Most Germanic houses built in Southeastern Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries had bake ovens; it was almost a requisite for Pennsylvnia Dutch dwellings.
When kitchen stoves replaced hearth cooking in the 19th Century, most farm wives continued to use der Backoffe since the ovens of the new kitchen stoves were relatively small. Not only were they small, but with wire racks instead of a stone hearth, the bread had to be baked in metal pans instead of on the hearth floor. Also, everyone said baking from the brick ovens just tasted better, so in New Hanover they were widely used well into the 20th Century.
Where they still exist, bake ovens are commonly called “beehive” ovens for their domed interior, but to the Dutch they were der Backoffe. Over the years they varied little in shape, design and placement. Some early ones were separate buildings: tiny, squareish, stone structures with clay tile roofs located close to the kitchen.
During the 19th Century they were commonly built along with a smokehouse (another necessity) against the back gable wall of the summer kitchen, and the interior was accessed through a small iron door in the summer kitchen fireplace.
When builders adopted the English style house and placed the cooking fireplace in a gable wall, the bake oven was often built outside the house against the kitchen wall and accessed through a door in the back of the fireplace. An excellent example of this is the house at Bella Vista Golf Course. This house was built in 1802 by John Markley and has a perfectly preserved “squirrel tail” style bake oven.
The bake oven itself had a brick floor and over it an oval-shaped dome of brick about two feet high. At the back of the oven’s interior was a small flue which curled back on top of the bake oven dome and so back to the main chimney. Commonly called a “squirrel tail” flue, this led the smoke back to the kitchen chimney. As a squirrel’s tail curls back over its body when it’s sitting, so the “squirrel tail” flue curls back over the domed bake oven to the chimney flue.
There was usually a small door about 18 inches wide and 13 to 15 inches high at the level of the hearth floor, which was about 30 inches from the ground. Sometimes the doors were sheet metal or cast iron riveted to hinges and sometimes they were wooden. Wooden doors would do because the doors were not closed when the oven was being fired, just when it was baking.
Early Friday morning a wood fire was built inside the bake oven. Every oven was a bit different and every farm wife knew by experience how much wood and time were required to heat hers properly. The wood to fire the oven was called bak hols – “baking wood.” Many bakers preferred seasoned chestnut sprouts for heating their ovens. An American chestnut tree, if cut down, will continue to live and send up sprouts from the stump. Once the sprouts grew to the right diameter, they were cut for fence rails. The wood cut from the thin end of the rail was small and became baking wood.
Sometimes old fence rails and long pieces were just stuck in the open door and fed in as they burned down. Eventually no more fuel was added, the door and flue closed and the hot embers left to thoroughly heat the dome and hearth. After a time the ashes were scraped down into the ash pit, the bake oven “floor” was swabbed down with a Hudelwisch, a wet cloth nailed to a stick six to eight feet long and dipped in a bucket of water. The water added a little humidity to the interior and cleaned the floor on which the bread loaves sat. Next the baker would use one of many methods to determine if the temperature was correct, the best one being she would just stick her arm in and see if it felt right. If it was too hot, the door was left open for a while. By this time the bread had risen again in the rye-straw baskets.
There was no fire in or under the bake oven while baking was going on. Residual heat radiating from the bricks did the baking job.
Every garden had a hop vine or two from which the small flowers were picked. When steeped overnight in a little warm water, they apparently helped to produce the yeast necessary to make bread dough rise and gave a bit of flavor to the bread. Friday was bake day and the Dutch housewife baked huge quantities of bread and pies too. A large family would easily consume two large loves and several pies per day.
Continued next week.The Historian is produced by the New Hanover Historical Society. Call Robert Wood at 610-326-4165 with comments.
