Magic Chef

Fifteen years ago, when we first showed our newly acquired antique cook stove to a friend in the construction business who is also a gourmet cook, his jaw dropped. “Whoah,” he said.  “I can’t say anything about this appliance until my erection subsides. Where did you find this thing?”

A 1930’s Magic Chef gas range with four burners, storage drawers, and a small oven, it is covered in pristine white enamel. Instead of horizontal handles to open the oven and the burner below it, we tug hanging vertical grips. The stove is a work of art, even if it weighs a gajillion pounds and was hell to lug up the two back stairs and into the cabin kitchen.

When the cook stove arrived, our “kitchen” here consisted of a white sink and very occasional running water. Wine crate shelves once nailed to the walls were still stacked in a corner when our gently used cabinets arrived. The same friend who first admired the stove had rescued them for us from a remodel project. Above the Magic Chef, the husband and two of our then teenaged sons installed a shelf and spice cupboard.  They list heavily to starboard. I straighten them now and then by tilting my head just a tad.

Through years of zero extra time or money, the stove sat cold, uninstalled. We percolated coffee or boiled spaghetti on a tiny camp stove perched on its top. Redemption came one day in the form of a Fairplay plumber who confidently ran propane to the originally natural gas burners. A trick he taught me:  to turn on the sluggish front ring after the pilot is lit, just give it plenty of propane and blow a good, strong, birthday-candle breath over the top to help with ignition. Only bits of stray bangs and the very top of an eyebrow have been sacrificed over the years using this technique.

One Thanksgiving, we filled the cabin with young folks and set about heating side dishes and warming pies, coaxing extra heat from the fickle oven. More than once, with a small “boom,” flames erupted ever so briefly from the Magic Chef’s torso. These weren’t explosions, exactly, but they were big enough to leave black smudges on the cabinet next to the stove. Now that the husband is the only one brave enough to run the oven, he likes to warm up the house on winter visits by baking enchiladas or banana bread in the ninety-year-old, leaky heat cave.  This November, we will once again, with courage, heat savory and sweets, proteins and greens, in the Magic Chef. We will throw a tablecloth over pine planks long ago nailed to a set of alley-found white table legs.  Before the husband and I reach our own tenth decades, surely, we will have a more predictable, less magical stove here.

Turns out we can both wait at least one more season.