Faith Nava, who posts on her AlaskaFaithola blog, recently wrote about the perfect marriage of sourdough and cast iron pots (part 1). The blogpost includes a photograph of Extension’s sourdough publication, which she acquired in the 1970s.
Nava says she was introduced to sourdough as a teenager working as a hunting camp cook in the Alaska Range. She made pancakes and biscuits for the clients’ breakfast, buns for lunch and rolls for dinner.
“More than once I fed the starter pot a bit too much and found it oozing out onto the counter the next morning — an alive and active batch!”
She has maintained a starter for many years and still relies on the publication. It’s fun to see where Extension publications show up. The current version of “Sourdough” has a different cover but the old sourdough flipping flapjacks remains on the final page.
In September, Nava also wrote about another 1970s-era Extension publication, “Wild Berry Recipes.” “It is a stapled together, berry stained, much used and greatly loved pamphlet of about 28 pages, back cover forever gone, who knows where,” she wrote. Two favorites she mentions are a cranberry/orange sauce at Thanksgiving and a cranberry ketchup for every kind of meat, with onions and spices. These days, berry recipes are mostly within what people call the Extension’s “berry book,” “Using Alaska’s Wild Berries and Other Wild Edibles.”
