Water Bath Canning on a Wood Cookstove

Last week, I finally got finished with school for the year, and on my first official day of summer vacation, I spent some time getting caught up with some canning that I've been putting off.  I make all of our own pancake syrup (don't get excited; it's just imitation maple syrup, not the real thing).  Sometimes, I make just a single batch at a time, but this can significantly increase the time that it takes to make breakfast.  Also, this is not such a big deal in the winter time when the stove is going anyway, but in the summer, when I might use the gas stove or electric skillet to make breakfast, having to also make syrup is inefficient.  I like homemade syrup better than anything that I've found on the grocery store shelves, but the problem with it is that since it doesn't have any preservatives in it, it molds quite quickly.  Ironically, I figure that this means that this syrup is better for you than what you find on the store shelves.  In fact, I know a lady who believes that no preservatives are healthy, and she says, "If it won't mold, I won't eat it."  I don't know if any syrup could be considered healthy since they are all simply another way to pile sugar onto your food, but perhaps this is just "less bad."  Hmmm . . . I think I've digressed.  At any rate, canning the syrup allows me to make a large batch of it all at once but not use refrigerator space to store it.

Secondly, our Qualified range was removed from the kitchen in June of last year before the black raspberry season began.  Thus, when I picked the raspberries last summer, I just washed them, cooked them, let them cool, and put entire pots of them into the deep freeze because I didn't want to spend the propane to make the jelly.  Dragging the whole mess down to the summer kitchen didn't seem appealing, either.  We were down to two jars of jelly on the jelly shelf in the fruit room of the basement, I wanted my pots back, and the room in the freezer was also needed, so I needed to make jelly, too.

Both the syrup and the jelly are canned using a water bath, and so I decided to multi-task.  Water bath canning is a very easy task on a wood cookstove, and I actually think that it is a job that is easier on a wood cookstove than on a gas or electric stove because the cooking surface of most wood burning ranges is so large.  This blog post documents what I did and shows my method of water bath canning on a wood cookstove.

First, on the right side of the stove (the part that is farthest away from the fire in our stove), I placed a metal rack from some long-forgotten appliance.  This rack is more sturdily constructed than your average cooling rack since it was designed for some kind of oven, so I use it on the top of the cookstove for various reasons.  On this particular occasion, I didn't want to put the frozen pots right on the stove because the temperature difference would be extreme and could cause damage, but I wanted to hasten the thawing of the raspberries.

Two pots of frozen, cooked black raspberries thawing on the cool
section of the cookstove.  The rack that they are resting on is
about one inch tall.

I hate to waste an opportunity to use the heat of the cookstove in the summertime, so I decided to really multi-task and put a chicken on to boil, too.  Then I started to cook the syrup.  I use the following rough proportions to make the syrup:

3 parts water

3 parts corn syrup

2 parts white sugar

1 part brown sugar

Flavor with X-tra Touch butter flavoring and Mapleine to taste.

The butter and maple flavorings are optional if you are using brown sugar, but I like the taste that they add.  Be careful about the Mapleine, however; that is such powerful stuff that a little goes a long way.

The syrup is coming to a boil over the front of the firebox; the
chicken is behind it. 

As the syrup was coming to a boil, I put the water bath canner over the back of the firebox.  I removed the lid of the stove so that the canner bottom was directly exposed to the fire.

Water bath canner now placed over the back of the firebox.  The
syrup was now boiling.

Once the syrup has come to a boil, it needs to cook long enough to reach the desired thickness.  The longer it is cooked, the thicker it gets.  I don't want my syrup all that thick because it makes it difficult to keep pancakes from falling apart on my plate if the syrup is too heavy.  I test the syrup for doneness by lifting the spoon from the syrup.  Once the initial syrup has run off the spoon and the last drop clings to the spoon for a long time before finally dropping off, I consider it done.

Testing the syrup for doneness.

I removed the kettle of syrup to the trivet on the back of the reservoir.  I then moved the teakettle to the front of the firebox because I wanted plenty of boiling water on hand.  I am never sure whether I'm going to need to add more boiling water to the water bath canner because the water level in the canner is dependent on how many jars of food are put into it.  I always put less than I think I'll need into the canner to begin with because removing too much boiling water is a lot more difficult than adding more since the teakettle is always at the ready.  You certainly don't want to add cold water to a canner that has jars in it.

A picture to show that the canner is sitting directly over the fire.

Of course, I had my lids warming in the little saucepan that I use for that task so that the syrup could be put into jars and then into the canner.

Putting the syrup into the jars and the jars into the canner. 
By this time, the frozen fruit had thawed enough to put the
kettles directly on the stovetop.

A shot of the fire at this time.  Obviously, I didn't need a raging
fire to do the water bath canning.  You can see that the majority
of the fire is placed to the rear of the firebox beneath the canner.

Once the canner has everything in it which is going to be canned at one time, pour enough boiling water from the teakettle into the canner to make sure that the jars are completely submerged.  At this point, you just follow the procedures for waterbath canning like you would on any other stove; just keep your fire hot enough to keep the canner boiling.

Seven pints of pancake syrup boiling in the canner.

I then experimented with a vintage cake recipe, and then I was on to the jelly making:

First a word or two about making jelly on a wood cookstove:

Making jelly demands an intense heat under the jelly pot because you need a full rolling boil.  In my experience, if it takes too long to reach this kind of a boil, the jelly can be ruined because too much steam escapes and changes the proportions of the mixture.  In some instances, even though I've had a very hot fire underneath the jelly, it takes a long time to reach the full rolling boil that is needed.  Thus, not only did I have less than perfect jelly, but it was also taking too much more time to make jelly over the cookstove than it did to make it over a gas or electric stove.  I have solved this problem by removing the stove lid beneath the jelly pot.  The pot is then directly over the fire, the cooking time is reduced, and the boil is much quicker.

As a side note, each of the stoves that I have used has had a traditional stove lid configuration on the cooktop.  Therefore, removing the lid to cook directly over the fire is easily accomplished.  There are several stoves on the market today (Kitchen Queen, Pioneer Maid, Ashland New Decade, Flameview--to name a few) which do not have the old-style, removable lids in their cooktops.  If you, dear reader, happen to make jelly on one of these stoves, would you please leave a comment and tell me about your method--or whether this is an issue for you at all?  I want this blog to be an information clearinghouse for all things cookstove, so your input would be helpful.

The jelly is to the left.  Because the canner and the jelly kettle are
too large to have the lids removed under both of them, the middle
rear lid is removed and is under the teapot.  The lid from beneath
the jelly is on the stove's floor pad.

I was using bulk pectin purchased from the Amish down in Redding, Iowa.  This is just like Sure-Jell, so I use the Sure-Jell proportions and method.  Once the juice and pectin have come to a full rolling boil, you add your pre-measured sugar.  Return to a rolling boil, and boil for one minute.  Remove from heat and skim the foam.  Pour into jars and seal in the water bath.

Some astute observers may notice that I don't have jars sterilizing in another pot of water.  I've read that if you water bath anything for ten minutes or more, you don't have to worry about sterilizing jars, so that's what I do now.  I haven't had any trouble with sealing or spoiling using that method, and the set of the jelly remains unaffected.

In some respects, I prefer using Certo for pectin when making jelly on a cookstove because the order is reversed.  When you use Certo, you bring the sugar and juice to a full rolling boil and then add the pectin.  Therefore, while it takes longer to get to the initial boil, getting to the second boil takes very little time. 

The jelly boiling after the sugar has been added.

I made three batches of jelly on that particular day because I figure while everything is hot and the dishes are dirty, get the job done.  In the middle of the jelly making, Nancy came home and assembled a casserole from that chicken that you saw boiling earlier.  We baked it for supper, taking full advantage of the fire.  I have more pics and posts about jelly making to come since I made strawberry preserves the next day.  If you have questions about canning on a wood cookstove, please leave a comment.  I'll do my best to answer!

Teakettles and Wood Cookstoves

You may have noticed that in each of the pictures of the three cookstoves that appear on this blog, a teakettle is resting somewhere on the cooktop.  Our cookstoves are not unique in this characteristic at all.  When I do a Google search for pictures of woodburning cookstoves, the vast majority of those ranges which are obviously in regular use have a teakettle sitting on them.

The Riverside Bakewell cookstove in our summer kitchen.

Marjorie the Margin Gem cookstove in the house kitchen.

The Qualified Range in the house kitchen before beginning to remodel.

Other than the occasional cup of tea, we are not tea drinkers at all; however, our teakettle gets a workout.  These soldiers of the kitchen serve many purposes, and I suspicion that when cooks began the transition from wood and coal-fired ranges to gas, kerosene, and electric stoves, the ever-present teakettle was sorely missed.  I know that each summer as we start to do more of our daily cooking with a modern range, I find myself feeling inconvenienced when I no longer have that old friend ready at my fingertips.

Of course, a teakettle is merely a pot with a pouring spout which is intended to be used to heat water.  When a house is equipped with hot running water, or when a stove is equipped with a hot water reservoir, it may seem redundant to have a teakettle heating water on the stovetop as well.  However, the water in the teakettle is used for different purposes than the water in those other systems.  The water in the teakettle is generally hotter than water from the reservoir or the tap, and if you spend any time reading over old, from-scratch recipes, you'd be surprised at how many of them call for boiling water rather than merely hot water.  Obviously, the cooks of the olden days were used to having their teakettles at the ready.

Another difference is that the water in the reservoir was often rainwater, which was what people meant when they referred to "soft" water prior to the advent of fancy electric water softening systems.  This water would have been used for all kinds of washing, but it would not have been consumed.  Of course, not all homes were equipped with a rainwater cistern, so their reservoirs would have been filled with well water, which obviously was often simply called "hard" water.  However, as my copy of The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cooking* states, "As bread crumbs or other food might fall into the water in the reservoir, a kettle of fresh water was always kept on the stove for coffee or tea or for adding to food that was cooking."  I am amazed at how often I grab the teakettle to add a little boiling water to this or that which is cooking merrily away, and the best part is that the cooking is not slowed by this addition because the water is already boiling.

Jane Cooper devotes a section of her book Woodstove Cookery: At Home on the Range to the teakettle.  A contributor to that book wrote that her grandmother kept eggs in the teakettle so that at a moment's notice, one could have a hardboiled egg for a snack (I wonder how green the yolks would have been after cooking for so long).  Ms. Cooper also notes that steam from the teakettle would add much needed humidity to the dry winter air.  This is true, but I'd like to point out that the same humidity is not as welcome on a sultry summer day.  I've also read warnings in vintage cookbooks which state that if the teakettle is not permitted to be on the range all the time, the buildup of lime deposits inside it will be kept to a minimum.  We do struggle with the lime deposit problem, but we choose to combat it with vinegar rather than remove the teakettle from the cooktop.

Our teakettle is a German-made vessel which we purchased from an Amish store near Redding, Iowa.  It holds over a gallon of water and has a lid that is equipped with a "whistle" in the handle which sounds remarkably like the wail of a freight train when it boils.  I would advise anyone interested in seriously cooking on a wood cookstove to purchase the largest teakettle that can be found.  In my opinion, there is no point in messing around with the dinky little designer models that grace most store shelves today.  Heating the greater quantity of water is not going to cost you any more since the teakettle heats as an incidental result of your cooking or heating fire, and I've never heard of anyone complaining because too much hot water was available.  Furthermore, if you ever do any serious canning, that large teakettle will be a necessity.

A side benefit of keeping a teakettle on the stove top is that when the water gets to a certain temperature, the teakettle begins to make that humming noise that all pots make prior to reaching the boiling point.  You can often tell what your fire is doing even if you are not right next to the stove simply by listening to what the teakettle sounds like.  I guess you could call it a primitive version of the baby monitor or remote sensor.

I'd like to close this post with a poem which appeared in the January 1968 edition of Ideals magazine.  Obviously, I'm not the only one who is conscious of the sound of the teakettle.

The Old Wood Stove

by Christel B. Ellis

The old wood stove would crackle

As the cedar dried and burned.

Through the grating coals would tumble,

Glowing red to black they turned.

And the firelight through the covers

Of that dear old kitchen range,

Turned the ceiling into patchwork

With each dancing fairy flame.

Like a warm and glowing magnet

We were drawn around the hearth,

And the high old corner woodbox

Was a warm and heavenly berth.

With our backs against the chimney

We would listen to the wind

As it swung the stovepipe damper

Up and down and back again.

Many crops were planned and planted

As the winter lingered on.

Near the hearth the neighbors gathered

Till the glowing coals were gone.

Woolen socks were always drying

Near the kitchen range back home.

The iron kettle hummed a love song

Folks today have never known.

I see the kitchen of my childhood,

Feel the warmth of that old range.

To have known its glow and comfort

Is a joy I'd not exchange.

I'm just happy that the sentiments recorded in the above poem can still be reality today!

* This is a very nifty book which I purchased for a dime when it was being purged from the Avoca Public Library's collection--probably the best thing I've ever bought for ten cents.  It is full of pictures of people using woodburning cookstoves of every shape and variety and has some general instructions on how to not only cook on a wood cookstove, but also in a fireplace.  It has quite a few wood cookstove memoirs in it, too.

"I Even Like Raisins in Gravy!"

As I look over this blog, I notice that many of the recipes which I have included here so far are for sweets and desserts.  In my experience, most general cookbooks and recipe boxes reflect this lop-sided phenomenon, but I think that it is because many cooks simply put the nutritional part of their meal together according to their own taste and do not rely on recipes for the standard fare of a meat, a staple, a vegetable, and a fruit.  At least, that is certainly what happens for most of the meals in our household. 

My grandma Marian is no exception to this rule.  For all of her married life, she routinely put huge dinners on the table at noon--first for her family and in-laws; then for family and the occasional hired man; and then for family, the occasional hired man, and a growing pile of grandchildren.  However, no written recipes exist for the succulent beef roasts, heavenly mashed potatoes, delicious fried chicken, creamed carrots, mouth-watering sweet corn, and various other midwestern traditional dishes which made a seat at her dinner table a coveted thing indeed.  Therefore, there is no written recipe for the meat dish that I'm going to share with you here, but this is one of my favorite main dishes that Grandma makes.  Even though Grandma had given up her wood cookstove about fifty years prior to concocting this recipe, this is a main dish that is particularly well suited to the wood cookstove.

One of the reasons that I like this recipe is because I am a raisin lover.  Some of my earliest food memories involve those tiny boxes of Sunmaid raisins that are the perfect size for a pre-schooler.  I like cooked raisins, raw raisins, raisins in salads, raisins in cookies, raisins in breads, raisins in cakes, raisins in sauces, and raisins on meats.  This recipe is the reason that I like raisins in gravy.  Everybody looks at me like I'm crazy when I say that, but trust me, this recipe is good.  Here is what you do:

You are going to first be browning some pork chops or pork loin slices.  If you know that your meat is lean, start with a little butter (I think a little bit of bacon grease tastes better) melting in the bottom of a skillet.  You just need enough to cover the bottom of the pan.

Butter melting in a skillet on the wood cookstove.  Excuse the ugly splotches
on the cookstop; we had fried doughnuts for our breakfast the morning before this.

Then, brown as many pork chops or boneless pork loin slices as you need to feed those who will be around your table.  Season them as you like. 

I cooked these directly over the firebox because I wanted that high heat which produces a good browned flavor.

While these are browning, mix a few tablespoons of flour into a cup of cold water.

Once the chops are nicely browned on both sides, transfer them to a baking dish and put them in the warming oven so that they will stay hot while you make the gravy.

The browned chops resting on the lowered door of the warming oven.
Unfortunately, because the stovepipe goes up through the center of the
warming oven on the Margin Gem Cookstove, I can't fit this pan inside
the warming oven and get the door closed.  It's no problem, though,
because everything still stays plenty warm resting on the open door.

Now pour a little hot water from the teakettle into the skillet, loosening the nicely browned bits of meat and drippings from the bottom with a fork or whisk. 

Pour the flour and cold water mixture into the skillet, stirring constantly with a fork or whisk to keep it from getting lumpy.  Season the resulting gravy to taste and let it boil rapidly.

Add a couple of generous handfuls of raisins.  Grandma's preference is to use golden raisins, but I like any kind of raisin.

Slice an apple or two into the gravy, too.

Pour the gravy over the chops in the casserole dish and pop the whole thing into the oven.

Pork chops are in the 9 x 13 baking dish in the back with a dish of
Grandma Ruth's scalloped corn in the front.  The oven thermometer
is registering right around 350 at this moment, but both of these
dishes will be fine if the oven temperature is a little hotter or a
little cooler.

Bake until the pork chops are cooked through.  Depending on the temperature of your oven and the doneness of the chops when you took them out of the skillet, this could take anywhere between thirty minutes to an hour.  As it cooks, the smell of it almost reminds me of Thanksgiving since my family puts raisins and apples in the turkey dressing.

The finished dinner would make Grandma proud.

I think that this meat dish holds well once it is cooked.  You can bring it back up to the warming oven to stay hot until you are ready to serve the meal.  It's also nice because it is made of things that people generally would have on hand.  Give it a try.  I bet there's a good chance that you too will "even like raisins in gravy!"

Ironing Clothes with a Wood Cookstove

Now that we have Marjorie the Margin Gem up and running, we are trying to take full advantage of her.  Just as in the days of old when the woodburning cookstove functioned as the main energy center of the home, we are using our cookstove for more than just cooking.  Marjorie is also busy heating our water, warming our house (though parts of March were awfully warm), and providing heat for ironing our clothes.

I wear a dress shirt to school every day, so the ironing pile is always quite large around here, and because time is always an issue, the process of ironing with heat from the cookstove needs to be made as efficient as possible for it to be a viable alternative to using an electric iron.  Thus, even though I have a collection of traditional sadirons and they would work just fine for this process, they remain hidden in a box somewhere. 

Instead, I heard somewhere that what some Amish do is to buy old electric irons, remove the cords, and then heat these atop the cookstove.  I have to say that even though I'm pro-old fashioned method in most areas of my life, I completely understand why the Amish would have adopted this approach.  The surface area on the bottom of an electric iron is much larger than the bottom of the traditional sadiron, and thus the process of pressing a garment is expedited.  Also, because the traditional sadiron is pointed at both ends, you cannot rest the iron on its heal while you adjust the article that is being ironed.

The pictures below show the two irons that I use.  I use two so that one can be reheating while I'm using the other.  The one on the left used to belong to my grandmother on my dad's side.  She and my grandfather married in 1939, and I suspicion that this iron was purchased not too long afterward.  It was the type that took a detachable electrical cord like those which used to be connected to waffle irons and coffee percolators.  This iron is quite heavy (in fact, when my grandparents lived in our house, I remember Granny using it as a doorstop for the kitchen door that you see in some of the kitchen pictures here on the blog), and it has a unique thumb rest which is attached to the top of the wooden handle.

The iron on the right was purchased from a thrift store simply to be used on the woodstove.  I chose an older style of iron which had the larger metal skirt above the soleplate because I was afraid that I might melt the new, mostly plastic style of iron. I paid a dollar for this iron several years ago, brought it home, and disconnected its electrical cord.  Truthfully, I still feel a little guilty about that because the iron did still work at the time that I purchased it.  It seemed wrong to ruin something that worked just fine.  I have saved the cord, though, and keep it in the basement.  I did that to assuage my guilt, telling myself that I could reconnect it if my contrition got out of control. 

Back to the point of this post:

You can see from the pictures that I put the irons on a piece of aluminum foil while they are heating on the cooktop.  I could just place them directly on the cast iron, but any food spills or other soil which doesn't get completely cleaned off the stove could travel via the soleplate of the iron to my white shirts, and that could be an unhappy and expensive event.  I have been using the piece of foil in the pictures for almost two months now.

Former electric irons heating on the wood cookstove.

The door of the firebox of the Margin Gem cookstove is open to show
the fire heating the clothes irons.

Naturally, the most "pressing" question that anyone would have about this whole process is "How do you control the heat?"  --Sorry, I just couldn't resist the play on words.

First of all, you'd be surprised at how little heat is actually needed to iron clothes.  It is very easy to get the irons too hot.  However, an iron that is not hot enough doesn't remove any wrinkles, either.  What I've learned is that an iron that is too cool or too hot does not glide smoothly over the cloth being ironed.  The "just right" window is pretty narrow, and it is the temperature at which the iron is easy to push along the fabric.

When I first learned to iron with wood heat several years ago, I turned on my electric iron, set it to the temperature that I used on my clothes, and let it heat up.  After it reached ironing temperature, I held the bottom of the iron about four inches away from my cheek to see what the heat felt like.  Then, I placed the other irons on the stove and waited until holding them up to my cheek at an equal distance showed that they had reached the same heat.  I've memorized what that felt like, and now this method is what I use to see whether the irons are at the appropriate temperature.

Some people might be able to accomplish this task by just placing their hands near the bottom of the iron, but I seem to have asbestos fingertips--convenient for taste-testing gravies and sliding hot pots and pans around on a wood cookstove, but no longer sensitive enough to tell whether it is time to strike while the iron is hot.

A cold iron is only ineffective.  An iron that is too hot can be a problem of epic proportions, so I must advise caution in the beginning.  If you do manage to scorch fabric enough that some of it sticks to the bottom of the iron, you'll have to let the iron cool completely and then rub it with steel wool until the soleplate is smooth again.

The clothing will have to be either sprayed with a little bit of water before ironing, or one could go through the process of sprinkling and rolling that our grandmothers witnessed during their childhoods.

Some who are reading this are shaking their heads and muttering that I'm crazy.  I'll not argue about my craziness, but it really isn't as inconvenient as one might think.  Plus, you'd be surprised at how nice it is to have a cordless iron that heats up for free! 

 

Four Hundred Degrees in Fifteen Minutes!

I just wanted to share a quick bit of information about one of the major differences between the Margin Gem cookstove and the other two cookstoves that I have worked with extensively.  When the Qualified range was in our house kitchen, you could always count on it taking around 45 minutes from the time that a fire was lit to the time when the oven reached 350 degrees.  The Riverside Bakewell in the summer kitchen usually takes about the same amount of time, but it is less consistent--an issue that I attribute to the considerably poorer draw in the short chimney down there.

The Margin Gem is entirely different.  Tonight, I started with a completely cold stove, lit the fire, and had a 400 degree oven in 15 minutes!  This is the second time that I have managed this.  I had heard that the Flameview Cookstove (another model manufactured by Margin Stoves) could do this, and I am pleased to find out that the Margin Gem is also capable.  In my view, this feature goes a long way toward making cooking on a woodburning cookstove a more convenient experience and certainly less of an adjustment for those who trade in their gas and electric models for this more old-fashioned method of cooking.

Apricot Bars in the Wood Cookstove

After this last weekend, I think I'm finally beginning to understand Marjorie the Margin Gem Cookstove better.  As I baked these bars tonight, I felt like the two of us were much more "in tandem" than we have been so far.  Jane Cooper, in her book Woodstove Cookery: At Home on the Range hits the nail on the head when she writes "You are as much responsible for the final product as the stove; rather than being your slave, it's a partner.  You learn to cook together."  Tonight, I'm happy to announce that I feel like Marjorie and I are finally coming to an understanding. 

I promise a long post about how to operate the Margin Gem later when I feel like I've become an expert.  The purpose of this post is to share with you all an excellent wood cookstove recipe that I found.

For my readers who are from outside my area of the Midwest, I need to first give a little background information.  I found this recipe for Apricot Bars in the April 1974 issue of Kitchen Klatter Magazine.  Kitchen Klatter was the longest running radio homemaker show in America.  Broadcast from Shenandoah, Iowa, to several radio stations throughout the Midwest, Leanna Driftmier (and later her daughters) had a huge following among the homemakers of America's Heartland.  The popularity of the radio show led to the publishing of a monthly magazine, the development of a line of flavorings and salad dressings, and then to the manufacture of some high quality cleaning products.  The brand is now known as X-tra Touch and is still widely sold in our area of the Midwest.

The April 1974 edition of Kitchen Klatter Magazine.
Leanna Driftmier, founder, is seated at left.

This recipe is a great wood cookstove recipe because it takes advantage of the heat of the cooktop while using the oven, too.  Of course, the deliciousness of the end product makes it a good recipe for any stove, but I always think that any recipe which would have meant turning on an extra burner or heating element in a modern stove is particularly well suited to the wood cookstove since that extra heat is already available from the same fire. 

Keep in mind that I doubled the recipe, so the pictures below are going to show a larger version than what the captions indicate.  Here is what to do:

Cut 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 sugar, 1 cup sifted flour, and 1/4 tsp.
butter flavoring together with a pastry blender.

Press into the bottom of a lightly greased pan.  Pop this mixture into
a moderate oven for approximately 25 minutes or until it begins to
brown very lightly around the edges.

The recipe says to use 2/3 cup dried apricots, but I think that a
full cup is better.  Put 3 tablespoons of water on the apricots in
a saucepan.  I put a splash of X-tra Touch apricot flavoring in
too in order to freshen their flavor a bit.

While the bottom crust is in the oven, simmer the dried apricots,
watching to make sure that they don't boil dry.

While the crust is baking and the apricots are simmering, beat
two eggs.  Beat in 1 cup brown sugar, 1/3 cup sifted flour,
1/2 tsp. baking powder, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp. vanilla (I used more),
and 1/4 tsp. almond flavoring. 

And now a word from our sponsors: X-tra Touch almond flavoring really is the best almond flavoring on the market.*

*I did not receive any remuneration or other consideration from the kind people at X-tra Touch for my endorsement of their product.  They know that I exist, but they are, at this writing, unaware that I am giving them free advertising on my blog.  While I'm on this jag, by the way, I'd like to mention that their butter flavoring is really quite good, too.  Oh, and did I mention that their laundry detergent is superior to anything else I've ever tried?  I didn't?  Then let me also just say that their laundry detergent is superior to anything else that I've tried.  Their color-safe bleach has salvaged many a garment around here, as well.  Oh, no!  I totally forgot to mention their Honey Dijon Dressing--OUT OF THIS WORLD!

Drain any remaining simmering water from the apricots and
add them to the brown sugar and egg mixture.

Poor the brown sugar/egg/apricot mixture over the hot crust.

Make sure that the apricots are evenly distributed.

Pop it all back in a moderate oven for about 25
minutes or until it is a deep golden brown.

When it is ready to come out, it will look puffy on the top.

As it cools, the brown sugar/egg mixture falls and creates a
gooey, yummy caramel layer.

Sprinkle the top with a little powdered sugar once they have cooled
quite a bit.  I'm sorry that the picture is of such a small piece, but the
rest are going to school tomorrow.  This piece didn't even make it to
the room where our computer is.

Here is the recipe the way it appeared in the 1974 magazine:

Apricot Bars

1/2 cup butter or margarine

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup sifted flour

1/4 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter (now X-tra Touch) butter flavoring

2/3 cup dried apricots

2 to 3 Tbls. water

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup sifted flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter vanilla flavoring

1/4 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter almond flavoring

Combine butter or margarine, sugar, 1 cup flour and butter flavoring.  Pat into a greased 8-inch square pan.  Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  While this is baking, combine apricots and water and simmer until soft.  (Add a bit more water if needed, but use as little as possible.)  Beat eggs and combine with brown sugar, 1/3 cup flour, baking powder and salt.  When blended and beaten smooth, add remaining flavorings and apricots.  Spread on top of baked crust.  Nuts may be sprinkled over the top if desired.  Bake in 350-degree oven until golden on top, about 25 minutes.  Remove from oven and cut in squares while warm.  Sprinkle the top with powdered sugar.

As you can see, these bars are neither healthy nor economical, but I hope you enjoy these as much as I do!

Little Things Mean a Lot

Happy Easter!  We've had a wonderful day celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with our church and our family, and now Nancy and I have finally gotten a little time to ourselves this evening.  I just wanted to write a few notes about how things are progressing as we get to know Marjorie the Margin Gem cookstove.  Tomorrow will mark one month that she has been installed, and with the exception of a couple of days when I was away for the All-State Speech Festival at the University of Northern Iowa, Marjorie has been fired every day.  We haven't necessarily cooked something every day, but except for those two days that I was away, she has been faithfully heating our hot water.

First, I need to say right up front that all of the food that has been cooked on the Margin Gem has been good, and I haven't ruined anything yet.  However, I'm still getting used to cooking on Marjorie, and I am a ways from being able to write a blog post which would give an expert set of instructions on how to manage her.  Significant differences exist between how I operated our Qualified range and how Marjorie responds to those same tactics, and I am still learning.  What I would like to address in this blog post is how some small aspects of the Margin Gem's design make it a much nicer stove than I have ever dealt with before.

One of the first things that I noticed about the Margin Gem was how clean the floor around her stays.  The floor just beneath the left side of the Qualified range always had a little pile of ashes on it.  Sweeping and vacuuming would only clean this mess up temporarily. Each opening of the white enamel door that covers the front feed and the ash drawer always sucked a few ashes out onto the floor, and each time the grates would be shaken, a few ashes would dribble out onto the floor, and when you pulled the drawer out in order to empty it, quite a few ashes would be dragged out onto the floor.  The bottom of the ash drawer slid along the floor of the stove, which was part of the problem.  As you can see in the picture below, the other part of the problem was that the bottom of the opening for the ash drawer was level with the floor of the stove

A photo of the ash drawer of the Qualified range pulled partly out of its
slot under the firebox.  You can see that the bottom of the drawer rests
on the bottom of the stove.  Even at rest and in a state of disassembly
in the utility room, you can see that a few ashes have collected on the lip
of the bottom of the stove.

 The Riverside Bakewell in the summer kitchen is constructed in much the same way except that it doesn't have the long front door which covers the access to the front feed and the ash drawer to suck out ashes each time that it is opened.  Thus, it doesn't usually have quite as many ashes on the floor in front of it as the Qualified did.

The ash drawer on the Riverside Bakewell pulled out a little way.

 The Margin Gem is constructed so that the ash drawer still sits on the floor of the stove, but a lip on the ash door fixes it so that the ash drawer actually sits about 3/4" lower than the opening of the door.  This allows one to pick up the ash drawer and--at the very least--slide the bottom of the drawer across the lip to remove any ashes which are stuck to the bottom of the drawer and leave them in the bottom of the stove.  Furthermore, if any ashes do drop as the drawer is removed, a small shelf is in place to catch them.  This has made a drastic difference in how difficult it is to keep the hearth clean.

A closeup of the open ash door in an attempt to show how helpful the lip
and shelf are in keeping the floor around the stove clean.

Another significant difference is the reservoir.  The Qualified did not have a water reservoir at all, so my only experience with a water reservoir has been with the water reservoir on the Riverside Bakewell in the summer kitchen.  The Riverside's reservoir is the conventional type in which a side of the copper water tank sits against the side wall of the stove.  While this is certainly effective at getting water hot, it can take quite a while for the water to get hot, and recovery time is not very quick.  Also, once the water is heated in that reservoir, it has to be dipped back out through the top for use.

The Margin Gem's reservoir has what its competitor calls a "hyper-heat" reservoir.  By turning a lever at the bottom of the reservoir to the right as shown in the picture below, a baffle in the stove diverts some of the smoke and heat from the fire so that it travels along the bottom of the reservoir before traveling under the oven and out the chimney.  This enables the water to get quite a bit hotter than the conventional water reservoir design and also improves recovery time.  The spigot, as shown in the second picture, allows the water to be drawn off the reservoir without having to go through the time-consuming and messy process of dipping it back out by hand.

Some of you may wonder why we chose the additional expense and bulk of having a reservoir when we also have the water jacket to heat our hot running water.  The answer is simple: at some point, I would like to have our rainwater cistern back in operation, so I wanted to have a way to heat rainwater with the cookstove, and the reservoir was the only logical option.  Until we are able to use rainwater, we will keep filling the reservoir with well water, thus increasing the hot water heating capacity of the stove.

The lever on the reservoir turned to divert heat from the fire to the
bottom of the reservoir.

The spigot on the side of the reservoir.

 The next feature of the Margin Gem that I like is the warming oven.  The Qualified simply had a high shelf, but the Riverside has a warming oven.  I cooked on the Qualified for twelve years before we hooked the Riverside up in the summer kitchen, and after getting a taste of what a warming oven can do, I wasn't going to purchase another stove that didn't have one.  The uses for this ingenious contraption deserve their own blog post someday, but for now, let me just tell you that Susan Fenoff from Stoves and More Online, the company that we purchased the stove from, calls her warming oven her "Amish microwave."  As my students used to say, " 'Nuff said."

The Margin Gem's warming oven.

 The firebox on the Margin Gem is huge!  I'm amazed at the size of log that fits in that thing.

A poor picture to demonstrate how large the Margin Gem's firebox is.

 Another thing that I find amazing about the Margin Gem is what an even baker it is.  In the first picture below, you can see four loaves of bread which were all baked at the same time, and they were never turned!  Furthermore, the bottoms of the loaves of bread were thoroughly cooked also, and I didn't have to do anything special.  In the Qualified, I always kept a layer of fly ash on the top of the oven box just under the cooktop, AND the top rack of the stove was always in the very top position with a sheet of aluminum foil over it to keep the tops of things from cooking before the bottoms were done.  I baked with the other rack resting on the floor of the oven so that whatever was cooking was only about a quarter of an inch from the oven floor.  Furthermore, when baking breads and rolls, I would remove the bottom rack for the last five minutes of the baking time and finish baking them directly on the oven floor. 

In the Riverside, I always put the baked goods on the stovetop for a few minutes to cook the bottoms thoroughly.  You can see this in a picture below.  Obviously, the Margin Gem has solved all of these problems for me.

Four loaves of bread in the Margin Gem oven.  They were not turned
at all during baking, but cooked very evenly.

You can see that the bottoms of the loaves were perfectly browned,
and I had nothing to do with it!

The first four loaves from the Riverside cookstove oven browning
their bottoms on the cooktop while the next two loaves begin baking.

 I do have one complaint to share, and that is that the oven thermometer in the Margin Gem is dreadfully unreliable.  The oven thermometer on the Qualified was spot on all the time, and I got spoiled.  I have a small oven thermometer placed inside the oven of the Margin Gem to help me get this thing figured out, but I sure do miss being able to just glance at the oven door and know what was going on within.  This seems to be something that everyone agrees about because one site even runs the disclaimer that the oven thermometer on the Margin Gems is for decorative use only.  It's a small inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, though.