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Recipe for a Winter day: A cast iron wood burning stove

February 20, 2012 ~ 30-Day Blogging Challenge prompt is "RECIPE FOR A WINTER DAY".

I remember a cast iron kitchen stove in a farmhouse in Oklahoma. I remember my Grandmother Darbe, my father’s mother, baking bread on a winter day. It was around Christmas and we had gone for a visit.

Grandma mixed the bread in a huge stone bowl. She covered the bowl with a dishtowel made from a flour sack and placed the bowl on top of the stove so that the dough could rise.

There was a pile of wood stacked behind the house. Grandma sent my brothers to the woodpile to get some wood for the stove. Then she put old newspaper in the firebox, placed the wood on top of the newspaper, and set the newspapers on fire. In a few minutes, the wood was burning.

The heat from the iron stove warmed the entire kitchen on a snowy December day in Oklahoma. Grandma shaped the dough into loves and placed them in the oven. The aroma of the baking bread premeditated the entire house.

After the bread finished baking, Grandma took the bread out of the oven and sliced it. Then she removed homemade butter from her refrigerator. Grandma had electricity and a Frigidaire refrigerator, but she baked her bread in the cast iron stove that dominated her kitchen.

The stove kept the kitchen warm on winter days. I remember, Grandma’s kitchen was the warmest room in her house. Through years I have used gas stoves and electric stoves, but none of them has kept my kitchens as warm as Grandma Darbe’s cast iron wood burning stove kept her kitchen.

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