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Sour dough range  Photo by: B. K. Chadwell (Chief Ouray mine boarding house, 2009) The inspiration for "Sourdough Range" This poem is a tribute to my mother; Beulah Frances Bell Chadwell. She cooked on woodstove ranges most of her life, in often remote cabins or boarding houses made of logs or rough sawn lumber. She made a home for her family and cooked for; Loggers, sawmill crews, miners, farmers and cowboys. She was a true Eastern Oregon pioneer. She, like a lot of other western pioneer women, knew how to keep food without refrigeration. They knew how to cook from scratch with groceries raised, purchased or perhaps bartered for in the fall; enough to last an entire isolated, snowed in winter, if need be. Many, rarely, if ever, had access to commercial electricity. Then there were those baking powder biscuits, and always that ever present crock of "secret recipe" sour dough starter to make hotcakes, hot rolls, bread and pie dough. My...oh my...I remember my mother had a way with sour dough. We ate it nearly every day and never tired of it. I can smell her sour dough, if I think about it, to this day. B. K. Chadwell
Sourdough Range © B. K. Chadwell The evening's chores were always done, just before her day was through, with sourdough set, water pails full... and the wood box was full too. She's up early in the summertime, to start the day out right With a cow to milk and bread to bake...she's up before day light. Alladin's lamp on oil clothed table...its base a pretty green, gives light to her placing kindlin' and... a smidge of kerosene. She starts the fire with kitchen match, then opens the damper bail, the fire roars as she aprons up and dips hand wash from a pail. Her kitchen range...in winter's welcome, it's stoked up then... all day, but baking bread in the summertime ... there's just no other way. So, she fired it up real early, just to beat the summer's heat, to get sourdough in the oven... and cook other things to eat. She'd stir up a pan of biscuits, then knead out a batch of bread, made up last night... from the starter crock and secrets in her head. That mystery crock of sourdough starter, sitting on the shelf... how she made this taste bud twister was known only to herself. If us cowboys were real lucky when she put the lunches up, we'd get left over biscuits... sometimes... she fed 'em to the pup. She'd put up several lunches... in some cotton sugar sacks, we would tie 'em up with leather strings behind our high back kacks. It was a time of my beginnings, on the Burnt River's Break's, a time of learnin' how to cowboy and to give what it takes.... A time when Mom was cookin' for "the brand", before times would change, a time when sourdough, beef and biscuits... came off that "sourdough range". # |
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