What kind of stove do you cook with: fire or gas or electric and heat? I have an electric stove, but sometimes I wish I had a gas stove. Gas stoves burn hotter, but you can get your fire to the level you want much easier. With electric burners you can't adjust the temperature of the coils. If you have the coils too high you can burn a hole into the bottom of your pans. With gas you could do the same thing, but it is a little harder to do.

Sometimes when you have small children around, you can teach them easier about trying to get too close to the burners. With gas stoves, you have a flame that they can feel before they get too close. With electric stoves these same burners have to be hot already before they can tell that it is hot.

In older days the stoves had the knobs on the front of the stove where the child could turn on the burner and end up getting burned. Consequently, the stove companies started to put their knobs on the very top of the back wall of the stove. When the older gas stoves had the knobs on the front sometimes you would have to use a match to start the fire.

If a child would do this without adult supervision they could get distracted long enough for this gas to become too heavy, and then they would light it. Of course they would have an explosion with severe burns and would probably end up not having a home or their lives for that matter.

This reason is why most homes of today have electric stoves in them. With electric burners you wouldn't have this problem, but you could still have a fire or get burned pretty bad. The stoves of today are also a lot better made. Before they had either one of these kinds of stoves they would be cooking with wood. These kinds of stoves were very dangerous because the whole stove got hot, not just the burners.

The little kids would have to be made sure that they know that this thing could really burn them bad. These stoves were usually put in a separate room because of all the heat that it put out. It would heat up the whole house. In the winter the kitchen would be the warmest room in the whole house. In the homes here in the south of olden days the kitchens were built under the homes.