That Little Oven...

A family appliance comes out of storage

I am frequently inspired by Lori Olsen White’s posts, one of which was A Family History in Biscuits. It got me thinking about the Kenmore Auto Oven, a small countertop oven, that both my mom and grandmother had when I was a child. I still have one of them.

My strongest memory of my mom’s oven is from around age nine or so. In a moment of unawareness, while reaching for something else, I touched the back of my hand against it, the exterior temperature of which hovered around smelting furnace level. I still have vestiges of that scar.

My strongest memory of my grandmother’s is the best…the smell of baking biscuits. Like some cooks in Lori’s family, my grandmother was an advocate of canned and frozen ingredients, so the little oven usually was baking canned biscuits whether for breakfast or supper. I love homemade biscuits, no doubt about that, but I also love the store-bought ones made in these not-safe-for-kids ovens. They had their own unique taste, it seemed to me.

I got the honor of popping open the can of biscuits, back when you could reliably do so by nonchalantly whacking them against the edge of a table, even without having to peel off the label first. I tried this recently, after peeling the label, and ended up pressing and prying with a spoon for some time before giving up and using scissors to get it started. What’s with that? I’m also one of those people who has to dig the label out of the trash at least once to reread the instructions.

The biscuits I used were twice as big as the ones she did because they were the ultra super duper size. Only five, with one cut in half, would fit in the sturdy removable aluminum pan, the one you need to be sure to grease if you want the bottom and sides of your biscuit intact rather than ending up soaking in the sink. They had the same delicious “little oven flavor” as they did all those years ago, even if I got them a bit darker on top than intended. I just need to cut back the time a little, a touch of blast furnace finesse.

I’m glad to be using this little gem again. But, I may need to buy some crime scene tape to put around it while in use to ward off other potential burn victims.