, she saw it there and asked if we could have "shrimp something" for supper after she got home from work today.

"Shrimp something" would probably have been shrimp Alfredo, but I neglected to buy cream on my last grocery run, so I had to strike out on my own.  The results were so good that I have to blog this before I forget what I did so that I can recreate this supper sometime in the future.

First, since I use this blog for personal record keeping, I need to report that as of last Friday (June 5) I have done all of our cooking out in the summer kitchen on my brother's Montgomery Ward Economy Cookstove that I blogged about back in 2013 in this post.  Our last daily fire in the Margin Gem went out on the morning of June 1, which was when it began to get pretty warm around here.  Obviously, that was also the day that I turned on the electric hot water heater, which we will run for the next four months. This was the latest in the season that we have ever waited to do that, beating our previous record of May 27th.  Thus, the stats for the 2019-2020 heating season are that from October 11 to June 1, all hot water was heated by the Margin Gem, and it cooked all but four of the meals prepared at home during that time (two frozen pizzas, one crockpot roast, and one meal cooked entirely on the grill).  Also, because of Covid-19, the Margin Gem cooked all but seven of the meals I ate between March 16 and May 31.

My brother's Montgomery Ward Economy Cookstove
temporarily installed in our summer kitchen.

I worked the primary election on June 2, and I had cooked enough food ahead that the only cooking I did between the Margin Gem and this little stove was French toast on the gas stove (a ridiculously difficult task--so hard to get it to brown evenly over a gas flame) and baking four potatoes in the electric stove in the basement.

I am writing a whole post about cooking on this little cookstove of Kevin's, so all I'll say here is that it has worked surprisingly well--great really.  I was so anxious to get cooking on it, you'll notice that I didn't get the floor of the summer kitchen scrubbed yet.

Anyway, back to supper tonight.  I started by making the angel hair pasta. To roughly a cup of all-purpose flour, I added a sprinkling of baking powder and a dash of salt, then an egg.  I worked additional flour into the pasta dough until I couldn't get it to take any more by hand.  Then, I started running it through the rollers of my Atlas pasta machine.  I got to level 7 on the rollers and then cut the pasta with the cutter labeled capellini (Italian for "little hairs," slightly larger than true angel hair).  I kind of clumped the pasta into little loosely packed nests and set them aside on a plate to dry a bit while I did other things.  These were probably the best pasta I've ever made.

Making pasta is a messy proposition no matter how you look at it.

I started the fire out in the summer kitchen then, and put a pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta. I also put on the base to the steamer with a little water in it.  While they were heating, I headed to the gardens and picked some garlic chives and two onion leaves.  I washed those and snipped them into a frying pan with a 1/2 stick of butter in it.  Then, I took two tiny garlic bulbs harvested yesterday and put them through my Pampered Chef garlic press; they would have been the equivalent of two store-bought garlic cloves.  The frying pan was carried out to the stove then, where the other two kettles had come to a boil.

While the butter was beginning to melt and cook the herbs from the garden, I put a large head of broccoli in the steamer and dropped the nests of pasta into the boiling water.  By that time, the butter was simmering nicely, so I added about nine oz. of the cooked, frozen shrimp and a few parsley flakes.  Since the shrimp was already cooked, it just needed to thaw and heat through.

Tonight's supper cooking on my brother's little stove.
Sorry about the lens cap on the right side of the pic.
I couldn't hold onto the lids of the two kettles and
keep the lens cap out of the way at the same time.

Everything was finished cooking at the same time, so I carried it all back into the house.  We used a slotted spoon to fish the pasta nests out of the water, draining them as we did so.  Then, we scooped the cooked shrimp and its buttery juice over the pasta and sprinkled it with grated parmesan cheese.  The steamed broccoli was seasoned with a quick sprinkle of garlic salt, and supper was served.

Our supper.  Next time we'll be sure to buy shrimp that doesn't
have its tails on.

Nancy said I had hit the nail on the head with what she had in mind for "shrimp stuff," and we agreed that our supper tasted like it had come from a fine Italian restaurant.  It really was outstanding if I do say so myself. Making the pasta was the most difficult part of this meal, and if I were in a hurry and not in the middle of a pandemic, I would have bought angel hair nests in the grocery store and not thought twice about it.  We are looking forward to having this meal again when our own broccoli is ready to eat.