It is possible that Wendi takes this vintage cooking thing too seriously

Back in January, when our old craptastic 1970s stove broke, I threatened to get a vintage stove. At the time, we had no idea what we were going to do to the kitchen other than to get another stove, and I wanted to get a new floor because the tiles were horrendous and never looked (or got) clean.

My house was built in 1911, and the kitchen had only been partially remodeled in all the years since — the original built-in “kitchen dresser” still exists on one wall. My dream was always to make it look like something in Bungalow Kitchens. But kitchen remodels — even period-style — are expensive, and I never thought we would be able to do one.

And then we saw this, and had to buy it:
"Country Charm" stove in our kitchen

Once you have a stove like this, it demands that the rest of the kitchen go with it. And so began the transformation of the kitchen into a modern version of a 1920s kitchen. (We didn’t quite go all the way back to 1911 style. 1920s kitchens have more storage.) It’s not finished yet. Normal people do this sort of thing in a more linear way, I suspect. But it is about 75% finished, and the kitchen is now usable. New Marmoleum floor, new cabinets, new (old) fridge, new big kitchen table to use as prep space and eating space — it is a dream kitchen, if you are a history geek like me.

The lesson, though, is be careful when you are planning to “just replace an appliance and maybe the floor tiles.” It doesn’t always work that way.

(About the stove — it’s not a true vintage stove. It’s a 1970s Country Charm reproduction, supposedly made from late 1800s molds, but with electric burners, a clock and timer, etc. It’s old enough to be vintage in its own way, but not a true antique. It works beautifully, though the oven is a bit small, and I like it. Eventually I might have to replace it with a gas stove, but currently we don’t have gas running to our kitchen.)

Welsh rabbit redux

One more try at the Welsh rabbit. Photo by Wendi.
One more try at the Welsh rabbit. Photo by Wendi.
Months ago, one of the first recipes we tried for this blog was Welsh rabbit (or rarebit), an old-fashioned dish I’d always been curious about but never tried. It did not turn out well. But it seemed clear (to me, at least) that it was a comedy of errors on our part (including the death of our oven in mid-cook, and our failure to deal with it correctly) that probably led to the recipe’s failure, and I vowed to try it again. Now I have a working stove and oven, so the time seemed to be right.

In the comments for the last Welsh rabbit post, reader Lynn wrote:

Do try the rarebit again…it is delicious. I serve it over a bowl of nice bread, cut as for fondue, with steamed broccoli and some nice red bell pepper strips. Quick, pretty inexpensive and really good on a winter night.
Here are my notes: Use a double boiler and cook out the roux first, beat the egg into the beer and thin the roux with this, then melt in the cheese. Foolproof.

We took her advice, using our recipe but her directions. The ingredients were the same, except that we used Buzzsaw Brown Ale instead of Newcastle. We used a metal bowl as a double boiler, and this time the rabbit sauce was dead easy to make and no trouble whatsoever. Lynn was right!

Although we now have a working oven again, I was taking no chances — I just toasted the bread in the toaster this time, playing it safe.

For a side dish, I served a salad with a sweeter balsamic vinaigrette dressing to balance out the salty savoriness of the Welsh rabbit. It worked perfectly.

Kristen wasn’t here that night, and is skeptical that the Welsh rabbit can be good after all, so I’ll be making this again for her to try. The men in the house loved it, though.

The lighting wasn’t great by this time of night (do all the other food bloggers do their cooking in the daytime or something?), but I did get a picture of the finished product:

Welsh rabbit -- in poor lighting

Compare this with the picture here, and it’s obvious this was a much more successful experiment. Thanks, Lynn!

Links to historic cookbooks online

We are bad, bad bloggers. No posts in ages. Well, I didn’t have a working kitchen for ages. But now I do, and I actually have a backlog of things to post.

I’ll start with a quick one. While browsing around today, I stumbled on a Scribd document that contains links to a bunch of historic cookbooks that can be found online. Some of the links in it are broken, but others work fine, and there’s a lot of fun browsing you can do from these links. Enjoy.

Online Historic Cookbooks 3