Karen Miltner|@KarenMiltner
Historians of any ilk often find eye witness accounts to be more accurate than second party narrations taken years after the fact.
But the rich details and precision with which Laura Ingalls Wilder describes food in Farmer Boy, the fictionalized story of a happy year in her husband’s childhood in northern New York, “all ring true as a first person account,” says food historian Patricia Tice, curator of the John L. Wehle Art Gallery at the Genesee Country Village & Museum in Mumford.
As the museum was hosting Laura Ingalls Wilder Days, Tice addressed an audience of more than 80 with a talk titled “Farmer Boy: At Angeline’s Table.” The free lecture and tasting was the third installment of the Flavors of Rochester Book Club.
Many assume Farmer Boy, published in 1933 when Laura was in her mid-60s, came about simply by her husband Almanzo recounting the delicious, abundant food that was prepared by his mother, Angeline Wilder, when he was 9 years old.
But a more careful look at the couple’s early marriage show that Laura experienced Angeline’s Yankee cooking herself when she was a newlywed.
The couple married in 1885 in South Dakota, when Laura was 18 and Almanzo was 28. Their daughter Rose was born a year later. But for the next few years, hardships befell the young family, including diphtheria, the loss of a newborn son, a house fire, crop failure and the financial difficulties that naturally ensued.
While the couple regained their footing, they lived with Almanzo’s parents for a year. The elder parents had long ago moved from New York to Missouri.
It makes Tice wonder if it is really 9-year-old Almanzo or 23-year-old Laura who is doing the remembering.
No matter whose memory is providing the fodder for this fond look back at prosperous farm life in the 1860s, the food passages are “a rich testimony of food, of what they had to eat and what they didn’t have to eat,” says Tice.
Salivate while you read this description of the typical Wilder breakfast:
“There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar. There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat pancakes, as many as Almanzo wanted to eat, with sausages and gravy or with butter and maple syrup. There were preserves and jams and jellies and doughnuts. But best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice and its crumbly crust. he ate two big wedges of the pie.”
Though it was more work to prepare upfront, maple sugar was the norm, as it lasted better than maple syrup, which could sour or mold in the oak buckets it was stored in back in those days, says Tice. If families wanted syrup, they would reconstitute the maple sugar with water.
Angeline’s doughnuts were long and twisted, not round. While round doughnuts were mentioned, Angeline preferred the less trendy shape because they did not require flipping. Round doughnut cutters were introduced in 1872, notes Tice.
Rotary egg beaters were also commercially available since the 1850s, but the Wilders whipped their eggs with a fork and platter.
Angeline had a meat grinder but no sausage stuffer in her kitchen. She, like other New England housewives, learned to freeze foods in the winter by storing them in the attic of the wood shed or other perpetually cold place.
“People back then were not necessarily slaves to labor. But some did not trust new mechanical devices which could break down,” she says.
One of the labor-saving appliances that Angeline did take advantage of was the rocking butter churn barrel. Butter-making was an important home business back then. With nine cows, the Wilder farm produced a surplus of butter, and Angeline’s high-quality butter commanded a high price. In the book, she sold 500 pounds for $250.
Meanwhile Almanzo’s father made $500 on his potato crop. The money from those two commodities alone put the Wilder family income comfortably above the average of those times, notes Tice.
Following her talk, lead foodways interpreter Pat Mead, dressed in period costumes, offered samples of several dishes that were referenced in the book, including mince meat, pound cake, eggnog (then a summer drink), fried onions and apples and bird’s nest pudding, which are apples baked in a batter pudding.
KMILTNER@DemocratandChronicle.com
