Foods of Yesteryear

This is a jar of historic sourdough starter - a direct descendant of the starter that kept Dick Proenekke company for those years alone in his cabin at Twin Lakes, Alaska. Thank you to Kay and Monroe, the cabin's caretakers, for your generosity in sharing Dick's starter... and your delicious hotcakes.

About those hotcakes ... Kay mentioned they picked their first quart of blueberries today, and I sampled a few along the path, the best blueberries of this season so far. All of the talk of starter and blueberries got the Park Ranger to thinking about a feast of sourdough blueberry hotcakes he had with Kay and Monroe several years ago. Our hosts, upon revisiting this memory, quickly got up and started making “sourdoughs,” as Monroe calls them.

Monroe’s Sourdoughs:
- bowl of sourdough batter/starter
- some salt
- 1 egg
- some oil
- handpicked blueberries
- maple syrup

Monroe makes a paste of baking soda and water and adds a spoonful to a small bowl that holds enough batter for two hotcakes. He says if he added the baking soda all at once, the last cakes wouldn’t have any rise left in them.