week of 1/29/03
 
 
 

Wood-burning cookstoves take you out of the fast lane
By George Ellison

For going on 30 years now, my wife, Elizabeth, and I have been cooking our meals with wood cookstoves. Just how we got into wood cookstoves is sort of complicated, so I won’t bother you with the details. But once we started using them we were hooked. Take our word for it: wood cookstoves are the only way to go if you don’t want to spend your life in the fastlane.

I don’t know when the first cast-iron cookstoves became generally available here in the Smokies region. It seems probable they appeared with the extension of the rail line westward from Asheville to Murphy during the 1880s and early 1890s.

The ancient Cherokees cooked on open fires, using wooden spits and clay vessels. Stone-lined pits increased the intensity of the heat, and they provided flat surfaces at the outer edges for pots and other utensils. The Cherokees rather quickly adopted the cabin-building styles of the early white settlers, which, of course, featured open fireplaces.

I’ve never cooked on an open fireplace. Doing so would be, I’d guess, difficult without considerable experience. I once observed portions of a workshop devoted to open hearth cooking. A horizontal iron bar hinged to the side wall of the fireplace could be swung over the fire several feet above hearth level. This was used for hanging pots and kettles in which various foods (soups, boiled meats, etc.) could be cooked at the same time. Long-handled frying pans allowed the cook to stay back from the fire. For quick frying or boiling water for coffee, hot coals were raked out onto the hearth. Other foods such as potatoes and corn were roasted by first covering them with ashes and then hot coals.

Elizabeth has an old-timey Dutch Oven, a deep frying pan with four legs and an iron lid with a half-inch lip all the way around the outer edge. For us it is more decorative than anything else, although we do use the lid all the time to cover pots and skillets on our wood cookstove. It was, however, an essential item in open fireplace cooking. Placed on top of coals and covered with coals, which the half-inch lip on the lid retained, a Dutch Oven served as a small oven for baking bread and roasting meats.

Our first wood cookstove was a monstrosity that we inherited. The thing had a side container built-in for heating water and various compartments. It was huge, ugly, and very inefficient. But it cooked food ... sort of.

After just one long winter of dealing with the monstrosity, we purchased, in 1977, a dandy little cast iron woodstove with compact warming cabinets from Allen and Joyce Moore, who live up in the Little Canada section of Jackson County. They had had the stove for about seven years and were upgrading to a newer model. I wish I could remember the name of that stove and its manufacturer, but, alas, I can’t. Neither can Elizabeth nor Allen and Joyce. Not remembering the name of a cookstove you’ve used for 20 years is akin to not remembering the name of a pet you’ve had for that long. That stove was an integral part of our family life when the children were growing up.

It wasn’t perfectly air-tight. When the kitchen was darkened you could see points of light through small cracks around the firebox door. One night at about midnight in the very late 1970s, I was sitting at the kitchen table alone, waiting for a teakettle to boil. Outside the temperature had dropped to 18 below. It was so cold I could hear tree limbs cracking and breaking. Inside the house the little stove was chugging away, doing its part to keep us warm and alive. Right then and there, I wrote a poem. Surely it’s one of the few poems ever written in honor of a woodstove?

In the mid-1990s we upgraded to a Waterford Stanley, a wood cookstove manufactured in Ireland. Compact, with a white porcelain finish and black cast-iron trim, it’s easily the most handsome, useful, and expensive item in our home. The firebox is air-tight. Heat can be directed via a damper directly toward the chimney flue or diverted into the oven, where desired baking temperatures can be maintained for hours. We mostly cook, however, directly on the top surface.

Cooking with a woodstove bears no relationship whatsoever to cooking on electric or gas burners. With a woodstove you have to slow down and get into a cookin’ frame of mind. It’s sort of like flying by the seat of your pants. There are no automatic controls. You use your sixth sense when deciding whether or not to slide a pot or pan this way or that. The food cooks longer and slower. When done, it tastes better because you’ve paid more attention to what you’re doing. You’ve put more of yourself into it. Also, there’s time to talk or think things over while cooking at this pace. Most of our family and professional decisions are made while cooking.

Both of us like to cook. For years, I cooked the majority of our suppers, but recently, for whatever reason (maybe I’m getting lazy), Elizabeth’s been preparing most of them. I can’t bake bread or make decent biscuits, but otherwise we’re about equal when it comes to cooking skills.

What we really enjoy arguing about is who knows the most about lighting and maintaining fires. First there’s the matter of paper. Elizabeth uses any sort of paper and lays it in the firebox any which way. I maintain that slick advertisement paper is inefficient and that paper should be crumpled into balls to allow more air-flow and burning surface. I like to cross my sticks of kindling on top of the paper for the same reason. Elizabeth doesn’t bother herself about that sort of thing. I always light the paper in three places for good luck. Elizabeth just lights it. I like to use small- or medium-sized wood to keep the fire hotter. Elizabeth likes to use larger sticks so as not to burn up all of our wood before winter’s over. We grumble at each other about how much to open or close air vents. I really do think that my methods are best. But I will allow that her fires start up quicker and stay lit longer.

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com