Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (33 page)

In the early eighties, when Carl's wife, Margaret, requested a sturdy, oldfashioned stove, he began to consider designing something that was both
more powerful and more stylish than the typical General Electric. Suddenly,
cooking and lifestyle magazines were full of restaurant stoves, and his customers wanted to buy them. "They'd be putting in a $50,000 kitchen and
they'd ask me to put in a commercial range, and I'd have to tell them it was too
dangerous," said Carl. "It says so right on the label on the back of those ranges:
`Not for Household Use."' The stoves made exclusively for restaurants can
pose a fire hazard in private homes, because they are not well insulated; they
depend on the fire walls, insulation, and venting systems that are customary
in restaurant kitchens. But Carl also thought that industrial ranges were energy hogs and impractical for home cooks because they have no broiler. He
began doodling-in his truck while waiting for deliveries at construction
sites, at his desk while talking to suppliers on the phone. He worked on specifications for insulation, pilot lights, and broilers. Soon he was thinking about
his stoves all day long and trying to run his construction business at night.
After eighteen months, he'd come up with a design.

For the next two years, Carl met with most of the major commercial stove
manufacturers in the United States and tried to persuade them to buy his design; they were not impressed. Failing to sell his idea, he paid the U.S. Range
Corporation, in Gardena, California, to manufacture his stove. "I was convinced that if I built something beautiful and powerful and safe, there were
people out there who'd buy it," Carl said. He waved his hand toward the Yazoo
River outside his office window, as if to direct my eye past the river to the
world beyond the Delta.

In 1986, Patricia King was renovating her kitchen on Waverly Place, in New
York City. King, who works with her husband in his mailing-list brokerage business, is an avid cook. She wanted a restaurant stove, and she was dismayed
when her architect showed her the ductwork and insulation that local ordinances required. "I would have lost six square feet," she said. King wasn't willing to sacrifice that much of her kitchen.

Then, after months of research, her architect produced a photocopy of a
flyer describing the Viking range-one of the several thousand flyers that
Carl, despairing of finding a national distributor, had mailed to kitchen designers around the country. It was a massive restaurant stove look-alike, and
although Viking later became known for its stainless-steel ranges, the first
model was black enamel. It had a big oven and a powerful gas broiler, and it
was well insulated-King could use all six burners at once without setting her
house on fire. The price of that first Viking was $3000, approximately three
times as much as a conventional range. When King put down a hundreddollar deposit, she had no idea that the Viking Range corporation had yet to
build a single stove and that it had precisely two (unpaid) employees: Carl and
his assistant, Tawana Thompson. Carl framed King's check, but even before he
shipped her range-nine months later and six months behind schedule-he
was forced to cash it.

King's new range was a disaster. The electric pilots didn't work properly,
and gas leaked into the kitchen. The oven doors would not stay open; once, as
she was putting a pumpkin pie in the oven the door slammed, burning her
hand. As each problem arose, King called Viking headquarters; Carl had recruited several friends, including an engineer, to help him part time, and
Viking's entire staff, now numbering four, would get on the line. Sometimes,
Viking sent in a local appliance repairman, and Carl talked him through the
job over the phone. Once, the company even flew in engineers. "They must
have rebuilt that stove about four times," King said. "I began to suspect they'd
sold me a prototype, but they were so nice and they cared so much I couldn't
get mad." In early 1988, her range was finally working well, and the company
sent King a basket shaped like the state of Mississippi filled with gourmet food
from the Delta. The card was addressed, "To the director of the Viking Range
Corporation New York Test Kitchen."

By then, Carl had gathered a group of ten partners-including his doctor,
the local Chevron distributor, an insurance agent, and several farmers, each of
whom invested an average of $12,6oo-and rented a small abandoned factory
in Greenwood. In 1989, he began building his own stoves.

For serious cooks, the appeal of the Viking stove lies in its size and power.
Its burners, unlike those of most domestic ranges, are powerful enough to sear
ingredients, caramelizing their exterior and sealing in the moisture. (Food sauteed on a conventional range often dries out before it browns.) The size of
the range also allows an ambitious cook to prepare simultaneously all the
components of a fashionably layered dish, such as Chilean sea bass with panroasted wild mushrooms, herbed polenta, wilted greens, and a preservedlemon sauce. The broiler is powerful enough to crisp sugar over a creme
brulee in an instant, and its oven is large enough to bake a Thanksgiving meal
for twenty.

Carl couldn't afford to advertise extensively, so he offered to lend his ranges
to chefs, food writers, cooking-school teachers, and television cooks. Soon,
chefs and food writers were calling the Viking "the Mercedes-Benz of stoves."
When I was building a test kitchen for a web-based food-media company I
had cofounded, a public-relations firm representing Viking called me and offered to outfit it. The strategy worked: like thousands of other food professionals, I was impressed by the appliance's look, power, and easy maintenance.

Word of the luxury range-and its growing market-eventually reached
Stephens Inc., the investment bank, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, that had
taken Wal-Mart public. In 1992, when several of Carl's investors became impatient and threatened to take over his company, Stephens stepped in, assigned the Viking Range Corporation a value of $1o million, formed a partnership with management to buy the company, and appointed Carl the CEO.

Stephens's investment allowed Carl to attract experienced executives to
Greenwood, double the size of the company's factory space, and increase its
advertising budget. That year, as the company's annual Christmas party approached, Dale Persons, its vice president of public affairs, begged Patricia
King to find her canceled hundred-dollar check, which Carl had always regretted cashing. After rummaging around, she found the check and sent it
back to Greenwood. Not long afterward, Carl shipped King a new stainlesssteel range.

Doug Martin, who oversees the Stephens partnership with the Viking
Range Corporation, knew nothing about stoves, but he knew that the Viking
range could appeal to more than a few hundred thousand cooking-obsessed
Americans. "We saw this whole demographic of baby boomers moving into
the time of their life when they have disposable income, saw them spending
on their homes, especially their kitchens. They wanted solid, ultra premium,
they wanted stainless steel. It didn't matter what it was, as long as it was stainless steel."

Months after Stephens invested in the company, its advertising firm, the
Ramsey Agency, of Jackson, began creating an ambitious print and television
campaign that placed the thoroughly modern range alongside potent icons of the past: in one ad, the industrial-looking stove gleamed in an amber-hued
kitchen of vintage linens, heirloom silver, and an old farmhouse table. The
campaign proved so successful that Viking reportedly had twenty million dollars' worth of orders backlogged for twenty-two weeks. In 1994, Carl instituted
the Toyota Production System, making each range to order and shipping it
within a month. It takes twenty-three people three hours to turn out a range;
to shape the 18-gauge sheet metal, bake on its porcelain coating, and assemble
the parts.

Meanwhile, in New York, King received a letter from Fred Carl, telling her
that she was now one of many celebrities -including Bill Cosby, Madonna,
and Alexander Haig-who owned a Viking. At her dinner parties, the guests
were talking less about her cooking and more about her stove. "The Viking
had become the darling of the entire swanky deluxe style in the United States,"
she said. "It's not just a stove-it's a trophy."

Stoves have always been status symbols in America. In the Colonial era,
even fireplaces were signs of conspicuous consumption: built without angling
walls to slow the draft or help radiate the heat, they burned fuel swiftly, displaying the owner's access to the rich timber resources of the New World. As
the Colonial population grew, however, the wood supply dwindled, and
stoves-which burned fuel more efficiently and provided steadier heat-became more popular. By 1820, stoves were outfitted with cooking tops and
began to compete with the fireplace in meal preparation as well.

The storage area of the Albany Institute of History and Art, in New York
State, contains a collection of about fifty American stoves made between the
early nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Tammis Groft, the chief curator at the institute and one of the country's leading cast-iron-stove scholars,
recently gave me a tour. "From the beginning," she said, "stoves were a very accurate reflection of aesthetic taste and what people cared about."

The earliest American stoves are small and squat, decorated with Gothicstyle bas-reliefs of biblical scenes. With the birth of the new republic, Moses'
tablets and Noah's ark gave way to eagles and stars-and-stripes. By the midnineteenth century, when the art of casting iron reached its height, stoves had
become pieces of sculpture, advertising their owners' wealth. In the institute's
collection, there are stoves cast as miniature Federalist-style houses, stoves
with twin columns molded into dolphin shapes, stoves whose walls feature intricate pastoral scenes of flowers and birds.

As the century progressed, however, the hearth became a focal point for a
number of social anxieties, from industrialization to immigration and urban
growth. "Whenever the culture gets scared, it runs home, and there is no more powerful symbol of home and family than the stove," Priscilla Brewer, a historian and the author of From Fireplace to Cookstove, said. But the stove's symbolic value cut both ways: some nineteenth-century social critics blamed
stoves for the breakdown of the American home, just as twentieth-century
observers would mourn the demise of home cooking. In an 1843 essay, "Fire
Worship," Nathaniel Hawthorne bemoaned "the invaluable moral influence
which we have lost by our desertion of the open fireplace," even as he installed
stylish stoves throughout his house.

There were also misgivings about the hygiene and culinary superiority of
stoves. Catharine E. Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe argued that
food had tasted better when it was cooked over the fire or in the chimney. "We
cannot but regret, for the sake of bread, that our old stead brick ovens have
been almost universally superseded by those of ranges and cooking stoves,"
they wrote in their book, The American Woman's Home (1869). The authors
were part of the growing Cult of Domesticity, a nineteenth-century movement that glorified the quotidian, the traditional, the handmade. In response,
stove manufacturers published cookbooks and sponsored cooking schools,
adroitly positioning themselves as indispensable to the return to a simple life
while simultaneously encouraging the notion that everything, including the
hearth, could be improved upon.

By the 1870s, the stove industry had moved from New York to the Midwest,
fleeing the violent labor uprisings among the ironworkers in the Albany-Troy
area. In Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, cast-iron cookstoves evolved into ranges
constructed of sheet metal. And as wood fuel gave way to coal, and then to oil,
gas, and electricity, the art of cooking came to seem more like a science, a byproduct of technological innovation. The 1907 Acorn cookstove in the Albany
collection-a shapely black cast-iron box with six burners, a single oven,
short church-lady legs, and shiny nickel-plated decorations-looks like a
grandmother of the modern range. And although many wealthy Americans
are still seduced by the promises of industrial-strength stoves like the Viking,
others have become more enamored of their predecessors. "At the beginning
of the twentieth century, people were nostalgic for fireplaces," Groft said.
"Today, everybody's nostalgic for stoves like the Acorn."

Edward Semmelroth, the thirty-four-year-old founder of com>, can't restore old stoves fast enough to satisfy his customers. Semmelroth
is tall, lumbering, and bespectacled, and he lives in Tekonsha, Michigan. One
of about fifty antique stove dealers in the United States he chose his occupation for sentimental reasons. "I wanted to be born before planned obsolescence," he explained. "You know, when Dad worked and Mom stayed at home, and every town had a diner and chrome was king-the kind of stuff that gives
you a warm and fuzzy feeling." For years he lived a life of quiet tinkering, not
unlike that of an appliance repairman in the 195os. Then suddenly in the early
nineties, he started getting twenty to thirty calls a day-"the Hollywood
types, big corporate types, techie types, the super rich."

Like Fred Carl, Semmelroth reads food magazines, but he isn't looking at
the pictures; he's looking for recipes. And the more articles he reads about the
demise of home cooking in America the more his telephone rings. Semmelroth calls this "the great compensation." Not surprisingly, stoves like the Magic
Chef and the Chambers-the white enamel ranges from the twenties and thirties, the green-and-cream models from the thirties and forties, and the rare
bright blue, red, and yellow models of the fifties-are now the most soughtafter. "They have that retro chic, the beginnings of an industrial look," he said.
"They are big enough to be restaurant stoves and outfitted for much more
ambitious cooking."