December 3, 2018 @goldenoakfarm

On Sunday we went out early in the rain and got this puzzle table and a couple boxes of family photo albums from my mother-in-law’s things. I got the pieces moved and sorted by color/type.

Because writing is easiest to find, I’d been able to put the 12 lyrics together as I sorted. I also left the green edge pieces in place.

After lunch I made myself a cup of my favorite Christmas tea and was preparing to start on the puzzle when one of my helper friends stopped by to pick up her milk. Her toddler was napping in the car, so we were able to visit for a while.

I again set to the puzzle and my sister called. She’d gotten her Advent package and wanted to open the first 2 with me. Then we talked a long time while I tried to get the edge of the puzzle together.

We found this cast iron door at a barn sale this fall and thought it would make a good insert in the planned masonry heater. I got curious about it and this is what I found:

“This picture of an 1877 patent Canadian farmers' cook stove is included here as another illustration of the way in which makers of stoves for the North American rural market in the late nineteenth century understood that some of their potential customers would appreciate getting a little bit of art thrown in when they bought their everyday appliances.

These stoves were a portable furnace with a cauldron on top for heating large quantities of water or other liquids, quickly and efficiently -- to improve the nutritional quality of cattle food, to provide the large quantities of boiling water required for slaughtering and curing meat, particularly hogs.”

So this was a stove a farmer would have in an outbuilding and use for farmstead applications. Cooking feedstock for livestock was popular in the mid 1800’s.

The reasoning:
“It is undeniable that stewing or boiling many things that would otherwise have been waste products from farming, as well as the usual food grains, could turn them into palatable, more digestible animal feed. But early nineteenth-century American farmers, even -- perhaps especially? -- the more progressive and "scientific," believed there was more to it than that. As the New England Farmer explained in 1822, this was "Among the most useful improvements of modern husbandry."

"A great advantage, which results from preparing food for cattle by steaming or boiling is obtained by its converting water into solid feed. [W]ater is capable of affording a great deal of nutriment either in a liquid or solid form."

While water is a needed nutritional element, it does not carry much other in the way of nutrition, for all its weight. For mammals, cooking waste foodstuffs may have made them more palatable but probably lost a lot of vitamins to the heat.

For chickens, which feed to a certain weight in their crops then stop eating, it would mean they most certainly were not getting the nutrition they needed.

I had no idea the door was so old! There is some damage: a crack on the lower left, and a broken hinge on the back, along with a missing edge on the lower right. But the facing side is in really good condition. We plan to frame it to install it so most of these things won’t show.

Sources:
http://stovehistory.blogspot.com/2014/01/jordan-motts-great-hog-boiling-success.html

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