Cooking with Fire

Where does family usually end up gathering at the house? It seems like the kitchen is the place for a lot of people. Food is universal and meals bring people together in a home.

The Biddle House, on Market Street on Mackinac Island, has a working kitchen with a fireplace that is used for demonstrating a household of the 1830s by means of creating a meal that would have been commonplace for the time period. Open hearth cooking remained the primary cooking method until the mid to late 1800s, when wood and coal burning stoves were commonplace. Every summer, staff and visitors gather here to learn more about the family around the fire.

Cooking and baking on an open hearth requires more preparation time just with tending the fire alone, but also the fresh or preserved foods being used. Gone are gadgets for slicing and dicing, premade mixes and, frozen and canned foods. Once the preparation is done, however, cooking is very familiar. To control the temperature, a swinging crane is used to keep the cast iron pot closer or away from the fire. Pans and skillets sit on a bed of hot coals to heat the food. You can increase the coals or let them sit and cool to change the temperature and cooking time. Strong arms for lifting cast iron, a steady hand for keeping ash and coals out of the food, and a sense of timing are needed to know when items are done.

By placing more or less coals under the skillet and moving it closer or farther away from the fire, one can control the cooking temperature.

Cooking for the family kept a household running. Agatha Biddle, matriarch of the Biddle House, was known to feed the sick and elderly of her tribe on a regular basis from her kitchen. She and her husband, Edward, also had many children and took in two foster children, all of whom she fed from the hearth. All of these bits and pieces of their lives come alive through affidavits, inventories, and archaeology.

And where do visitors end up spending most of their time when visiting the Biddle House? Visitors flock to the kitchen, listening to the staff talking about the family, watching them cook with plants from the herb garden, and sometimes sampling a bite. Maybe it’s where people feel most at home.

Admission to Historic Downtown Mackinac is available from early June to mid-August and included with the purchase of regular Fort Mackinac admission.