Stirring Up History Over a Crackling Fire

When I think of cooking over a fire, I think marshmallows. When Sally Waltz thinks of cooking over a fire, she thinks corn pie, apple butter, biscuits and candied sweet potatoes.

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She wasn't always like that. She grew up in Sabillasville, not far from Camp David, in a house with a typical 20th-century American kitchen. But when she married John Waltz and moved to the Smithsburg, Md., farm that has been in his family since 1774, she became the owner of a cooking house.

The gently worn wooden building had been used for cooking, butchering and laundering by the farm's first generation of Waltzes. When John and Sally took over 39 years ago, the building had long been used for storage. It took them two years to clean it out and ready it for cooking again.

Like many cooking houses of its time, it was built far enough from the main house that an accidental fire would be self-contained. "They often burned down, were cleaned up and rebuilt," Waltz says.

But hers has stood on the same spot on the Waltz Farm on Waltz Road for more than 200 years. And when you step up on the big slate stone and through the old wooden door, you walk into another century.

The focal point of the small building -- probably no more than 15 by 25 feet -- is the hearth, six feet wide and tall enough for most adults to walk into. On either side are movable cranes from which pots can be hung over the fire. Waltz says they probably held both boiling laundry and boiling meats in their early days.

Around the hearth are cooking implements, both originals and reproductions: copper pots, iron skillets, and large and small reflector ovens, also called tin kitchens. The large ones are lightweight boxes with reflective interiors that cook meat while it turns on a spit. Smaller tin kitchens have a cover and a shelf for cooking pies.

A piece of heavy wire with a coil at the end is the chicken catcher. Farm women took it to the henhouse, where they snared a chicken; then they wrung its neck, dressed the bird and served it for dinner.

Waltz has a collection of cast-iron spiders -- frying pans with legs -- in different sizes. She uses them for candied sweet potatoes or fried apples. A hanging cast-iron griddle is used to make biscuits. She has an apple roaster that looks like a shallow trough sitting on its side in which she cooks whole, cored apples filled with cinnamon and sugar.

When she finally got the cooking house in working order, Waltz wanted to know what had happened there 200 years ago, so she took classes at the Landis Valley Museum in Lancaster, Pa. The "living history village and farm" reflects rural Pennsylvania's German community from 1740 to 1940, a community that included the Waltz family.

Now Waltz, 64, does cooking reenactments at various sites, including the nearby Washington County Rural Heritage Museum in Boonsboro, an agricultural museum depicting early rural life in the area.

She dresses in period costume and uses her implements, pots, pans and a lot of what is called redware, clay pottery made in Pennsylvania since the 18th century. A casserole dish called gumbis, for example, is steamed in a redware gumbis pot. Waltz makes it with layers of cabbage, onions, apples and pork.

In open-hearth cooking, the protein usually goes on first. So at a recent demonstration in Middletown, Waltz started with a chicken. It hung from a twisted string that turned, roasting the chicken on all sides -- the first rotisserie, she says. Fowl in the 17th century often was cooked with the head and feet on. Waltz's modern audience was spared.

Waltz put an apple pie in a reflector oven and set a gumbis pot to steam at the fire's edge.

She "preheated" her bake oven (a large skillet with a top) because it was cold, and sudden high heat could expand and crack the cast iron. After it warmed, she set it on hot coals, put in her corn pie, replaced the lid and placed more hot coals on top.

Though it might look quaint to contemporary eyes, this kind of cooking was backbreaking, dangerous work for women. Waltz does not cook regularly in her cooking house. She does, however, enjoy it when she uses it.

"Because you can't get away from a farm," Waltz says, "this has been our getaway." Instead of giving traditional gifts for special occasions, the Waltzes give friends dinner in the cooking house. John builds and tends the fire, Sally cooks the food in the hearth, they light all the candles and they spend the evening as they might have 200 years ago.

The Waltzes' son also lives on the farm with his wife and three children, and he will take it over from his parents. This Thanksgiving they all will be in the cooking house, as they are every year.

The holiday starts on Waltz Farm with breakfast: a hunter's stew of pork, beef, sausage and sauerkraut, served with pancakes and hominy. Thus fortified, Sally Waltz stuffs her turkey with carrots, celery and onions and puts it on the spit in her large reflector oven.

A copper kettle sits on an iron stand in the coals, and everyone takes turns stirring apple butter with a long wooden paddle. For dessert there are apple and pumpkin pies baked in reflector ovens.

The family members are joined in the cooking house by their ancestors. An old jelly cupboard, draped with a quilt and filled with jars and pottery, holds a bottle with a leather nipple that John's grandfather fashioned to feed lambs. A wicker basket his grandfather used for carrying corn from the field has a shoulder print stained on the bottom.

"Everything in here is about meaning and memories," Sally Waltz says.

Bonny Wolf is the host of NPR's "Kitchen Window" podcast. She can be reached atfood@washpost.com. Her column appears monthly.