Wood “Going Home”
One of life’s glories is homemade bread, but the sadness is that it is rapidly becoming a dying art. My mother used to bake bread every week when we lived in the little Missoula, Montana house that my father designed and built in the 1940s, but in 1950 we moved to Helena, and from then on the closest we ever got to that wonderful yeasty taste was a Helena bakery that baked fresh bread; a decade later, when we moved to another state, not even that. From that day to this, it’s been store-bought bread like everyone else.
She used a wood-burning stove in Missoula, and to her dying day Mother always insisted it was the best stove she ever had. Perhaps that’s why she gave up baking bread, because if it’s not going to be as good as it used to be, why bother? I don’t know. Maybe we should have found a way to hook her up with Elmira Stove Works, which is a Canadian firm that actually began operations in 1975 by manufacturing wood-burning cook stoves for local Mennonite and Amish communities.
It’s weird what you get used to-or don’t get used to, I suppose. In this day and age the thought of a wood-burning stove seems so alien to all that we know, to a point where the first question must surely be, “Well how many hours does it take to get it going?” Truth to tell, though, the dry kindling that is always beside the stove, a bit of newspaper, and a match gets it going in not much longer than it takes to fire up a gas range-a minute or two, tops! (Read More)