FARM KITCHEN

With winter’s supply of wood cut and stacked, we could now keep our voracious woodstoves satisfied. Our farm kitchen with its wood-burning cookstove was the heart of our farm, especially in winter. It was in the kitchen that we ate our meals, shared what happened in school, warmed up after a cold round of chores, listened to the radio, and took phone calls on the big wooden party-line telephone that hung on the wall near the outside door. It was in the kitchen that Ma baked bread, cooked meals, and washed and ironed clothes. It was where the Watkins man displayed his products: liniment, salve, pepper, vanilla, and much more. It was where we made big plans for the future and tried to dismiss the disappointments that sometimes came our way.

Our wooden kitchen table, large enough to seat eight people, sat at the center of the room, moved to the side only on wash day to make room for the washing machine and tubs that Pa dragged in from the woodshed. The table was old, scarred, and sturdy; most of the time it was covered with a red-and-black-checked oilcloth. A kerosene lamp stood in the middle of the table every day of the winter months, and many days in spring and fall, too, as the kitchen was at the west side of the house, with limited natural light filtering in through windows on the north and south. A woodshed was attached to the west end of the kitchen, and at the east end a door led to the dining room. The outside door on the south opened onto a roofed but open porch.

Ma kneaded bread on the kitchen table, rolled out cookies, and sewed various items of clothing for us, often out of remnants of cotton feed sacks with designs imprinted on them. It was at the kitchen table that Ma sewed together my first teddy bear. The pattern for the little bear had been printed on a feed sack; Ma cut out the pieces, sewed them together, and stuffed the little bear with cotton batting.

Ma folded clothes on the kitchen table, sat by it to peel potatoes, mended clothes and darned socks there. She studied the Sears, Roebuck catalog at the kitchen table and made out orders for new socks, shirts, and whatever else in the way of clothing had worn out and needed replacing. At the kitchen table she pored over the new seed catalogs when they arrived shortly after the new year. She studied the new varieties carefully but usually ordered those vegetable seeds with which she was familiar and had good success.

Along with the kitchen table, the wood-burning cookstove had a prominent and permanent place in the kitchen, its stovepipe pushed into a brick chimney on the wall behind it. Ma did all of the cooking on the stove, in all seasons of the year. It was cast iron, black with silver trim. The firebox was on the left side of the stove, and a reservoir for warming water was on the right. Six lids sat above the firebox, the hottest of them directly over it on the left. Ma varied the cooking heat for various foods by moving the pots and pans around on the lids. To keep things warm, she placed them far to the right. To bring water to a boil, she moved the pot to the left, the hottest part of the stove. The stove also included a large oven where Ma did all her baking. There were no thermometers, no dials to set; everything was done by feel, sight, and experience. Ma knew which sticks of wood to put in the stove for a quick fire (pine) and which to use for a long, sustaining heat (oak).

Another feature of the stove was a warming oven about two feet above the stove’s cooking surface. This was where Ma put sweet rolls to rise, where she kept food warm before serving it, and where she put anything that needed warming but didn’t require direct heat.

Woodstoves can be messy and very demanding with their constant requirement for more wood. It seemed to me that Ma was forever asking my brothers or me to haul in wood. And burning wood creates ashes, which had to be removed from the stove every day. By spring a considerable ash pile had formed in the secluded yard just to the north of the kitchen. (With the first warm weather in spring, Pa shoveled the ashes into the manure spreader and spread them on our potato field; wood ashes are a good source of potash, which potatoes need to grow well.) Ma was constantly sweeping up ashes that spilled on the linoleum kitchen floor—and complaining about the dust that seemed to accumulate everywhere in the kitchen. On windy days, occasionally a puff of smoke that was supposed to go up the chimney sneaked out around the stove lids and settled under the kitchen ceiling, over time turning the white ceiling gray.

The fire in the kitchen stove would go out overnight, and every morning Pa started it up again before he left the house for milking. On below-zero nights the temperature in the kitchen, along with the rest of the house, was well below freezing. Ironically, what we didn’t want to freeze solid we kept in the insulated icebox that stood at the north end of the kitchen.

At the back of the stove we hung wet mittens to dry; we hung our wet coats on chairs alongside the stove. On cold nights Pa often rested his feet on the open oven door, the warmest place in the house when the weather was blustery.

The teakettle always sat at a back corner of the cookstove. It wasn’t much to look at: dented in several places, dull aluminum in color, with a chipped black handle. But it played an important part in our lives. The teakettle was misnamed; maybe only once or twice during the years I lived at home was water from our teakettle used to make tea, and then only when a persnickety city relative complained that coffee wasn’t good for you and insisted on sipping bitter, foul-smelling black tea. With no running water in the house, the teakettle was our main source of hot water. We made many demands on it, especially during the winter. When my brothers or I came down with a sore throat, we gargled with hot water—as hot as we could bear—with a goodly amount of table salt mixed in. When we suffered from colds, a whiskey sling was my mother’s preferred treatment. The recipe: start with a glass of hot water, not so hot that it would burn your mouth and throat, but hot enough. Into the glass of hot water dump a jigger of “medicinal” whiskey. It tasted awful, but it worked—sort of. After drinking a whiskey sling, and after Ma rubbed an ample amount of skunk grease on your chest (an odorless, white fat from a dead skunk my uncle trapped), she covered your chest with a square of red flannel pinned to your long underwear. You popped into bed to “sweat out” the cold. It must have worked, because I’m still here.

If you got a chill or had a fever or got kicked by a cow or stepped on by a horse, the hot-water bottle came out of the closet. Ma filled it with hot water from the teakettle, wrapped a towel around it, and you held it on the injured body part or merely snuggled up to it when a little extra warmth was what you needed. (Neither of my parents ever considered putting ice on an injury. In winter, cold was the enemy, and we fought hard to keep it at bay. The idea of holding ice on your knee or your foot was close to ludicrous. Besides, we had no refrigerator and thus no ice cubes—though of course we did have 160 acres of ice and snow blanketing our farm.)

The teakettle’s hot water served many other purposes both inside and outside the house: thawing a frozen pump, removing ice from the pig trough, providing warm water for the hogs, removing ice from the kitchen porch stoop. Steaming away on the back of the woodstove, the teakettle added humidity to the kitchen. There are few things as comfortable as sitting around the cookstove on a cold winter day, the teakettle’s tongue of steam spilling out of its spout adding a quiet sizzle to the subtle sound of oak wood burning. I remember well the little ditty to be acted out with arm motions: “I’m a little teakettle, small and stout. Here is my handle and here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out.” Today at my farm cabin a teakettle sizzles on the back burner of my woodstove. It is there mainly to add humidity to the dry indoor air, but it also triggers an abundance of memories.