Have you been encountering articles online about how it’s a great idea to get into cooking and baking during the coronavirus shutdown? Make bread! Make cookies with your kids! Etc. And while I’m all for positive family activities to hold everyone together during these long days, I’d sound my usual note of caution about discretionary eating. It’s all too easy to binge/gorge on food as well as Netflix. Neither choice is going to have a good end result.
Here are some ideas to keep the food part of the equation under control:
- Steer projects towards items that can be part of regular meals. Sure, go ahead and bake something sweet—but make cinnamon rolls, not cookies, and eat them for breakfast. Scones, biscuits or muffins, also for breakfast, not cake. Flatbread for pizza, not brownies. Bread or rolls that can be used for sandwiches, not pie. Etc. You can bond just as well over bread dough as over cookie dough. And don’t make cookies for the neighbors! Use the same guidelines for them. You know what else would be a great, great item on this list? Homemade pasta. If you have eggs and flour you can make noodles. It’s very labor-intensive and time-consuming, which is just what you want. Go for it! You know what I remember most vividly about my Grandma Baerg’s cooking? (My father’s mother.) Her chicken-noodle soup with homemade noodles. I didn’t know you could even do such a thing. It wasn’t that my own mother wasn’t a good cook—she was—but she’d just never made that particular item. Isn’t it funny what the mind retains? I must have been in grade school—probably sometime in the late Fifties since I was born in 1952—and we had taken our usual trip to my dad’s childhood home in Delft, Minnesota, driving, as we always did, “straight through.” (Heaven forbid that we should spend money on a motel. I was in college before I ever spent a night in a motel.) In our 1950 Chevy it was about an 18-hour trip. For some reason, perhaps a late start, we didn’t get there until 2:00 AM. Grandma had fallen asleep and I guess our pounding on the door scared her to death. But she got up and reheated her soup. I remember that bowl of soup so clearly, with its thick, wide noodles floating it in. No memory survives of how it actually tasted, but I’m sure it was good.
- Steer cooking activities towards vegetables and fruits, if you can. I just got back from a run to our local Safeway, taking advantage of their “senior” hours from 7:00-9:00 AM on Tuesday and Thursday. (Can I really be in that category? Well, yes.) While there were some bare shelves, the produce was amazing. I have the usual stuff that I always buy—lettuce, broccoli, mushrooms, carrots—but there’s more than I like to get at one time. So I need to be sure we eat up the fragile stuff, mostly the lettuce, and that I make things out of the other. I can chop up and cook the mushrooms, make the broccoli into soup, etc. If I had kids I could let them wash the mushrooms and broccoli, maybe even use the salad spinner for the lettuce. (I have a terrible habit, as I’ve said before, of buying lettuce and then letting it go bad. My intentions are always good; the follow-up not so much. But the sturdy greens I’ve been wanting to use—baby kale, Savoy or Napa cabbage—weren’t in stock. So I caved in and bought two heads of lettuce.)
- Plan celebrations and make any sweets for those, but don’t overdo it. Or you can do something such as making up dough for refrigerator slice-and-bake cookies. You could even (I say this gingerly) bake a few cookies at a time to have as a post-lunch treat. That would be very dangerous for me, as I’d just bake up the whole batch, but maybe you’re a moderator.
As I’ve mentioned over the last several posts, I’ve been dipping back into the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’d started at the very end with The First Four Years, then backtracked to These Happy Golden Years, the next-to-last one, in order to get the full story about Laura and Almonzo’s courtship. Then I was offered the first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods, and if you want to read all about the various ways that American pioneers fed themselves there’s no better source than this book. The Ingallses raise a lot of their own food but aren’t really farmers as such, depending at least equally on Pa’s hunting and on gathering wild food. (Hunter-gatherers, I guess you’d call them.) As the book opens it’s fall, and, as Laura tells us, “The little house was stuffed with food.” The book then follows a year in the family’s life, taking us to the next harvest. I want to write a little more in a future post about Ma, Laura’s mother Caroline, but here I’ll just make at least a partial list of the items that they harvest and store. Note that there’s no canning going on. In fact, I’d venture to guess that if a medieval family were plopped down in this setting of around 1870 in what is now Wisconsin they’d be perfectly at home, with the only modern item new to them being the cookstove instead of an open fireplace.
Okay, here goes, as far as I can remember:
Winter squash from the garden, including pumpkins and Hubbard squashes, stored up in the attic and some so big that Laura and Mary can use them as furniture for playing house. Ma has to use an axe to chop up the Hubbard squash, as I recall. She’s pretty tough!
Smoked venison from the two deer that Pa shoots right at the beginning of the book. We’re told how he builds a smokehouse and how Ma and the girls have to keep the fire going with green hickory chips. No info is given as to how they know when the meat is preserved well enough and can let the fire go out.
Honey, seemingly gallons of the stuff, that Pa brings home after finding a hive in a big old tree while he’s out hunting.
Maple syrup and sugar, made from the sugar maples that Grandpa (Pa’s father) has around his property. The grandparents are within a day’s journey or so from Laura’s family. We’re told how Grandpa made all of the buckets and spouts during the previous winter and how they have a “sugaring-off” party and dance to which Ma wears her “delaine” dress, the dark green one with the red strawberries all over it.
I’m way over my word limit, so I won’t be so long-winded for the rest:
Pork from the pig that Pa has been raising. It’s cut up and smoked or made into sausage, with the head being made into (what else) head cheese. The fat is made into lard or salted down in barrels to make salt pork. (Don’t ask me!)
Pork from a pig Pa shoots in the woods. This is kept frozen out in the shed, along with the
Bear that was carrying the pig. It’s also kept frozen, and when Ma needs some fresh meat Pa goes out and chops off some meat from the carcasses with his axe.
Fish from a whole wagonload that Pa brings from the lake; I think he goes net-fishing with his brothers who also live in the area. Some of it is eaten fresh, some smoked and some dried or salted, I think.
Butter and cheese from their cows’ milk. Ma knows how to make cheese, she knows how to churn butter, and she also knows how to make
Hulled corn, or hominy, which I guess keeps better than just the corn kernels. This has to be something that had been taught to the earliest settlers by the Native Americans, as of course corn, or maize, is native to America. It’s quite a process, using lye from cookstove ashes to soften the hulls. And the children go out in the woods and gather
Nuts, including walnuts, hickory nuts, and hazelnuts.
There’s not a whole lot of green stuff in their diet, but they seem to do very well. (I think in a later book Ma makes sauerkraut, but I’m not sure.) Really, the only items that they need from the general store in town are flour, salt (very important for preserving all that meat, as it has to be rubbed with salt before it’s smoked), and tea for Ma and Pa. Sugar is for when they have guests; now sugar is cheap and maple sugar and syrup are luxuries, right?
Well, I think I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll stop for now and pick up in the next post. In the meantime, go see if there are any squash left in your attic! You may need them.