It is SNOWING here!!!!!!!
Wish I could say Presto and be there for the fun. A cold, drizzling day here, which reminded me of Sunday's Houston Chronicle guest column by a woman named Pauline who is described as "a rancher and freelance writer". The column is titled "Home on the range ruled by her royal highness, the stove" and starts out ......
The best place in the whole world on a wintry day was my grandmother's kitchen. Her Great Majestic cooking range dwarfed everything in the room, perfuming the house with the fragrance of baking pies and roasting hens, pots and pans bubbling with delectable promises on its scrubbed and stove-blackened top.
The Great Majestic was as wide as Grandmother was tall. It had a reservoir for heating water on one side and was crowned by a filigreed plate warming rack. Its six burners were covered with lids that could be lifted with a wire-handled tool for adding fuel.
The oven had a fuel chamber separate from the range top's fuel box. This was important because temperature was regulated not by thermostat but by the kind of wood used. Well-seasoned pine was fine for frying eggs and boiling beans, but roasting beef required hot, slow-burning oak. Hens and turkeys did best with mesquite. Cakes needed hickory, although angel food, being delicate, preferred elm. A supply of each kind of wood, refreshed daily from covered piles in the back yard, was kept in its own basket next to the Great Majestic...
Sounds like a good place to be today, as long as Grandmother is there for stove duty. |
