WOKKING: The Summer Kitchen

One thing my side garden is good for is use as a summer kitchen. We know our old house has seen a lot of hot and humid summers. It was built about 1922 by the same family that lived in it until about 2000.

It's really easy to imagine the hot-weather measures taken in the past in this house because just across the river in Pennsylvania my own family did the same things years ago. Before A/C there were noisy fans--(unless an electric storm wiped out the power) and there were the other fans-- held in the hand and wafted back and forth to evaporate some of the sweat on one's face and neck. My Dad used mail or other papers, but he fanned too. There was an industrial-sized fan roaring in the third-floor attic which could be heard clearly from the first floor.

My mother used to pull down the blinds in early morning to keep the sun out. My Dad had elaborate formulas for getting the prevailing breeze to come in one side of the house and go out the other. There were rules about which doors and windows could be open and which closed depending on the direction of the breeze. When there was NO breeze, we just sweated. I can see the iced tea glasses making pools of water on the card table where we tossed sticky cards in a game of rummy or canasta or occasionally double solitaire. A good trick was to take ourselves down to the swimming pool and get a "midnight swim" (the pool closed at 11 pm.) That would chill our bodies a bit without adding a shower's moisture to our household atmosphere. Some nights we slept in the stuffy living room on sheets stretched over the rug with as little on as possible. It was just too hot upstairs. Well, it was too hot downstairs as well!

Dad would come back from Philadelphia on the train early, his shirt sticking to his body and the newspaper damp and pulpy. He would change into his shorts, pour a cold drink, and just sit still until dinner. Dinner was often cold meat and salad in those days.

Today I can conjure up the memory of those sticky days easily. Both heat and humidity are in the 90's right now, even in the morning, and we are blessed to have air conditioning in this old house now. We use the blinds and fans too, and with limited door openings we keep the heat somewhat at bay. But dinner is tricky. And we are frugal with our energy use and unwilling to heat up the kitchen when we have the house tolerably comfortable.

So I use a very plain "off or on" type propane camp stove outside. The hot "on" flame is really suited better to a huge camp kettle than an ordinary household cooking vessel, but I have discovered that using my wok on that stove with the wok stand upside down so that the pan is raised up rather high, is a great solution. Last night I prepped in the kitchen and took a stack of bowls out to the "summer kitchen" and whipped up a very tasty dinner of mushroom-onion home fries and mustard glazed ham. With a nice cucumber/tomato/lettuce salad in vinaigrette dressing it was a lovely meal that we enjoyed in our cool living room in front of the Phillies game.

I do not know HOW the Phillies stood it in Citizens Bank Field, but I know how I did. By keeping the heat out of the kitchen!

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