WHAT IS DUMBER THAN AN ELECTRIC STOVE?

When I build my dream home, it will not have one of those blasted electric stoves.
My dream home may have electric lights - I may relent there - but it will not have that shocking, stubborn, worthless apparatus known as Edison’s revenge, the electric stove.

Hooked up to cables that lead to massive dynamos at Boulder Dam, these electric assassins silently wait to perform their sole mission in life, which is not to assist a sleepy-eyed cook in preparing a sensible breakfast of biscuits and gravy. On no! The electric stove’s sole mission in life is to electrocute the human race. And it wants to make yours truly the first crispy critter on its list.

Let me tell you what is wrong with these unnatural wired contrivances which were developed as an unnecessary improvement on Man's original discovery of fire, which as any cook worth his oregano knows, is certainly enough for sny culinary task.

My sad experience with electric stoves makes a tale designed for weeping.

In 1969 I conned the District Manager of a large food service company into hiring me as chef/manager at NASA’s industrial cafeteria in Mountain View, California. It is quite something to get a cooking job in one of these government installations. I discovered that there are security checks to discover any past record of advocating the violent overthrow of grammar school. You need an ID card with your picture on it, fingerprints, all that stuff. Armed U.S. Marines look you over every time you enter or leave.

And all this for a cooking job, mind you.

Suppose I had claimed to be a rocket scientist. In fact, maybe that’s what I should have hired on as. Then I would never have been forced to work on that black battery of electrical contraptions they called stoves! Hah!

My first morning on the job the district manager introduced me to the crew. He showed me around and proudly pointed out what I assumed must be atomic reactors or, possibly, pottery kilns. They were electric he told me. No more smelly gas.

“Fine,” I said. “But where are the stoves?”

I was younger then and did not know that kitchen designers think everything that doesn’t move must be plugged in to Boulder Dam.

In that cafeteria we had four of those electric abominations. There were no individual burners on top. Each stove just had a big, heavy iron slab with electrical heating elements. And underneath each flattop lurked an electric oven. Every contrivance in that blasted kitchen was electric.

One main trouble with electric stoves is that you can’t walk by one of them and with a cursory glance determine how hot the heating element is under a sauce pan full of spaghetti sauce.

Oh no. Nothing so simple. You have to walk over to the stove, bend over and squint at buttons that are labeled HOT, MED, or LOW. I hate those buttons. I like to see the actual fire, then I know exactly how hot it is. I don't need a button to tell me that.

Worse yet, half of those electric stoves were always out of order - their flow of electricity weakened or stopped entirely by rotten wiring. When I had a pot of water on top of an element whose HOT button was pushed in, that pot of water could not be relied upon to boil until next Tuesday afternoon. Buttons or not.

I was constantly calling repairmen who sauntered in to fix the wiring when they had time. Meanwhile, lunch was to be served at 12 noon. No excuses.

That job was not my only sad experience with electric stoves. Back in 1974 I took a job as camp cook way out in the bush at a remote site in Alaska called Granite Mountain. You’d think that a kitchen so far out in the tundra they would at least have a campfire with real fire. But no. Even that primitive lashup had an electric stove.

The main problem with that confounded electric stove was that it interfered with a new hobby I had taken up - shooting black powder pistols. This shooting hobby required that I melt hunks of lead to cast my own bullets. But surprise, surprise! that cranky electric stove seldom got hot enough to melt lead. It produced only enough heat to fry an egg. Maybe.

Still at other times and in other kitchens the saga of my battle against electric stoves went on.

A couple years after I quit that Granite Mountain dodge, I made the same dumb mistake of taking the chef job at a country club without asking if they believed that in a sensible civilization you needed fire to cook anything.

My first big production was to be a buffet dinner with prime rib and game hens. I was determined to astonish the members at once with a magnificent display and thus make my reputation for all time.

But when I walked into the kitchen early - giving myself plenty of time, you see, to get organized in a strange kitchen - my heart dropped.

Blasted electric stoves!

I fiddled with the buttons and discovered those stoves were running on about two cylinders. I crammed the prime ribs and game hens into the ovens and fought those stoves for hours, trying to coax out enough heat just to take the chill off my big spectacular dinner!

Worse yet, one of the stoves had the peculiar habit of giving me an electric shock when I touched it. Not every time - just once in a while when I wasn’t expecting it. Things like that make a cook jumpy.

Give me a gas stove! You know when they’re on! you know when they’re off! They never fail! They give a cheery light!

But do those fools who design modern kitchens know these things? Do they know that cooks need fire and grease to accomplish anything. No! They just keep building magnificent electric showplaces that are impossible to work in. How happy those devils must be, rubbing their hands in glee, knowing that the great chefs of the USA must live a life full of misery. ##
THE END
Wrote by hand