Century-old Recipe for Meatloaf

Not too many years ago, Nancy, her mother, and I had all gone down to Clearfield, Iowa, to visit Nancy's grandparents.  Nancy's grandma Ruth, an avid cook in her day and still a food aficionada at age 97, had apparently been rummaging through old cookbooks and had decided to send a couple home with Nancy's mom.  I was not the driver on the two-hour return trip, so I sat in the back seat and read the cookbooks.  One of them was the 1915 Clearfield Presbyterian Church Cookbook.  The Clearfield Presbyterian Church is long gone, but a recipe that caught my eye needs to be carried into the future.

The recipe was simply labeled "Beef Loaf," but what made me pay attention to it was the ingredient list.  Most meatloaf recipes are fairly similar in nature: meat, meat stretcher, an egg or two, some moisture, and your seasonings.  What caught my eye about the ingredients was that this recipe included ground bacon.  Now, I'm an unashamed meatloaf lover, and I've had meatloaf that was draped in bacon, but the idea of grinding bacon and including it inside the meatloaf was intriguing to me.  Furthermore, with not nearly enough shame, I will admit that I believe the following verse: "Bacon and butter make everything better."  Thus, I definitely had to try this recipe! 

The first try was a success; the second try earned me an "I sure wish I could make a meatloaf like you" at a church dinner.  Thus, this recipe has now become one of my "go to" recipes when cooking for a potluck, so I pulled it out for the Nightingale Circle Christmas Potluck which we hosted at our house last Wednesday evening.  Here is what you do:

 



1. First crush enough saltine crackers to make a cup of cracker crumbs.

2. Grind one pound of bacon and set aside.

Normally, I would be ashamed to show you that we have an electric
food grinder.  (We have a hand-cranked one that I have used many times
for this recipe.)  However, we bought this grinder a few weeks ago at the
Goodwill Warehouse in Omaha.  You pay for your merchandise by the
pound there, so I estimate that this vintage deluxe Kenmore grinder cost
us less than $6.70.  Aren't you impressed?  You'll see why I wanted it if I
write a post about making suet pudding for Christmas.

3. Mix cracker crumbs, eggs, milk, dried onion, and salt and pepper.

4. Add the ground bacon.

5. Add the ground beef and mix thoroughly.

6. Shape into a loaf and put into a baking dish. 

Keep in mind that you've got four pounds of meat here,
so you need a big pan.  This Pyrex dish is 11" x 14" and
holds 4.8 quarts.

7. Bake in a moderate oven for approximately 1 1/2 hours.

You see the meatloaf cooking here in the stovetop oven.  I actually started it in
the Margin Gem's oven, but I had to finish it on top of the stove
because the dinner rolls wouldn't fit in the stovetop oven, so they had
to be baked in Marjorie's oven.  This stovetop oven is coming in handy!

8. During the last ten minutes, I like to glaze it with two cups of homemade ketchup, about 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar, and two teaspoons of dry mustard.

Mix all of that together until it is smooth and poor over the top of the meatloaf.

The finished product with about half of it gone.

Notes:

a) At first glance, one might think that this meatloaf is bound to be greasy since it has a pound of bacon in it.  Surprisingly, most of the bacon fat cooks out during baking, and there is no greasy texture or taste.

b) Because the bacon fat cooks out, the hot fat tends to sputter a lot in the oven, so be prepared to run a damp cloth over the inside of the oven after it has cooled down to being just warm.

c) The original recipe did not call for the dried onion or the glaze, but it was quite bland without them.  The original recipe also called for a tablespoon of butter.  Despite my mantra above, I leave that out because it seems superfluous even to me.

The recipe:

 

Beef Loaf

 

3 lbs. ground beef

1 lb. ground bacon

2 eggs

1 cup cracker crumbs

1 cup rich milk

3/4 cup dried onion (or to taste)

Salt and pepper to taste.

 

Mix all together and shape into loaf.  Bake approximately 1 1/2 hours in moderate oven.

During last ten minutes, glaze with the following:

 

2 cups ketchup

3/4 c. brown sugar

2 tsp. dried mustard

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do.

"Automatic" Cooking on a Wood Cookstove

My mother has always taken great advantage of the "Time Bake" feature of her electric stoves in order to be able to have Sunday dinner cook automatically while we were at church.  Nancy and I would occasionally do the same thing with our 1951 Hotpoint electric range, which we sometimes used in conjunction with the Qualified Range until we began remodeling our kitchen.  Usually, whatever meat dish we were having would be cooked in the Hotpoint, and then we would cook the side dishes on the Qualified once we got home.  The reason that we never cooked the whole meal in the woodburning cookstove was because the Qualified couldn't hold a constant fire for the time that we were gone to church since it wasn't airtight.  It would have been able to start the cooking with no problem, but the oven temperature would have dropped to a point where meats couldn't have been safely consumed.

The 1951 Hotpoint was delivered to a used appliance store to hopefully be refurbished and resold shortly after we began serious work on our kitchen in 2011.  I will admit to having been sad to see it go.  However, it had some quirks that Nancy found particularly unforgivable, and the new plan for the kitchen doesn't allow any space for it anyway.  The good news is that because Marjorie the Margin Gem is an airtight cookstove and is able to easily hold a fire while we are gone, I've begun to experiment with having her cook our dinner while we are gone to church.

In The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, Addie Norton is quoted as saying, "If I put a fire in that woodstove and go out of the house, it's not gonna get hotter.  It's gonna get cooler.  That wood's gonna burn up and it's not gonna hurt nothing."  For the most part, I would say that is true.  The exception is that if you fuel the fire right before you leave it, the fire will first get hotter and then will get cooler.  In an old style cookstove, this cycle will take less time, and the extremes in the hottest point and coolest point in that short cycle are most likely to have a wider gap between them.  In an airtight stove, the burn time will be longer, and the extremes of temperature will not be as discrepant.

Knowing how the heat of the stove will behave governs one's decisions regarding how and what to cook when you are having your wood cookstove cook "automatically."  For our initial experiment, I chose pork roast and mashed potatoes.  I seasoned the roast, put it in our red spatterware roaster, and slid it into the oven.  The oven was running at about 400 degrees at the time that the roast was put in. 

The potatoes were peeled and quartered and then put in a Saladmaster saucepan with a vented lid.  I chose that particular pot because I could put the lid on it tightly, but the chances of the potatoes boiling over were lower because the steam vent on the lid would have reduced the chance of that happening.  I was also only cooking a small amount of potatoes, so the pan was plenty tall in order to provide additional protection against boiling over.  The potatoes were placed between the rear middle and right lids.

Pork roast in the oven and potatoes on top of the stove
ready to cook while we are gone to church.

I then filled the firebox with large pieces of wood, turned the damper down, and completely closed the drafts.  We left at about nine in the morning and got back home at about 12:45.  When we returned, this is what we saw.

Cooked potatoes that were still very hot but no longer boiling.
They did boil, though.  You can tell that by the starch that is clinging
to the sides of the pot.

A completely cooked pork roast.  I know that the top looks burnt,
but there was a thick layer of fat on the top side of the roast.  I cut
the blackened part away since it was not meat anyway, and a tender,
succulent pork roast lay underneath.  The oven was still at a safe
temperature to hold the meat.
 

I put a pint of home-canned green beans on the stove to boil while I mashed the potatoes and carved the meat.  Nancy cut some pre-cooked bacon into the green beans and set the table.  Within minutes of coming home, we sat down to a wood-cooked meal that looked like this:

Yumm!

We deemed this experiment a definite success and feel that we have yet another reason to be glad that we upgraded from the Qualified Range to the Margin Gem.  I can't wait to try other combinations of dishes.  If I were to cook another pork roast in this manner, I think that I would add a little water or stock because I think that a little added moisture would have prevented the top of the roast from becoming overly browned.  My grandmother-in-law says that I also should have put the potatoes in with the roast.  I would have thought of this with a beef roast, but I guess my mother never did that with pork roasts, so I didn't think of it.  I don't think that the moisture from the potatoes would have been sufficient to prevent the over-browning, though.  At any rate, stay tuned for more "automatic" cooking experiments!

Roasting a Turkey in the Wood Cookstove

My parents will be hosting our family's Thanksgiving celebration this year, but Nancy and I have hosted it several times since we have been married, and it is certainly one of my favorite meals to cook.  Of course, the centerpiece of most Thanksgiving dinners is the turkey, and the last one that we roasted in the Qualified Range in 2010 was the best one yet.  Fred, one of our neighbors and a longtime family friend of my mom's side, was a guest at our dinner that year, and he raved about the turkey.  He swore up and down that the reason that the Turkey was so delicious was because it was cooked in a wood cookstove.  I have read that some people believe that foods cooked in the oven of a wood cookstove are better than those cooked in modern ovens because both electric and gas ovens are vented, whereas the ovens on wood cookstoves are basically sealed when the door is shut.  The thought is that this helps keep the flavor in the food.  All theories aside, 2010's bird was fantastic, and I want to share how we cooked it.

I didn't have the energy that year to get all of the pies baked on the Wednesday evening before, so Nancy and I had gotten up early to bake the pumpkin pies.  I tend to keep the oven pretty hot for pie baking (see my post about that here), and our timing was such that when the last pie came out of the oven, it was imperative that the turkey be put in right away.

To prepare the turkey, I used a Reynolds oven bag, following the directions on the box for shaking flour inside the bag before putting the turkey in and cutting slits in the top of the bag.  Then, I rubbed butter all over the top of the bird to add a little flavor and encourage browning.  I sprinkled the top of the turkey with salt, pepper, paprika, and probably some Mrs. Dash.  We stuffed the turkey's cavity with part of the dressing that we made according to our family's tradition (I'll blog about that sometime).  We sealed the bag and put it in the oven, which was running at about four hundred degrees at that time.

Just before putting the turkey in the oven, I had fueled the fire, so the oven continued to run hot for at least the first forty-five minutes that the turkey was in the oven.  The turkey developed a beautiful, golden brown crust right away.  After that, we let the oven cool to about 325 until the turkey was cooked, timing it according to the directions for the oven bags.  Ideally, you want your turkey to be finished cooking about a half hour before your meal is to take place.  A meat thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the breast should register 180 degrees.

We then spooned the stuffing out of the turkey's cavity and mixed it into the rest of the dressing.  The turkey was permitted to rest for at least fifteen minutes; then it was removed from the bag to a platter for carving while all of the wonderful juice that it had been swimming in was made into gravy.

At every Thanksgiving dinner we've hosted, as soon as the turkey is out of the oven, I add quite a bit of small fuel to the fire and return the oven to about 400 degrees in order to dry out the dressing a little, brown the marshmallows on the top of the sweet potatoes, and cook the gravy.

Making sure that the turkey gets a chance to brown well while it is roasting also helps to ensure that the turkey gravy will have an appetizing color.  If your gravy is too light to be appealing, though, don't despair.  My grandma taught me that a little coffee added to the gravy aids in giving it good color and is usually undetectable as far as flavor goes.  If no coffee is already made, I've seen her put a few granules of instant coffee into the gravy to get the same effect.  Trust me on this one; if you do it right, no one will be the wiser.  Just remember to always taste the gravy as you are making it, adjusting your seasonings to fit your palate.

If, while the turkey is cooking, the top of it begins to brown too much, just lay a couple of pieces of foil over the top. This may be necessary because most wood cookstove ovens are hotter at the top than at the bottom. If the turkey is cooking too slowly, it helps to remove the stuffing from inside the turkey and cook it separately from the bird.

An additional consideration that a wood cookstove cook must make while cooking Thanksgiving dinner is the fact that there is usually a large pot of potatoes to cook along with other top-of-the-stove side dishes.  Generally, when I'm using extra large vessels on the cooktop, I keep a hotter fire because of the extra BTU's needed to heat the larger pots.  However, the hotter fire would result in the oven being too hot for roasting the turkey.  Thus, I always have to remember to put the potatoes and other sides on earlier than I normally would because they will take longer to come to a boil.

The only pictures that I have of any of the turkeys that I have roasted in a wood cookstove are some that my aunt took in 1999.  This was actually the second turkey that I had roasted in the Qualified range.

Thanksgiving 1999's roast turkey at the Qualified.  Note the large
stockpot of mashed potaoes over the firebox.  The other two pots
are carrots and green beans.

Man was I young then!  I don't look anything like that anymore.

Making the gravy.  The potatoes have been removed from the
range for mashing, and the two vegetables have been moved to
the coolest part of the cooktop because they are finished.

Astute blog readers will notice that the stovepipe angle in the pictures above is not the same as in other pictures of the Qualified Range.  When these pictures were taken, the Qualified had only been installed in our current house for a few months (I had it installed in our little rental house next door for about a year and a half when I lived up there).  I hired a professional to line the old kitchen chimney with stainless steel and install the Qualified in my present kitchen in the summer of 1999.  He configured the stovepipe so that it had a very direct route to the chimney, which is what is recommended to optimize draft.

However, I didn't like the look of the funky angles, and it was difficult to take the pipe down and put it back up for routine cleaning, so I changed it after a while.  We didn't install wall protection behind the stove until 2005 (a year after Nancy and I married), so until then, the stove stuck out into the kitchen quite a bit further in order to meet the clearance requirements.  In fact, the wall protection was installed on the weekend before Thanksgiving that year because Nancy and I were hosting, and we wanted to have more room to work and for our guests to travel through the kitchen (Have you ever noticed how people tend to gather in the kitchen during get-togethers, even when they aren't helping with the meal preparation?).

Hopefully, our kitchen will be finished by Thanksgiving of next year so that we can host the celebration again.  I'm looking forward to cooking a really large meal on the Margin Gem since it is so much bigger than the Qualified and has a warming oven to boot.

Using a Stovetop Oven on a Wood Cookstove

Nancy and I spent a few days in Storm Lake, Iowa, while I attended a conference there about Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction this last week.  On the evening of the second day, we ventured downtown and stopped in a candy and antique store.  There, clean and bright, stood a stovetop oven.  For those who are unfamiliar with these little contraptions, they are metal boxes which are placed on a stovetop and thus heated for baking.  Historically, the most common use for these ovens was for baking atop kerosene cookstoves, most of which did not come equipped with an oven.  In our area, many homes had kerosene cookstoves for use during the summertime when the extra heat of a wood or corncob-fired cookstove was particularly undesirable or unnecessary.  My great-great aunt Meme, who taught me to cook, used to talk about using a kerosene cookstove and stovetop oven occasionally during the summers and on days when the weather conditions prevented them from being able to get a fire started in the Monarch wood cookstove.

We have been looking for a stovetop oven since this summer when we were baking for the Monday Markets.  While baking for the markets, we operated at peek capacity most of the time.  Something was usually in the oven from as early as possible in the mornings to just a few minutes before we left to set up our table.  Even at that, demand exceeded supply.  We could have fired up the Riverside Bakewell down in the summer kitchen (we did, in fact, on the first baking day), but the distance to the summer kitchen from the house was too great to make that really feasible.  Furthermore, the heat radiating into the kitchen from the cooktop of Marjorie the Margin Gem was extremely uncomfortable, and it seemed like we ought to figure out a way to make better use of it.

New stovetop ovens are still being manufactured and can be purchased from Lehman Hardware.  These are rather expensive, though, and we couldn't believe that we would make enough additional sales at the Monday Markets to offset the cost.  We found a couple of ovens in antique venues, but the only one that was large enough to be at all helpful was not only quite expensive, but also had some visible insulating material which looked alarmingly like asbestos.  Thus, Wednesday's find was a happy one, especially since its price tag was less than half that of the first suitable antique we had located.

Of course, I had to try it out as soon as possible.  My first foray into the stovetop baking world was with a batch of from-a-box blueberry muffins.  I'm ashamed to admit that I love from-a-box blueberry muffins.  There, I've confessed; now we can be done with that and move on.  I started with the oven positioned on the cookstove as shown below.

The stovetop oven heating on top of the Margin Gem.

I placed our trusty oven thermometer inside it because the thermometer in the door of it simply says "cold, BAKE, hot."  Don't you get a kick out of thermometers like that?

The oven thermometer inside the stovetop oven.  The shiny piece
of metal on the bottom is a baffle.  The right and left sides are
open to the stovetop below.

It didn't take too long for the oven to reach the appropriate temperature for baking muffins.

I popped them in and began to monitor their progress and the oven's temperature. 

I used one light pan and one dark pan to see which type of pan would work best. Just so the faithful blog readers who don't know me very well can get a glimpse into how tenaciously I hold onto the past, I'd like to point out that the pan on the left is one of a pair which belonged to my grandmother on my dad's side.  The pan on the right is one of a pair which belonged to the aforementioned aunt Meme. 

Obviously, I'm big into hand-me-downs.  Many people know this and give various wonderful things to me.  By the way, if you are the person (or know whom the person was) who left three pairs of blue jeans and a brown sort of mock suede shirt on our back porch, would you please make yourself known?  I really appreciate both your generosity and your belief--albeit mistaken--that I have a narrow enough waist to fit the jeans.  If you would like them back, you're going to have to forfeit your anonymity.  Otherwise, we're going to forward them to the Goodwill.

Where was I? 

The oven began to get too hot over the firebox, so I had to move it a little to the right.

After what was probably a little more than normal baking time, the muffins were done.  They weren't quite as brown on the top as they might have been had I baked them in the regular oven, but they were quite presentable.  You can also see from the second picture below that the bottoms were an acceptable brown also.

This was all very encouraging, but we don't sell from-a-box muffins at the Monday Market, so today I had to try baking bread in the stovetop oven.  I made a batch of whole wheat bread which should really have had more whole wheat flour in it, but when you don't measure much of anything, you are bound to turn out the occasional less-than-perfect-but-still-delicious batch of bread.

The oven beginning to heat while the loaves of bread rise in
Marjorie's warming oven.

Seven loaves of bread all ready to be baked at once.  Notice that
the thermometer in the oven door has moved to just a little to the
left of "BAKE."  The stockpot on the right is a mess of chicken
breasts being cooked for casseroles and salads next week.

I put four of the loaves into the Margin Gem's regular oven and initially put three loaves into the stovetop oven.  This was a mistake.  With three loaves in the oven, it was filled wall-to-wall with bread, and the heat rising from the cooktop was not allowed to sufficiently circulate within the oven to cook the tops of the loaves of bread.  I took the middle loaf out at about the halfway point, and the other two loaves immediately began to brown on the top--lesson learned.

The two loaves on the lower right were those which were baked
in the stovetop oven.  Their top crust is lighter due to the initial
presence of the third loaf.

The bottoms of the same loaves of bread.

Despite the difference in the complexion of the top crust, which I believe will be resolved next time since I won't try to cram too much into the oven, the loaves of bread baked in the stovetop oven were thoroughly cooked and identical to the other loaves in flavor.  All in all, we figure we have successfully accessorized our cookstove.  Not only have we increased our capacity for the Monday Markets, but as Nancy pointed out, we will be in better shape whenever we next host Thanksgiving dinner, too, since the foods that we traditionally make for that meal are mostly cooked in the oven.

As always, I hope this information is helpful to a reader, and if you've got information to add, please do so in the comments section.  I enjoy hearing from readers!

Adventures: First Time Pressure Canning on the Margin Gem and First Time Using Tattler Lids

A dishpan of broccoli from our garden.

Even though we've had a couple of hard freezes, the broccoli plants in our garden have begun to produce in earnest since we've had several nice rains lately.  We both love broccoli cooked, raw, or in casseroles, so we're happy for the late harvest.

We've canned broccoli before.  While it isn't the prettiest canned vegetable to look at, it is quite convenient to be able to open a quart jar, drain the water off, and have broccoli that is already defrosted and ready to be stirred into a couple of our favorite 70's era casserole recipes.  Thus, we decided that we would pick what is very likely the last broccoli of the 2012 growing season and try pressure canning on the Marjorie the Margin Gem for the first time. 

I also decided to take this opportunity to try using Tattler reusable canning lids for the first time.  We had bought a trial box of these lids when we were at The Dutchman store in Cantril, Iowa, back in June, but I had completely forgotten about them while we were canning during the summer.  We buy our canning lids in bulk sleeves from the Amish stores down in Redding, Iowa, at very reasonable prices, but if we could reuse them indefinitely, that would be quite a savings in the long run.

After picking the broccoli, we soaked it in salt water to wash it and draw off any insects.  Surprisingly, a few tiny bugs did surface despite the chilly weather.

 

Then, I placed the canner over the fire and scalded the Tattler lids.

Tattler reusable canning lids waiting in hot water.  (Forgive
the looks of the teakettle.  It has a date with a scouring pad
scheduled in the near future.)

We trimmed the broccoli and cut it into the size pieces that we want; then, we packed it fairly tightly into quart jars.

Broccoli waiting in quart jars on top of the reservoir.  The
teakettle has been moved closer to the fire to boil briskly again.

We put the lids on the jars, loaded them into the canner, and put the lid on.  The canner exhausted for approximately ten minutes.  I covered the petcock with the weight, and "the dance" began.  The following pictures are posted in chronological order, showing how many different positions the canner had to be in in order to reach and maintain the approriate amount of pressure for the appropriate amount of time.

A little too much pressure showing on this one.  I moved it back
toward the right for a little while next.

There were a few other positions that I didn't snap a picture of, but these pictures show the general progression.  I did not fuel the fire while the canner was maintaining pressure, but it would have been best to have added only small pieces of wood so as not to run the risk of cooling the fire too much while waiting for a large log to ignite.

Once the processing time was finished, the trivet that you see resting on the reservoir in the pictures above was moved to the ledge on the kitchen cupboard, and the canner was placed there to cool.  Remember, a pressure canner has to be completely removed from a woodburning range in order for the pressure and temperature to drop at the correct speed.

As you can see, the canner had to be moved around a lot more in this canning session than in the one that I photographed for my original post about pressure canning on a wood cookstove.  Keep in mind that there were several differences, though: six pints/seven quarts, different canner, different stove, different processing time, and different weather conditions.  Even with the increased movement of the canner in order to maintain constant pressure, I don't really think that I adjusted the canner's placement any more frequently than I would have adjusted an electric or gas burner.

All went well, and every jar sealed.  I'm anxious to see how well the seal holds and how difficult they are to get into without damaging the rubber ring.

The blue jar on the left shows what a Tattler lid looks like after
the metal band has been removed.

Notes:

A) The directions on the Tattler box simply say: "When jars have cooled, remove metal band and determine by feel if lids are securely sealed."  Tattler lids don't make that familiar "ping" sound when they seal.  However, before sealing, the lids have an obviously convex curve to them.  When they are sealed, they are noticeably concave.

B) Nancy finds the odor produced while canning broccoli particularly offensive and likens it to the odor of dead mice.  I have to admit that it isn't the most pleasant smell, so consider yourself fairly warned that this may not be an activity you would want to complete before having a house full of company--unless, of course, you don't particularly like the company that is coming and hope that they'll either leave in a hurry or think twice before coming again. 

In Hot Water, Part III

Wow!  The posts about heating water with a wood cookstove have generated a great deal of interest over the past few days, and I've received some great questions. 

I'm going to do something a little different with this post.  I've spent an embarrassing amount of time reading information about how to heat the domestic hot water supply with a wood cookstove, but it was because of my research that we were able to make what I think were wise decisions regarding our system.  What I'd like to do here is share the reference materials that we used so that others can benefit from them, too. 

1) "Hot Water from Your Woodstove" --booklet written by Jay Lehman and sold by Lehman Hardware.  Available for purchase online here.

Includes diagrams and information about various styles of systems.

2) "Heat Water while Heating Your Home" --article by Tim King in the March/April 2011 issue of Countryside magazine.

Pictures and article about a Waterford cookstove connected to a boiler in tandem with an electric water heater.

3) "Free Hot Water from Your Wood Cookstove" --article by Patricia Greene in the January/February 2010 issue of Countryside magazine.

Pictures and article about an Oval cookstove connected to a salvaged modern water heater for the tank.  This article is available online at www.countrysidemag.com

4) "Get Tanked!  Keep Hot Water Flowing on Your Homestead" --article by Ned Wood in the July/August 2011 issue of Countryside magazine.

Pictures and article about a different Waterford cookstove hot water heating system used in conjunction with a solar system.

5) I don't even know what to call this last one.  On a Google image search using the phrase "hot water from a cookstove," I ran across a picture of a beautiful blue Oval cookstove which was connected to a boiler.  When I clicked on it, it took me here to see more detailed pictures of the Oval and boiler.  This system has an electric circulating pump connected to it.

I know that this post about hot water is pretty "dry" reading, but I hope that these materials can be of as much assistance to others as they were to me.

In Hot Water, Part II

A couple of days ago, I received a comment on the post called In Hot Water from a reader asking for more information about our Margin Gem and hot water system.  Her questions were quite good, and I felt they deserved their own blog post.

As we are entering the heating season, our Margin Gem has been fired pretty regularly.  In fact, we've only had a handful of days in the last month when we've had our electric hot water heater going.  There have been days when we've intentionally fueled the fire in such a way as to keep the stove heating while we are gone during the day, and it has almost always had a fire in it overnight.  However, we still haven't been firing the cookstove at full tilt like we will when our weather is truly cold. 

While the stove is in use, we are quite happy with the amount of hot water that we have--and unless there are unforeseen circumstances (on one night, a log didn't burn the way I had expected that it would), the water that we do have is HOT! 

Below is a picture of the firebox of the Margin Gem taken while standing in front of the stove.  I let the fire die down enough this afternoon so that we could remove the piece of the stove top that covers the firebox in order to snap the picture.  The pieces of metal in the corners and in the middle of the right side are the air jets for Margin's Air Jet re-burn design.  At times when you open a top lid, you can see flames curling from those holes.  At the top, the right side, and the lower half of the bottom, the light gray panels are firebrick.  The entire left side of the firebox is the waterfront. 

Top view of the Margin Gem's firebox with water-
front on the left.

Just like hot air, hot water rises.  Thus, cooler water from the bottom of the range boiler flows into the bottom of the water jacket.  There, it is heated by the fire and then flows up out of the top of the water jacket to the top of the range boiler. 



The pipes carrying water to and from the waterjacket.
(Ughh!  I hate how a camera flash makes dust that, in
normal light, is imperceptible to the naked eye
 suddenly appear unduly tragic!)

The Vaughn range boiler behind the Margin Gem. 

In the picture above, the pipe which enters the tank on the left side is the one which carries the hot water into the boiler.  The two pipes coming out of the top of the tank are both exits.  The one on the left has a temperature pressure relief (TPR) valve on it for the tank and is connected to the other two TPR valves in the lines going to and from the waterfront and is plumbed into the basement to exhaust near a floor drain.  The pipe coming out of the top right side of the tank is the hot water which serves the house.  When we open a hot water tap in the house, the hot water flows out of the top of the tank and down to a mixing valve which is located where the cold water enters the right middle side of the boiler.

The mixing valve which allows us to temper the hot water before
circulating throughout the house.

The end of the pipe that is attached to the TPR valves.

The above picture shows the end of the pipe which is attached to the TPR valves.  It is located in the basement and is aimed toward a floor drain which is a few feet away.  The dark stain on the concrete below the opening is from a few drips of water which leaked out during the Margin Gem's first firing.  No noticeable moisture has occurred since then.  Originally, I thought that this pipe should have been plumbed directly to the sump pit in the basement, but the plumber felt that this was unnecessary.  I was concerned about this because I was afraid that if a valve should release, there was a chance that someone could be standing in the way of the hot water coming out of the end of this pipe.  However, the only time that anyone would be standing there would be if he or she was using the shower or the wringer washer.  As it turns out then, the plumber was right because both of these activities would use enough hot water and release enough pressure to preclude the valves from releasing.

To date, the TPR valves have not released.  I'm surprised at this because some of the things that I have read seemed to indicate that this could happen on a fairly regular basis, and if it does, each TPR valve is supposed to be replaced after it has released three times.  These valves were purchased from Lehman Hardware and are supposed to release at 210 degrees or a pressure rating of 125 PSI.  We do bear in mind, though, that as I said earlier, we have not yet been operating the cookstove at its peak output for long periods of time, so we'll see what happens when it is truly cold outside.  The one thing that we also know is that colder outdoor weather will also mean that the water entering the system will be much colder, too.  This may be sufficient to offset the additional heating capacity of the hotter fire.

One thing that is different about heating water with the cookstove as opposed to electricity or gas is that as the water heats, if no hot water has been used for awhile, the first time that a hot water tap is turned on there is noticeably more water pressure for a second or two while the pent up pressure in the system releases through the faucet.  This pressure is neither dangerous nor excessive, and might not even be noticed by people who routinely have more water pressure than our gravity fed system provides us.

I recorded in my original post about wood heated hot water that we had had some initial difficulty in adjusting the tempering valve due to its having been damaged slightly during installation.  Because the indicator plate on the black part of the valve fell off, we have no idea where the temperature of the valve is actually set.  I measured the hot water temperature at the tap this morning at 169 degrees.  That's HOT!  If we had children here, we would definitely adjust the valve to a more reasonable setting, and we may have to adjust it down as the stove is regularly kept burning at a hotter rate.

Our blog reader asked if we noticed a drop in the space heating capacity of the range because it is also heating our water.  My answer to that is that we don't know how the Margin Gem would have acted without the waterfront because it came equipped with it and you cannot fire a range with a waterfront unless the waterfront is connected to a water system.  However, here are two observations that may be helpful:

1) One thing that I have noticed about the Margin Gem that is different from the other two cookstoves that I have used is that the left side panel of the stove is always cool enough that you can touch it.  I don't know whether this is because the water jacket is on the left side of the firebox or just due to the design of the stove (note the louvers in the side panel in the picture above).  I like this feature because now my legs don't have to roast while I'm standing over those pesky dishes that have "stir constantly" in their directions. 

2) The presence of the range boiler in the kitchen adds a great deal of thermal mass to the whole set up.  When the water in the boiler is hot, you cannot comfortably lay your hand on the outside of the boiler.  If the fire is allowed to go out and little hot water is used, the boiler will radiate noticeable heat for quite some time.  When you figure in the radiant surface area of the boiler, it seems to me like any change in room heating capacity is negligible if it exists at all.

Some things that you read indicate that having a woodstove heat your domestic hot water cools the combustion in the stove sufficiently to increase creosote buildup.  While it is true that the waterjacket has creosote covering the side of it, this is normal and actually beneficial.  It is also true that coals and firewood resting against the waterfront don't seem to burn quite as hot as in the right side of the firebox sometimes.  However, as far as increased creosote in the rest of the stove or chimney, all I can say is that I haven't noticed it.  Perhaps this is due to the Margin Gem's air jet re-burn design.  At any rate, I would chalk it up to the stove being airtight and the fact that we aim for a long slow burn overnight and while we are away during the day rather than the presence of the waterfront.

Overall, we are very happy with the Margin Gem and Vaughn range boiler so far.  I wish that we'd been heating our water with wood much earlier now that we know how easy and efficient it is.