Posted by Peter Ceresole on April 17, 2005 at 06:43:50 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Mrs. DIXON cooking over open fire posted by Robert Dilley on April 17, 2005 at 02:17:53:
holding it "over the fire" seems quite specific. You wouldn't hold a frying pan over a stove.
But you might well hold on to the handle as you moved it about over the rings on the top of the stove; with the old ranges, you had sets of removable concentric rings to make differently sized holes over which to offer the bottom of the pan to the flames. Bacon is a quick job- she wouldn't necessarily have changed the configuration from the previous job, jam maybe?
I remember my aunt cooking on an old wood burning stove in the mountains in Switzerland, in the '40s. For a quick fry-up, she'd hang on to the pan and move it about to spread the fat about, although she wasn't actually bearing the weight.