In fact the word was applied to a number of different cooking tools.

First there was the stove that suggested a small chamber which held glowing coals and served as a low temperature drying oven. Candied fruits and vegetables (comfits, suckets, and sweetmeats) were sometimes set inside this chamber to complete their drying off. Illustration: E. Smith [London, 1758] offered instructions "To Candy Orange Flowers," in which the flowers are boiled, candied in syrup, and then "set in a stove [italics mine], or in the sun, and when they begin to candy take them out, and lay them on glasses to dry." The stove heat, apparently comparable to England’s sunshine, was not easily sustained on the hearth.

Mrs. Smith was not the first: Predating her cookbook by some hundred years, a private recipe collection included directions for preserving algelica stalks, describing its use: "Lay them on plates, & set them in a stove, in which put a chafing dish of coles [coals] twice a day, till they be dry." This kind of stove sounds more like an oven. It must have been large enough to contain both the heat source and the angelica stalks with enough distance between them so as not to overheat or burn the food. Seventeenth-century candying recipes often suggested that the final drying be done in a warm oven "after the bread is drawn, till they be dry and well candied." The "stove" had several advantages, among them that one did not have to work around the bread-baking schedule, but one did have to own the thing. The status of candied foods was based not only on the high cost of the sugar but also its requisite equipment. Incidentally, this stove had the added advantage of being used at waist height on a tabletop or special stand, was convenient and easily supervised.

And then there was the small portable stove often associated with the military of the American War of Independence. It was basically a hinged grate suspended over a rack for coals, sitting on penny feet, an open footed cube with a wooden handle and only about 8 inches in each dimension. Such stoves were hand-forged, and probably not limited to the battlefield. Nor were they enclosed chambers, but rather portable burners, very likely adapted from the built-in stew stoves long-since known and used both in Europe and the colonies. They had the advantage of portability, as well as small, relatively cook fires so valuable in candying.

The word stove then had a variable history complete with confusing and flexible applications to a number of kinds of cooking apparatus that were sometimes tabletop and other times oven. And, apart from the subject of cooking stoves, the word came to signify the heating stove, the precursor to central heating. That’s another story.

The fantastic large cook stoves were not new to the nineteenth century, despite their great development and general use in that period. The early Puritans had known bank or box stoves in Holland, where they had already been in use for over one hundred years. Illustrations in early European cookbooks suggest that they were in use far longer. At first of masonry construction, they were like table-tops, the fire below feeding individual grated openings upon which one set the pots or a small spitted roast. Needless to say these were not to be found in ordinary homes, but rather in the kitchens of those with means, and were often presided over by professional cooks. Sometimes these evolved into what became known as stew stoves of various sizes, sometimes so large that the large open cauldron was built into a masonry base and heated by its own firebox below. Such stew stoves were common in the almost-institutional kitchens that fed large numbers daily, as in the courts of Europe or the communal kitchens of the American Shakers, where they produced mammoth stews and soups.

The growing production of smelted and cast iron in Europe encouraged the evolution of stew stoves into cast-iron plate stoves. The first foundry in the American colonies, the Saugus blast furnace (1645) smelted bog iron with charcoal and cast "pots..., mortars, stoves, and skillets," although it is unclear whether they were for heating or cooking.

However, before 1750 box stoves were made and used. In the colonies they were expensive compared with those of Europe. German immigrants were sometimes advised to bring their own stoves with them, an easy enough thing to do as they were made of interlocking plates, sometimes bolted, and easily broken down and reassembled. At first simple five-plate ovens with adjacent fire boxes, they were expanded inventively to become the dominating centerpiece of the Victorian kitchen. Often constructed with two or more ovens and six or eight removable lids, it was possible to set one’s pots anywhere on the stove top, to slide them from one end to the other to achieve the necessary temperature. A system of dampers and flues controlled the fire in the firebox and consequently the stove top and oven—the successful cook trained herself to a constant routine of heat checks and fuel and air flow adjustments.

By the turn of the century electricity and soon gas were to supplant wood and coal, eliminating the need for chimneys and stove pipes. Modern stoves are available in choices that seem unrelated to the early cooking devices of the same name. Yet one sometimes finds an old-fashioned bank stove used in a fine restaurant, or an Aga cooker that uses the same principle; and more than nostalgic cook dreams of the kitchen that will hold a working Victorian cookstove.