Later today or tomorrow I’m planning to put up a brief exercise video, something you can put to use on your living-room floor, and then I’ll be posting much less frequently on this blog as I concentrate on my other site, Behind the Music. That material is much more heavily trafficked, and I have quite a bit of material on sale there, with more being added periodically. If you’re a subscriber to this blog but not to that one, please take a moment to sign up if you have any interest at all in choral music. I write posts about the music we sing in my lovely, lovely choir, The Cherry Creek Chorale, and I also have several books on major choral works. So take a look! All materials except for the books are free, just to be clear.
I did want to finish up a few ideas about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her estimable mother Caroline. As I mentioned in the last post, Laura and her daughter Rose shaped the narrative as they wrote the Little House books. They re-arranged and sometimes left out events, also giving the impression at times that the family was more isolated and independent than they really were. There is no way now to know, for instance, if the picture of Ma making the hulled corn, with her skirts tucked under her, her sleeves rolled up exposing her plump white arms, and her cheeks rosy, looking so pretty and not getting one drop of water on her dress as she put the corn through multiple rinsings, actually happened. I think it did, though. To me it has the characteristics of what I call a “memory snapshot.”
Anyway, there are two scenes in the books that describe making a meal for a farm work crew, a group of men who are pitching in with either a machine or just group labor to get in a harvest. Pa hired a crew to winnow the wheat and Alonzo, Laura’s husband, did the same thing to help with the haying. Caroline fed the crew well, with Laura describing how she’d test to see if her beans were done by taking up a few of them in a spoon and blowing on them. If the skins wrinkled as she blew the beans were done. Her meal was a great success even though it was very plain. (Beans, cornbread, and salt pork, I believe.) Laura, on the other hand, had to feed a work crew very early in her own marriage and managed to undercook the beans and leave the sugar out of the rhubarb pie. (One of the crew members was a tactful soul who said as he lifted up the top crust on his pie to sprinkle on some sugar that “it’s better this way since every man can sweeten the pie to his own taste.”) Laura was mortified, knowing that her Ma would never have pulled such a stunt.
As I was thinking about all this crew feeding I was reminded that I knew somebody who had talked about doing this very thing: my Aunt Martha Goertzen, my father’s sister. She and her husband Russell ran a dairy farm for many years and also raised crops, mostly to feed the cows. I remembered her talking about feeding the harvest crews five meals a day, with one of them, the afternoon snack, called “faspa.” (That’s a Dutch Mennonite word from a language called “Low German.” If you squint just right you’ll see the word “vesper.”) Martha is sadly no longer with us–indeed all five siblings, including my dad, are gone–but I contacted her eldest daughter Joyce. Did she remember such things? She’s a couple of years older than I am. Yes indeed, she did, and she very kindly obliged with some details. While I was spending my teen years mostly with my nose in a book, my cousins Joyce and Ruth were working alongside Martha during harvest to feed the men in the fields–in addition to their own chores. Joyce’s work habits were and are legendary, and she and her husband ran a camp in Canada for many years. She was the cook–and the nurse. And on call for emergencies. And who knows what else. Now, in her “retirement,” she’s working as a community health nurse in Red Deer, Canada, and also teaching a class on nursing at the local college. Other than that, she’s pretty well twiddling her thumbs! She has a nice intergenerational memory, stretching back to her grandmother and great-aunt working in the farmhouse kitchen to make the big noonday meals. At some point Martha took charge as those two older women would have been out of the picture. And then one day Joyce and Ruth had to do the big noon meal on their own because Martha had to be away for some reason. So the girls did potatoes from the garden, cabbage salad and fried chicken (also from their own production, I’d be willing to bet) and lots more besides. They were a bit nervous about getting everything on the table at the same time, but they survived.
My point here for the purposes of this blog? Just this: an enormous amount of work and planning went into feeding people who needed it as fuel. But the food was also supposed to be well prepared and delicious. I hope if nothing else that being stuck at home during the lockdown and having to make limited grocery runs is fueling some food prep improvisation. I’ve been doing so much better than usual about monitoring my supplies and planning meals around what I have. Tonight’s dinner will be Chicken Caprese with Smashed Potatoes from the great cooking blog Pinch of Yum, although I don’t have any fresh parsley or basil. I have potatoes from Costco (not from the garden) and even dug out some garden tomatoes from the freezer and plan to roast them for the topping. My brother-in-law will probably come over to join us. (He’s been isolated, never fear.) I can hardly wait!
Hope you’re all safe and healthy where you are. Watch for the video tomorrow! I hope it will be helpful. In the meantime, just in case you want some more old-timey memories, here’s a 1947 article from the magazine Mennonite Life about hog-butchering. Read it and be thankful! (Thankful, that is, that you’ll never have to do this.)