The kitchen, the heart of the home, part 1

The kichen is one of our most important places in our little house. Here do we cook our food, bake our daily bread, preserve food for the winter months and heat water for bathing. All through the history the kitchen has been an important place. Long ago this was the place where it was warm all day round and where you would have light from the open fire. In the 19thcentury this changed when the more economic woodstove made his entrance. The smoking open fire became past time, although in some houses it stayed in use until 1930´s.

I´m not certain when our home got it´s first woodstove but you can see that the timber above the stove has been burned and I suppose that they had an open fireplace back in the 1850´s when the house was build. When we moved into the house, a large ¨Skillingaryd¨ stove was build in but unfortunaly it was damaged and could not be repaired. Without the stove the kitchen was useless so we did buy another stove. A Näfvekvarn 19 B, I think it was build in the early 20th Century and it was renovated before we bought it. I´m very happy with this woodstove. Most of the early Swedish woodstoves have very little fireplaces, you almost need to split your firewood into safty matches formate. But this stove has fortunately a large fireplace. I cook on it, bake bread or cookies but also cake goes fine, even when I have to turn the cake  after half the time, it never collapse. I know a lot of people where that happened despite the have a modern oven.

This time I made some picture how we clean the inside of our stove, we need to do deed every other week or so, it´s important to clear out all the soot. If I don´t do that, I can´t  regulate the oven tempature that well, and the stove smokes when I lay new wood on the fire. I also blacken the stove  this time, I often forget to do that but now he is black and shiny again.

 On the picure above, you see the right cook plate, this plate is provided with extra iron on the underside, this makes that the plate stays  longer hot. A lot of soot is collected here.

 Also above the oven you´ll find a lot of soot and ashes. These scratch we beside the oven where it falls down...

 Last we clean in the sootvalve. Behind this little valve all soot and ashes are collected now and we can scratch is out and put it away.

 Brush the blacken on top and polish it out

And black and shiny after all work!