Coal-fired stove focal point of kitchen of yesteryear
Can you imagine a housewife preparing several daily meals for her large family in a kitchen that offered no running water (hot or cold), no mechanical refrigeration, a coal-fired cook stove and few if any of the small appliances that make life simpler today? How do you think today’s homemaker would adapt to working in the typical kitchen of several generations ago? Today we begin a series in which our readers will share their memories of the “kitchen of yesteryear.” In today’s opening article, we will focus on the central feature of the kitchen of a century ago – the coal-fired cook stove, which has been described by some as the temperamental and demanding “engine of the house.”
A coal-fired range served several purposes in a household. It was used to cook food, it was a source of hot water for bathing and other purposes, and it provided welcome heat in a home that often had no central heating system. Much of the stove’s heat went up the chimney, and the stove demanded a constant diet of coal in order to continue performing its duties. Baking a cake in a non-temperature-controlled, coal-fired oven required a special talent that came only with experience. The idea of setting the oven’s “temperature control knob” to maintain a constant baking temperature was a futuristic concept that would have produced incredulous reactions from cooks of that era.
“What I can’t figure out was how my mother, Gertrude Peters Winterhalter, could bake an angel food cake in her old coal stove,” marvels Mildred Winterhalter Keppel, who says she grew up near the mine entrance in the “coal patch” of Republic. “Her angel food cake was the best. Any time there was a dinner at the church, my mother was asked to bring an angel food cake.
“My oldest sister, who lived in the same house from the time she was married until she died, had a coal stove that had a water tank attached. That was a convenient way of having hot water, at least when you were using your stove for cooking. Our stove didn’t have one when I was young, but I remember our stove as being the sole source of heat in the house, in addition to its importance in cooking and keeping food hot.
“The best thing I remember about our old coal stove is that it was a good place to curl up with a book in the winter, putting your feet on the part that held the ashes. Behind the stove was a good place to hang the dish towels to dry.”
Rosalie Renshaw Coughenour of Hopwood was raised by her grandparents, Jesse and Flora Ellen Cole, in a company house in Colonial 4. Rosalie recalls, “The old coal stove was the center of activity at Grandma Cole’s house in Colonial 4, until we got our first electric stove when I was about eight. On cool mornings or upon returning from cold weather visits, playing outside, or shopping, the coal stove’s oven was put into use to keep our feet (and the rest of our body) warm until the coal furnace could be fired up properly.
“My husband and I currently have a beautiful old coal stove with ceramic bun warmer on top and ceramic oven door in our basement. My husband still uses it to make the Christmas turkey and soups, and we use it for warmth when the electric goes out.”
During cold weather, great care was often taken to prevent the fire in the coal stove from going out overnight. Failure to do so would mean a very cold wakeup the next morning. Lillian Patterson Petrie of Thomasville, Ga., remembers how that fire was kept alive.
“I was raised in the old Crawford farm house in Luzerne,” she told me, “which is on the way to Maxwell. My parents, Elbert and Ora Patterson, had a coal cook stove in their kitchen. Mom would put slack coal on the fire at night, and that was called ‘banking the fire.'”
I asked Lillian what she meant by “slack coal.”
“Slack coal was a very fine coal,” she explained. “If you ground it very fine, that would be slack. It sat there and smoldered all night, and it did not burn up until the next morning, when we ran the fire poker through it. That helped air get to it, and that would get the flames started again. Then you would place more lump coal on it to make a larger fire.
“In the morning we heated water in a reservoir, which was on the right side of the stove. Until the early 1940s, all of our water was brought into the house from a pump, and we bathed in a large washtub using hot water from the stove reservoir. There were also warming bins in the top part of our stove. Mom always got up at five in the morning so she could have the kitchen good and warm for us children when we got up and got ready for school.”
Hiller native Bill Harris of LaGrange, Ga., recalls, “My great-grandmother, Elizabeth Edwards Harris, lived in Century and had a big old black coal stove in her kitchen. There was a fire going in it all the time, even in hot summer months. How she managed in the summer with all that heat I’ll never know, but in the winter it did provide most of the heat for the house. The only other heat in the house was a small black pot-bellied stove in the corner of the living room. There was no heat at all upstairs.”
As cool weather approached, the kitchen became a magnet, attracting family members to its warmth as it became the most popular room in the house. That cool weather also signaled an impending frost, which meant the remaining fragile vegetables in the garden must be harvested. To little Norma Marcolini, that meant a mouth-watering delight was about to be created in her grandmother’s coal stove.
“A favorite food that we used to enjoy in my grandmother’s kitchen,” remembers Brownsville’s Norma Marcolini Ryan, “was bagna calda. It was something we would eat in the fall when they cleaned out the garden to beat the frost. If you did not eat up the vegetables they would spoil, since there were no freezers in those days.
“Nonna would remove the stove lid from the coal-burning section and put a black cast iron pot directly over the coals to make the bagna calda, which means ‘hot bath.’ It consisted of butter, olive oil, tons of finely chopped garlic, and anchovies. We would take cut-up pieces of the remaining vegetables harvested from the garden, such as red and green peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, celery, and cabbage, and we would dip them in the bagna calda. It was delicious!”
When natural gas and electric stoves became available, they were a heavenly convenience for cooks who had never had the luxury of turning a knob and immediately having a temperature-controlled oven and four hot burners ready for use. However, the ability to leave the oven off until it was needed could occasionally create some unexpected excitement.
Rosalie Coughenour recalls one such dramatic moment from her childhood. It was the day her grandmother suddenly remembered that she had used her electric oven the previous day for an unusual purpose.
“My grandparents were products of the Depression,” Rosalie explained, “and they distrusted banks. One day, grandma turned on the electric oven to bake bread, then went into the living room. After a while, she suddenly ran screaming into the kitchen and threw open the oven door.
“She had forgotten that the oven was her ‘bank of the day.’ She had taken a small paper bag containing a roll of bills with a rubber band around it and had hidden it on the top shelf in the back of the oven. Grandma reached into the hot oven and pulled out a blackened paper bag containing a charred wad of bills. The outer part of the roll had become ashes, but the inner rolled part had not burned. The one-third to one-half of each bill that remained unburned was enough to enable her to take it to the dreaded bank and have it replaced. It was close to one hundred dollars, which a big ‘roll’ in those days.
“She never hid her money in there again!”
Coal-fired stoves could make the kitchen and house uncomfortably warm during the summer. When there was baking to be done, some housewives had a welcome alternative to having to bake in the kitchen’s coal-fired oven. In hot weather, it was a blessing to be able to bake the family’s bread and other pastries in a back yard oven. Coal patch houses often featured an outdoor brick oven, and the aromas that wafted across the patch some mornings could set stomachs growling for blocks in every direction. I invite you to join me here next week, when I will share mouth-watering tales from readers who will never forget the delicious hot bounty that was pulled daily from those back yard ovens.
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Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201 or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Comments about these weekly articles may be sent to Editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com . All past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/