Wood Stove Cooking

Dear Diary,

I took a wood stove cooking class yesterday and it was so much fun!  It was held at the Remick Farm in Tamworth, NH, where I watched the ice harvest a few weeks ago.  A wonderful place to experience history hands on.

I have a wood stove and have cooked on it but yesterday I learned a lot of the ins and outs of the process that my great grandmother knew so well.  It was a constant chore of cooking and tending the fire in the winter months.  The summer must have been brutal!  No wonder all the cooking was done in the very early morning in the warm months!  Homes in the North didn't have "summer kitchens" as they did down South.   

We made a soda bread and little hand pies.  I guess you would also call them turnovers.  I remember these growing up.  Sometimes they would be little meat pies but we made blueberry ones.  Then we sat down for a lovely lunch of farm raised turkey soup, our breads and pies.  Perfect for a cold New England day.

They offer an open hearth cooking experience in the fall and I will certainly go to that to see how my 18th century family lived  I am really enjoying this ancestral experience to accompany my genealogical research.  It breathes life into all these people.