Chapter 8
How to Cook on a Short, Hot Coal Cookstove
The beast in the basement of the St. Botolph Club was an authentic Victorian-era six-burner coal cookstove with two large ovens: a Number 7, the largest model ever made for the American market. It was sitting unused in a corner of a small office, and I immediately inquired as to its future. After months of sly suggestions, petitions to the board, and promises to fully restore this black monster, it was decided that I might purchase the stove and move it to our townhouse. Unlike modern ranges or the wood cookstoves used on farms, this urban colossus is an assembly of cast-iron parts that are assembled around an existing brick structure. In other words, the stove is the outer shell and the bricks form the inner workings. Yes, there are metal ovens (they can be slid out), but when one removes one of the circular “burners,” one looks down into a firebox made entirely of brick.
Almost a year later, the stove had been deconstructed, the brick foundation built, and the stove put back in its place after having been fully restored off-site. As it turns out, the problem with coal stoves is that the extreme heat of anthracite coal over a period of decades warps the top, especially the oval pieces that surround the burners. In other words, the top of the stove is not one solid piece of cast iron but made up of a series of small interconnected bits, many of which had to be recast in order to present a smooth, even cooking surface. Since heat makes metal expand, we soon discovered that the pieces had to fit rather loosely when the stove was cold since, when hot, the pieces would overlap and buckle, turning our perfectly flat stovetop into a train wreck. But over time, this was sorted out, and we began the long process of learning to cook on our Number 7.
Today, most readers would find this method of preparing food both silly and terribly outdated. The coal cookstove was in fact a modern invention, one that infinitely expanded the possibilities of the home kitchen from the limited potential of a fireplace. Cooking in and around a fireplace presented a host of problems, including lack of precise temperature control, the inability to cook a number of things at once unless one had a built-in brick oven next to the hearth, the need to constantly turn meat and game so that they came out evenly cooked, and the general difficulty of managing a cooking process that was nothing more than a campfire moved indoors with all the dirt and lack of a convenient cooking surface.
Roasts were delicious when cooked over or near an open fire, but they had to be turned by hand. A dripping pan was placed directly underneath the roast—usually a cast-iron skillet or, in England, a pan used to bake puddings, Yorkshire pudding being the most famous and also the crispiest. They had grease, heat, and a hot pan—why not simply throw in a batter and bake it up? These breads were often served as a first course, not as a side dish, and when the coal cookstove came into fashion, these puddings had to be baked in an oven, which led to the invention of popovers.
Hand-turning the roast for a few hours was not ideal, so the simplest solution was to hang the roast by a string; a kitchen helper could give the roast a turn every few minutes, and it would spin back and forth until it came to a stop. It was then given another spin by the cook. (I have seen this done with a roasting chicken over a campfire at a Revolutionary War reenactment near our farm in Vermont.) Later improvements on this system were the clock jack, which used a system of pulleys and levers to automate this process, and the spit engine, which was spring-loaded and used a horizontal spit in front of the fire on which the roast was tied. The most ingenious solution was the smoke jack, which automatically rotated a spit above a wood fire. It was a horizontal wheel, installed in the chimney above the fireplace and filled with metal spokes set obliquely like the sails of a windmill. The spokes turned when a current of hot air and smoke hit them, in turn rotating another wheel to which a chain was attached. The chain stretched down to a wheel fastened to the spit so that the spit rotated. The hotter the fire, the faster the jack went around.
As the process of casting iron became more refined and with the advent of a sophisticated railroad network, coal cookstoves could be easily cast and transported. Early prototypes had an open-faced fire in the center of the cookstove, which meant that the foods nearest the fire cooked more quickly. Eventually, both wood and coal cookstoves had an enclosed fuel box and built-in dampers that allowed the heat to circulate evenly around the oven(s) once the wood or coal was well lit and up to temperature (although all the country wood-fired cookstoves that I have ever used had the firebox on the left side of the stove, thus making the left side of the oven hotter). This produced more even heating, which was particularly important for the afternoon baking when the fire had been allowed to decrease a bit from the fierce heat needed for breakfast (toast, chops, bacon, and so on).
Why coal and not wood? In the countryside where wood was free and plentiful, most folks did use wood cookstoves, but in the city the issue was storage. Coal is substantially more efficient per cubic foot, and therefore took up a whole lot less space in the basement coal cellar, and required less transporting of fuel within the house as well. I have cooked on both wood and coal cookstoves, and the difference is remarkable. Just to keep a cookstove hot for an eight-hour cook day, I have had to use ten to twenty lengths of oak; the coal stove needed no more than two large shovelfuls, although coal does require jostling to stay properly lit. (Coal stoves have a handle on the side that allows one to rotate the grates under the coals, thereby knocking off excess ash.)
So what was it like for a kitchen maid at the height of the Victorian period? She would start the day by raking the ashes at 5:00 a.m., saving the cinders that could still burn. (The light, useless coals were referred to as “clinkers,” since they clinked when jostled.) Then the flues had to be cleaned with long-handled brushes or a long chain tied to a stick. The stove had to be cleaned and black lead (carbon and iron) had to be applied to the front and sides. It was purchased in sticks and mixed with a drop of turpentine, then put on a brush, much like shoe polish: one brush was used to put it on, one to brush it off, and one to put on a shine. Steel or chrome on the range also had to be burnished. Wind was also a problem, causing a downdraft and a terribly smoky kitchen, but chimneys were usually built within the walls of a house in order to keep the flue warm, offering a better draw. On many occasions, I have tried to start a wood cookstove connected to a chimney mounted on the outside of our Vermont farmhouse on a cold morning, only to find it is almost impossible to warm up the air quickly enough to jump-start a good draft. We had to install an electric fan on top of the flue to help get things moving.
In the 1880s, home cooks had a wide array of fuels: wood (soft and hard), charcoal made from wood, anthracite coal, coke, kerosene oil, and gas. In cities, however, coal was the fuel of choice. To start a coal cookstove, the bottom was lined with paper, then fine pine kindling crosswise, and then hardwood, leaving plenty of air spaces. The direct draught (damper) and the oven damper were opened and the paper lit. When the wood was fully kindled, coal was added to fill the firebox. The coal was pushed down as the wood burned away, and more coal was added to keep it even with the top of the fire bricks. When the flue flame turned white, the oven damper was closed, and when the coal started to burn freely, but not red, the direct draught was also shut. Lincoln cautioned that coal was at its height when kindled and only needed sufficient air to keep it burning; when bright red throughout, however, it had lost most of its heat and was dying out.
Although the stovetops offered a variety of heat levels and were therefore quite convenient, the ovens were difficult to manage, since it took time to either increase or decrease their internal temperature. (After six months of experience on our cookstove, however, I found that I could raise the temperature of the ovens 200 degrees in about forty minutes, so heat levels could be managed more efficiently than I had thought. It is also possible that wood fire offers more rapid adjustments in heat levels than coal, which is a slower, steadier source of heat.) To deal with this, Lincoln suggested using a screen (another pan, for example) on a rack above or below the item cooking if the oven was too hot. This would moderate the temperature around the food by reducing the amount of radiant heat. Another method was used when roasting: adding water to the roasting pan in order to moderate the oven’s temperature. Lincoln also suggested that the cook get to know the various points in the oven to understand their relative temperatures. (Even modern ovens have a wide range of temperatures—sometimes 40 degrees or more—depending on where one measures inside.)
In the early days, there were no built-in thermometers, so cooks had to judge their ovens from experience, using either the flour method (sprinkle flour on the floor of the oven; brown is good, but black is too hot) or the paper method (if the paper burns when thrown into the oven, it is too hot; if it turns dark brown, the heat is good for pastry; light brown is good for pies; dark yellow for cake; and light yellow for puddings). Over time, however, oven thermometers became available. Joseph Davis invented a thermometer that had the bulb inside the oven and the tube with the mercury outside, attached to the oven door. He also made a thermometer that stood inside the oven. By the 1870s, most wood or coal stoves had hot-water reservoirs either within the stove or in an attached tank; metal pipes for circulating and heating water ran from the tank to the back of the stove.
Gas cookery did not become popular until 1900, although prototype gas stoves had been invented in the 1840s. The first commercially distributed gas stove was made by William W. Goodwin of Philadelphia as early as 1879. The Sun Dial range included two to four cooking burners and an oven and open broiler below. There were problems with rapid adaptions of this technology, including the high price of gas—over $50 per thousand feet in 1850, compared to under $2 by the end of the century—and the consumer’s fear that the gas itself would taint food during the cooking process. It wasn’t until 1896, however, that the Massachusetts Pipe Line Gas Company was capitalized at $5 million with the purpose of “conveying, transporting and distributing gas for illuminating, heating, cooking, chemical, mechanical and power purposes.”
Early on, we decided to use wood instead of coal for three reasons: we had plenty of room in the basement for storage; the smell of wood burning is nicer than coal, which has a noticeably unpleasant aroma; and because David Erickson, our stove expert, had made a grill insert for our stovetop that would allow us to grill indoors over a wood fire. Our first thought was that indoor grilling would throw off a great deal of smoke, but to our amazement, the draft was so strong in our cookstove that all the smoke was sucked down into the firebox and then out the flue. So we had an unexpected bonus—an indoor grill.
So, exactly how does our stove work? The firebox is located in the center of the stove; this is ideal since it heats both sides of the cooktop evenly. To add wood, one removes one of the circular cast-iron burners with a lifter and simply slides the wood into the firebox. (To start a fire, paper and kindling are added first, as with any wood fire.) There is a door in front of the stove that allows the firebox to be used much like a fireplace, but for cooking purposes it remains closed. There is a sliding draft control underneath the firebox at the front of the stove which is slid open for maximum air intake during lighting or when you want a rapid increase in oven or stovetop temperature. Then there are two additional controls above the cooktop and located between the two ovens. (The ovens sit fourteen inches above the stove, built into the brick surround, and are twenty inches deep by nineteen inches wide.) These are two “pulls.” One is a knob that can be pulled out to adjust the opening in the flue. The other controls the direction of the draft: when the knob is pulled, the hot air moves directly up the flue and out the chimney; when pushed in all the way, the heat is diverted around the ovens and heats them. These controls were also effective when grilling on the stovetop, since a few quick adjustments turned a moderate fire into a fierce source of heat.
Victorian cooks had to be remarkably inventive since the temperature of the stovetop varies depending upon location: right over the central firebox you get enough heat to boil water; off to the sides, the two burners are medium in heat; and toward the back, you get the equivalent of a hot plate or a low simmer burner—hence the origin of the expression “on the back burner.” Yet this is still a rather primitive setup, since the heat of the whole unit cannot be changed quickly and the internal temperatures of the ovens is usually the deciding factor, the stovetop being less crucial. So what do you do?
For starters, you might invent the bain-marie, whose original purpose was to keep sauces just below a simmer. These were long oval pans with small covered pots that fit neatly into them, usually resting on a trivet inside. These bains-marie were also partially filled with water, and since water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the sauces would never get any hotter. The braising pan, used to cook meat on the top of a cookstove, used a similar principle. Meat and broth were put into the pan, then the lid was put on and then sealed with clay or dough. The braising pan was put on the corner of the range to simmer, and live embers or coals were put on the concave top of the pan. This was, in essence, an indoor Dutch oven, which also used heat above and below the pot. Copper cookware was lined with tin, and pots had to be constantly retinned. Anyone who has used an old copper saucepan or skillet knows that if the pan is heated while empty for too long, the tin will simply melt and puddle at the bottom of the pan.
One story recounted the fate of several gentlemen who died from a ragout that had been stored in a copper vessel that was badly tinned. In the event that one was poisoned, the Victorian remedy was to beat the whites of a dozen eggs in two pints of cold water, administer to the victim, and repeat every two minutes until vomiting was induced.
It was hard to perfectly regulate an oven in a coal cookstove, so cakes were not the easiest item to prepare. One solution was to design a cake tin with a metal cone projecting up from the bottom, a design that came into fashion in the 1880s. This conducted heat through the center of the cake to promote even cooking, much like a tube pan. One way to check if your cake was done was to take out a slice, check it for doneness, brush each side with egg white, and then slide it back into place.
The hot closet was a screen on one side with shelves on the other, and was used to keep cooked foods or serving plates warm. (The screen was placed near the cookstove or fireplace.) The American oven was an open-fronted metal box, its floor inclined to reflect heat. This box was placed with the open front facing the coal fire; the meat, smaller cuts such as chops, was positioned on a shelf halfway up the box. The oven was often stood on a chair and pushed up to the range. (One would have to open the door covering the firebox on my oven to use this device.) One could also purchase a bottle jack for an American oven, a small spring-loaded vertical rotisserie from which a small roast could be hung, rotating slowly in front of the fire. This was consistent with how the English roasted their meats using coal cookstoves, since they favored the notion of hanging a joint in front of the open coal box using a three-part metal screen that had a hinged opening in the middle in order to baste the meat as it roasted, with a pan beneath to catch the drippings. This was probably done for a number of reasons: that’s how they used to do it when they cooked in a fireplace; they had only two ovens, so they were at a premium; and a large joint of beef simply wouldn’t fit into most ovens.
What other cookware, appliances, and tools would have made up a true Victorian batterie de cuisine? For starters, a Victorian kitchen would include an ice chest: ice wrapped in sacking was placed in the top, and foods could be put above or below on perforated shelves. Maids would have to drain off the water from a tap from time to time. Although there is some dispute about whether ice chests were common household items by the 1890s—ice was expensive—there is no question that any upper-middle-class home in Boston would have had one. This resulted in the popularity of ice creams; crude ice-cream machines were patented as early as 1840. Ice-cream molds became extremely popular as well, wealthy households having them made to order, often with the family crest.
I wasn’t going to install a true ice chest, but Adrienne did find a fully restored four-door electric Kelvinator “icebox” from a firm out in California, and we had it shipped in and installed. At least it looked the part. We also purchased a manual ice-cream machine from White Mountain—quite similar, I suspect, to the original manufactured in Fannie’s era.
Cast iron had been around forever, but enameled cast iron made its debut in 1874, followed in 1892 by enameled sheet steel, which was lighter and easier to clean and maintain. This graniteware was used for tea and coffeepots, as well as for stew pans, although egg beaters and even waffle irons were eventually fashioned from it. Vollrath Ware, an American-made line of this enameled cookware, was known for its speckled or mottled blue, black, brown, or gray enamel. Of course, bread graters were everywhere, since using up stale bread was the basis for hundreds of recipes, from rissoles to puddings, from stuffings to croquettes. Other common kitchen items would have included jelly molds, patty pans (pie pans), and tartlet pans, a corned beef pan, cast-iron gem pans, muffin rings, and square biscuit pans. And, with the twentieth century right around the corner, the late Victorians were being introduced to the cookware of the future, such as the electric skillet, which was marketed in Britain as early as 1898.
MAY 2009. RESEARCHING HISTORY IS A TERRIFIC WAY TO CURE oneself of taking anything for granted. Fannie wasn’t really the “mother of level measurements,” FDR’s New Deal didn’t really fix the American economy (unemployment jumped up to 19 percent in 1938 and the market had taken another header), and Salem wasn’t much of a town for witches. What? It turns out that Salem deserves a solid gold Chamber of Commerce medal for taking a very short and undeniably sordid historical period, one that most normal folks would like to quietly forget, and transforming it into a year-long bonanza of tourism, ersatz Wiccan memorabilia, and huge crowds on Halloween, not to mention crappy T-shirts and greasy sausages.
First, let’s get a few facts straight. Witch hunting was all the rage in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Germans, in particular, were thorough professionals, although the French also deserve an honorable mention. During this bloody period, one hundred thousand witches were put to death in Germany and seventy-five thousand in France. How did New England fare in comparison? Bloody amateurs! Only thirty-two witches were ever put to death in our part of the world, and just four of them in Boston. And the whole fervor only lasted a few years—the first witch, a Margaret Jones, was hung in 1684. By 1693, the fervor had abated. So, once again, hats off to the folks up in Salem.
The history of food is equally misleading, because how the average Joe cooked and ate is less likely to be reported than how the rich and famous dined. The Victorian dinner that we were re-creating would have been as alien to the average resident of New England in 1896 as it is to us today. The rich had refrigeration, domestic servants, silverware, access to expensive foods, a kitchen large enough to prepare a multicourse meal, and a dining room, still a rarity for most Americans at the time. We were taking a thin slice of the culinary pie here, and doing so on purpose, since I would rather research and prepare a twelve-course high Victorian menu than a plate of baked beans and brown bread.
So to come to any ready conclusions about the food of the late nineteenth century is fraught with danger. Okay, I scanned all the recipes in the Boston Globe of 1896, but do recipes in a newspaper really tell the whole story of the typical home cook of the era? Maybe, maybe not. Do the food pages of the New York Times truly reflect what New Yorkers are cooking for dinner? Most of them probably eat out five nights a week.
However, I have learned something about the Victorians after two years of cooking their food. They had one foot in the past and one in the future. They had grown up in parsimony and were now headed toward abundance. Fannie was teaching them how to make hoe cakes (a cheap form of cornbread) as well as endless recipes wrapped in puff pastry and finished with béchamel. More than in any other period in American history, the Victorians were a bipolar mix of old-fashioned and modern, and their food exemplified the coexistence of these two very different lifestyles.
In 1900, for example, one could purchase Jell-O manufactured by the Genesee Pure Food Company; or make one’s own jellies using any number of thickeners, including powdered gelatin, Irish moss, or isinglass; or boil calf’s feet to make homemade gelatin, as we did for our jelly course. Unlike modern times, the gap between how various New Englanders lived was extraordinarily broad, from the technology they used in their everyday life (many New Yorkers and Bostonians already had access to gas for lighting and cooking, whereas in rural areas farm wives were still cooking over inefficient wood cookstoves) to where their food came from (Château Lafite for the urban rich and cheap ale for the poor). Today, there is, for the most part, a homogenous culture; in the 1890s it was a cultural hodgepodge.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book reflected this disparity, from its preachiness regarding the science of nutrition, to the inclusion of basic American staples such as Indian pudding, blanc mange, or even water bread (stale bread dipped in water to refresh it and then buttered), all the way to the ersatz French concoctions like vol-au-vent, birds in potato cases, and gâteau de Princesse Louise. Cooking in the Victorian age was nothing in particular; it was everything all at once.
This mixed-up approach to preparing food was particularly true when it came to Fannie’s recipes for fish cookery. As far as I could tell, Fannie was not a great lover of fish, since most of her preparations were rather pedestrian. To be fair, her instructions for broiling seemed fine, but a four-pound bluefish was to be baked in a hot oven for forty-five minutes, a three-pound halibut was baked a full hour, and one is sometimes instructed to throw a lobster sauce onto fish that turns out to be nothing more than hollandaise with a bit of chopped lobster meat added. One also finds many references to “white sauce I,” which is a classic medium béchamel (two tablespoons each butter and flour, a cup of milk, salt and pepper). This would be a rather grim blanket, although it was not at all uncommon in Fannie’s time as an accompaniment to a nice piece of fresh cod or halibut. There was also a basic recipe for fish stuffing—nothing more than cracker crumbs, stale bread crumbs, melted butter, hot water, salt, pepper, and a few drops of onion juice.
Fannie also suggested broiling salmon, so I decided to head in that direction: a simple preparation that would let the flavor of the salmon shine through.
MY GRANDFATHER, CHARLES STANLEY WHITE, WAS A GREAT salmon fisherman, and that is probably why I have spent quite a bit of time fishing the Matapedia River in Quebec, as well as the Restigouche and Miramichi rivers in New Brunswick. The first run of Atlantic salmon starts in April or early May, when the ice lets out, and the fish that have spent the winter upstream swim down to the ocean. Then, beginning from June to July, the main run of salmon begins, the fish swimming upstream to their place of birth, where the cycle begins all over again. Fly-fishing for salmon has always been a popular sport. The rich and powerful took trains up from Boston and New York, even in the late nineteenth century, and then took up residence on small houseboats floated on rafts that were pulled upstream by teams of horses or oxen onshore toward the camps where “sports” might spend a few weeks during the season. Fishing was done, before the use of outboard engines, in wide-bottomed canoes that were poled up and down the river from one “pool” to the next.
Anyone who has been to a hunting or fishing camp knows the drill. On the evening of your arrival, you immediately inquire about your prospects. How many fish were caught last week? What is the weather report? Have the salmon started running? The answer, given by the head guide, is always hopeful but murky, something like, “There is a full moon tonight and the water should be rising and I expect a good run in the next day or two.” Translation? Nobody is catching fish, but we hope to shortly.
My first salmon fishing trip to Cold Spring Camp on the Matapedia in Quebec involved ten sports and, oh, about ten thousand casts between us. The only woman among us caught the only fish, a twenty-six-pounder, on the fourth day. Other than an excursion to the local strip joint in Campbellton, the highlight of that outing was a taste of that lone salmon. The flesh was almost white, not orange, incredibly firm and light, not at all oily. It was vastly better than even the expensive wild salmon one can buy at the best fish markets.
As for cooking the salmon, I was surprised that our Victorian cookstove could be used for indoor grilling. David Erickson, the gentleman who restored our cookstove, made up an oblong grill insert that can quickly replace two of the burners and the surrounding cast-iron pieces. The beauty of this design, and what makes me think that the world is moving backward in terms of technology, is that the draft from the chimney is so strong that any smoke from the grilling is sucked downward and up through the flue. So, there we are, indoor grilled salmon.
I began by seasoning the grill with a dozen different coats of oil as it heated on the cooktop. Then we took four salmon fillets, two to three ounces each, seasoned them with oil, salt, and pepper and, over a hot fire, grilled them skin-side down until the skin was brown and crisp. We flipped the fish to finish. I found that by adjusting both the draft in front of the firebox and also the main flue, I could immediately change the heat level. Unlike a Weber or most other charcoal grills, it was much like cooking over gas—there was a high degree of control. We served them with a caper vinaigrette and an additional garnish of fried capers. This was the best grilled salmon I’d ever had, and it was cooked indoors to boot.
GRILLED SALMON WITH CAPER VINAIGRETTE
It is true that Fannie did not offer any grilled fish recipes—they were mostly boiled, roasted, or poached—and the cooking times were ridiculously long. In addition, canned salmon was available at this time and was often used in cold salads. However, a few contemporary cookbooks did offer grilling salmon as a common preparation method, so we followed that advice. We used our wood-burning cookstove with a grill insert to cook the salmon indoors, not a charcoal grill. When grilling salmon, we find that ten separate coats of oil on the hot grill will create a nonstick surface. Brush the oil using tongs and a wad of paper towels.
Vinaigrette:
¼ cup lemon juice
¼ teaspoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon whole-grain mustard
1 tablespoon minced shallots
2 teaspoons capers, rinsed, dried, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon caper juice
¼ teaspoon thyme, minced
Salt and pepper
6 tablespoons canola oil
6 tablespoons high-quality extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 lemons, cut into wedges
Salmon:
12 3-ounce salmon fillets, cut into rectangles
1 to 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Salt and pepper
1. For the vinaigrette: Combine lemon juice, mustards, shallots, capers, caper juice, thyme, and salt and pepper to taste in small nonreactive bowl. Whisk until thoroughly combined. Combine oils in small measuring cup so that they are easy to pour. Whisking constantly, very slowly drizzle oil into lemon mixture. If pools of oil are gathering on surface as you whisk, stop addition of oil and whisk mixture well to combine, then resume whisking in oil in slow stream. Stir in parsley. Vinaigrette should be glossy and lightly thickened, with no pools of oil on its surface.
2. For the fish: Prepare a hot fire for grilling. Pat salmon dry with paper towels. Make two or three shallow slashes along the skin side of each piece of fish, being careful not to cut into the flesh. Brush both sides of fish with thin coat of oil and season with salt and pepper. Place fish skin-side down on grill diagonal to grate, and cook without moving until skin side is brown, well marked, and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes. Flip fish to second side and cook, until centers of fillets are still translucent when cut into with a paring knife, or register 125 degrees on instant-read thermometer, 2 to 4 minutes longer.
3. Serve fish skin side up, and drizzle vinaigrette around and over each piece of fish, with 2 to 3 teaspoons vinaigrette. Serve with lemon wedges.