Until about 1832 no attempt was made to heat our houses with any other fuel than wood. In nearly every room there was a fireplace, that in the living room in some houses supplemented by a Franklin or Pierpont stove, which stood on the outer verge of the hearth, and with flaring sides, threw all the heat into the room without the loss of any by escape into the chimney. When coal was introduced, perhaps a grate was set in the living room, and into some of the chambers a spitfire stove, and finally as the last step in methods of heating, came the furnace. Fires in chambers were in my day far from being universal. I do not think that at home I ever slept in a heated chamber, except when sick, until I was sixteen years of age. How well I remember lying in bed looking at the peacocks and other figures on the chintz curtain of my four post bedstead, dreading to get up and wash my face and hands with water frozen in the pitcher. Warming pans, now obsolete, were invaluable in those days. In making fires in the different fireplaces, instead of using shavings or newspapers and matches, a fire pan, a very important article in every house, was used to carry a brand, or a parcel of coals from the kitchen fire, which placed under the wood, with the aid of a bellows soon kindled into a cheerful blaze. The fire pan made of iron, had a wooden handle, a cover punched with holes, and its under side sloped up in front. The kitchen fire, like the chanukkah light of the Jews, which was intended to be perpetual, was supposed to never go out, and being covered up at night, was rekindled in the morning. If a neighbor lost his fire he would come to our house with a fire pan and borrow a brand. In connection with fires the foot stove must be mentioned, an article indispensable in those times when houses were insufficiently heated. It was also an indispensable article in the meeting house, where the heat from a box stove, with a long funnel running overhead the full length of the house, was supplemented by the foot stoves in the pews to a degree, which alone made the atmosphere tolerable. I recall the relief from the Sabbath imprisonment at home in those days, when it seemed to me,
“That congregations ne’er break up,
And Sabbaths never end.”
when I was permitted to go to the meeting house with the foot stove and place it in the pew. The use of the foot stove in church was almost as ancient as the New England meeting house itself. On the fourth of March, 1744, it was voted by the town “that each person leaving his or her stove in any of the meeting houses in said town, after the people are all gone out (but the sexton) shall forfeit and pay the sum of five shillings to be improved as the law directs; and the stove so left to be forfeited to the sexton finding the same, and the sexton of each meeting house in the town is required carefully to inspect the pews and seats in each meeting house he or they have the care of, and to take into his possession all such stoves as may be so left in either or any of said meeting houses, and them keep in his possession until the owners thereof pay him the value of said stove or stoves so taken; and also each sexton is required and impowered to prosecute each person leaving his or her stove as aforesaid, and to recover the penalty set on such offender by this act.”
The kitchen in our house was almost a baronial hall, nearly thirty feet long, with an open fireplace wide enough to take a four foot stick for a forestick, and deep enough to take an iron back log six inches square, bearing up a back stick with sticks between making a roaring fire capable of performing the multiplicity of duties assigned to it. On the left side was a fire hole by which a wash boiler set in brick in the sink room was heated. Over the fire was a long iron crane with its pot hooks and tramells from which a teakettle always hung, never permitting any usurpation of its place by pots and kettles of less royal station. By its side hung the boiling kettle from whose recesses came at times those wonders of culinery art, the hard boiled puddings tied in a bag, of which the present generation knows nothing, and with which nothing has ever been seen since to furnish any comparison. They were the hard boiled rice, plum rice, apple, Indian, Indian suet, batter, bread and huckleberry, sure proofs to all who remember them that the world has retrograded. The hasty pudding was exempted from confinement in a bag, a pudding older than New England, and a favorite food of the Indians. Joel Barlow described its preparation in the following lines:
“She learnt with stones to crack the well dried maize,
Thro’ the rough sieve to shake the golden shower,
In boiling water stir the yellow flour;
The yellow flour bestrewed and stirred with haste,
Swells in the flood, and thickens to a paste,