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Findley and McClary are two common, fully functional cook stoves which are well known from kitchen to kitchen across Canada.
These styles of wood cook stoves have been the focus of every homestead kitchen; whether or not you stood on a dirt floor or a wooden floor the cook stove offered you heat to warm your hands and backside, not to mention the hearty cooking which fed not only the family but large groups such as thrashing crews when the harvest was in full swing.
There was no household without one, just as we all have an electric range today.
Here in Ministikwan Lake my wife has kept a wood stove in service for years. She has prepared not only meals for special occasions but baked up some of the finest European butter pastries along with her original phyllo apple strudel.
Needless to say she has perfected with wood and loves doing so. Unfortunately, insurance companies don’t really care for wood cooking and require you to have newly certified appliances to qualify for household insurance.
In an attempt to comply with the rules we recently purchased a state-of-the-art Heartland wood cook stove, with the latest technoloby and engineering.
It also came with a state-of-the-art price tag. With all this technology and engineering one would kind of expect this new stove to be the best thing since sliced bread. Not so.
While the fire box may work fairly well, the oven doesn’'t work at all unless you can do all your baking at 200 F, and to top that off when the manufacturer was confronted, they did not have any qualified personnel to offer any type of assistance or excuses for that matter, stating that the only qualified person had recently passed on.
After some steady complaining I think Donna may have a contingent of engineers coming to witness how cooking and baking is done with an antique stove compared to the latest and greatest model.
I recall while hunting Hungarian partridge around Shamrock, Saskatchewan, we were in an old yard site and in the quonset was the largest wood cook stove I had ever seen. Apparently it had been removed from a Moose Jaw hotel and came to rest on an abandoned yard site waiting to be plucked up for a museum or some such endeavour.
Nevertheless while observing the magnificent piece of art and the sheer magnitude of the unit one could only imagine the stories that stove had to offer.
I am sure the stove was over 15-feet long with several ovens and various cooking areas on the top with the warming ovens above. No need for a microwave.
Here at Ministikwan some may recall for years we had a wood cook stove in the picnic shelter until the weather got the best of it and rust took it to its grave.
If you have never cooked with wood, it’s worth giving a try. You may find a unique flavour is transferred into your food. Most desirable. There is a restaurant in San Francisco, California, which specializes in wood stove cooking, but there you will pay a premium for the experience.
Perhaps one should source out Grandma’s old stove and give it a go.
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