This past week, my two youngest children have been reading "Little House in the Big Woods" with me. This is the first of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" series, which details her childhood on the frontier. When I was growing up, these were the equivalent of "Harry Potter" for the grade-school set. For me, they were topped only by Nancy Drew.
A few chapters of these books give you a major appreciation for your refrigerator and well-stocked grocery stores. We read how Wilder's "Ma" churned cream into butter, giving it a little more color with the juice of a carrot. One chapter is devoted to preparations for the long winter ahead: potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips and cabbages piled into the cellar; fish salted in barrels. When we got to hog-butchering day, my daughter begged us to stop.
"That's SO disgusting!" she said after we read how Pa blew the bladder into a balloon that Laura and Mary played with, and how they roasted the pig's tail over the fire and made "head cheese."
These are the same kids who don't think twice when they turn on the TV and see people getting shot at, cars getting blown up and so on. But their aversion to hearing about butchered pigs is probably because we've let them believe that ham and bacon come in nice little packages from the grocery store.
I'm impressed at how Laura savored life's little pleasures that we so often take for granted — a cold glass of buttermilk after the butter was churned, the savory "cracklings" from the pork fat that were used to flavor cornbread. How many times do we modern-day diners simply stuff ourselves without really tasting the food or appreciating the work involved?
This passage from "Little House on the Prairie" illustrates the appreciation for Ma's cooking efforts:
"Ma made the cornmeal and water into two thin loaves, each shaped in a half-circle. She laid the loaves with their straight sides together in the bake-oven, and she pressed her hand flat on top of each loaf. Pa always said he did not ask for any other sweetening, when Ma put the prints of her hands on the loaves."
Every year one of my children's teachers, Vicky Wiseman of Windridge Elementary in Kaysville, holds a "Little House on the Prairie Day." The kids dress like characters from the book, play pioneer-style games and make some of the food from that time period. As one of the mothers who helped in past years, I demonstrated how to make cornbread in a Dutch oven, the "bake-oven" that Ma used on the Kansas prairie to bake her cornbread.
Wiseman supplied me a recipe from "The Little House Cookbook," which gives many of the Wilder family's recipes. The success of that experience has prompted me to demonstrate Dutch-oven cooking to other classes when my children study pioneer life.
Wilder's original recipe calls for "cracklings" and, lacking a hog to butcher, I improvised with some bacon pieces that come in a jar. They're not quite as fatty, but they do give off a bacon flavor. If you'd like to have your own "Little House" experience, here's the recipe to start things off:
CRACKLING CORNBREAD
1/4 cup butter
2 cups stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2-3 tablespoons cracklings (or bacon pieces)
2 cups buttermilk
2 eggs
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Melt butter by heating it briefly in 8-inch baking pan. In the large bowl, mix cornmeal, salt, baking soda and cracklings. Stir in buttermilk. Beat eggs well in small bowl and add them to batter. Stir in the melted butter last. Pour batter into hot, greased pan and bake about 30 minutes, until brown edges pull away from pan and the center of the bread bounces back when pressed. Cut in 2-inch squares and remove from pan before bread cools. Serve warm. Serves 16.
E-MAIL: vphillips@desnews.com