At Philipsburg Manor the manor house, a water-powered gristmill, a barn and a tenant's house will be open, featuring activities like open-hearth cooking, weaving, spinning, herbal medicine making.

Today and tomorrow from 1 to 5 p.m., "Early American Food Tradition," demonstrations of open-hearth cooking for the holiday.

Other activities include lessons in posting a soldier's tent and starting fires with flint and steel, as well as open-hearth cooking and dancing.

I recently installed a cast-iron behemoth of an early Industrial Revolution woodstove at my place, the next best/worst thing to cook on after the Civil War put paid to open-hearth cooking.

Van Cortlandt Manor offers views of restored gardens and demonstrations of blacksmithing, dyeing and open-hearth cooking.

Call ahead to take part in special weekend workshops in Pennsylvania German crafts of scherenschnitte (paper cutting), quilling (coiled paper art), decorative egg scratching and open-hearth cooking.

Maligned by 19th-century cookstove manufacturers, condemned as unhealthful and inconvenient by Victorian feminists and dietary reformers, open-hearth cooking had faded into the past by the turn of the century.

This is what Alice Ross, a lecturer on open-hearth cooking, calls culinary "connectedness."

Demonstrations of period crafts like dying with indigo, candle-making, and open-hearth cooking are performed six days a week.

The period rooms are decorated for the holidays, Christmas trees have been set up in the parlors, and open-hearth cooking will be demonstrated at the King House.