I don’t think there is anything more pleasant than walking, on a cold, cold winter day, into a kitchen and smelling food cooking on the stove.
Most of these memories scatter back to my teenage years and beyond, when I spent a large amount of time in the fresh country air out of doors.
In my double digit pre-teen, no-car years, having three older brothers, two in the armed forces and the third working at assorted jobs, followed by two sibling sisters, the oldest housekeeping for a far away neighbour, a mother of twins, while the younger designated for housework, and a much younger brother, too young to help, it was my job after school, and before barn chores, to fill the wood box.
Our kitchen was heated with a cast-iron cook stove, and the rest of the house was heated with a large pot-bellied, indescribably scary, black cast-iron hulk, whose bulging sides glowed red in the darkness of night. The smoke-pipe, which went up through the floor and across the ceiling of the double-sized bedroom above, was, at the time, state-of-the-art central heating. It could easily swallow an 18 inch, overnight lasting, elm block that was a foot or greater in diameter.
But it was the large old stove in the kitchen that I liked, or better said, loved, most. As I came in and out with armfuls of kindling and firewood from the cold winter air, it was it that greeted me with warmth and the tantalizing smell of what’s cookin’ both on top and within.
From the up-top old stove’s warming closet would come any number of home-baked apple pies, on its surface would be a large simmering soup pot, and from its oven would come high loaves of homemade bread. Still warm, large chunks, pulled apart, were smeared with home churned Jersey butter, and/or soft melted honey from the bee yard we hosted. Umm, umm, eat your heart out, folks!
Each spring or fall, up the hill at a neighbour’s, of Czechoslovakian extraction, I would get a chance to volunteer picking stones, hoeing turnips or harvesting them in the fall. The lady of the house, though she could speak little English, would come out to the field at both 10am and 3pm break time. She would be carrying heated plates in a wrapped-around blanket.
What she held in her arms, I felt then, came from heaven.
On each plate would be a large piece of still-steaming warm apple pie, with a thick slice of cheese and a steaming hot, bulging, well seasoned cabbage roll. She would state, in her broken English with gesticulating hands, that she had cut the large pie only in four, because if she cut it in eight I would eat too many pieces and gain too much weight, no longer able to work. Umm, umm, eat your heart out, folks!
Later in life, mid-upper teens, my first job necessitated that I live close to work. This brought me to a well remembered boarding house. Here the lady of the house, with a slight German accent, had grown a few things in her previously-sold farm’s kitchen garden. One of which was a bin full of shelled, dried, large, black-eyed white beans. These she would soak in water overnight, and slow simmer on the stove during the day. Then she would add a big blob of, what was then called blackstrap, now molasses, throw in a dozen or so wieners, turn up the heat for five minutes or so, and umm, umm. Eat your heart out, folks!
But the best I remember were the different flavours of the deep apple pies that the Little Lady would make from handpicked wild apples that grew along farm hedgerows. Although it could well have been her homemade fudge, both chocolate and caramel. Umm, umm, You guessed it. Eat your heart out, folks!
Perhaps I should be saying 10-4, over and out to that, for I’m sure I’ve just gained ten pounds mauling the thoughts through my mind.
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105