I paid a visit to London's Fanshawe Pioneer Village this week. It was a drizzly Wednesday afternoon, and I was waiting for a package from work before I could finish the project I've been doing. There was nothing to do. Why not a wander through a nineteenth century village?
Poking through the authentic kitchens is the most fun. If you were reasonably well-off, you had a winter kitchen and a summer kitchen. The idea was that in the winter, the heat from the stove would get trapped in the house and keep everyone's toes warm (relatively, at least). In the summer, you dragged the stove out to a room on the back of the house from which the heat could more easily escape.
Many of us are still doing something similar today. I know my family has always forsaken the stove as soon as the summer heat hits, favouring instead the barbeque or a cold supper of crusty bread, cured meats, salads and devilled eggs. In the winter, it's back to hot stews and baked pastas and casseroles. And I'm probably not the only shivering apartment-dweller to have hovered over a stovetop hoping to thaw my fingers while the chicken roasts.
Autumn, I think, is the perfect season. If you want to slap a steak on the barbeque, no one will call you crazy. But a piping hot roast is equally fair game.
It's 34 degrees today. And now I want some stew.
