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starve or freeze to death. To my young imagination it looked like a black animal with four stout legs under a square body, a flat top with lids that opened to the fire, and one long tail of a chimney that curved through the wall to puff smoke outside. It had three mouths, a small one to make little fires for cooking, a bigger one for overnight fires, and the biggest of all for the oven, with white enamel around a temperature dial ranging from “cool” to “very hot” and the brand name, “Kalamazoo.” When the bread was done, Mama opened the oven door and the loaves came out golden brown and steaming, to be placed on the counter to cool.

“Warm bread will give you a tummy ache,” Mama said, if only to protect the bread, moving it out of reach of my small hands. That didn’t stop my stomach or me, as I grew older, from indulging in the delight of warm bread and butter melting in the mouth.

Our staple was a yeast-free flatbread called a chapati, which Mama learned to make from David Hatch, who learned in India. Mama let me help mix the flour from the grain mill with water and salt to make a pliable dough, then kneaded it to bring out the gluten and let it set for an hour before making round golf balls of dough that she flattened with a rolling pin into thin, but not too thin, pancakes. She prepared the cookstove ahead so there was a bed of hot red coals in the firebox, and heated a greaseless twelve-by-sixteen-inch cast-iron skillet to sear both sides of the chapati and trap the steam inside. The chapati was then placed on a bent clothes hanger over hot coals inside the firebox, where it would blow up into a steamy balloon. Once it was removed from the flame, the air in the middle was released and the balloon flattened to form a perfect tortilla-like vehicle, warm or cold, for whatever you chose to put on or inside it.

Papa liked to make himself sandwiches by filling a chapati with alfalfa sprouts, sliced tomatoes, handmade mayo, arugula or basil, and grated cheese for the perfect quick lunch or snack. For dessert he’d take another chapati and spread honey and butter with coconut peanut butter from Walnut Acres or tahini made from finely ground sesame seeds and, depending on the season, fresh strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, or grated apple and cinnamon. This became officially known as the “Pa-wich.”

“Mmm, mmm, mmm, Pa-wiches,” I’d sing, rubbing my belly.

“Not bad for a boy,” Papa always said of his culinary creations.

He made “bacon” by frying strips of nori seaweed in oil to form a crisp and salty treat. And on Thanksgiving he and Mama amused themselves by creating a “turkey” out of a large butternut squash filled with traditional stuffing and potatoes attached to it with toothpicks for drumsticks.

Our other staple was goats’ milk, which we drank raw or was heated by Mama with Irish moss and honey to make a custardlike dish called junket, or blancmange. I loved to find junket cooling in small bowls on the shelves by the window. “Don’t touch,” Mama said from the stove, but when she wasn’t looking I’d tip one up to my lips and let the warm sweet curd slip down my throat to settle comfortingly in my tummy.

Goats’ milk was also used to make yogurt with the help of cultures mail-ordered from France. Mama sterilized the milk by heating it to 160 degrees to kill the bacteria, then mixed it with the culture and poured it into quart canning jars with lids. These sat in a large pot of warm water on bricks on the far back burner of the cookstove for about six hours or more, depending on how tart she wanted it. When the yogurt was cultured, she submerged the jars in cold water in the root cellar, and it would stay fresh for days. Yogurt was especially recommended by a doctor friend of the Nearings, who said it would help provide the B12 vitamins missing in our vegetarian diet.

“Scott-o absolutely loved my yogurt. Did you see him wolf it down?” Mama bragged to Papa after the Nearings joined us for lunch one day. “And Helen asked to borrow my corn dodgers recipe.” The recipe, which consisted of adding salt and oil to cornmeal mush,