Pat Online ~ May 2012

Biscuits

“Lonesome Dove” is my long-time favorite western, even though it was a television series.  Three of the rustlers lived together in a cabin out in the Texas wilds, and every morning one of the rustlers got up before the others, started a fire, and cooked biscuits in their Dutch oven.  One day I mentioned to my friends Dave and Marti Lisaius that someday I would like to try that, cooking biscuits in a Dutch oven.  They immediately went out and bought me a Dutch oven.  That was about thirty years ago and I have never yet cooked a single biscuit in my Dutch oven.  But that is about to end.  For some unknown reason, I have lately been overcome with a desire to cook biscuits in my Dutch oven, but since we have moved three or four times since Dave and Marti presented me with that gift I doubted we still had it in our possession.  I asked my wife Bun if we did and she said, “Sure, I use it all the time.”

[Pat, almost for sure thinking about making biscuits, cooking over a campfire along the beautiful Clark Fork River in North Idaho. Photo by Bun.]

It turned out she didn’t use Dutch oven as tradition calls for but as a regular kettle that she placed in an electric oven or on the electric stove, something the Lonesome Dove cowboy cook would have considered a sacrilege.  I immediately rescued the Dutch oven from the bottom drawer on the electric stove.

My daughter Erin remembered she had once used the Dutch oven in the appropriate manner. At the time we spent summers in our cabin on a river in North Idaho, and one of my friends and neighbors there died.  Erin, probably still a teenager then, remembered during the present Dutch oven episode that she was staying alone at the cabin when Ernie died and some of  his relatives arrived for the funeral and were staying at his cabin.  Erin thought she should do something for the family, so she cooked a batch of biscuits and chicken in the Dutch oven, using the traditional coals from a campfire.  Ernie’s family was no doubt grateful and enormously impressed, as I expect Ernie, hanging around somewhere close by, was too.

As it happened, I was having a donut with Dave Lisaius last week when his friend Bob Spears showed up and they got to raving about a device for lighting briquettes that uses a couple of sheets of newspaper for fuel.  I rushed out and bought one, because this obviously was the perfect device to provide fuel for cooking biscuits in a Dutch oven.  Now all I have to do is persuade Bun to whip up a batch of raw biscuit dough, and we’ll have hot biscuits for supper, a la “Lonesome Dove.”

['This old title page from Pat's memoir / cookbook with his sister Patricia "The Troll" which was originally published over 20 years ago (and is now unfortunately out-of-print) shows a Dutch oven aptly illustrated by daughter Shannon. While Pat has yet to actually make biscuits with his Dutch oven, I'm sure The Troll was an expert because she was an excellent camp cook.]