The Kitchen Range and Other Warm Things

When my parents bought the palace back in 87,’ there was no central heating system. Life without central heat means a variety of things; keeping cupboard doors open to avoid frozen pipes, frost on the upper level ceilings, but also a nice place to preheat your pants before you put them on in the frosty February mornings. 

I loved reading about Laura and Mary Ingalls being shoveled out of their bed when it snowed in the Little Town on the Prairie book because it was almost the same as waking up with frost on the ceiling like I did. No matter how you stoke a stove, it usually doesn’t throw a lot of heat after not being tended most of the night. I was in about 1st grade when we finally did get central heat. My folks exclusively used that for a few years, basking the the break from chopping an hauling wood. Then one, crisp day a fire in the parlor stove was suggested and now the thermostat is really only there to prevent the pipes from freezing, or for days when there hasn’t been anyone in the house to tend the fire all day. Most cold days the stoves burn and crackle merrily, inviting us to gather round. 

Mama will tell you that the break up of the American family was not TV or video games or most of these other contraptions, though I am sure they haven’t helped. The real culprit is central heat systems. Teenagers spend much less time alone in their rooms when it is 45 degrees there. Families gather by the fire - where they won't freeze to death. There we sat. Pa in his chair with a book in his lap, maybe he is momentarily napping. Tea cup on the walnut table nearby. Mama in in her chair with her stack to books and a notebook with her cup of tea in one hand while she reads. And there is me, knees up in another chair with a book of my own, or a sewing project on my lap - turning button holes. The parlor stove has a glass window in it. Sometimes I would pretend it was a TV when I was a kid. I had all those videos of the fireplace burning way before it was cool. There is something deeply comforting about it, which is probably why they make it a setting on the TV nowadays.

Lack of central heat also means the existence of the kitchen range. The first kitchen range had belonged to me Great-Grandma on my mother’s mother’s side. Maybe even my Great-Great-Grandma since no one can remember how long it was at their farm. Grandma and her siblings broke the oven door from sitting on it on their frosty mornings in their childhood. A lovely 1930’s Kalamazoo stove that was green - little lime, little pistachio, little key lime all mixed up in the same color, with almond accents on the doors and the backsplash.  It had an oven, cooking range, water reservoir on the right end, and a warming shelf up top. 

Kitchen ranges make it easier to get out of bed for kids in the morning. If you know Mama already has a fire roaring in there you make a mad dash for the cozy kitchen and your oatmeal tastes that much better. I spent my winters before school sprinting down the freezing cold stairs and stuffing my clothes in the warming oven of the kitchen range. There is hardly a better feeling than putting on cozy warm clothes that smell like fresh baked bread, and burn your skin in places.  In the days after central heat was installed, there were days when the stove wasn’t lit yet when I got up and it was the biggest letdown ever. I dash to the kitchen and find it cold - it takes everything a girl has not to dash back to her hopefully still warm bed and try again later. It is warmer in bed - plus there are books!

The Kalamazoo fed my imagination and  childhood obsession with being Laura. Mama could scold me throughly by saying "Laura" in a certain tone that all mothers know and it worked even though my name wasn't Laura. When I was old enough to cook. I dressed in my Civil War reenacting dresses and cooked from the Laura Ingalls cook book on the kitchen range. One recipe I made was ox tail soup. The old Kalamazoo was a comfort in kitchen. My friends and I baked from the American Girl cookbooks in it and fashioned our gingerbread houses next to its warm presence.

As a child Mama and I visited many historical sites and museums over the years. Many guides had much different expectations for a kid my age. “And do you know what this is?” The kind lady asked motioning to the far right end of the old Kalamazoo kitchen range in the museum kitchen. “That’s the water reservoir.” I stated, and the kind, elderly lady was surprised. She looked at my Mama and back at me. “We have one at home,” I said, “it has water in it too.” It is perhaps one of my favorite things about being raised as I was - shocking old people with my rad knowledge of old things they don’t expect to find in a person my age.

That Kalamazoo was a good old stove, but for Mama’s 40th birthday we got a brand new, Waterford Stanley cook stove shipped all the way from Ireland and it is wonderful. While the old Kalamazoo was a good stove, but Stanley is solid cast, heats hotter, and has a real warming oven instead of a shelf. Stanley is forest green with black trim. Perfectly cozy. Mama’s first test was making tea, and if I remember right, she went from building a fire to boiling water in somewheres around 20 minutes. In the colder months, the tea kettle can be found at the back of the range waiting and ready to be pulled to the hot spot for a needed cup of tea. 

Stanley the Stove

Stanley has a cast iron, tight sealing oven. Especially when it was new. This heats far more evenly than the old Kalamazoo and it also heats much hotter. Once when baking with a friend, we left the kitchen before the last tray of cookies were out of the oven and Mama found them later in the week as charred, blobs that resembled a hockey puck more than a cookie. When she went to thrown them into into the fire, they came off as ash. No one ever smelled them though. 

In truth, I don’t know how people survive holiday meal preparations without an old style cooking range. Stanley’s warming oven is packed full while certain dishes wait for others to be ready. Pans are pushed back and forth across the top from the hot side to the cooler side as they cook. Mama has both the electric stove and Stanley blazing with all the good aromas spilling from the kitchen. The activity and stove makes it warmer and cozier than any other place in the house. Every time I walk in I thank the Lord that holidays are in the colder weather so we can all enjoy the convince and comfort of the old kitchen range. The rest of the family gathers around the parlor stove. I can’t imagine what we would do in July. Though, I suppose that is why folks grill out for the 4th of July. 

Still, a kitchen with a good, wood fired, kitchen range is homey to me. The whole kitchen seems to glow with its warm readiness. Nowadays, I always feel like something is missing in the modern kitchen. There are tasks I do where I wish I had one. Days where my modern stove stays on all day to simmer a sauce or cook down the last bit of maple syrup. Days where I wish I could just push those kettles to the back of the range and leave them there. The original “set it and forget it” cooker. I miss the beauty of sliding a pan across the stove top to find just the right spot. When the weather turns cold perhaps most of all, I miss wearing warm clothes just out of the warming oven while I drink my morning tea.

Minimalism is Lame and No One Should Do It

It has been a crazy past few weeks here, our family just having lost great friend and mentor Neil Ostberg. It causes a body to look down the road to perhaps one’s own demise and what will happen to a life’s work. 

There are plenty of things in these modern times telling us to be minimalists. It’s the “in” thing. How to downsize your closet. Never have more than thirty books. If you haven’t used it in a year - get rid of it. All of this while simultaneously selling mass consumerism - get every gadget you probably don’t need super fast by telling Alexa you need it so it appears on your doorstep the next day. 

Neil's Diagram of the Button Lathe
 that is now mine.

Neil(some of his work can be found here, Dude and Rusty and Pa make an appearance too), passed on like we all will someday. How we first met Neil is too early for my memory to know, but I do know it had something to do with Pa building his Kentucky long rifle. I can also remember snippets of conversations over various things Pa built over the years. "You should paint the Windsor chair black and then strip it." because that is the best finish for a Windsor chair apparently. "and why not cast a thousand brass tacks for this project?" I don’t really think the "how we met" is the important part of the story here. The important part is that Neil, like those in my family, was not a minimalist. Defiantly not. Upon his death, his widow and her children were left with masses of stuff to sort through and find new homes for his lifetime of collecting. A first look at the situation left me feeling sad and depressed. Staring at the tables filled with things that he had collected over the years, the stories they held, and the bizarre gadgets and tools few people would even be able to identify let alone what to do with. Old junk some might say. The second look at the situation brought opportunity. I realized how much Neil passed to Pa. The same sorts of tools, and a very similar style of building things. Two things, which I think I have always known, became glaringly obvious. One, minimalism is lame and no one should do it, and two, bizarre old junk is and will always be the foundation for creation, creativity, preservation, and most importantly, handwork.  

Here are my notes on the subject - 

Where a minimalist probably would have had a heart attack, there was a gathering of people and their minds to pour over Neil’s collection. Even in death this gathering of thoughts continued. What if the point is not the mountain of stuff he accumulated during his life, but the mountain on knowledge he accumulated? What if the point is not the buildings packed with tools, artifacts, and broken things, but instead things to be fixed and skills learned. More importantly, the people who learned so much from him over the years. What if it is the same is for you? Not the things in the back of your closet or the junk in your craft room, but the skills and knowledge you accumulate in your mind and hands- and, most importantly, can you have one without the other? I don’t think so.

We are all taught in some way or form to work. How to keep a tidy space, how get our school work done, how to apply ourselves to an extra curricular activity - but at the same time, few are taught what they are capable. How to make and create with our hands the way our foremothers and fathers did. Laura Ingalls Wilder committed her whole girlhood to stacks of legal pads with a pen, by hand, and I am reminded of my shortcomings as I type the story of mine on my MacBook. While I think we can take this all too far, I mean, Laura didn’t make her ink and use a homemade quill. Perhaps it is a bigger accomplishment, or even a bigger self satisfaction results in staring at a stack of legals pads filled with ones own story verses my product which is a one inch icon on the upper left corner of my home screen.  No matter what way the writing is done, there are still tools and a finished product in evidence. Is it really clutter?

Somewhere is the mess of consumerism and minimalism, we are loosing skills. Mama never learned to spin by throwing her spinning wheel onto the burn pile. Pa never learned anything because he owned less than 30 books. Even though progress demands that more skills be honed, it also demands that some be lost - unless we hide them away in out closets, craft rooms and workshops. Important to save because newer is not always better, and because there is always more than one way to do something and some things are just plain enjoyable. Too enjoyable to throw away. 

In my journey through the world of historical things, I settled into sewing and dressmaking as a comfortable spot. Through the years I have made many beautiful dresses and tailored items for menfolk. But! In 2019 I made my first gown entirely by hand sewing. An adventure into eighteenth century impressions, left me with the need and want to make a gown with the appropriate techniques. I began the intimidating project by investing in quality fabrics and turned out a nice gown I am rather proud of. So far- out of everything I have made, my eighteenth century clothing is that which I am most proud of because I made it with my hands. My many times great grandmothers sewed with the same techniques and stitches I hadn’t heard of because Singer made it easier, but not necessarily better. So, I relearned the stitches, and the gown is better for it. 

The recaned chair

We live in a consumer culture. You know why Facebook is filled with notes on purging our houses and becoming minimalist? Because there is no pride of ownership, or investment of self in plastic things from China and ikea furniture. Nothing is learned. The cure for a consumer culture isn’t minimalism, it is handwork and skill. Handwork is an investment in ourselves that cannot be undone. It helps us grow in ways that a big box store can’t. It gives us skills and teaches us life lessons along the way. The new dress or book shelf is really a bonus. And when I die, and my body is committed to the ground, and my stuff divided up, it is my hope that the skills are divided up too. Neil’s things are all scattered to the four winds now, but his knowledge and the things he taught everyone who crossed his path are all still here too. In some ways the non tangible things are attached to the tangible. I took an old chair, spinning wheel, and button lathe from the sale. I have re-caned the seat of the chair, oiled up the spinning wheel, and am still tackling the button lathe… learning lives in it still, even after all these years. If I hadn’t picked these things up from Neil I likely never would have tried any of these things, and I am sure I am not alone in this. 

My Son and the new/old
spinning wheel 

Given my experience and that of my family, I invite everyone - no - I challenge you all create with your hands. Make great-grandma’s pie recipe from scratch and bake it in her old pan - no premade crust, no instant pudding. Build that book shelf you always wanted, and don’t be afraid to carve those joints out by hand - our forefathers had spectacular tools for this that can still be found if you are willing to look. Sew the dress with just your needle, thread, and thimble. Will it be hard? Yup. Will you get super frustrated at some point? Also yes. Will you learn something? Absolutely. And will it become one of your most treasured things because of all of the challenges? Defiantly! 

When someone close to you passes on, take one of their torches and keep it lit. Light someone else’s torch with yours, and pass it on. Lest we forget what out hands and minds can do.