Author: Amy Thielen

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.

The month of November is the prime of white truffle season. Never mind black truffles—the whites are where it’s really at. The most prized fungi in the world, they fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars a pound and look exactly like clods of dirt. Shaved thinly over a dish of hot pasta, their elusive flavor lies somewhere between wood smoke and brown butter, or roasted meat and overripe cheese. With a primal aroma that in its muskiness both seduces and repels us in the same instant, truffles hold a special, outlaw place in the collective taste. Unable to characterize the scent, gourmets throughout history were relieved to call it “aphrodisiac” and leave it at that.

To that point, scientists have since discovered that truffles produce a chemical identical to the one present in the saliva of wild boars, the very stuff to which the wild sow is attracted. The chemical likeness to boar pheromone would explain the attraction for wild pigs and their usefulness in finding truffles amid the tree roots.

Technically, they’re a kind of mushroom, species name Magnatum Pico. Most mushroom systems, or plants, reside beneath the humus layer of the forest, decomposing roots and such. At one point in this process, and in some cases in the space of an hour, they give birth to a fruiting body, which is the mushroom itself and the part we eat. Truffles never get that far. They remain below deck, compressing into something of such gastronomic value that it’s almost mineral. Like the first person to find the rust-colored ore so essential to making iron, the original truffle hunter must have had the same squinting ability to divine the hidden value inside a dirty chunk of earth.

Although people are taking to the woods and hunting them down in Oregon, the bulk of truffles used by restaurants in the U.S. still come from Europe, mostly from Italy’s Piedmont region, where they claim to produce a truffle with special, delicate flavor. Although the demand for truffles has grown in recent years, the supply hasn’t, and the precious harvest has become even more dear.

Just as a squirrel climbs to the tops of trees and gnaws off the freshest, tightest pinecones to add to his nest, it’s human nature to covet special, limited harvests. In New York, where everything is available for the right price, and where decadence never goes out of fashion, they clamor for the rare and hard-to-get. White truffles, trumping even foie gras, argan oil, and rare beef, are the bling of the food world. This explains why, though cost-prohibitive to most Americans, fresh truffles are so common in upscale Manhattan restaurants that cooks handle them with an offhand nonchalance which belies their price. A simple truffle sauce, from the French repertoire and common in four-star kitchens, begins with caramelized onions, garlic, a bottle of Madeira, veal sauce, and thick cream. It is finished with a generous grating of white truffle, costs hundreds of dollars to produce, and garnishes perhaps a mere two dozen plates.

As if the kitchens weren’t hectic enough in the fall, what with cooks hustling to make it through the busy season, insert a bunch of flashy truffle salesmen into the mix. Starting in mid-October and continuing until just past the New Year, these purveyors of the delicacy tromp through the dining rooms and into the kitchens, trailing small black leather valises. For the most part they’re slick dressers and partial to very expensive sunglasses that they tend to wear well past the hour when they need to do so. Speaking somewhat brusquely, with (usually Italian) accents, they locate the chef and lift their mysterious black leather valises onto the countertop. Ducks and fish are pushed aside. A very fancy scale, generally shiny with chrome, appears. It conducts the business of measuring the truffle weight, gram by gram, with an exactitude usually reserved for the weighing of other controlled, precious substances. The black-clad European unzips the case and releases an unmistakable and essential truffle odor so strong that it takes perhaps ten seconds for the aroma to reach every cook in kitchen. Like dogs, their noses lift in the air. Sous chefs set down their knives and move in closer, as if they were needed in the bargaining process. Ambitious cooks peer over the pile and have something to say. Managers stop by in passing to offer their own vacuous observations. Meanwhile, everyone in the room is dumbly thinking, Wow. Truffles.

The chef, however, is thinking about the sale and how to get the best price from the wily salesmen. He chooses the finest three of the bunch, the most firm and aromatic knobs, and signs an agreement to pay nearly two thousand dollars. Taking the stairs two at a time, he immediately begins to envision additional courses on the truffle prix fixe menu.

That seven-course menu, at $250 a pop, begins to make a dent in the seasonal truffle debt. (I don’t think they make all that much on the truffles: Providing them is more like a service, or for publicity.) For that kind of money there are truffles tucked between the milky slices of raw, live, sea scallop; truffles with potatoes and brin d’amour cheese; truffles shaved over fresh tortellini in capon broth; truffles balancing atop tender pink veal loin.

But it’s a telling irony that truffles are best with the plainest, most elemental ingredients: potatoes, eggs, bread. Any great chef will tell you this: If you have a great truffle, eat it with scrambled eggs. Shave it into potato salad. Or, to call up the image of Italian peasants in little stone houses, sit in front of the fire, alternately chipping at a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano and a crumbling chunk of white truffle. Mop up the bits with a crust of bread thickly spread with good butter.

At the end of the night the chef stores what’s left of the gnarly globe in a small varnished cigar humidor, nestled into a bed of vialone nano rice alongside a half-dozen eggs. It doesn’t take more than a full day for the truffles to impart their fragrance to the eggs and the rice, which are then turned into “truffled risotto” and “truffled sabayon.” This truffling, now a verb, seems a wondrous trick of nature, but it really does work.

Maybe it’s this trickster quality of the truffle that we desire. Animal or vegetable? Right or wrong? Like or lust? We like it because the first taste of a dish with white truffles never fails to unsettle us. During those first seconds, before you have determined whether it tastes good or bad, the brain nonetheless craves more. And we will pay good money for that.—Amy Thielen

 

 

In a good year, the wild rice grows thick on the lakes and rivers in northern Minnesota toward the end of August. The rice stalks multiply into such dense thickets that the waters become nearly impassable—to everything but the sleek canoes that glide through for harvesting. This job takes two people: one to knock rice into the canoe, and the other to propel the canoe through the water. Last year, I took the canoe’s middle seat, and my ricing partner stood tall in the back, pushing at the bottom of the creek bed with a twelve-foot pole, hand over hand, maintaining a gentle pace. With a stick like a fat pool cue in each hand, I poked one end behind a hank of rice stalks, bent it over the canoe, and used the other to softly strike the bursting seed heads: A shower of rice rained into the canoe. All the while, rice spiders, tiny and albino-white, skittered down my arms. Between swatting at them and keeping up with the canoe’s steady pace, it made for arduous work in the heavy, late-summer heat. But on and on it went, until the canoe became heavy with a belly full of rice and we slowly weaved our way to shore.

Hand-harvesters like us generally yield small batches. In our case, we brought in around two hundred pounds of raw, or green, rice. Compared to the professional harvesters, or even the ambitious amateurs, it’s considered peanuts, and hardly enough to process. All rice must be cooked, or as they say, parched, in order to solidify the milky, soft kernel inside its sheath. Everyone we talked to pointed us to Lewie DeWandeler and Donnie Vizenor, friends and business partners who have been parching wild rice at Lewie’s farm for more than twenty-five years. Just like Donnie’s father and his father before that, they use a steel barrel that rotates over a blazing wood fire. Standing by, their eyes, ears and sense of smell are expertly attuned to the rice. “Some people use propane for parching, but you can taste the difference,” says Donnie. “We like to use wood, so that there’s a certain amount of smoke in the rice.” The heat dries out the soft kernel, but it’s the smoke that lends the wild rice its flavor.

There’s also history to consider. Then and now, the many hours spent hand-harvesting rice provokes a desire to finish it in the right way. People from this area of the state have always parched their rice over wood fires because it’s the best, most precise treatment for a precious grain. Wood-fire parching also requires a great deal of intuition. Knowing when to raise the temperature and when to slow the barrel’s rotation are skills maintained through generations only by the act of doing. In this age of mass production of wild rice and other grains, those few who have kept the craft of wood-parching alive seem to sense that they are the last inheritors of a great tradition.

Lewie DeWandeler and his wife Betty live on the Ponsford Prairie within the White Earth Indian Reservation, where fields of bright green hay give way to lush clumps of beans in rows. Abandoned farmhouses and the occasional one-room school sit squat in the middle of fields, shedding their whitewash.

My partner and I had been told to show up at Lewie’s at the crack of dawn, no later, but when we get there Lewie leans out the kitchen door and says, “Come in. I have to eat my breakfast yet.” We stomp the mud off our boots as we climb the rough steps to the kitchen. It’s been drizzling for hours, and looks to be a day of pure gray sky and soaking wetness. The three dogs standing at well-spaced intervals across the long driveway glare at us, standing proud in their heavy wet coats. One, to be polite, gives a slow wag.

Inside, Lewie is whipping eggs into flour to make pancake batter. His eyes have the glint of a true Midwestern prankster—someone who works hard but can make light of it. He makes a triple stack of pancakes and fried eggs, one on top of the other, and pours dark Minnesota maple syrup, thick as caramel, over all of it. We watch Lewie eat, we drink coffee, shoot the bull, and wait. Donnie Vizenor shows up, cheerful for the early hour, wearing bright blue workmen’s overalls.

By 7:45 we are all well-fed and, holding our coffee cups, heading out to the parching shed. A wind-worn but stubborn structure, it’s open on two sides, and a lush green mess of baby oaks and bindweed comes in through one of them. The other side, next to the fire, is open to the grand sweep of the Ponsford Prairie. Like many people who live on the prairie, Lewie DeWandeler has learned to diversify: he logs and traps in the woods in the winter, farms hay and pinto beans in the summer, parches rice in the fall, sugars maples for syrup in the spring, and in this way generally survives the extremes of Minnesota weather.

Over the years Donnie and Lewie have filled the shed with equipment for processing wild rice, an operation that begins and ends on the behemoth 1912 scale given to them by Donnie’s father. With its smooth white enameled shoulders, it stands as tall as a man and weighs in up to thirty-four thousand pounds of green rice each year. Donnie’s father, who grew up on the White Earth Reservation, updated the original parching method with a gas-powered motor: His first barrel parcher used a Ford Model A engine. As he scaled back on parching, Lewie and Donnie took on more of the job, eventually trading in the Model A engine for an electric motor to turn the barrel. They also invested in a thresher (often pronounced “thrasher”), which looks something like a washing machine and sports rubber rudders that gently beat the chaff loose from the parched rice. A large screen-lined grain separator shakes the whole kernels of rice down into a bucket, leaving a cloud of rice dust and chaff to blow out the side of the shed.

While the rice is in the barrel, it is tempting to lean in close, to get the full force of the steamy smell of grain toasting—but the fire beneath is intensely hot. Lewie and Donnie keep a large but well-controlled blaze going from logs of white pine and oak, whose smoke perfumes the rice. Lewie stands next to the fire, leaning on a tall, blackened stick, which he uses every few minutes to adjust the logs and maintain the temperature. Parching rice demands full attention, but also allows those involved plenty of time for leaning on sticks and reminiscing. “Back when everyone brought in local rice, we used to be able to tell what lake the rice came off of,” says Lewie. “Some is almost yellow, some brown, some almost white. Rice from Mitchell Dam is short, fat, like coffee beans. And then there’s that lake just north of Highway 200—the rice from there is blond, almost transparent, once it’s parched.”

Just like a cook, he’s keeping half a mind on the rice as we talk. He stops mid-sentence, turns a switch to speed the barrel. Opening the shed’s wide door to cool the place off a bit, he says, “Smell that? It’s going a little too fast.” When I ask how he can tell when it’s done, he gives my simplistic question a poker-faced, smartass response: “Standing here for twenty years looking at it has something to do with it.”

Then he responds seriously, for Lewie is serious about this: “When the rice is just right it rattles against the barrel and sounds heavy.” He could parch it just enough to make it edible, but he works toward something a little better than that. Crafting a superior product with great flavor takes someone who again and again chooses to bring each batch precisely to the point of perfect doneness. “I toast the rice almost until it burns,” he says, winking, “but just almost. That gives it a nice smoky flavor.” And it does. Steaming a mere cup of rice that Lewie and Donnie have parched will fill an entire house with its earthy fragrance, as if you can smell at the same time both the fire it was parched in and the water it was raised in. Each taupe-colored kernel cooks up separate, tender and gently bent, barely splitting.

Lewie’s and Donnie’s parching method closely resembles the Native American method practiced around the turn of the century. At that time, the rice spent a day or two drying in the sun before it was toasted in a large cast-iron kettle over a wood fire. After parching, it was then stamped upon with soft, moccasined feet to loosen the chaff. Once cool, it got poured it into shallow grass baskets and flung expertly into the air. The breeze carried the chaff away, and the rice fell back into the basket.

Ricing on lakes within a reservation is limited to enrolled tribe members, but lakes on public and private land outside of the reservation are open to anyone. The best ricing lakes on reservation land (such as the aptly named Big Rice Lake near Mahnomen, Minnesota) throw annual lotteries: Names of tribal members go into a bucket, and only a lucky handful win the right to go ricing.

Today the portrait of a small-time harvester is an interesting amalgam of Native American and European settler, with some of the ricing and processing being done by Native Americans on reservation soil, some on private land, and some by mixed teams on reservation lakes and on public lakes. The fact is, wild rice is a northern Minnesota foodstuff and its gathering is intertwined with the history of the northern territory. Settlers learned to rice from the Indians who lived here, in this place where rice grew wild on most every lake and in nearly every stream. When the Depression hit, all kinds of people took to harvesting and selling rice on a larger scale than ever before. At that time, the extra money and source of food nicely supplemented what could be, for both the settlers and the native people, a lean life on the northern prairie.

Since then, people devised ways to produce wild rice on large scale, and today, most commercial producers have eliminated the fussy steps: They flood a field to grow rice, drain it to harvest, dry the grain until it’s completely black, and then parch it with steam until it’s solid. There’s not a lot of aroma surrounding this kind of operation, and zero romance. And having eaten plenty of this solid black commercial rice, I have to say that there’s not too much flavor in it, either.

Cream of wild rice soup, a staple at diners in every small town across Minnesota, should be made with the old-fashioned, wood-parched rice. The steam-parched kind doesn’t cook evenly, so you end up with a few fully exploded kernels swimming among a lot of chewy, half-cooked rice. Wood-parched rice cooks more gently and evenly, and seems to thicken the creamy broth with its smoky, tender kernels.

I like wild rice best when it’s prepared most simply: steamed with a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, and a few cloves of garlic for perfume, with a thick pat of butter melting on top. (Contrary to popular myth, wild rice doesn’t take an hour to cook. Rinse it and cover it with enough water so that the tip of your finger touches the rice and the water reaches your first knuckle. Then bring it to a simmer, cover it, and steam for half an hour.) But this grain is also amazingly addictive when popped, salted, and buttered like popcorn. The kernels swell and explode when poured into a pan of hot oil; smaller than popcorn, the little puffed grains retain all the smoky flavor from the parching, and it’s a challenge to get the little bits in your mouth in enough quantity to satisfy.

This year, Lewie’s son is parching some of the rice. As my grandma would say, it’s nice to see young folk take an interest. Because while small processors like Lewie and Donnie parch rice year after year, they’re not exactly besieged by apprentices. And like any artisanal process, rice parching must be taught, not described.

Back in the day, families would bring their raw products to someone who would finish the processing. The cream went to the town creamery for butter and cheese; the wool was taken to someone who would spin it; the wheat was brought to the mill for flour. In this way, producers developed finely tuned skills for processing or finishing different products. With these kinds of cooking and processing, intuition is usually more precise than science.

In northern Minnesota, many people enjoy getting out onto the lakes, gathering the rice, getting it parched, and taking that simple pleasure in eating all winter what they reaped in the fall. “People like to come to us because they get their own rice back,” says Lewie. “We could parch two small batches from two different people together, but you don’t know what that guy did with his rice before it got here.” Though I hadn’t thought about it before, I too was thankful that we got back the very rice we brought in. When Lewie said “the taste comes from right here,” he may have been pointing to his barrel parcher, but he was also talking about this northern place, those logs on the fire, this creek bed, and the one down the way.