From Lin Pardey's Care and Feeding of the Sailing Crew, 4th Ed.:
I have a passion for commercial boats, and I've never been on one that was fitted with a gimbaled stove. I had the dubious but interesting privilege of being cook on a 100-ton Costa Rican shrimp trawler for a month. I fed our crew of six with little difficulty, using oversize pots clamped to a 3-inch-high sea rail on a solidly attached stove. A shrimp boat may not heel like a sailboat, but it sure can roll.
On Seraffyn, we bolted our oversize cooker amidships to the aft side of our forward bulkhead. We had a 3-inch-high solid bronze sea rail with great, easy-to-use clamps. Twice we were on our beam ends—once because of an unexpected williwaw and the second time because of a hurricane. Both times our high-profile, 6-cup coffee percolator stayed put.
What did I do when we were beating to windward? Lucidly, Seraffyn was a beamy boat and didn't immediately assume a 30-degree heel. About 15 to 20 degrees is right. More than that and ifs time to shorten down. Taleisin, her five foot longer big sister, is the same.. So, deeper pots solve the problem. Since we rarely race Taleisin long distances, I could usually get Larry to shorten down for mealtime. During an ocean passage, five minutes lost means little. Living on board means about 8o or 85 percent of our cooking is done in port. That leaves only 15 percent to be done at sea, and odds are that half of that should be with fair winds and calm seas. (Odds have been against us at times, I will admit.)
One special advantage of having an athwartships-mounted nongimbaled stove—i.e. the cook is facing either fore or aft when using the stove—is that if the liquid in a pot does overflow or boil over, it usually spills either to port or to starboard, not toward the cook.
In 1985, we met Doug and Joanna Watson in Tonga when they were heading home from a cruise on 36-foot Ben Hall. As I was showing them the safety features of Taleisin's athwartships-mounted stove, I remember Larry saying, "If we had another 8 or 9 inches of beam, I'd gimbal our stove athwartships and have the best of all worlds—the safety of keeping the cook clear of spills, no fear of the oven door overbalancing the stove when it was opened, and the advantage of taking up less space than a normal gimbaled stove."
Five years later, we visited Joanna and Doug in Sydney and had a tour of the almost completed Ben Hall II, designed for them by Rodger Martin. There was the stove exactly as we had envisioned it, taking up far less space than a side-mounted gimbaled stove (fig. 24).
Rodger Martin took his stove idea a step further when he designed Katie G for the well-known U.S. East Coast boatbuilder Eric Goetz. In Eric's words, "The stove lives in its own module, which gimbals as a unit. This enables the cook to stand aft of the stove, never downhill from the hot soup. The module also provides level surfaces, which are covered with stainless steel, on which to place the hot kettle. The funny-angled face outboard of the oven allows one to open the oven even heeled." (See figs. 25 and 26, plus photographs.) Katie G is 40 feet in length. I think her stove arrangement nears perfection.
If space for a large stove and oven is a problem on your boat, consider installing the oven separate from the top burners. Although this means additional plumbing, it worked wonderfully for Bill Townsend on his 40-foot light-displacement cruiser, and it led to a safe, easy-to-clean gimbaled burner arrangement. Bill's oven was mounted against the bulkhead at the aft end of the galley.
The burners were set on gimbals in a stainless-steel-lined depression along the side counter of the galley. A drain leading from the depression into a Y connection on the galley sink drain made it easy to flush away spills. Bill had three burners on his gimbaled stove. The front of the depression created a good handhold for the cook and made it impossible for anyone to bump into the stove in a seaway.