Category: Food and Drink

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.

I had a German grandmother who could cook, but she lived in Michigan. During our summer and holiday visits, this silly American girl didn’t know how to appreciate her cooking. I thought meat wrapped in pancake was weird and wondered why the potato salad was pink. When I finally realized what I could have learned, it was too late. I have a copy of the Baltisches Kochbuch from which many of her recipes came, but it isn’t her original copy, the one with her scrawlings in the margins. My grandfather didn’t think anyone was interested, so he gave it away.

Not long after my grandmother’s death, I began to search antique stores and musty old bookshops for copies of the book. Part of me thinks I will find her copy someday. In the meantime, I have found a diversion: collecting vintage cookbooks.

My first was The Modern Priscilla Cook Book: One Thousand Home Tested Recipes, published in 1928. The crackled cover and yellowing pages caught my eye. Inside were recipes for dishes I could barely imagine: Wild Rose Mousse, Shrimp Wiggle, Chicken Timbales, Grand-mother’s Piccalilli. I was hooked immediately. Although many recipes, such as Pork Cake, Hot Lettuce Sandwiches, and Fried Calves’ Brains will never come out of my kitchen, Ada’s Famous Gingerbread, Eggs Baked in Whole Tomatoes, Tosca Sauce, and Zephyr Potato Squares have inspired me to work through the terse, sometimes vague directions to bring forth an arcane taste of the past.

I am not alone in this odd hobby. In 1999, the Wall Street Journal called the antique cookbook sector the hottest in the rare book field. Collectors range from food historians and book lovers to beginning cooks and professional chefs. Probably the most rare collectible would be American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, which was published in 1796, and is known to be the first American cookbook. Collectible cookbooks are hard to find in good condition. A first edition of The Sun Also Rises might have been read once and then stacked on a shelf for years, but you can bet The Modern Priscilla was consulted daily, splattered with buttermilk, and used as a coaster. For rare book dealers and hardcore collectors, this detracts from the value of the book. For me, it only adds to it.

There was something else, besides the recipes, that enchanted me about my Modern Priscilla. It was Miss Myrtle Finden McIntosh, presumabley the original owner of the book. On the inside cover she inscribed her name, followed by “Should this book take a notion to wander, box its ears and send it home.” Her graceful handwriting can be found throughout the book, reminding herself to add one cup of sour milk to the sugar cookies, checking off and rating the good dishes (“yes sir!”), and re-naming the oatmeal cookies “rocks.” Once-blank pages are covered with hand-written recipes for versions of Overland Banana Pie, Scalloped Oysters, Honey Pumpkin Pie, even a “Hands-Off” recipe for soap. And then there’s the phone number for Dr. Chowning, the addresses of friends, and the small, seemingly quick notation that Marie died on the 6th of February in 1935. Miss Myrtle Finden McIntosh not only used this book, she loved this book. And now, so do I.

I began hunting down the tattered and worn old cookbooks. I wanted only books that had lived in a kitchen. I came across a Text-Book of Cooking by Carlotta Greer, published in 1915, which instructs the reader not only in the preparation of food, but in its scientific composition. A discussion of starches and carbohydrates is followed by a number of practical experiments and a recipe for Cream of Wheat. Mary Tretter dutifully penciled notes throughout, checking off the questions she’d been assigned, working through a chart of one-hundred-calorie portions of food, and doodling a caricature of, I assume, her instructor. On October 25, 1921, she mastered French Toast.

My copy of The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, published in 1935, has only one or two handwritten notations, including a name I can barely read as Mrs. A.J. Slemin. The recipes are interesting, but it was the four four-leaf clovers pressed in separate parts of the book that really attracted me. Did she think it was a safe hold for her good luck? Was it the singular site she could call entirely her own, where no one else would look?

I started out searching for a grandmotherly figure in old cookbooks, the kind of figure many famous cooks claim as their inspiration. But I never found her. Instead I found a collection of women who were closer to my own age, doing what I am doing, cooking and learning. Without glossy photos or guidance from celebrity chefs, they invented, adapted, and grew confident. Their cookbooks were as significant to them as any diary, marking their successes and failures, giving them a place to record daily life. I feel tied to these women when I cook something that fails, and then turn to Priscilla for an easy molasses cookie recipe that I know will work and bolster my bruised ego. Most of my recipes are stored on my computer and I am guilty of countless glossy cookbook purchases, but, if I ever find a four-leaf clover, I’ll press it between the pages of Priscilla, right next to my favorite Miss Myrtle notation: “Abra-ca-dab-ra, one two three, magic magic, come to me.”

Eggs Baked in Whole Tomatoes

adapted from The Modern Priscilla

3 medium-large tomatoes

3 eggs

salt and pepper

3 T toasted bread crumbs

1 t chopped rosemary

1/2 t garlic salt

3 slices prosciutto, diced

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice off top of tomatoes and carefully scoop out centers. Break one egg into each tomato, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Set in shallow baking dish. In separate bowl, mix bread crumbs with rosemary and garlic salt. Cover each tomato with some of the bread crumb mixture and top with pieces of prosciutto. Bake for 30 minutes. If prosciutto isn’t crisp enough, place under hot broiler for less than a minute.