Fireplace Cooking

[lupinfarm]

A Rayburn

http://rayburn-web.co.uk/

Hattie should be familiar with them, gorgeous stoves. I believe they can be wood or coal burning. I'd love one, but we're likely getting a regular woodstove with the cooktop.

Yup! I have had 2 AGA's (very like Rayburn's but better looking IMHO) in previous homes & I really loved them. They will heat your water & your radiators too! I've used the cooler bottom oven (with the door wide open) to revive just-born lambs that the mother rejected. In my last house I had a rack, for drying clothes, put in just forward of it --- The clothes etc dried so fast. I miss it a lot but I have a wood-stove in my living room instead -- not nearly as useful.

Hattie

I'm really quite fond of the Rayburn, my mum always whines about missing the one her family had as a child whenever we see them on television (she's pretty much addicted to Escape to the Country and Build a new life in the country). My nan never had one, she lives in a fairly modern flat with a regular ole' cooker, but my auntie has a lovely old Rayburn in white. Totally jealous. Here we can get woodburners with removeable trivets for the top to cook food on. They're quite a bit more expensive than the bog standard woodburner but when a bit of ice can knock out power to your house, it's totally worth it. We don't have any woodstove right now at all, for some reason someone thought it was a brilliant idea to take it out (there are old stove pipe holes EVERYWHERE) so we heat using oil with a forced air furnace sadly. I miss our fireplace from our old house.

Stephy

 

[ORChick]

The dining room fireplace had metal rods that could be swung over the flames, to hold pots. I don't remember them ever being used though; could be grandfather built them in just for looks, but that room is 20 years older than I am, so possibly they were used before my time.

Are you referring to cranes? When mine was being built I had the mason install one for cooking over the fire. It swings out and can hold chains or hooks for pots and kettles. When my water lines freeze up in the coldest days of winter I can be found melting snow for water in a dutch oven hanging from the crane. Other times it's used for soup.

Thank you Sylvie, that's the word I was looking for. Yes, a crane. There was no electricity in my grandparents' home until just a few years before I was born, so I can imagine that the fire was used sometimes for cooking, but I never saw it being used so. This house is on the central California coast, so I can assure you that it was never used for melting snow!

 

[savingdogs]

We have a woodstove designed to heat the house, but it has a flat top suitable for cooking on. Usually I just have cast iron teapots with water and something like a cinnamon stick in there to humidify the room and give me a nice scent inexpensively.

However during power outages I have used it to cook. While it worked, you'd have to stick to simple things unless you want to really spend some time at it. It was hard to make things all ready at the same time. Frying an egg or reheating something was easy enough, but even something as simple as rice would be hard because you cannot control the temperature very easily (at least on my stove).

It really works best at heating water to a boil! However that is the start of a surprising number of meals.

 

[hennypenny9]

My grandparents had a wood burning oven/range in their kitchen. They also had a newer electric oven, which is what they actually used, lol. But they usually burned something in the wood burning oven to keep the kitchen warm. This never made sense to me, but they're my relatives so that's an excuse. If I ever get a place of my own I will tentatively ask for it. I think it would be awesome to be able to bake during a power outage, which is common here. At the house I grew up in we had a wood fireplace which you could cook on top of, but not bake with. *nostalgia*

 

[pioneergirl]

Ok, so help me figure out how, on a flat top wood stove, one would bake bread, or muffins, or anything else that needed 'baked'? DH said he would make a metal cover to retain the heat to cook something all around.....thoughts?

 

[xpc]

Ok, so help me figure out how, on a flat top wood stove, one would bake bread, or muffins, or anything else that needed 'baked'? DH said he would make a metal cover to retain the heat to cook something all around.....thoughts?

When we camped and wanted to bake we just piled large rocks or stones around a small fire and let it heat up then put the goodies in it. You had to be in the right place that had the large flat rocks (limestone) that you could stack easily but we often made pizza if we knew we were going to that particular area.

Besides using a large cast iron dutch oven I think an insulated metal box would work well. Use high temp insulation and paint with bbq enamel.