2025, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized, Words

Cooking With Gas

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One major adjustment to living in our new house is relearning how to cook with a gas stove. My parents had a gas stove until I was about 18 when we moved to a new house and they had a glass topped stove installed.

My mother instilled in me a fear of gas stoves. In her mind they were just bombs waiting to explode. I know there are lots of safety features in these stoves now, but I still am anxious. With a glass stove top, spilling liquids or having drips from lids that are slightly askew is no big deal. On one of my first forays into using the new stove last week I spilled a very small amount of water near a burner and it wouldn’t ignite, just clicked with no flame until a few minutes had passed and the water evaporated. We are being much more careful as we cook so we don’t spill on the stove top.

It is hard for Husband to hear the igniting clicks if he doesn’t have his hearing aids in, so I find myself surreptitiously monitoring his stove use. I hope I can relax as we get more experience with this stove. It cooks things really well and we seem to have more control as we cook and bake. The phrase “Now you’re cooking with gas!” was a marketing slogan to encourage people to switch from wood or coal burning stoves to gas stoves in the 1930’s. It then became a general idiom to indicate the someone was doing really well. I hope we can “cook with gas” as we learn to cook with gas.

What are your experiences with gas stoves? Any favorite idioms or sayings?

47 thoughts on “Cooking With Gas”

  1. I cooked almost exclusively on gas stoves until we moved to the Midwest. Then I had to start cooking on electric – mainly because our house couldn’t be configured to properly vent fumes from a gas stove (which is really important). I hated cooking on electric until we got an induction stove. I love it – no fumes, precise controls, no stray heat in the kitchen, etc.

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  2. I am a gas devotee. I’ve had gas stove tops my entire adult life and it will actually be on my list of requirements for my next move (whenever that may be). My mom switched to electric when I was in college and when I visit her these days, I detest cooking in her kitchen.

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    1. We didn’t. We burned wood.
      Idioms today are all letter codes. My children avoid using them with me except very common ones, I only know 2-3 of those.

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  5. I’ve only cooked on a gas stove top a couple of times. I’ve cooked more on a wood burning stove, which is much harder to regulate.

    I’ve always had electric stoves. I loved the ceramic topped stove I had in my last home. I had to buy a new one when I moved here because the stove that was here was vile from lack of cleaning. It had the coil burners on top, one of which didn’t even work. The guy who lived here had never considered cleaning. It was a fire hazard. I bought a new one and it works, but I’m not impressed. They really don’t make them like they used to.

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  8. I have mostly gas stoves in my life. Much easier to cook on that electric. ALthough electric ovens are generally considered superior to gas ovens because of the more even distribution of heat.

    If we ever decide against a new stove that uses gas, we’ll go with induction, as I do hear it’s excellent for stovetops.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  10. Not an idiom, but forgotten thing. I drop my cap/hat on the bed all the time. Do you know what that was once supposed to mean? Or dropping the dish rag?

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    1. So they want to mice or rats to run up their pant legs? My dad talked about that experience more than once and he was careful to tie his pantlegs shut to prevent it.

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  13. “Sweet roll, no coffee,” is a golf idiom for hitting a good putt that barely missed going in the hole.

    Another one is for a shot that lands on the green and stays there is, “You’re on the dance floor.” I modified that a bit a few years ago to describe a shot that stays on the green but is a looooong way from the hole. “You’re on the dance floor, but standing near the ugly girls (or guys).” Works for both sexes.

    Not a favorite idiom of mine, but I always wondered about the origins of “He doesn’t even have a pot to piss in.” I know it refers to someone who’s broke, but how did that particular phrase get to be popular? Anyone care to educate me?

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. Poor Victorian families sold their urine to tanneries to make money. If they didn’t have a urine receptacle, they were poor indeed.

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  15. Back in Moorhead, an elderly lady friend and her daughter had an aged cat with incontinence. The house smelled so badly that it was almost impossible to visit them. We tried persuading them to “remove” the animal to no avail. Later, their olfactories had become so damaged that they couldn’t smell the stove’s gas leak. They escaped harm in the explosion that literally knocked the house off its foundation. The cat survived. The gals took up residence in an assisted living facility that did not accept pets.

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  16. Rise and Cook with Gas, Baboons,

    I love some of the British words: Gasbag and Gobsmacked just are so precisely descriptive. And they make me laugh.

    My stove is gas, and I enjoy cooking that way. I do not care for electric at all. Some friends have used induction stoves, as well, and they like that, but you need a companion set of cookware for it to work. That said, I do not like the gas stove I have. It is difficult to clean at times and I am a sloppy, sloppy cook who has to clean up a lot. The burners do not ignite as they should either. It is one of those things that I never get around to replacing though.

    There are more phrases and idioms that I love, for example, Is that lemon worth the squeeze? or Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas.

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  17. 59 years our apartment had a small gas stove in it. You had to use a match to light the burners and the oven. Now my landlords fir I’d matches or candles in apartments.

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  18. Faulkner wrote a book called Light in August, which meant a woman in the book was expected to give birth in August. My father always said that about cows, tracking when they were going to give birth so planning when to dry them up, which is another idiom.

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  19. I have cooked on both electric and gas stoves, and at the time, I thought nothing of it; I just made do with what the apartment was equipped with.

    When I moved into this house in 1979, I was dirt poor, having spent my meager savings on the down payment. However, replacing the flimsy gas stove that came with the house was a priority because the warming drawer under the oven had an disgusting amount of mouse turds in it. I didn’t trust that even a thorough scrubbing would make the oven safe to use.

    So, when a Dayton’s warehouse sale rolled around, Hans and I set out to buy me my very first new stove. We were quickly spotted by an aggressive salesman who was determined to sell us a stove that was not what he referred to as “a space heater.” An hour or so later, that’s exactly what I had purchased because that was all I could afford. We used that stove until we replaced it with our current stove.

    Our current stove is dual fuel, i.e. the stove top is gas, the oven is electric. Since I’m not a baker, it made no sense to spring for the considerable difference in price for an electric oven, but that’s what I did thirty-two years ago. Go figure! Overcompensating for the years of cooking on a space heater, I guess.

    If I Had to buy a stove today, I’d probably get an induction stove.

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  20. We are planning to replace our gas range with an induction one. I’ve always preferred gas to electric stovetops but, looking forward, it seems that we should be moving away from gas, on account of the indoor air quality issues if nothing else.
    Although I don’t really understand the physics, induction ranges work by employing magnetism to cause the metal of the pan itself to heat up instead of the heat coming externally from a flame or resistance coil.
    It’s true that induction is limited to certain cookware. One can test the suitability of a pan for induction with a magnet. If the magnet sticks, it will work. Cast iron and enameled cast iron are induction friendly, as are many stainless steel pans. Much of the new cookware on the market has been designed to work with induction ranges.

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  21. I love idioms and find them revealing and fascinating; they tell us a lot about their culture and/or time of origin.

    At our house idioms can be interesting. Hans routinely translates Danish idioms into English. For instance, the Danish equivalent to “a bull in a china shop,” is “en hund i et spill kegler,” or as Hans says, ” a dog in a bowling alley.” Because I’m familiar with both idioms, it makes sense to me, but his American friends often give him quizzical looks.

    It’s fun to compare parallel idioms in several languages, and I like how many old sayings have been altered somewhere along the way. One example is “it’s the early bird that gets the worm.” Nowadays someone will almost inevitably add “but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.”

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  23. I learned cooking on gas stoves, and have disliked electric ones ever since. Alas, the house we purchased in retirement is wired for and has an Electric stove. I’ve adapted, but am unable to use a wok to make Chinese-style stir fried foods effectively.
    When in Taiwan, we cooked with Gas. A Taiwan-style gas stove has only 2 burners, but puts out a flame like a blowtorch when opened up to max.

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