Comfort Food: Fried Mice
Hi all people! Melody here. I had this put up all written up after which visited Paul's internet site to locate the whole thing all a laugh and sun and booze! Fabulous posts! I waffled on now not following in shape, however figured that I'd spent too much time writing to relegate it to the trash bin. Read on...
I changed into born in 1970 and grew up in a small city near Lancaster, PA, under no circumstances some distance from Paul?S formative years home. Cue the violins...It turned into the stereotypical Irish family as introduced to the American recognition via Frank McCourt, together with all its requisite elements; a bombastic, selfish, alcoholic father, a depressive mom and 3 ragamuffin little youngsters. I turned into the oldest ragamuffin. It wasn?T nearly as bad as McCourt?S situation even though. Our domestic?S first floor wasn?T continually flooded with sewage and I by no means suffered from debilitating conjunctivitis delivered approximately via coal dirt.
Not one to spend any cash on anything other than himself, my father didn?T deign to even supply his family with a reliably heated home. Our house became in large part heated by way of this (forget about the man in the foreground, a friend of the circle of relatives having a lager. It?S the best photograph I could come up with):
While I have really no right to examine my early life to that of a pauper in Ireland and a wartime refugee, I want to think that after I stir up our fireside this iciness and make a Dutch oven dinner, I might understand, just barely, what Dr Heinrich feels when he eats those fried mice.
Needless to say, I was never the first one out of bed. And I also did my best to ensure I wasn’t the first one home from school in the wintertime. I’d try and hang out at the neighbor’s house until an adult came home and built a fire. That plan didn’t always work out and safety was not a concern, so many times at eight and ten years of age, I’d find myself playing caveman and starting a fire. Unfortunately, we never managed to burn the house down.I doubt many people alive today have cooked over a fire in cast iron pots unless they’re camping or “rouging it” (it really makes me laugh when people tell me about their camping weekends and how cold it was and how they cooked their dinner over a gas stove. Hah! I hope you’re not trying to impress me!), but at one time in my life that was an everyday occurrence. And as insane as this sounds, I actually miss it. My mom never cooked anything more complicated than roasts, stews and pies, but for some reason apple pies and beef stew made with the most simple of elements – iron and fire – tasted so much more real and authentic than anything I’ve had since.If I find myself failing mentally and get desperate enough for times gone by, I can buy a brand new wood-burning cook stove from Heartland Applicances: 
Maybe kitchen fancier readers will know these are available, but I’m not terribly well-versed in the field and could hardly believe it when I ran across Heartland’s website. I had no idea such things were still manufactured. They have one with a little more modern styling, still wood-fueled: 
If I was single, had an enormous kitchen, won the lottery and had plenty of backup cooking power that doesn't take 45 minutes to come to temperature, I’d buy one of those things and use it with aplomb just for old times' sake. Here's the old style for modern kitchens 
available in gas, electric, or dual fuel. A more realistic and fitting version might be this one 
with a hint of retro that would look smashing in our current house. I had never heard of Heartland Applicances before searching the web for information on wood-burning stoves, so if anyone has any information or opinions on their products, I’d love to hear about it. How my tastes skyrocketed from a $25 second-hand stove to a $7000 luxury range, I'll never know.I look back on that stove with great fondness. After all, it kept us alive in more ways than one and, in all honestly, was not a bad experience despite what one might think. To this day, the smell of burning wood in the fall fills me with with an overwhelming sense of contentment and pleasure, no doubt a vestige of growing up dependant on it. I liken it to an experience of my favorite natural history writer and scientist, Bernd Heinrich. He and his family lived deep in Hahnheide Forest in northern Germany for several years after having fled their native Poland when the Russian Army invaded. They subsisted on whatever they could find in the forest and one of the things that kept them alive was the consumption of fried mice. To this day, Heinrich occasionally waxes nostalgic and indulges in a dinner of fried field mice at his Maine cabin.
An vintage Sears and Roebuck solid iron cook dinner stove. Believe it or no longer, that?S what I found out to prepare dinner on and what we used until we moved to a more present day home when I became sixteen. We had an electric powered stove as a backup, but that was saved in an unheated summer season kitchen and was usually used at some stage in the hotter elements of the 12 months. My dad and mom bought the iron stove for $25 at a public public sale after they purchased the house in 1973. Twenty-five greenbacks to install a heating machine!? Not horrific strategizing for a crazy bastard!We had any other timber burning stove in any other room of the house that furnished little warmth for the top ground. And I do suggest little. It didn?T be counted anyway, due to the fact by the time morning rolled around the fire had lengthy because long gone out. Getting away from bed in January took Herculean attempt?But after I ultimately did get dressed under twenty kilos of blanket, steeled myself to go out my warm cocoon, and labored up the nerve to make a frenzied sprint to that liked antique cook dinner range, oh, what great relief. Pleasure like this is hard to come with the aid of in these days of perpetual consolation.