New stove kindles memories of cooking past

To the editor:
    My new apartment-sized stove, which replaced the 1964 36-inch range, brought contentment in the kitchen. Nostalgia for the old one is rare. Instead, I may recall those in the more distant past.
    The big, black wood-burning stove in the cottage at the lake came first, with four burner lids and the one lid lifter, a water tank on the right end, and a gauge on the front of the oven that baked eight double loaves of Ina’s bread every Sunday. She added a grated potato to the dough and placed it in the pail-like bread mixer for stirring. Raised twice and baked, the loaves sat on the kitchen cabinet till they moved into the metal bread drawer with its pull-tight lid, to last the week.
    One time Leonard brought in a pail from the chicken coop and set it on the stove. Ina asked, “What’s that terrible smell? Oh!” She got black pepper and sprinkled it on the stuff that came off the bottom of the pail to burn on the stove. Presto, no odor. Well, a little smell of pepper, preferable to the aroma of chicken droppings.
    A more modern, squarish white stove replaced the black one. Wood-burning at first, it got changed to coal, then oil, which at first was in a glass tank. Then Porter had a big metal tank with a line to the stove buried nearby out back. That stove baked bread, pies and cookies, also ducks, geese and turkeys, and kept the oil from each bird warm in case it needed to be rubbed on someone’s cold-filled chest. The stove made oatmeal in a Pyrex double boiler, chocolate fudge sauce for frosting a cake or pouring over ice cream, pancakes and “pork scraps” on an iron griddle, popcorn in the screen-cage popper with a long handle to keep it moving.
    That stove did all that its predecessor had, with one addition: It also cooked — well, singed — my eyebrows and hair. I knew well how to build a fire, but alone at the cottage, I let in too much oil before throwing in a lit match and it sort of exploded. On the phone I explained to Ina, who was in town in the studio, adding, “No real damage.”
    When Porter expanded the kitchen and dining room, nearly doubling their width, he added an electric range. The deep well at the back, filled with aluminum sections, gave us a boiled dinner on Sunday: ham, potatoes, carrots and cabbage.
    One evening Ina was frying doughnuts and the fat caught fire. Porter rushed out from the living room to use the fire extinguisher. She told him, “I was afraid the flames would reach the curtain over on the window …” (An event becomes scarier in retrospect when we think, ”What if?” than at the time when it ended quickly and life went on.)
    If nostalgia for my last stove sets in, I can see its chrome-trimmed top panel (with big clock, fluorescent light and timer outlet) in the garage. Before a truck took the stove, a man amputated the section, removing nuts and bolts and cutting wires, to humor me. I had thought of mounting it on the wall above the new stove. Crazy idea. Just let go.
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y.