The Hulk in the Kitchen

Right beneath our noses, an underground clutch of vintage appliance enthusiasts is quietly buying up all of the redeemable old stoves and classic refrigerators. To the uninitiated, it looks like a hobby, not unlike repairing and collecting classic cars. But some of the new converts to the vintage appliance game aren’t buying them because they want to resuscitate an era, or because they want to embark on a tricky renovation project; most lack the kind of accompanying home décor that marks the “vintage enthusiast,” a designation they casually shrug off. Lots of people have been outfitting their kitchens with vintage pieces because, for the money, they are some of the best buys out there. With a quick tune-up and a polish, many of these octogenarian appliances continue to work with faithful precision. Of course, the retro curves and colorful porcelain surfaces don’t hurt, either.

Every vintage appliance buff has a story about how a love affair with an old range caused their conversion, and to this I am no exception. Chambers, Wedgewood, O’Keefe & Merritt … there are websites devoted to fans of each that forsake the others. Mine’s a Roper, a brawny, sure-footed hulk of a stove, manufactured a few years before World War II.

Some nights after dinner I take care to detail my stove, from the top of the clock all the way down to the footed legs. I deep-clean the burner plate weekly. This uncharacteristic fastidiousness is a testimony to my love for this old thing. If to scrub it is to know it, I’ve learned that mine is a more solid and more beautiful machine than any stove made today. The fine features are legion: the generous coat of white porcelain enamel, pouring over the corners thick and creamy like milk off the farm; the design dimples and ripples in the chrome; the pretty little clock; the flourish of the Roper brand name dashed across its front. Every small detail reveals that its makers had high hopes for this stove. While it would devote its life to a relentless cycle of work, it was meant to be a thing of beauty, too.

The latest in a lineage that began with fireplaces and then wood-fired cook-stoves, mid-century gas and electric ranges assumed the place and prominence of a hearth in the center of the kitchen—but with a sleek, modern look. Examining the smooth, clean lines of the shiny chrome and glowing Bakelite features, you’re struck with the sense of bold optimism inherent in these appliances. Their makers were obviously smitten with modernism and had great hopes for the possibilities of the future. This was the era when new devices in home technology were so darn exciting that it seemed as if they had dropped into the home from outer space—and they looked like it, too.

Flash forward to today, when weekend gourmets with expensive stoves cook a little and fantasize a lot about being professional chefs. Meanwhile, when the professionals cook on the home front, they want to feel comfortable, like they’re cooking at home. I say this as one of them. Having spent the last eight years cooking on professional suites—and the last thirty minutes of every twelve-hour day scrubbing the shine back into the range top—the last thing I want to see when I get home is a hunk of industrial stainless steel. I have nightmares about the dark crevices where stainless steel corners meet, about what kinds of desiccated (or horrors, living!) creatures hide in the greasy grime. So for me, perhaps the strongest attraction to my old stove lies in its lovely porcelain façade: It looks nothing at all like work.

Visual appeal has in large part driven the demand for retro stoves. According to Floyd Harvala (that’s “the Wild Finlander” to me and you) of Harvala Appliances in Park Rapids, my hometown, vintage pieces, especially those manufactured from the 1930s to the late 1950s, have increased in desirability over the years. “You usually get two or three people in a summer asking about them,” he said. “Mostly people in their forties, or younger.” Note that in a town of three thousand, two or three fairly constitutes a trend. Burt, the son-in-law who recently took over the store (thenceforth assuming the moniker “the Mild Finlander”), stocks and sells a great many contemporary appliances, but shares Floyd’s understanding of the older pieces’ appeal, noting that they “have a lot more character, more little features, neat-looking legs, and stuff like that.” Both Finlanders admire the thicker gauge of the porcelain and the steel foundations on these stoves, as well as the durability of the old cast iron burners. New burners are constructed of aluminum and even Floyd admitted that in comparison, they are “not very good.”

Detractors might say that the older appliances lack technological advances that have since become commonplace. In reference to refrigeration, I must concede that these claims have validity. Fridges like my 1930s Royal, a compact model by General Electric, look glamorous in the kitchen, but they are not without problems. Food placed in the back tends to freeze, and after a few weeks of operation, opening the little inset box freezer is like looking at a diorama of the Ice Age: Squinting, you can barely make out a box of peas in butter sauce back there, frozen in time. With advances in compressors and insulation, these fridges just can’t compete with new ones. It takes more energy (and money) to run them, as most of the cold air just leaks out the door. Burt surmises: “Old fridges take a dollar a day to run. For new ones, it’s ten cents a day.” Hard truths like these have turned many a vintage fridge into a vanity piece: They look cool, but are not, in fact, actually cool. They’re commonly found in garages, demoted to holding the summer stock of fish bait and soda pop.

Vintage stoves, on the other hand, possess the cooking power to compete with today’s top-of-the-line models. Is it possible for my Roper to pump out more Btu’s (British thermal units, the measure of heat output) than the average contemporary range? “Well, it depends,” said Jack Santoro, founder of the Old Appliance Club and publisher of the Old Road Home, a quarterly for vintage appliance buffs and hack restorers. He has been restoring vintage American stoves for thirty-seven years, with enthusiasm to spare. “In these old stoves, the valves which control the size of the orifice are adjustable.” The Btu level depends on the amount of pressure, natural gas or propane, squeezed through the orifice. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered the propane service guy asking me if I wanted it hot. I must have said something like, “Hell yeah, hot as she goes!” which would explain the power I now enjoy. Water for pasta boils in about eight minutes. Flames shoot up the sides of a wok, giving stir-fried greens the authentic Chinese lick of fire. By this estimation, my four Roper burners sport Btu’s in the ten thousand to twelve thousand range—hotter than a new budget stove (averaging nine thousand Btu’s) and comparable to those strapping, faux-commercial ranges (whose burners range from two thousand for the simmer plate to eighteen for the power burner on the priciest model).

But beyond Btu’s, it’s the physical scale of my range top that makes it conducive to the bouts of intensive cooking, pickling, and jam-making in which I sometimes indulge. Like most of the stoves from this era, mine was built to handle some serious production. Its burners were widely spaced to accommodate huge canning kettles and stockpots of simmering broth, hog’s heads slowly melting into head cheese, pots of spurting apple butter, and, of course, the ever-warm pot of coffee.

Currently, the market for these stoves is at that middle point: They are popular enough to sell for six thousand dollars on the Internet (totally refurbished and gleaming clean), but you could just as easily find one lolling amongst the old sinks at the local dump. That is, not everybody knows they’re desirable—not yet. The use of the Internet by rural junk dealers has gone a long way toward ruining, perhaps forever, the prospect of the insanely good deal. Now little dusty storefronts on deserted main streets that once promised the bargain of a lifetime are run by clerks who sell most of their stuff on eBay. They know what a Chambers stove is and how much it’s worth.

Luckily for me, my husband got our Roper from a relative, and we bought the fridge from Burt for thirty dollars and a case of beer. But that was last year.


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