“Thoreau’s Cooking Stove”  |  Anthony Satori

“I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing.  My house was not empty though I was gone.  It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind.  It was I and Fire that lived there.”

“The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy…  but it did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace.  Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process.  It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes.  The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion.  You can always see a face in the fire.  The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts…  But I could no longer sit and look into the fire.”

— Henry David Thoreau