CookCook Kitchen Grill Oven by Ruegg
10 November 2009
“Now You’re Cooking”
I guess the only thing I don’t like about winter is, essentially, everything. The snow, the cold, the lack of barbecues, the no dining outdoors. and I say these things even though I don’t deal with the snow in San Diego, California. But it’s still cold and wintery enough for me to just not like it very much. Really, I think what I most miss in the winter months is my main summer staple-burgers and beer! I bring that up because it seems that just about any kind of a problem has a solution on the Internet. Well, not my bank balance, so much, but hey, that’s a personal problem, right?
To get this back to where it started, winter can be, and for some people actually is, a most romantic, rewarding season. One of the slickest things my wife and I ever did as newly weds was to rent a mountain cabin for a weekend in the winter months and then do everything we could to melt the snow off the roof! And cooking, believe it or not, was a big part of that wonderful weekend, which brings us to the CookCook kitchen grill oven by Ruegg.
Ruegg is a Swiss maker of fireplaces and ovens who’s been at it for over half a century, but recently they have taken their products in a new direction by going, ironically enough, back to the oldest concept of all. Long before there were kitchens of any type, there were one room huts with a fireplace, which was the center of activity for the home. Meat was roasted on a spit, and soups and stews were made in a large pot which hung over the fireplace and was tended by an old gnome. Or witch. It could have been a witch! All kidding aside, it was normally tended by a wife who, in those faraway days, really did have a full time job taking care of the household, and a large part of the daily chores consisted of making whatever meals could be made in such primitive circumstances. Nowadays, of course, people like me lament the onslaught of winter because it means I cannot barbecue, which is really not much more than throwing raw meat on a fire!
But all of that aside, it is still a fact that there is something rather romantic and nostalgic about cooking over an open fire. I was no more than four or five at the time, but I still remember watching my mother cook on a wood burning stove. In memory yet green I can see her swing open the little door to put in more wood, almost like feeding wood to the fire in one of those old steam engines you see in Western movies from time to time. And to her dying day she always asserted that the best bread she ever baked came out of the oven on that stove.
Well, time marches on, but sometimes the best of the new involves a little of the best of the old, which brings us back to Ruegg and what they call their CookCook. More and more these days, people are congregating in the kitchen. Kitchens used to be a place off to one side. Now they are often at the center of things. People with working brains have decided their children can use the computer, but not alone in their bedrooms, hence the place in the kitchen. And now we have bill-paying centers and I don’t know what all. And, because kitchens are becoming so large, people now meet in them.
One of the biggest surprises my wife and I encountered when we got our home was how people love to congregate around the counter in the kitchen, to a point where it is very difficult to get them to go to the living room while we finish cooking the meal. So we’ve just learned to live with it-and live with them in the kitchen, which is actually in keeping with the direction things seem to have taken these days. Or as Ruegg puts it on their website, “True to the motto ‘live in the kitchen-cook in the living room,’ more and more architects are integrating the kitchen into the living area.” And that, in turn, is pretty much where the whole thing started in the first place! Half way through the 19th century the evening entertainment often consisted of a family member reading the latest Dickens novel aloud to the family gathered about, you guessed it, the combination fireplace/kitchen/cook pot!
One of the kitchen forums I regularly visit in search of inspiration for this site once featured the question, “is a fireplace in the kitchen a good idea?” The problem with this concept, and the reason the question was asked, is that a fireplace in the kitchen just seems to have no purpose. You’re got a stove, right? So, what are you going to use the fireplace for? Well, now! Ruegg has certainly changed the dynamics of that particular question. What can you do with a fireplace in the kitchen? Well, as it turns out, you can cook on it, and you can make that fireplace, and the kitchen in which it resides, the hub of an active home filled with gentle conversation and warm laughter.
It’s probably hard to believe for those who see those “chamber of commerce” shots from Southern California during such things as the Rose Bowl Parade, but it actually does get cold enough here to warrant a fire in the winter months. I used to think nothing could be better than a cold rainy day in front of the fireplace, but putting a roast on a spit and roasting it over an open fire in the kitchen while friends gather round with a glass of wine. now, you’re cooking, man!
Joseph
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