A Country Store: The way it looked and the way it was in the kitchen

By Diana and Norman Boggs

A good, welcoming host always finds people in his/her kitchen.  No matter where you set up the snacks and drinks, people will always congregate there.  That is the way it was with the kitchen at Henry’s store.  It was attached straight in back of the store.  There was a large, black kerosene stove with six burners and a generous oven.  The cookware was all cast iron, and there were all sizes.  Across from the stove was a red coca cola  cooler with beer on one side and soda on the other. It was about 6-8 feet long, waist height. . I think the whole top assembly must have come off because the inside needed to be periodically washed and drained.  The cooling circulator in the middle acted as a separator of the two halves:  left beer, right soda. It was such fun to open the sliding door and look at the bottles before making a final choice.  There was also a supplementary large refrigerator. 

When the circulator circulated its last, the cooler was simply kept full of a mixture of chopped ice and water.  The water was normally so cold that if you plunged a bottle of beer in too fast, it would explode.  The soda bottles seemed to be sturdier.  Henry would make periodic trips to Kingston or Saugerties to get 50 lb blocks of ice.  He kept the ice in an older coke cooler outside the kitchen door.  He had all the tools to move the blocks:  a long handled cutter to cut the blocks (looked like a relic from the old chopping ice out on the pond era), a tongs to carry them or their parts and any number of ice picks to finish the disassembly.

   Cabinets ran along the wall, and they were filled with eight ounce glasses, some were the classic beer glasses with the bulge on the top, others were just straight.  There was also an assortment of pitchers and Miss Rhinegold metal trays. They were gleaming and ready for the Saturday night dances when jolly groups would order up several for the table.  The sink was a double sink, and Henry was very specific about washing glasses. There could be no milk products washed with the beer glasses as they could leave a residue and the poured beer would not have a head.

You had to be careful of dangling flypaper that could catch you by the hair if you were not careful.  It worked pretty well to keep the fly population down.

The blue/gray cabinets were built low.  They were SPOOL CABINETS.... serious antiques...wish I had'em.

This is a picture of Bill Wilgus in the kitchen.

William (Bill) Wilgus and Ernie Short

There was another cash register in the kitchen for the convenient purchase of beverages to be consumed on the premises. Of course, there were various sign up sheets for the annual fishing contest, and other notices if they were important to the community, and funny pictures of who “skunked” whom in the ongoing card games.

Henry always cooked Sunday dinner for the family and he would invite anybody who happened to be hanging around in the kitchen to join us.  The variety of meals is discussed in another blog entry, but chicken was the most usual choice.  Boiled or canned veggies were included, and there was always a plate of white Bond bread and butter never margarine.

It was not unknown for him to suddenly have a party that included a clambake with lobster and plenty of corn.  He was, after all, a Jersey boy and had grown up near the ocean.