Book Review: Little House Cookbook

The Little House Cookbook is so much more than a list of recipes. It is a history book, a kitchen manual, and a very interesting collection of old-time recipes. You won't just flip through it for recipe ideas; you'll want to sit down and read it from cover to cover!

It explains some of the most basic ingredients in the Little House kitchen, such as salt pork, cornmeal, molasses, and other stand-bys. There is a detailed explanation of the bread-making process the way Ma and Laura did it. There is a how-to for homemade butter, both in a churn and in a mason jar. There are even detailed instructions for making cheese as described in Little House in the Big Woods.

You will also find instructions for copying the scrumptious meals featured in Farmer Boy (Little House) , made by Almanzo's mother. Look for Fried Apples 'n Onions, Apple Turnovers, Chicken Pie, and even Roasted Pig!

If you remember The Long Winter (Little House), you can re-create the brown bread the Ingall's ate twice daily when the town ran out of food.

Make the same sourdough starter that Ma used in By the Shores of Silver Lake (Little House) for her biscuits.

Try the Stewed Jack Rabbit and Dumplings that the family shared with Mr. Edwards in Little House on the Prairie (Little House, No 2).

And make Fried Salt Pork with Gravy as the Ingalls family did in nearly every book in the series.

What's more, most of the recipes can be made today with our basic kitchen ingredients!

For the self-sufficient type, this book is a must-have. The Ingalls family, like all Pioneers, were self-sufficient by necessity. The Wilders were, as well.

You can find out how to make baking powder, vinegar, soured milk, and more in your own home! Find out how they used up every last morsel to make their resources stretch.

For any Little House fan, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Order yours today!

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Food Coloring

There are many examples in Little House of the way people did things before "advancements" changed our lives. Take food coloring, for example.

After (Ma) had put the cream in the tall crockery churn and set it near the stove to warm, she washed and scraped a long orange-colored carrot. Then she grated it on the bottom of the old, leaky tin pan that Pa had punched full of nail-holes for Ma. Ma rubbed the carrot across the roughness until she had rubbed it through all the holes, and when she lifted up the pan, there was a soft, juicy mound of grated carrot.

She put this in a little pan of milk on the stove and when the milk was hot she poured milk and carrot into a cloth bag. Then she squeezed the bright yellow milk into the churn, where it colored all the cream. Now the butter would be yellow.

From Little House in the Big Woods in the chapter entitled Winter Days and Winter Nights



It seems so simple and nutritious to use a carrot for the yellow-colored butter! Today, we use artificial food colorings in nearly every food on the market. Yet, studies have shown that these colorings are detrimental to our health. This is just one of hundreds of examples of how our advancements have actually complicated our lives (and risked our health).

So, how can you color foods the natural way? Here are some suggestions:

• Use beet juice for red or pink. I did this in some store-bought vanilla icing and it works beautifully without compromising taste. I wonder how it would be in a Red Velvet cake?
• Blueberries make a nice dark juice.
• Ma's carrot solution for yellow works!
• Lots of berries would work for purple, like blackberries, mulberries, etc.

Not only do these methods substitute an all-natural ingredient for what could be a very dangerous chemical ingredient, but just think of the added nutrition that beets, carrots, and blueberries add to your diet!

There are many, many natural solutions to every day living that we have forgotten, or maybe we didn't even know. Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy are two wonderful references for self-sufficiency and natural solutions. If you've never read them, or it's been too long, why not read them today?

BOOK: Laura Ingalls Wilder Country

If you've read the Little House books, this is a must-have!

Laura Ingalls Wilder Country takes you on a tour of Laura's life, book by book, with photos, maps, and other descriptions of the real places and people. It even goes beyond the books and shows photos of Laura and Almanzo in Mansfield, MO, and photos of Rose in childhood and adulthood.

My kids like to flip through this book occasionally to see "real" photos of Laura and her family. There is a photo of Pa's fiddle, Mary's organ, some of the quilts, the house in DeSmet (Little Town on the Prairie) where Ma and Pa lived until their deaths, and so much more. There is even a little background on some of the other families mentioned in the stories.

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