kitchen.odt

January 11, 2015

The old cook stove stood on the east wall of our big kitchen. It was the only heat we had in that room during the winter months. Wood was the main source of heat. The range had warming ovens above the cooktop, a big oven below and a reservoir for hot water at the end. My what delicious chicken, roasts, meatloaf, cakes, pies, and cookies came from that big oven.

After the wood stove, we got a gas stove that had to be pumped up to get the pressure up to the stove. It had 4 burners on the left side and the oven on the right side. Memories from that stove are the delicious rice pudding and floating island pudding that Mama made. We had our own milk from our cows and eggs from our chickens. My mother was making use of what we had, which was alright with me.

The gas stove was later replaced with an electric stove.

The linoleum on our kitchen floor had seen lots of traffic and the top surface was very worn. What fun we had when we got new linoleum. It was so shiny and pretty. All the neighbor kids came over and in our stocking feet we skated all over that floor. It was a wonder that we didn't wear out that new floor.

Mama did lots of canning for both our family and for others, such as: asparagus, corn, green beans, tomatoes, peaches, pears, cherries, blackberries, applesauce, which we grew on our farm. My mother worked hard doing all of that canning. Sometimes she wouldn't get done until midnight.

A funny story: One day the neighbor kids that lived across the road from us were helping us stem and break green beans. We were sitting on the back porch. Their mother came over to get them. She said “you don't help me, so you aren't going to help them”, and took them home. Many laughs have been shared over this incident.

I used to like to bake, but did very little cooking growing up.

One day my brother, Charles was doing a chemistry experiment using our table in the kitchen. All of a sudden there was an explosion that left this funny looking spot on the kitchen ceiling.

We had to heat water for washing dishes. Besides the usual dishes we had a cream separator to wash. The cream separator had a handle that as it was turned it separated the cream from the milk. Milk was strained into a large bowl on top and the cream came out a another spout. After the cream was cooled it was thick and it was stored in containers in the refrigerator until it was used for cooking and baking. It wasn't unusual to find some of the containers of cream in the refrigerator that had stayed there too long and grew green hairs on it. The machine had a set of disks on a rod that helped separate the milk from the cream. These disks and other parts of the machine had to be washed and scalded after each use. It was not a fun job to wash all of those disks.

My mother made a special cake for our birthdays. It was a sponge cake with a cooked frosting on it. There was also jello pudding (this was my father's recipe that is in his cookbook developed for the Boy Scouts). She made delicious baked custard and rice pudding using the milk and eggs that we had on the farm.

There was a door on the north side to the front porch and a door on the south side to the back porch. The west door went into the dining room.