Taste History:Open Hearth Cooking at Durand-Hedden

This year Durand-Hedden welcomes a new cook skilled in 18th and 19th century foodways to our annual historic cooking program honoring late longtime trustee, Irene Kosinski. For over 20 years Carlotta Defillo has demonstrated open hearth cooking with flair and dedication at Historic Richmondtown in Staten Island and she looks forward to working at our kitchen fire. Irene, a gifted educator and lover of living history, oversaw the restoration of Durand-Hedden’s beehive oven in 1981. She went on to establish our perpetually popular open hearth cooking program, which for thirty years has drawn visitors who are ‘hungry’ for history. On the menu this year will be a chicken roasted in a tin reflector oven, crumpets fried on a griddle, tasty “cobblestones” and preserved foods from the fall harvest. Children will be able to try their hand at old-fashioned cooking chores like kneading dough and making butter. . Visitors can still catch the intriguing exhibit, The Maplewood Theater: Its Forgotten Saga, which explores the ever-changing 87-year history of the Maplewood Theater, spanning silent films, vaudeville, talkies, a famed era of live theater, neighborhood cinema, and the current sixplex. Out in the carriage house the Country Store will be selling historic- themed treasures: early American children’s games, books and toys, facsimile documents, quill pens and ink, historic cook books, cookie molds, tin lanterns, reproduction decorative ceramics, vintage photos, hiking sticks and more. The hard- to-find original Doors of Maplewood poster and Smile, the history of Olympic Park, will also be available. The Durand-Hedden House is dedicated to telling the history of the development of Maplewood and the surrounding area in new and engaging ways. It is located in Grasmere Park at 523 Ridgewood Road in Maplewood. For more information or to arrange group tours call 973-763-7712.