Corning "Counter That Cooks" in VA

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I had seen a more TOL verison of this in NYC where electric cooking is an anomaly.

It had a plastic (or was it glass?) see-thru control panel with a back-lit control knob indicator that spun around so that the number of the heat setting selected was always at the top in the neon-lit area.

At the time, pyrolytic self-cleaning was a fabulous "un-heard" of feature. [Remember, gas self-cleaning came WAY later.]

Cooking took place only in Corning brand sqaure pots which were ridcuulously slow to heat as stated above. Pasta for this Italian-American family was in a "standard" 5 qt/5L metal pot that had to be held down to keep the bottom flat and in contact wiht the hot surface, or the vessel would be slow to heat and revolve on its own.

Memories!
 
A Warning.......

Just found out this morning that my neighbor had a kitchen fire last night(I was home and heard absolutely nothing). Seems she was cooking french fries on the smoothtop, and turned the burner off and went into the living room to enjoy her dinner and TV. After a few minutes, she heard some crackling and the pan was on fire. It burned the backsplash of her stove, as well as the range hood. Scorched her cabinets. And when her husband lifted the burning pan to the sink, it caught her kitchen curtains on fire.

What a mess. I viewed the damage just a while ago.

Guess you have to realize that the smoothtop continues to heat even after you turn the control to OFF. The burners take longer to heat, and take a while to cool down.

Guess she won't be making french fries via stovetop anytime in the near future.
 
Self-imposed rule of safety, especially for new-to-electic gas converts like me. IMHO, there should be nothing on the stove unless it is actually coking. Period. Full-stop.

Maybe one of these (in the link) would help the frying-challenged. Methinks your neighbor needs a thermostatically controlled, deep fryer, frying pan or at least this electric DW-safe pot.

I guess she did not realize that if oil is smoking, it is too hot, and approaching the flash-point of self-ignition.

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/... DINING&cm_pla=KITCHEN ELECTRICS&cm_ite=K6412
 
QUOTE:"At the time, pyrolytic self-cleaning was a fabulous "un-heard" of feature."

Huh? Didn't self cleaning predate this range by about 10 years? I'd have to go check my Consumer Reports, but it wasn't that long after electric self-cleaning that the gas version appeared.

veg
 
Careful dear your slip is showing...

"un-heard" of feature.

Yes actually GAS self-clean at the time I saw this range was still quite rare in the homes in that area. So seeng one, especially electric, was a treat for me, then.
 
According to my appliance "collage", there is a GE range pictured on there from 1964 and thats when gen first invented it..
 
Looking through my stuff the first i see was in the mid-late 1970s and it was a Caloric... But not 100% sure
 
Careful dear your slip is showing...

Well then, if self cleaning had been around for 10 years already, how does is qualify as "a fabulous "un-heard" of feature"?

Hey--at least my slip is clean and paid for!

veg
 
frying

If the good Lord meant for us to fry at home he would have given us fireproof skin. Frying scares me, and has scared me ever since I burned my arm in a restaurant accident in the 8th grade. It was my sorry lot in life to have to dump the fryer oil every Friday afternoon, and a big spash of it hit my bare arm (yes, I should have been wearing long sleeves). It hurt like hell, but I couldn't put the big thing of oil down until it was all dumped. It's only been in the last 10 years that the scar finally went away.

I can handle skillet fried chicken, but no immersible frying for me :-)
 
For smoothtop cooking, magnetic induction is awesome!! It's making a slow comeback, manufacturers need to promote it a little better and find a way to get it into a free-standing range to nab some of that market share as well.

I've seen broken and cracked glass tops, small grease fires - even my mother has a few browned pot-holders and kitchen towels from not realizing the burner/cooking surface is still hot and dropping them on the stove.
 
One of my cousins had the built in version of the Corning Smoothtop. She absolutely hated it. An excellent cook, who was equally adept at cooking with either gas or electricity, she couldn't wait to get rid of it. (The ironic part is that she was the one who chose it when she and her husband built their house!)

Mike
 
Fry Daddy!

Part two of my phobia against frying came in college. I worked at the University cable TV station. Tuesday night was "hospital night" where we showed a variety of programs glorifying the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics (billed as either "Iowa's Tertiary Healthcare Center!", or "The largest teaching hospital in the free world!" I assume that last slogan has changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It remains one huge, and very excellent, hospital though)

Anyway, one of the regular features was about some unfortunate toddler from Storm Lake who pulled a fully-loaded fry daddy onto herself by the cord and had suffered horrendous burns. She was transported by helicopter to Iowa City and presumably made a full recovery, but that was little consolation to me as I petulantly rubbed my hot-oil scar.

I know this has very little to do with the whole Corning cook top, but the whole Fry Daddy reference opened up a whole new can of worms ;-)
 
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