My mother used a dish towel made from a bleached flour sack to tie her hair up before baking. She would fold it into a triangle, wrap it around her springy hair, and tie it in a knot above her forehead. Even then it was not a casual look, or a casual action. In all those years, in all those hundreds of loaves of bread, and thousands of rolls, no one ever found a strand of black or silver hair. It was a ritual, a comforting pause before she began her favorite chore.
She’d hold the measuring cup above a Fiestaware bowl, letting the milk run above the red markings and over the edge of the cup, judging instinctively that on that particular day, the flour would take more milk. She never used exact measurements for her baking recipes.
When she’d finished making the dough, she placed a towel made from a flour sack over it. I remember standing on tiptoe to look at the dough, its expectant bulge beneath the rough cotton, and how she’d guide my small fist to punch it, letting the air go whoosh.
Her motions were as graceful and unchanging as a choreographed dance. She dusted the board with flour, cut a section of dough and rolled it out. She swept the softened butter over the surface, dotted it with small chunks of brown sugar and dashes of cinnamon, rolled up the dough into a log, cut it in a dozen pieces, and placed the shiny circles of deep brown and ivory neatly in a baking dish. After all the dough was gone, she carefully brushed the little heaps of flour off the breadboard back into the flour bin for the next baking project.
When my mother was a teenager, she prepared meals using a natural gas range in her family’s house in Pierre. When she arrived as a young bride on the farm with its wood burning stove, she had to learn to bake all over again. In the first days of their married life, she presented my father with a plate of biscuits from the recipe she always used. He eagerly picked one off the plate and bit down on it. He put that one aside, and tried a second. He tried another and set that one aside too. My mother came in from the kitchen just in time to see the fourth biscuit whizzing through the air toward the wall where it hit with a BANG!
“What the heck! Are you trying to make me an old man?” he asked.”Need false teeth before I’m not even 30? These biscuits are harder than a rock!”
After several more mistrials she asked her mother-in-law for advice. My grandmother, with her son’s well-being forefront in her mind, gave instructions on how to bake in a wood burning stove. To start the fire quickly, use kindling composed of ash twigs or dry corn cobs, then add ash pieces cut lengthwise to keep the fire burning steadily and minimize the”pops” caused by the dampness of knots. My brother Bob was often given the task of splitting the firewood to these specifications. He remembers well the exacting labor it required. I remember the lonely job of searching for corn cobs on the hill above our house. Our grandmother gave precise instructions about the timing and placement of baking dishes so as to brown the pastries evenly.
I like to think that my mother, who was well-educated and must have been bored while doing so many mundane chores over and over, was not only challenged, but fascinated by learning the techniques of baking in a wood burning stove, and the math and science that lay behind them. She’d been an amateur artist in Pierre. She now shifted her talents to the kitchen where she created mouth-watering meals using only basic ingredients. It wasn’t just in baking that my mother excelled. She made turtle and oxtail soup, mayonnaise and ketchup from scratch, and devised a recipe for the most delicious baked pheasant. Today the grandchildren of friends who hunted with my father cook that dish with pride.
My mother continued to bake, and the summer Bob turned 9 and I turned 7, we came up with a great way to make money. Our plan was to set up a stand by the side of Highway 12, near our farm south of Big Stone City where the bridge spanned our fields and the river. We’d use fruit crates as a storefront and draw a sign declaring,”Cinnamon Rolls! 25 Cents Each.” We ran home and into the kitchen where we excitedly explained the project to our mother, assuming she’d be happy to be our unpaid head chef.
“We won’t even need anyone to drive us there! We’ll just pick them up as you take them out of the oven and carry them through the woods to our stand. It’ll be all profit.”
Bob, a salesman even then, ended our pitch with,”They’ll sell fast, everyone loves your rolls!”
For the first, maybe the only time, I heard my mother say unequivocally,”No!”
In 1952 when my father and his friend Heinie designed and rebuilt the kitchen, they tore out our old wood burning stove and installed a new range fueled by propane in its place. When they were finished the kitchen was much more efficient, and my mother was very pleased with how it looked.
After 25 years of making my father his standard breakfast of three fried eggs (sunny side up) and five strips of bacon (well-done), my mother had become adept at bringing the plate to the table in just 3 minutes. The first morning she used the new stove, she was horrified to see that the eggs were hard and the bacon burnt to a crisp. In the afternoon she burned bread and a pan of rolls. The morning after that she ruined another skillet of eggs.
When my father yelled from the table,”What’s taking so long?” she put down the spatula, walked into the dining room and proclaimed,”Take that stove out of my kitchen! Bring my old stove back!”
Of course, that wasn’t possible. After the remodeling there was no space in the small room to fit it back in. In a few weeks, my mother learned to control the switches to moderate the immediate burst of heat propane provides. Her baking prowess continued. Presented with the challenges offered by different fuels — natural gas, wood, propane — my mother adjusted and continued to bake dough into memories.
When I returned home to South Dakota decades later, in 2019, I was amazed to hear that a third generation of Big Stone women are now using my mother’s recipes to make her pies, her spice cake, and of course, her cinnamon rolls.
Myrtle’s Cinnamon Rolls
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Dough
3 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package active dry yeast (not instant)
1/4 cup warm water
1 cup milk, scalded
1/4 cup shortening
1 egg, well-beaten
Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Proof yeast for 1 minute in warm water (100–110 degrees) or according to package directions. Mix together dry ingredients, egg, shortening, milk and yeast mixture until doughy. Do not overwork dough.
Let rise 5 minutes in a warm oven, then another 40 minutes in a covered bowl on counter until doubled in size. Roll out dough into a 1/4–1/2 inch-thick sheet.
Filling
1/3 cup salted butter, softened
1/3 cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Dot dough with softened butter, then cover by generously sprinkling with brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll dough up into a long log. Section dough into 2-inch pieces and place cut side up in a greased 8×8-inch baking dish. Allow room for rolls to double in size. Let rise in a covered baking dish for 30 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes or until golden brown.
Icing
1/8 cup milk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup powdered sugar, sifted
Combine in a small bowl until there are no sugar lumps in mixture. Drizzle over cooled cinnamon rolls.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
