The Kitchen from Hell in the House from Hell

Many of Napoleon's troops died of hypothermia on the retreat form Moscow, 1812. It is likely many people in homes with heat pumps die similarly each year

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Before returning to the main thrust of the series—kitchen equipment from hell—I must put the kitchen into a setting…the House from Hell. Chief among the ranks of equipment in such a house would be a heat pump.

The first time I experienced so-called heating by one of these infernal, wasteful, totally useless frost-bite producing miracles of modern science, I decided that someday, I would find the inventor of the devilish devices and kill him.

I am too late. The inventor was an Austrian named Peter Ritter von Rittinger, and he has been dead quite a while (since 1871, in fact, his bones have been warming the earth), having visited his heat pump on the world in 1855. Perhaps it was a boon to the workers in the salt works in the village of Ebensee where it was installed. Any improvement in damp underground temperatures in the dead of winter must have been welcome.

But it’s a far cry from there to attempting to use the things to “heat” (and I use the term very loosely) houses in which ease and comfort, not simply absence of misery, is the intention.

Indeed, in any house I owned or rented that was served by a heat pump, misery was my daily lot. We had two heat pumps in Maryland, one for each wing of the house. The one for the new wing was a piece of junk; the one for the older wing was slightly less junky. This meant it did not seize up in bleak midwinter and require running on air conditioning mode to unfreeze the exterior coils. You haven’t lived until you’ve paid a $500 electricity bill after bundling up for the previous month because you had to run the air conditioning to make the heat work. Wasteful? Hmmm….

Aside from that, there is nothing more comforting than having cold air pouring out of the vents in mid-winter. You get fat from it, in fact. I know this, because each winter I put on weight. Running to the kitchen to make another hot chocolate or coffee and endless warm toast did not make for an economical expenditure of calories in any way, and I’m convinced that shivering—supposed to be a way for the body to warm itself—uses no calories at all. It does, however, put lines on your face and flakes on your skin.

If you’ve got a nice gas oven, at least you can turn it on, open it up, and let some actual hot air pour into one room. Modern houses rarely have kitchen doors—mores the pity—so that can be quite wasteful and ineffective. But at least sitting in front of it can take the wintertime blues away…for a few minutes. Unless you like high gas bills, too.

Finally, to encourage you to join me in the anti-celebration of Peter Ritter von Rittinger’s invention, I offer these facts from Wikipedia:

“The air outside even at 32°F has heat energy in it. With the refrigerant flowing in the opposite direction the evaporator (outdoor coil) is absorbing the heat from the air and moving it inside. Once it picks up heat it is compressed and then sent to the condenser (indoor coil). The indoor coil then rejects the heat into the air handler, which moves the heated air through out the house.” Translation: Are you nuts? Outside air at 0 C might have heat in it, compared to the heat contained in liquid nitrogen which becomes liquid (otherwise being a gas) at –410°F. But it isn’t heat compared to the temperature of a human body, or even at which a human body will find life tolerable in ordinary clothing, something above 65°F. Plus, the air forcing the so-called heated air through sheet metal pipes and out of slatted vents cools it, as do the slatted vents themselves. It must have been lost on the doofuses who invented air pump heating systems that in India, they COOL houses by forcing air through slats and decorative holes.

But Wikipedia does drolly note that, “When comparing the performance of heat pumps, it is best to avoid the word ‘efficiency’…."

Yup.

As I write, it is 33°F outside my house. It is probably no more than 65F. inside, but then, the gas/radiators haven’t been on since their automatic turnoff a few hours ago. I’m warmer, though, than when I had the heat pumps in Maryland set on 75°F; no coldish air hitting the back of my neck.

There is already an extensive awards program in Austria named after Peter Ritter von Rittinger. But I would like to offer one more:

The Peter Ritter von Rittinger Half-Baked Alaska Award for Contributing to the Eternal Discomfort of Gullible Humans.

I realize the name of the award is long, a lot longer than the prize money (fittingly, $0). But it does fit with both the convoluted and lengthy nature of German, von Rittinger’s native tongue, and the extense of the misery the award recognizes. And so it shall remain.

The score on gas vs. electric cooking

When did you last look forward with anticipation and salivation to an invitation to an electric stovetop cook-in of tough grey steaks, mushy corn and instant mashed potatoes?

On the other hand, when did you last savour a thought similar to this one: A big barbecue, sizzling steaks, burgers and even humongous shrimp, seared over open flames―maybe even flames produced by hickory charcoal―accompanied by corn roasted in the coals and potato salad to take the edge off all that deeply satisfying, perfectly singed and lightly charred meat and the sweet roasted taste of the fresh corn.

No more need be said about the vileness of the electric stove. But I’ll say it anyway, since its inventor has, for many years, occupied the top spot of my list of "People I Would Willingly Consign to Hell."

The electric stove, no matter how good the cook, doesn’t produce delicious food, and often not even nutritious food. It produces colourless, lifeless, tasteless overcooked vegetables rather than crisp, tasty, nutritious ones, cooked fast. (There are rare exceptions. For example, cassoulet can be cooked almost equally well on gas or electric stoves. Click here for my favorite cassoulet recipe. Great hearty dish for bleak midwinter.)

It produces tough, grey beef, absent the luscious red-brown exterior a fast start and slow finish imparts to a roast or a grill.

The electric stove’s sins are no yolk

Even eggs are no joke to cook on an electric stovetop. You might be able to get by with fried eggs, if you let the butter or oil get truly hot and are willing to toss the pot around, on and off the hob, rather than just turning down the flame. Ditto for omelettes. But scrambled eggs? Forget it. No matter what temperature pot and butter are when you start, when you finish, in spots the eggs will be too runny to eat, in others overdone to the point of toughness. Tender scrambled eggs are not an option on an electric range. Worst of all, perhaps, you will be left with a goodly portion of the eggs stuck to the bottom and sides of the pot, requiring a good soaking and then a scrubbing, filling your steel wool pad with yellow bits that won’t wash out.

There’s no question about it: The inventor of the electric stovetop deserves a One-Way Ticket to Hell for his part in the Nightmare Kitchen (the additional essential nightmare equipment will be dealt with in subsequent columns).

Contenders for the Stove Hell Prize

There are a number of people who might get that One-Way Ticket to Hell from me, all men of course. I knew no woman could invent a piece of kitchen equipment that requires time to heat up, thereby wasting part of her life, and time to cool down, thereby risking injury to any children who might be in the house, and adding to the cooling bill in hot climates, while dissipating heat uselessly in cold ones. Inefficient, ineffective, dangerous, and low-functioning all describe the electric stovetop.

It is plain from the outset that the inventor must certainly have been a man. Not a man who is a chef, of course. A male chef would never countenance the miseries of an electric stove, nor would the restaurant patrons awaiting their badly cooked meal. Nope. This abomination was obviously invented by a man who had no business even thinking about kitchens. Sadly, there are two contenders for the ticket.

In 1859, George B. Simpson was granted a patent for an “electro-heater” said to be useful for warming rooms, boiling water and cooking food. His invention was, as Wikipedia calls it, “essentially an electric hotplate.”

The second contender is a Canadian, Thomas Ahearn, who introduced the electric cooking range in 1882. He and Warren Y. Soper were owners of Ottawa’s Chaudiere Electric Light and Power Company. Imagine the increase in their fortunes if home cooks gave up wood, coal and gas and started cooking with their product? A self-serving invention if ever there was one. Certainly, they didn’t install one in the exclusive Windsor Hotel out of charity; they installed it doubtless out of an attempt to make the well-heeled believers in their kitchen chicanery.  It is apparent that, over time, their kitchen chicanery did, indeed, capture the public’s imagination, or lack thereof.

THIS JUST IN: And then there’s the matter of burning the feather stubble of poultry. This morning, I needed to roast a couple of duck legs for a cassoulet. But they were local free-range, in other words, not over processed. There was feather stubble. On a gas range, I’d have quickly burned them off. What to do? No one would want to eat the skin that way, except the dog. My husband suggested a candle flame. OK. It worked. It also covered the duck legs with soot, most of which washed off.

Gas cooking, 1: Electric cooking, minus-10 and counting.