Stove Envy

Cooking for a crowd of hungry mourners is a pleasure when you have equipment like this. Not only do you get to offer a kind of solid comfort to people you love, you also get to play around on a cook's dream.

Two huge ovens, six burners, a broiler, a grill and two warming lights. Heaven! It's my Belle-Mere's gas-fired Magic Chef, a beast so large that the kitchen was actually built around it by the previous owners, Texas millionnaires who apparently employed a professional cook - it would never have fit through the door.

You use matches from a big box of wooden ones to light it, a faintly exciting event with a delicious hint of danger about it. The puff of blue flame always slightly startles.

I have always coveted it and enjoyed concocting family food on it, but it really came into its own after the memorial service for my Belle-Mere when it was heating easily in a single oven a huge pan of lasagna, an equally impressive pan of mac and cheese and a medium-sized ham. We didn't even bother lighting the second oven!

My Belle-Mere was always a casual cook who bought impressive cuts of meat as the centerpiece of any meal she made and added a couple of veggies to round it out. She moved around her kitchen with a calm, unhurried air and the food always emerged perfectly cooked and served at the same time without apparent effort, on plates warmed under one of the warming lights. I think the Magic Chef was part of her recipe for culinary success but her own natural calm was the other ingredient. I have never seen her flustered, either in the kitchen, on her boat, or anywhere else. She had a marvelous personal peacefulness that one would call dignity in a stuffier woman, but her spark of humor and self deprecation rescued her from stuffiness.

Maybe hers was just an old soul, one of those that had recycled through the ages enough times that it had smoothed off its rough edges. Whatever the reason, I admit not only to stove envy but also to calm envy.