This Old StoveWhy going vintage is better than modern.
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009, at 11:35 AM ET
The Bushwhacked economy has at least one upside: It has put crazy things that once seemed sane farther out of reach. Once upon a time, like a year ago, many cooks would not even blink at spending $10,000 or more on a stove better suited to a small restaurant than the average heat-and-eat home kitchen. Now that the near-depression and credit drought have taken hold, the gleam is off the stainless steel.
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StumbleUponSo what to buy if you're upgrading your kitchen in tight times? My suggestion is the same as with quality ingredients these days: Look backward.
Like heirloom tomatoes and heritage pork, stoves manufactured in the first years after World War II are superior to the hybrids foisted on today's microwave world. They are not only gorgeous—with sleek lines and gleaming enamel and chrome—they also were built to last. (As I always confess, my Wedgewood is as old as I am but in much better condition.) They cost less than the incredible modern hulks in kitchen showrooms—those all-too-tempting Vikings and Wolfs and BlueStars—and they actually appreciate in value, like any good antique. One similar to mine, which cost $1,199 in 1992, was recently on Craigslist in North Carolina for $9,500.
Those sellers may be dreaming, but these stoves are like the 1950s Pontiacs still rolling around Havana, compared with the Hummers so many cooks purchased. Even if they have not been assiduously maintained from the beginning, vintage stoves are easily restored. Ours was rebuilt inside and out by Antique Stove Heaven in Los Angeles and looked showroom-fresh when we uncrated it back in Manhattan. It's as powerful as a restaurant-style range, with 15,000 British thermal units, but it looks like home to me. (Having gone through restaurant school and cooked in restaurants where the only color is gunmetal gray, I find nothing romantic about industrial appliances.) It's the most elegant workhorse imaginable, with four burners, a griddle, two ovens, and two broilers. And it has charming retro touches, like cooking times and temperatures for '50s foods printed on the inside of the oven doors.
So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you're asking for a crash. Google "I hate my Viking" these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.
Vintage stoves are different. Mine runs solely on gas and is solidly built, with plenty of cast iron and with serious insulation so that it retains heat and cooks splendiferously. It has a built-in clock and timer as well as a shelf that folds out when I need more space while using all four burners. And it is so functional. Unlike vintage refrigerators, which are energy sucks with only enough space to keep milk from spoiling and to freeze a tray of ice, these stoves are totally suited to the way we cook today. When I'm having a dinner party, I can be roasting duck legs in one oven while lemon-curd-and-almond cake bakes at a different temperature in the other. Admittedly, the stove lacks a grill, but I do have a grill pan that heats fast and stays hot on my venerable burners.
Repairs are ridiculously easy, too, if indeed they are ever needed. Early on, I replaced a small part myself while one of the owners of Antique Stove Heaven talked me through it on the phone. Almost every element—grill pans, burner grates, clocks, timers, oven doors—can be bought online and popped in or out.
We had to go all the way across the country to snare our prize 17 years ago, but today vintage stoves have acquired an almost cultlike following. (Even Rachael Ray uses one on her show.) Besides Antique Stove Heaven, Antique Gas Stoves, AntiqueAppliances.com, Dream Stoves, Buckeye Appliance, and others all either sell directly or will steer buyers to vintage stoves. Craigslist often has listings, as does eBay. Word of warning, though: It's best to snag one from the late 1940s or the 1950s. Earlier, and they are too small, with constricted oven space; later than that, the look changes—it's not retro, just dated.
The mystery to me is why we ever veered away from these gorgeous pieces of machinery. Julia Child can be blamed, in part. She famously used one of the first huge Garland restaurant ranges in her home kitchen. (It's in the Smithsonian today, in working condition but not hooked up to gas.) As food became more about trends than about sustenance in this country, the most basic appliance was marketed as one that could send a clear message: Here lives a Wolfgang Puck wannabe. By the early '80s, downsized versions of those stoves were coming onto the market, from Garland and Wolf in particular. Fred Carl started Viking around that time after his wife could not find the range of her dreams. (Ironically, it was a vintage Chambers.) He used to say he would have been happy to sell 1,000 stoves a year. By 2006, he was moving that many every week.
Viking stoves took off so wildly, in fact, that the company opened a cooking school in the same town as its factory, an inn to lodge customers who made the journey to Greenwood, Miss., and a restaurant to feed them, too. According to the Wall Street Journal, that tourism industry has been collapsing. Twenty percent of Viking's factory workers have been laid off, and some have been forced to go back to their sad old jobs in chicken-processing plants.
Maybe it's time to go into the restoration business.
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Do these stove restoration companies do any modernization at all? Older stoves have their charms and advantages but they ain't all skittles and beer. They are usually big and their stove volumes small and heating conventional. Flame broilers can be real fire hazards. Pilot lights burn gas 24/7 and they keep those porcelain tops sorta kinda too hot for comfort. They will have no convection and no rotisserie features.
I dunno. Not many kitchens will accommodate those iron cooking dinosaurs. You can bet that you would not want to stub a toe on one. One the other hand if you're ever in a big quake, tornado or hurricane stay close to one. It will keep you anchored and hold up a collapsed building.
-- Scoot'r-d
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Yes, they do. There are simple easy-to-install kits that convert the pilots. A retrofit isn't that expensive if the stove is in decent shape. Where I live, in order to be hooked up to gas and to fulfill building code requirements, you have to install them, otherwise the stove will be 'tagged out' and the gas connection removed by the gas company.
-- apropos1
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Your oven discussion reminds me of an incident several years ago.
My wife was a top notch baker of pies. She baked great pies for about 20 years. Then we got a new oven. The pies started coming out under-cooked. She said "I'm doing it all the same. The pie cooks from the bottom up. I know the whole pie is done when the top gets brown." I investigated and saw that a new feature, the top element (browning element?), was always on. Thus the top of the pie was getting brown quickly while the rest of the pie has not had enough time to cook from the bottom up. We tried baking the pies by the clock, but when the whole pie finally cooked, the top was burned black. There was no mode on the oven where the top element was not active. I called the manufacturer and asked how to disable the top element. They said I would void the warrantee if I disabled anything. I asked if I could send it back, but they said if it is malfunctioning or defective due to materials or workmanship they would replace it. But of course it was working as it was designed to. We were told that all modern ovens have the browning element. She never baked pies again.
The moral of the story is make sure the oven operates exactly like you want it to before you buy it. If you have come to depend on some feature of an old oven make sure the new one has it. Or-- Just stick with old ovens.
-- Mike Salisbury
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