Bisquick

Okay, one more ...

I've dealt with Campbell's tomato soup--with Kraft Dinner--and now ... yet another staple from boyhood days.

We always had a box of Bisquick in the house when I was growing up, and we used it for a handful of things: biscuits (duh), pancakes (see box), and--perhaps my favorite--a kind of cherry cobbler that my mother made on special occasions, a cobbler she called "cherry cake." It looked kind of like the pic below, though Mom always used a rectangular loaf pan for it.

I loved that "cherry cake"--could have eaten the whole damn thing by myself, but, of course, had to "share" (a word I despised in boyhood). I have a memory that Mom served it hot? With vanilla ice cream? Or maybe that's just Old Man Hunger invading my brain?

Dad was the Pancake Maker in our house. Sometimes he would just do the Bisquick thing; other times he would make buckwheat pancakes--or cornmeal pancakes (a recipe that was a favorite of my Osborn grandparents). And every now and then ... waffles (also Bisquick).

I think Bisquick was the gateway drug to the baking that I do now. It's simple to use, and so I used it. (Bis)quickly, I figured out how to do pancakes and biscuits--though I never tried the cherry cake, not until years later. (Not as good as Mom's.)

Bisquick was on my kitchen shelf from the very beginning of my Years Alone. In my early years of public-school-teacher-penury I would whip up a batch of biscuits. Easy. Filling. Kept me alive until payday. And when I married (December 1969), Bisquick remained a staple.

I can't remember now when I quit buying it. I began bread-baking very early in our marriage (cheaper), and I didn't use Bisquick for that. I think it was a gradual evanescence for that yellow box. I recall no epiphany, no wet-eyed decision to "move on," no emotional scene at the trash can. We just quit buying it.

And once I acquired my sourdough starter in August 1986, well, that sealed the deal. I now use that substance for the waffles and pancakes and bread and biscuits and muffins and ...

Oh, a memory: When I was teaching The Call of the Wild to my 8th graders, I would bake for each of them a tiny little sourdough biscuit. Why? Wild takes place during the Klondike Gold Rush, a time when a Northland veteran was called a "sourdough." Jack London uses the word in his Klondike fiction (though not in Wild). Anyway, sourdough was a substance the miners relied on. So ... I wanted to give the kids a taste. Some gobbled; some eschewed (politely or otherwise); some saw and seized an excuse to run to the bathroom. Bathrooms beat English class, you know?