Country Lore: Readers’ Wood Cookstove Favorites

From Junkyard Gem to the Stanley

I’ve been cooking on a wood cookstove for close to 30 years — mostly the same stove, made in 1909, that I bought for $25 at a junkyard in Colorado.

I roasted my first Thanksgiving turkey in that stove, and over the years it has turned out many more birds, loaves of bread, pies, pans of biscuits, etc. — not always to perfection, but everything that came out of that oven seemed to taste extraordinarily good.

I brought it with me when we moved to Oregon, and we installed it in the house we started building in 1980, and finally replaced it when, late last winter, my husband got my (reluctant) consent to buy a new stove — a Waterford Stanley. I loved my old stove and was so used to its ways, but once we fired up the Stanley, I never looked back.

The Stanley can be installed closer to wall surfaces and gives us more floor space than the old stove did.

  • Published on Mar 14, 2011
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