Introducing cast-iron cooking

My wife was out of town for several days recently, and I am still recovering from having to do all the housework—vacuuming, dusting, making the bed, and worst of all, cooking. My plan to rely on our fancy microwave oven to heat up simple meals was thwarted by technology. A jet cockpit has fewer dials, instructions, and flashing lights.

But at least I did not have to prepare meals over an open fire, which was a daily routine for generations of Arkansas women.

Imagine cooking three meals daily in an open kitchen fireplace. While the wood-burning cook stove was common by 1855 in northern urban areas, it did not make its way into rural Arkansas until after the Civil War. An exception was the massive iron cook stove found at Lakeport Plantation near Lake Village.

Blake Wintory, the historian in charge of Lakeport Plantation, believes the stove was installed when the house was built in 1859-60. I do not know of an earlier surviving castiron cook stove in Arkansas history, although it’s possible since cook stoves were advertised in the first issue of the Arkansas Gazette in 1819.

The Lakeport kitchen is not detached, but is located on an ell porch. Most antebellum kitchens were in a separate building out back due to the excessive heat they produced and to protect the home in case of a kitchen fire. A well-known example of an extant detached kitchen is at the Stagecoach House (also known as the McHenry House) in southwestern Little Rock.

Wayman Hogue, who grew up in rural Faulkner County in the late 1800s, recalled that he was 10 years old before even hearing about a cook stove. “We did all our cooking on the kitchen fireplace,” Hogue recalled in his memoir Back Yonder (1932). He continued, “This necessitated fire in the kitchen every day in the year. … My mother would rake out some coals, and put over them a threelegged skillet in which she placed biscuits. She then put a lid over the skillet and heaped coals on the lid.” The results, Hogue wistfully recalled, were “wonderful biscuits; I have never eaten any since as good.”

John Quincy

Wolf, who was born near Calico

Rock during the Civil

War, recalled late in his life that food was scarce after his father died when young John was only 6: “I remember watching mother prepare our meals: she would bake three corn dodgers [similar to cornbread muffins] in a skillet over a shovelful of live coals on the hearth [and] would put a lid on the skillet and live coals on the lid to equalize the heat so that the bread would cook uniformly. With the corn dodgers we had sweet milk [meaning not buttermilk] to drink— and that was our fare—not very elaborate but wholesome enough, and we lived on it the entire winter of 1871-72.”

Cornelia Dickson, writing from her home in rural Ouachita County in southern Arkansas in March 1872, complained of the drudgery of laboring over the fireplace: “I have not had a leisure hour until now, for this cooking business exhausts me entirely.” Happily, she reported that her half-brother George, whose family she lived with, had ordered a stove. Six weeks later, Miss Dickson reported, “We have a stove at last.”

Cornelia’s new stove bore the brand name of Philanthropist, and was obtained from a New Orleans merchant. The stove was important to Cornelia, for she could name the brand of stoves in use throughout her community. “Clara [her sister] has the Olive Branch; Mrs. Alston a Charter Oak; Mrs. Annie Stone, Pacific; Mrs. Moseley a Buck’s Brilliant.”

These wood-burning cook stoves were large, impressive contraptions. The 1871 Little Rock city directory carried a full-page advertisement noting “the great excitement over the wonderful success of Buck’s Brilliant cooking stoves!” The ad contained a drawing of the stove, standing waist high and loaded down with five large pots. In the flamboyant decorative style of the times, the stove bore numerous flourishes, including a large bas relief of a stag’s head.

As the century wore on, the stoves grew larger in size with many models having warming compartments, and some models had built-in basins for warming water.

While cook stoves were considerable improvements over hearth cooking, they could be finicky. They did not have thermostats, so excessive heat required opening oven doors temporarily. Cooks soon learned that the top of the stove was not evenly heated, so pots had to be moved about to reach the desired temperature. As one historian has written, “Cook stoves were notoriously eccentric. A good cook learned their vagaries and adapted.”

While cook stoves might have made a belated arrival in rural Arkansas, this does not mean the state did not have a cook stove pioneer of its own. Historian Margaret Smith Ross published an article in 1956 that included a tantalizing tidbit of information: “Henry Jackson, [a] free Negro, operated a confectionery earlier [than Nathan Warren], but he invented a cooking stove which proved to be profitable, and he moved to Evansville, Indiana, where the stove was manufactured.” This tidbit of information fascinated me, and I eagerly set about tracking down Henry Jackson and his stove, but to no avail though I’m still looking.

A number of museums in Arkansas demonstrate historic cooking, and some have detached kitchens on their grounds, among them Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock, the Latta House at Prairie Grove Civil War Battlefield Park, Historic Washington State Park, and probably many more.

Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.