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Sour Dough

Some of the best bread we have eaten in our camping lives was made out of sour dough by Rose and another amateur baker we called Red, while we Browns were prospecting for gold in the remote hills of Argentina. Our sour dough loaves were baked in an imported American sheet iron stove we had brought by pack saddle 65 miles from the railroad, straight up into the mountains, and an Indian woman neighbor gave us the "starter." "Fermento," she called it, and a very good tasting ferment it turned out to be.

This bread and an ever-renewed sheep that hung from a tree in front of our mud hut were the mainstay of our monotonous diet, varied with dried beans and rice and balanced with canned tomatoes and dried fruit. At that we fared like kings compared with our Indian neighbors, who had lost their indigenous culture and had not yet acquired the white man's. Mutton, and sour dough got by trading sheep for flour, was nearly their entire fare except for the yerba mate they drink at all hours (see under Drinks) . They mold their sour dough into cartwheels an inch thick and a foot across and fry them in deep fat-very indigestible grub. Once you have the "starter," or "lightnin'," another old name for it, use it just like yeast. Even if you don't want to try the stunt once in a while for the sheer grubstaking romance of it, every camper should know the general principles for those times when he has neither baking powder nor eggs to lighten his bread and bread-making.