Good morning. Welcome to Jo Ann’s Virtual Café 2021. Come on in and help yourself to a breakfast beverage.
Let’s talk. There are several items that we need to use to have a Café. Probably the most important one is a good stove. Now Miss Josie loves her stove. I remember my Grandmother cooking on an old wood stove. Joe’s Grandmother cooked on a wood stove.
It must have taken a lot of time to learn to bake and cook on a wooden stove before the modern ones were invented. Joe found out some facts about stoves. Here are a few of them:
- Cooking was performed over an open fire nearly two million years ago.
- During the Paleolithic era, approximately 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, primitive hearths were constructed, with stones arranged in a circle shape.
- Most open fires are 30% efficient on average, and heat is distributed positively, with no heat being lost into the body of a stove. An estimated three million people still cook their food today over open fires.
- The three-stone stove is still widely used around the world. In some areas, it developed into a U-shaped dried mud or brick enclosure with an opening in the front for fuel and air, sometimes with a second smaller hole at the rear. Native Americans in the Southwest used these types of stoves. Pizza and bread are still cooked in some restaurants even today instead of using modern stoves.
- The Ancient Egyptian, Jewish, and Roman people used stone and brick ovens fueled with wood in order to make bread and other culinary staples.
- The earliest recorded stove was created in Alsace, France, in 1490. It was entirely made out of brick and tile, including the flue pipe.
- In 1642, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the first cast-iron stove was constructed. This stove was little more than a cast-iron box with no grates.
- During Colonial America, beehive-shaped brick ovens were used to bake cakes and other pastries. Temperature control was closely managed by burning the appropriate quantity of wood to ash and then testing by inserting hands inside, adding additional wood, or opening the door to allow cooling.
- In 1735, the Castrol stove, or “stew stove,” was developed by French designer Francois Cuvilliés. It was the earliest recorded wood-burning stove
- In 1740, the Franklin stove used a grate to burn wood and had sliding doors to control the draught, or flow of air, through it. Because of its compact size, the stove could be housed in a large fireplace or used free-standing in the middle of a room by connecting it to a chimney.
- In 1800, Isaac Orr of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, created the first circular cast-iron stoves with grates for cooking meals on them
- The potbellied stove traces its origins to the early 1800s, inspired by the Franklin stove.
- Jordan A. Mott designed the base-burning stove for burning anthracite coal in 1833. In 1834, Philo Stewart created the Oberlin Stove, a small wood-burning cast-iron stove. It was a compact metal kitchen stove that was far more efficient than cooking in a fireplace due to its improved heating capacity.
- The earliest reported use of gas for cooking was in 1802. The switch to gas was prompted by concerns about air pollution caused in coal-burning fireplaces and stoves.
- The first commercially produced gas stove, invented by Englishman James Sharp, did not enter the market until the 1840s. By 1900, gas stoves became popular because they were easier to control and required less maintenance than wood or coal stoves.
- Electric stoves became popular not long after the advent of home electricity. One early model was created by Thomas Ahearn, the owner of a Canadian electric company, whose marketing included a demonstration meal prepared entirely with electricity at Ottawa’s Windsor Hotel in 1892.
- The original meaning of the word ‘stove’ actually meant ‘a heated room’.
- The biggest difference between gas and electric stove is that gas uses an open flame, and electric uses coils.
- There are basically ten types of stoves: Gas Stoves, Electric Stoves, Induction Stoves, Dual Fuel Stoves, Professional Stoves, Freestanding Stoves, Slide-In Stoves, Electric Coil Stoves, Electric Smooth Top Stoves, and Downdraft Stoves.
It’s hard to imagine cooking on a Franklin stove that sits in a fireplace. Now that’s an art. Nowadays, microwaves have made stoves somewhat obsolete. Many people prefer to use them than the stoves that we grew up with.
Now that’s enough about stoves. We could go on and on and bore you. However, what type of stove did your parents or grandparents use, or what type of stove do you prefer?
Having said that, let’s share a breakfast beverage and a Native American Proverb. The Proverb of today goes like this, “Everything comes from Mother Earth. Whatever you do to Mother Earth, you do to yourself and generations to come.”
Thanks for coming! Enjoy your gift of today. Have a great day! We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
