New addition to the family: Westinghouse Commodore

[norgeway]

One Secret...

To that Frigidaire, and most Westinghouses, is the seal around the door! It makes a big difference, that Frigidaire is beautiful!!

 

[kevin313]

Hans,
That Norge is a work of art!

 

[mixfinder]

Griddled in the Middle

Hans, my grandma had a Kenmore double oven range with a griddle in the middle that she got in 1955.  The two ranges look so much alike I wonder if Norge made the 40 ranges for Kenmore at that time.  Do you miss not having it in the kitchen?  I often wonder how you decide which one you like and which one to use when you have so many.

I am blessed to have the NIB Whirlpool convection Microwave which Greg gave me this spring.  I use it daily and it's 1000 watts make short work of microwaving, the convection oven is capacious holding a 9X13 and bigger and has plenty of height to accomodate a tube pan which convection/mix makes short work of.  Its nice to have a second timer so I can time both ovens on the Frigadaire and not have to guess or remember.  Oh my God are we not the luckiest men on earth!

 

[arbilab]

Well it couldn't very well be copyrighted 1952 in 1949, gotta run with that. I'm also not reckoning with variations between models of the same year, the Lucy one is the only one I know.

 

[peteski50]

Ranges!

Kevin,
Thanks for posting - that is a beautiful range. You have inspired me to start a new range thread. I would like to see the 1972 crown.
Thanks,
Peter

 

[kevin313]

Peter,
Here's a photo of the Crown (sorry it's a little blurry):

 

[peteski50]

Crown!

Kevin
Thanks for posting the one we had from 1974 had the broiler above also coutinous cleaning.

 

[rp2813]

My mom loved to bake, and her '49 Westy turned things out flawlessly.

 

Attached is a picture of it in its new home at Greg's in Sparta, GA.  From the looks of things, there's something simmering in the deep well pot.

 

[tomturbomatic]

That is the 1949 WH range that neighbors across the street had and when I baby sat for them, I loved to watch the elements heat up on High and then watch the outer ring cool on Medium High. Am I remembering that right? It was the very early 60s when I did that. I still have one Westinghouse range with those elements. They are not speedy, but are still faster than gas. I found one like it, but with double ovens, in the basement at an estate sale, but it was not priced and the people running the sale acted like horses asses when I asked if I could buy it.

 

[abcomatic]

Kevin

HI Kevin, thanks for all of those yummy dishes you make. Have you ever cooked on a coal burning cookstove before? I had a Copper Clad until last year and used it in the winter time. Sure did keep the kitchen warm. I have a 1935 gas Detroit Jewel now in its place and it does a great job.
You know anything about Detroit Jewel? Happy baking. Gary

 

[kevin313]

Gary...

I have never cooked on a coal or wood burning stove before. I'm sure it must be a trick to figure out how to regulate the tempuratures, but people figured it out somehow.

I don't know much about Detroit Jewel but I saw a lot of them growing up and there are still quite a few here in the area. Believe it or not, before becomming the automotive capital of the world, Detroit was actually the stove capital in the late 1800's and early 1900's. There were more than a dozen stove manufacturers here in Detroit, and Detroit Jewel was a product of one of them (it might have been Michigan Stove Works). Sounds like yours is still going strong!!

 

[xraytech]

here is my 40" General Electric with P*7, I'm not sure of its age but I'm guessing between 66-68.

I found it for $30 and had to have it as this is the range my grandma Mary had for 34 years before it got replaced by a 67 Frigidaire

View attachment xraytech++7-20-2011-20-49-28.jpg

 

[henry200]

Kevin...

There's a knack to cooking with coal or wood but once you get the hang of it, it makes perfect sense and is quite nice.  Temperature control is largely a matter of proximity to the firebox and taking advantage of direct or indirect heat.  My grandmother switched to an electric stove when the farm was connected to power in the 40's, but she kept the wood cookstove for backup.  That's what my mother learned to cook on, and heat the irons on come laundry day!

 

There's also the principle of stored heat in heavy cast iron stoves.  I have friends in the UK who lived for a time in an 18th century row house which was heated by burning coal in the fireplace in each room.  They had a modern gas stove in the kitchen but used a coal-fired Rayburn cooker in the winter which doubled as the heat source on that level of the house.  After burning a hot fire in it for a couple hours, enough heat was stored in the heavy castings to do most of the cooking for the day.  The left side of the top (right over the fire chamber) was for boiling and the right side for simmering, and there were two ovens...one hot and another for slow-cooking or warming.    They made the most wonderful oatmeal (porridge!) I had ever tasted.  Before bed the pot of oats with milk and butter were put in the "slow" oven and in the morning it had turned into the most heavenly, creamy concoction imaginable!  Roasts cooked in the "hot" oven were falling-off-the-bone tender, with a crust like it had been cooked on a barbeque grill.

 

If I had about $15,000 burning a hole in my pocket I would get a modern gas-powered Aga so I could cook like that.  NOT in the summer though.  That constant heat in the room would be unbearable!

 

 

[abcomatic]

Cooking with coal

Yes guys there is a knack with cooking with coal. My Copper Clad had a sandwich of copper between the layers of cast iron for even heat distribution. Two lids were over the firebox and the other two farther away from the fire, there was also a flat gridle type of cooking space too. You regulate from full boil to simmer by how close to the fire you have your pans etc.
The oven was not vented so you couldn't really tell if anything was buring in there until you opened the door.

I can type more later if any of you would like to know how to start a fire in one of those stoves and keep it going?

I will say this, most movies and TV programs that are set in the 19th. early 20th centurys have it all wrong. How many times do you see the cookstove placed right
against a wall? If there is a combustible wall that it is next to, a big fire and no more house! Against a brick chimney would be ok.
I had mine 2 feet from the wall and the stove pipe went up and over to the left to the chimmney. I loved going outside in the winter to see the chimney, 3 stories up, belching out black smoke. Have fun. Gary

 

[norgeway]

Kenmore ranges...

As far as I know a subsiduary of Roper Co made all the Kenmore ranges, the griddle on the Norge is very similar, it has big flat prongs and plugs in just like an oven element.

 

[combo52]

ELECTRIC RANGES

Thanks for all the good insight and cooking tips Hans, Kelly, and Kevin about using your electric ranges. I have found over the years that my customers that have been around awhile and are good cooks and have had both gas and electric ranges almost always come down on the side of cooking Electrically. The only real exception are the folks that have no mechanical sense of how things work, but these same people are usually not great bakers.

 

I consider the invention of the modern electric range to be one of the top 100 inventions of the last 100 years. It seems that almost everyday I am using a customers range to boil water to speed defrost broken refrigerators and the electric ones are just faster and they don't make the kitchen hot and smelly. I had to do one on Wednesday, two gas burners blazing trying to boil water in a condo kitchen with the A/C off and no effective exhaust fan. It was HOT but when you are getting paid good money you can put up with things that I would never do in my home.

 

I never fail to enjoy cooking on the 11 different burners in my kitchen and if you count the interchangeable cartridges for my Jenn-Air cook-top I have more than 20 different type burners to chose from european cast iron to induction but its hard to beat the sealed rod Calrod type elements. But no matter how you cut it we are a bunch of lucky guys and girls.

 

 

 

[norgeway]

I agree..

Although I do like a gas oven, I dont want one in summer, and I never want to fool with the top burners again!

 

[norgeway]

Wood Stove...

When I was a kid, we would go visit cousins in Catawba NC, they had a big old Home Comfort in their kitchen, it always amazed me that Lil could bake a much better cake in that thing than she ever could in her electric stove, in fact, she never baked a cake in the electric as far as I know, that gauge would never vary, and once in a while she would lift a lid and add wood!

 

[maytagbear]

Uh

 

I happen to be a good-to-very-good cook, and I have used both gas and electric ranges.  I am also a very good baker.  I have posted more than a few of my recipes here......

 

My experience is that great food can come from gas ranges as well as electric ones.

 

 

I have a gay male friend, who when he had some of the cookies from the first batch of cookies I baked in my new Whirlpool gas range's oven said, and this IS an exact quote; "I love your new oven."  This man has eaten a lot of my baking over the four years I have known him.  He is also a good cook himself.

 

 

I will, and do stipulate that gas cooktop cooking does release more heat into the area, but electric cooking (except, of course, for microwaving) also releases heat into the area.  Less, perhaps, but still some.

 

 

As for cleaning.......yes, a gas cooktop can be a challenge to clean.  As can a coil top electric.  Smooth tops?  I have used them, and to keep them looking good, one needs to be almost obsessive about cleaning.

 

 

Let's please have some balance.

 

 

The first two ranges I ever cooked on were gas.  My parents, excellent cooks, cooked very good meals with gas.  I cooked on electrics from 1996 to 2011. <span style="text-decoration: underline;"> I think I have sufficient experience with both.</span>  The two worst I have ever used were a pushbutton GE, and the electric 80s Tappan in this apartment.  Admittedly, they were both heavily used apartment ranges when I got to them.

 

 

Lawrence/Maytagbear

 

(edited for clarity)

[this post was last edited: 7/23/2011-01:48]

 

[rp2813]

1949 Westinghouse

Tom, you are remembering correctly.  The outer coil stops glowing when switched to Med-Hi.  Everything stops glowing when set to Med or lower.  Even during that range's last days in this house before it got shipped off to Greg, I'd have races with the two small Corox elements to see which one got to full blown red glowing coils the fastest.   I knew the outcome, because I put the fastest and strongest appearing burner at right front, which was the most often used unless a bigger pot or pan required using the 8" burner.

 

The deep well coil (the curly open type inside a clay plate) had issues for a long time, but still worked.  Greg managed to get a guy out to fix it and advised that it can now boil water almost as fast as the Corox burners do.

 

Ralph