Baking Cornbread in a Wood Cookstove

When I was growing up, I could take or leave cornbread.  My mom used the same recipe that her mother Grandma Marian used.  Maybe the recipe was even Grandma Gladys's or from further back in our family than that.  I don't know.  While it was just fine, it wasn't my favorite recipe for cornbread.

I remember enjoying the cornbread that was served in school lunch, though, and I mentioned that to Phyllis, a family friend and now one of the ladies who comes in to help with the Monday Market baking here in the summer.  Years ago, Phyllis invited me over for supper on a night when she was serving her family cornbread, and her recipe was just what I was looking for!

Phyllis has graduated to a cornbread recipe that she says is even better than this one, but I'm sticking with this version--which I've changed a little from the original version.  Here is what I do:

In a medium-sized bowl, place 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1 cup cornmeal, 1/3 cup sugar, 4 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 tsp. salt.

Whisk all of these dry ingredients together.

Into a glass measuring cup, put 1 and 1/4 cups buttermilk, 1/3 cup salad oil, and 1 egg.

Beat these wet ingredients together until well blended.

Add the wet mixture to the dry ingredient mixture and stir only until well combines.  You don't want to over mix at this step because that will make your cornbread tough.  Pour all into a greased 8" x 8" dark square pan.  

Bake in a moderately hot oven (400ºF) until edges are slightly brown and have begun to pull away from the pan and the center tests done when a toothpick comes out clean.

I find that pulling a pan of cornbread out of the oven of a woodburning cookstove feels somehow--what is the word? "nostalgic" maybe?--since we know that this was a staple on the supper tables of history.  I notice that our local Fareway sells cornbread alongside the other bakery goods, but I haven't dared try it.  For one thing, I know that homemade cornbread does not keep well at all, so I figure there must be all manner of preservatives in what they sell at the grocery store.  Besides, this is not a difficult recipe, and I don't think anything could come close to the flavor of it fresh out of the oven.  

When I was growing up, cornbread was served with white corn syrup or molasses.  This is not my preferred method of serving it, however.  Stay tuned for the next post to see how I like to eat mine!

Cherry Bars Baked in the Hayes-Custer

In my last post, I said that I would be bringing a series of posts to you about cooking out in the summer kitchen.  I've started those, but this isn't one of them.  

We have five sour cherry trees here on our farm.  Three are courtesy of my grandparents, and the other two are volunteer children of our venerated Montmorency cherry tree.  The Montmorency cherries are my favorite, but they aren't quite ready yet.  Nancy and I did pick from the other two dwarf cherry trees yesterday, though, and as she is not a pie lover, I made cherry bars.  I've seen this recipe in several places, but we first had these in the early 80s after my aunt Rhonda Jo made them.  Now, they are a recipe that I will forever associate with her.

I think Rhonda Jo probably made them with canned cherry pie filling, but since we are starting with fresh fruit, the first thing we had to do is convert the cherries into pie filling.  To do that we use an old Kitchen Klatter recipe that my Great-Grandma Ruth very likely copied down as she was listening to the radio.  

For one batch of cherry pie filling, you need the following:

4 cups of fresh cherries

1 to 1 1/2 cups cherry juice (the juice from the cherries should be sufficient)

1 cup sugar

3 to 4 Tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring

This avocado green plastic colander belonged to Granny,
my paternal grandmother, and I've been picking cherries
into it for almost forty years.

Of course, you first have to pit the cherries, saving as much of the juice as you can.  The process of pitting cherries by hand is messy and not an appropriate place for a camera, so there are no pictures of that step.  Sorry.  

Both of my grandmothers, Meme, and my mom were all very thrifty cooks, and very little of the produce that we grew here at home went to waste.  I grew up watching this team of women work for hours over dishpans of wormy apples just to save whatever they could for human consumption.  Hence, Granny always made us save the pits as we processed cherries.  She would then put just the tiniest bit of water on them in a saucepan and bring them to a boil on the stove to get as much of the cherry juice as possible.  I don't know whether this is necessary or not, but this is what she always did, so I continue the tradition.

  

The cherry pits and a splash of water coming to
a boil over a freshly started fire in the Hayes-Custer
in the summer kitchen.

The boiling cherry pits.

Once you have all of the juice drained off the pits, place the four cups of cherries, the juice, one cup of sugar and 3 to 4 Tablespoons of cornstarch in a heavy-bottomed saucepan.  

Start cooking this mixture directly over the firebox, but when it begins to thicken, move it to the middle of the cooktop to continue cooking until the desired thickness is reached.

Hint: This step can be a bit tricky.  Sometimes (often), this has not wanted to thicken for me.  I discovered that if you strain the cherries from the juice and cook just the juice, sugar, and cornstarch directly over the fire, once it reaches a good boil, it will thicken when you add the cherries back into the hot mixture.

It has been extremely dry around here this spring, though, and we had a hard time getting much juice to come out of the cherries at all.  Thus, yesterday, I actually had to add a little boiling water from the teakettle in order to thin the mixture to an appropriate consistency.  You just have to watch and be careful!

Remove the cherry mixture from the stove and stir in a 1/2 tsp. almond flavoring.  Set aside.

For the batter, you will need 1 cup of very soft butter (no substitutes) and 1 3/4 cups of sugar.  

Please pardon my avocado green Sunbeam Mixmaster.
It is uglier than sin.  It belonged to Granny, and when I 
inherited it 26 years ago, I thought I would just use it
until it died.  The thing has to be near to fifty years old now
and shows no sign of dying anytime soon.  How I wish she'd
bought a white one!

Cream the butter and the sugar together until smooth.

Add four eggs to the butter and sugar mixture.

To the above, beat in 1 tsp. vanilla, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1 1/4 tsp. baking powder.

Stir in 3 cups of sifted all-purpose flour.  Good luck trying to keep from tasting the batter at this point.  It is SO GOOD!

Spread two-thirds of the batter into the bottom of a greased jelly roll pan.

Spread the cherry filling over the bottom layer of batter, and then dollop the remaining batter on the top.

Bake in a moderate oven for about a half hour until it begins to pull away from the edges and is golden brown.

Doesn't the Hayes-Custer do a nice job
of baking?

Notes:

If you want to freeze sour cherries for later use in pie filling, pour the cherry juice from cooking the pits, the four cups of cherries, and the cup of sugar into a freezer container and freeze.  When ready for use, thaw, drain the sweetened juice off, add the starch and cook.  Add the cherries once the juice and starch have come to a boil and thickened.

If you were going to make a cherry pie with the filling, I would recommend adding a dash of cinnamon to it along with the almond flavoring.  JUST a dash, though.

These bars can be made with any type of canned pie filling.  Strawberry is one that I've seen fairly frequently.

Some people drizzle a little vanilla icing over these bars.  Now, I love frosting and put it only lots of things, however, I will admit to thinking that these are sweet enough without it.  You do what you want, though.

Cooking on the Hayes-Custer in the Summer Kitchen Again

Nancy has pronounced me crazy.

My insanity is not news, however.  My longtime, loyal readers and certainly those who know me personally had no doubt arrived at this conclusion long ago, so that is not the reason for this blogpost.

The reason for this blogpost and the reason that Nancy has pronounced me crazy are one and the same.  She made her proclamation when she saw me hauling a large skillet of cauliflower out to the summer kitchen a week ago Saturday.  

"You're cooking out there?" she said incredulously.

"Yes," I responded.

She looked at me strangely.

"I've told you how much I don't like cooking on that gas stove," I said, shrugging.

"You're crazy," said she.

Guilty as charged, I guess.  I've said before on this blog that no method of cooking compares to cooking on a woodburning cookstove, and now that I don't have to give it up for the summer, I don't plan to.

I had posted on May 22nd that we had turned our electric water heater back on.  However, we had some cooler weather after that, so I fired the Margin Gem again for a few more days.  We left the electric water heater on, but we used the valves in the basement to alternate using water heated electrically and water heated by the Margin Gem.  Once the first of June rolled around, however, the weather got quite warm again, so I have not had a fire inside the house since then.

I've put a two-burner electric hot plate on the reservoir of the Margin Gem in the house kitchen--something that was done quite frequently in history judging from the pictures I've seen.  I've used this for only very light cooking here and there.  Any serious cooking and baking has been hauled out to the summer kitchen.

I really think this Hayes-Custer is quite fuel efficient.  On just a few sticks, I can do quite a bit of cooking and baking.  Speaking of baking, I think it does a beautiful job of it.  In the picture below, I left the goods in the oven about three minutes too long (my fault entirely), but isn't everything a beautiful, uniform golden brown?  I didn't have to rotate anything during the baking time, either.

Bread and rolls coming out of the oven on the Hayes-Custer.  Notice how 
small a fire was required to keep the oven hot.

Oh, and I wish someone would explain something to me: Why do I like cinnamon rolls that are made out of bread dough so well?  I make very good cinnamon rolls using my own variation of my aunt Meme's recipe.  For Monday Market baking, I mix up 15 batches of those rolls, five batches at a time.  People stand in line to buy them.  But, when I'm baking bread for just Nancy and me, I sometimes make one loaf's worth of the dough into a pan of cinnamon rolls.  That's what I did in the picture above.  And I love them!  They have less fat and less sugar in the dough; they are not nearly so light.  In fact they're downright chewy, and I savor every bite!  But why?

Anyway, the picture below is my first ever attempt at tater-tot casserole.  It was very good, but I'm just not a huge fan of tater-tots.  I would like to try it as the recipe originally said, which was to make it with sliced potatoes.  We'll see.  Didn't the Hayes-Custer do a nice job of browning the tater-tots, though?  Nancy doesn't like vegetables to be in the casserole, so the two saucepans over the firebox have home-grown peas and sweet corn from our freezer in them.

During Covid-19 quarantine time, I learned to make hamburger buns from scratch.  The ones that I made on Tuesday of this week were the best batch ever.  The secret?  I think it was the fact that I used bacon grease in them instead of Crisco or vegetable oil.  I've never done that before.

The buns didn't taste like bacon at all, but they were very tender.  They look a little brown on the top, but they were actually just perfect.  I made them for the barbecued shredded pork that you can see in the smaller saucepan directly above the oven.  I made the shredded pork out of some that I had canned on the Margin Gem back in 2017.  The sandwiches were very delicious.

When I start a fire to do some cooking in the summer, I try to take advantage of the fire as much as possible in order to be more efficient.  The black saucepan on the warming shelf has hardboiled eggs in it that are being timed before their cold water bath.  The saucepan over the firebox was water coming to a boil for cooking pasta for a salad.

The last picture is of yesterday's breakfast--and supper and today's supper actually.  The pancakes and part of the bacon were the breakfast.  The rest of the bacon and the chicken breast hidden inside that small cast iron skillet on the back of the range all went into the aforementioned pasta salad.

Breakfast cooking on the Hayes-Custer wood cookstove.

There has been much more cooking done on the Hayes-Custer already this summer, but not every occasion has warranted a picture.  As you can see, the stove has been busy, and I must say, it's been very cooperative too.

I've got a series of posts using this stove coming up, so stay tuned!

Vintage Recipe: Prune Soup

This recipe is...well...this recipe is...different.  But I really like it!  Don't let the name fool you; this is a "dessert soup" and a rare gem indeed.

I copied this recipe from the Anita, Iowa, Centennial Cookbook over a year ago and finally got around to trying it last week.  The recipe caught my eye because I love raisins--a point I've mentioned before.  I even like raisins in gravy!  And prunes?  Hmmm.  Prunes are just overgrown, slimy raisins, right?  That's what I tell myself, at least.

I'm game to try anything that I think might be good once, so I made this after our Sunday dinner a couple weekends ago.  I found it in the section of the cookbook dedicated to historic recipes, and it was labeled as a Swedish dish.  The recipe was contributed by Mrs. Nolan Stockham who put the following note with it. 

"Anyone whoever ate a meal in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Osen was probably offered this dish.  Mrs. Osen kept it on hand constantly."

I don't have a drop of Swedish blood in me, but if prune soup and their meatballs are representative examples of traditional Swedish cooking, I'm interested in learning more!

Here is what you'll need:

water
1/3 cup large pearl tapioca
1 lb. prunes

1 lb. seedless raisins

1 1/2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice
dash salt
1 tsp. vanilla

First, soak the pearl tapioca in water overnight.  My personal practice when a recipe calls for soaking pearl tapioca overnight is to actually soak it longer than that.  I have a strong dislike of tapioca pearls that are crunchy in the center.  I put the pearls in a quart jar and filled it nearly to the top with water.

The pearl tapioca after it had soaked in water for over 12 hours.

The next day, cover the prunes and raisins with water and cook until soft.  The fire from cooking our noon dinner out on the Hayes-Custer in the summer kitchen had nearly died, so I added a couple of small split pieces of wood and put the kettle of prunes, raisins, and water directly over the firebox.  In this picture, I tried to capture the flames, but I find it very difficult to photograph fire.

Astute observers will note that the front lid over the firebox was not a part of the original photos of the Hayes-Custer in this post.  It is one of those that has three concentric lids all in one and was purchased at the antique store in Corley, Iowa.  It fits both the Qualified Range and the Hayes-Custer, so I'm excited to have it.

After the prunes and raisins have had time to simmer and plump up--which only takes a few minutes-- the next step is to add the soaked tapioca, sugar, vinegar or lemon juice, salt and vanilla.  Because I was cooking this out in the summer kitchen, I combined them all in a bowl in the pantry first.  Also, I used lemon juice rather than vinegar because I don't like the combination of vinegar and raisins.

All of the ingredients now mixed together in the pot on the stove.

Cook, stirring frequently, until tapioca is done.  It will begin to look mostly transparent, and the soup itself will have begun to thicken.  It took about fifteen minutes over a low fire.

The prune soup simmering nicely over a low fire right over the firebox.

Remove from the fire.

The freshly-made prune soup cooling on the counter in the summer kitchen.

Cool and serve with whipped cream.

A sauce dish of the finished prune soup.  It's oh-so-GOOD!

Some notes:

This soup is very sweet.  I did not sweeten the whipped cream, and I was very glad that I had not.  I am going to reduce the sugar next time by at least a fourth cup and see what happens.

My preference would be to make this with two pounds of raisins and omit the prunes altogether.  I'll have to rename it, of course.

To all of my prepper readers, in my opinion, this is a great recipe to have on hand for a disaster.  All of the ingredients are extremely shelf stable, and it didn't take much fuel at all to prepare it.  It would also be easy to cut in half or to double without any adverse effects.  I wouldn't necessarily call it economical, however.

Even though Nancy said "Prunes will not cross my lips," this was a hit with my mom and Phyllis, the lady who helps us with our market baking on Mondays, so I'm not the only one who thinks it's good.

Oven Canning Dry Goods in a Wood Cookstove

I don't think I'm an alarmist, and I really wouldn't even consider myself a prepper, BUT...

I'll admit that when everything fell apart in practically the blink of an eye back in March, we were thankful that a) we had a well-stocked fruit room, pantry, and freezer, b) that for years now we have made it a practice to have more than enough toilet paper on hand at all times, c) we had kept a complete year's worth of garden seed (hadn't planned that intentionally--just a happy accident this time), and d) we had more than enough work, projects, puzzles, board games, and other activities to keep us so busy at home that there has been no time for boredom.

I don't have a crystal ball that lets me see into the future, and I think I'm like the vast majority of people who, if they are being truly honest, don't know which "experts" to believe regarding what the coming months of the continuing Covid Saga will look like.  And so, while most things are readily available again, we are slowly replenishing our stockpiles of a few things "just in case."

When we were at our local Sam's Club a few days ago, they had 25 lb. bags of long-grain white rice for under $10.00.  I don't know that we even eat five pounds of rice in a year, but we do like it, and in some kind of major catastrophe, it could be a welcome thing to have on hand.  As a regular habit, we keep rice in the freezer for a while and then transfer it to an antique two-quart canning jar that we use it out of.  However, we are in the season where our garden is steadily contributing to the contents of our already-full freezer, so we didn't want to sacrifice the real estate there to a large bag of rice.

I remembered reading an article in the May/June 2012 issue of Countryside & Small Stock Journal about oven canning dry goods.  I hunted up that article and reread it; then I did some further online research about oven canning flour, rice, beans, and such.  In a nutshell, the idea is that you heat the dry goods inside open canning jars for a length of time and at a temperature sufficient to kill any of the insect larvae that are inherently present in such foods.  The temperature needs to be low enough that you don't toast the food, of course.  Then, you put a hot canning lid on the hot jars of hot food, and the canning lids seal as a vacuum is created while everything cools.  This would allow us to store the rice on a shelf in the fruit room rather than in the precious space of the chest freezer, and it would be safe from both pests and environmental issues (aside from earthquakes).

However, another discovery that I made in my research was that there are no hard and fast rules for dry canning.  Each video I watched instructed me to use different times and temperatures ranging from a half-hour to an hour and a half at anywhere from 215-250ºF.

Initially, I thought I'd probably do this job in one of our modern stoves because I've never tried to maintain such a low oven temperature in a wood cookstove.  Being able to digitally set an exact temperature on our newer Frigidaire gas range was particularly enticing.  I wasn't excited about turning on one of the ovens in the air-conditioned house, though, and--truth be told--it seemed pretty hypocritical when I'm always saying that you can do anything on a wood cookstove that you can do with a modern gas or electric stove.

Then I remembered another truth that the modern appliance companies don't want to talk about much: oven temperatures in modern ovens are really not all that steady--especially in gas ovens.  I know this for a fact because when our gas oven is first turned on, it gives a reading of what the current oven temperature is.  Sometimes, I've accidentally turned it off and then had to turn it back on right away, and I can assure you that when you are choosing an oven temperature on a modern oven, you are choosing an average temperature.  Thus, I figured that oven canning in a wood cookstove was certainly possible and struck out on a new adventure with the Hayes-Custer out in the summer kitchen.

The first thing I did was wash a bunch of one-quart canning jars.  Then, to make sure that they were completely dry inside, I put them on a jelly roll pan in a slow oven for fifteen minutes.

After that, I removed them from the oven and filled them with the dry rice.  

It seems important to note here that one of the jars in this first batch had a regular mouth on it and the Atlas insignia on the bottom, though it didn't have the traditional "Atlas Strong Shoulder Mason" embossed on the side. We have used it for wet canning before, so I thought it would be fine for this application.  Not so.  The empty jar came out of the oven with fine lines that looked like crazing on the inside.  I ran my finger against the inside of the jar, and it came out with shiny glass powder on it. Obviously, the jar's useful life is over.  I know that there were lots of regular mouth glass jars which were used to package coffee, salad dressing, and other foodstuffs years ago, and many of them have been successfully used for home-canning against the advice of the jar companies and the USDA for a long time.  However, it appears that oven canning may be particularly hard on this type of jar, so I would advise strictly using canning jars.

Once the jars were full, everything went back into the oven.  I'm not going to share the time and temperature that I used (I'm not throwing my hat into that ring!), but I will tell you about regulating the oven temperature:

Longtime blog readers will no doubt be tired of me preaching the value of using little pieces of wood for building hot fires for high oven temperatures, but the same is true for maintaining the temperature of a slow oven.  The difference is that you just don't put so many pieces on the fire at once. Instead, let each piece burn down quite a bit before you add another.

Actually, there is another method for maintaining a slow oven, too: once you have a well-established bed of coals but before the oven is very hot, add a single large piece of wood which is dense and will burn slowly for a long time.  I used this method with a piece of black walnut on the second batch of jars, and it worked great, too.

As a side note, I think it would be rather difficult to do much other cooking while simultaneously oven canning just because you are keeping such a cool fire.  The fire might be perfect for stews and the like, though.

Place the lids and rings that you are going to use in a shallow baking pan. During the last fifteen minutes of the time that the jars of dry goods are in the oven, put the pan of lids and rings in the oven to heat up as well.  A nice feature of oven canning dry goods is that you can use canning lids that have already been used once.  I used half new lids and half used lids to see how it would go, and everything sealed just fine.  Tattler lids are not recommended for this application.

When the jars are ready to be sealed, take one jar out of the oven at a time.  Fix the lid and ring on the top and place the jar in a draft-free place to cool and seal.

In case you are curious and for my own record-keeping, 25 lbs. of rice fills 15 quart jars.

On that same day, I also canned our first small picking of green beans (on the right in the picture below), and then I tried something new and canned hamburger patties.  I've canned meat on a wood cookstove several times, but I've never canned hamburgers.  The idea came from Linda at the Youtube channel "First Coffee Then Life Sustainably Off Grid & Happy." We'll see what we think when we open them.

I will take the rings off the jars of beans and meat before putting
them on the shelf, but I can see no reason to remove the rings from the rice.

Everything I have read about oven canning dry goods tells me that the shelf life of foods stored in this way is anywhere from 20 - 30 years.  I know it won't take us that long to use this rice!  Another advantage is that as long as you've got plenty of jars (we do), have kept a few used canning lids and your firewood is free, storing rice in this manner costs only your time.

Using the Hayes-Custer Range in the Summer Kitchen

As I've mentioned before, we moved our summer kitchen closer to the house in April of 2019.  However, I didn't get a cookstove hooked up in it last summer because I was so busy with all of the rigamarole of publishing my novel.  This year, because of all the Covid-19 stuff, I've had a lot more time at home, so with the help of my brother, I was able to move the Riverside Bakewell to a different corner of the summer kitchen and put the Hayes-Custer on the hearth.

First, some of you may be wondering why I traded the beautiful green and cream Riverside Bakewell with its spacious warming ovens for the beige Hayes-Custer which is only outfitted with a high shelf, especially when I tell you that the baking ovens and cooktops are the same size.

The Riverside Bakewell--former occupant of
the hearth in our summer kitchen.

Folks, it all comes down to this:

The right oven door hinge broke some years ago, and while the stove still heats, cooks, and bakes just fine, this is a major inconvenience, and it's also rather dangerous since one has to balance the hot oven door on one's knee in order to transfer anything into or out of the oven.

Besides, I also wanted to be able to share the experience of cooking on a different cookstove with all of you.

You can read about the acquisition of the Hayes-Custer at this post, and you can read about the history of the Hayes-Custer Stove Company here, so this post is about the range itself and its actual use.

This stove has done 100% of the cooking, baking, and food preservation here since its installation on June 12th.  While food preservation has so far only been canning pickled beets, blanching peas for the freezer, and a batch of mixed fruit jelly, there is a lot more of that to come.  The meal preparations have only involved breakfast once because I've been eating a lot of toast and cold cereal on these warmer mornings, but dinners and suppers have been a little more elaborate.

So far, I would say that the stove performs just fine.  I do have to rotate things which are baking, but I've got some chimney improvements to do which may change that.  I'll let you know.

The fire you see burning in the stove is of wood, but yes, you
do see coal in that hod in the lower right corner of the picture.
I'm trying to learn how to burn coal, but it is proving to be quite
the learning curve.  I'll let you know if I ever get it figured out.

In the picture below, you can see some homemade hamburger buns which were toasting over the fire, waiting for the barbecued beef which is in the pot to their right.  The hamburger buns were baked in the Hayes-Custer and rotated once.  You can see that the bottoms were sufficiently browned as well.

One of the things that I like about this stove is that it has a pouch feed with a door which lifts up.  The Riverside Bakewell has a pouch feed, but it opens down.  The Qualified Range has a pouch feed too, and it opens up, and I really prefer this arrangement.  The Margin Gem doesn't have a pouch feed, and I would have to admit that I miss it.

You can also see from the picture below that the hole for the lid lifter in the "T" has worn through, and I have stuffed it with foil so it doesn't spoil the draft.  There is also a chip out of the cast iron to the right of the pouch feed door, which I have also temporarily patched with foil for the same reason. This is not scientific stove repair, but it is certainly affordable.  (Actually, the foil had even been used once already.)

While putting the stove back together after moving it, I noticed something unique about the pouch feed door.  The left hinge pin is constructed such that it has a tab on the end that juts out to the left.  This seemingly little thing is actually quite thoughtful on the part of the Hayes-Custer designers. The Qualified Range is not equipped with this extra tab, and I've had the pouch feed door fall off a few times during particularly athletic episodes of adding fuel through this door.

You may have noticed how rusty the top of the range is in the two pictures above.  I had removed all of the rust with my grill brick and given it a good coating of vegetable oil once the stove was in place, but I've had some hot fires since then, so the oil burned off over the firebox quickly.  Then, even though the summer kitchen is an enclosed building, the windows are open nearly all the time, so the humidity can get pretty high in there.  Hence, the rust came back in a hurry.

You can see in the picture below that this stove has seen some intense heat. Below the pouch feed, a repair has been made using stove cement. I imagine that this injury is the result of an extremely hot coal fire at some point in the stove's history.

The Hayes-Custer firebox is 7" deep x 8" wide x 18" long and is equipped with duplex grates.

Another interesting feature of this stove is that the only place which tells you who the manufacturer was is the outside of the front firebox door.  In a day when most stove makers were prominently autographing their ranges, the Hayes-Custer company was concealing their information pretty well. You can also see from this picture that the handle has broken off the front of the ash drawer.  This makes ash removal a little more difficult than it need be, but I've learned that by prying with a small flat screwdriver or the handle of a pair of pliers, you can create a gap between the top of the ash pan and the opening to get your fingers into and pull.

Although I haven't measured its capacity, the reservoir on this stove seems HUGE.  It must hold at least ten gallons.

Of course, when I run into a vintage stove, I can't help but wonder about its history.  Was this range a household's only heat during the notorious winter of 1936?  How many Thanksgiving dinners did it turn out?  In this stove's previous home, it had not been used since the 1970s when an ice storm knocked out the electric power for a week.  It kept its owners warm and well fed during that time.

No matter what its history, it is certainly working hard in its present.  And I'm pretty sure that I'm the first person in its list of owners to ever bake a frozen pizza in it!  Don't be too harsh on us.  During Covid-19 Quarantine, we've eaten exactly two frozen pizzas, but we've had three from-scratch homemade ones, complete with sauce which was home-canned.

You can see the raging fire that was burning in
order to achieve the quick oven needed for baking
a frozen pizza.

The finished frozen pizza.

I don't know what the temperature inside the summer kitchen reaches, but I can assure you it is beastly hot.  However, doing all of the cooking out there has enabled us to go without turning on our house's air conditioning so far this summer.  In addition, there is very little cost involved in collecting the fuel for this stove since I'm able to use small sticks and other poor quality scrap wood I've picked up in our pastures.  And while the Lord has so far protected us from dire financial consequences during these uncertain times, it does seem prudent right now to trim costs wherever we are able.

Stay tuned for more posts which feature this stove, since it looks like it's going to have a busy summer.

In the meantime, if you are interested in the Riverside Bakewell, let me know--since I'm interested in having the floorspace back.

Moving the Summer Kitchen

Monday was a big day at our place.  It was the first day in the last eight that I didn't have some kind of school obligation or other.  I was not scheduled to substitute, so I spent the whole day at home trying to get some things done.  While I was eating my lunch, my brother came in from loading out corn to find out if it would work to move the summer kitchen. Secretly, I had been hoping all morning that this would be the case, but he travels a lot since he is the First Vice President of the National Corn Growers Association, and his days at home are usually quite full as he catches up on farm work and other responsibilities.  Therefore, I didn't want to exert any pressure.  But, bless him, he took time out of his busy afternoon to organize and transport the necessary equipment while I vacated the more portable things from the inside of the building.

Originally, we put up this shed to operate a small bakery out of it at the end of our driveway.  After seeing how the Amish in southern Iowa have bakeries and little grocery stores on their farms, we thought that we'd like to try something like that.  Thus, back in the summer of 2009, we purchased this Tuff shed, finished the inside, installed the Riverside Bakewell cookstove, which I had had since the late 1990s, and began baking every Saturday that fall until it got so cold that the garden hose which supplied our running water froze.

We did an okay business that fall, and I learned A LOT.  Our biggest problems were that it was hard to sacrifice the time from our already busy weekends, and we never knew how much we were going to sell.  Some Saturdays we didn't have anything left by the evening; other Saturdays would see us with five or more loaves of bread that didn't sell.

We opened again the next fall, but it became a drag in a real hurry, and so ended that phase of our lives as custom bakers.  The "shed" as we called it, then became our summer kitchen, but because it was located a full 75 steps from the back door of the house, cooking down there was colossally inconvenient.  Couple that with the fact that the oven door broke during the family reunion in 2011, and you have all of the reasons that we just haven't used the summer kitchen all that much.

True confessions now: we didn't have a clue as to how to move a building. I'm not sure that I do yet, but Kevin is brave and adventuresome, and we accomplished the task!

The summer kitchen now rests on a concrete pad north of the house where our old garage used to be.  It is only 11 steps away from the back door, and is actually very close to where the original summer kitchen/washhouse was on our farm.  Hopefully, this will mean that I'll use it more.

Noting that Sunday evening marked the end of March and that there are only a maximum of two more months that we will use the Margin Gem on a daily basis, I lamented to Nancy, "I already miss the cookstove."  She was in a different room; otherwise, I'm pretty sure I would have seen an epic eye roll in response.  But, now I can look forward to just switching to a different cookstove!

I'll keep you posted on the progress as we get the summer kitchen rearranged and in operation.