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!

Visit my Prairie Sense Book Store for a list of all things Little House!

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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?

Breakfast on the Farm

If you read Farmer Boy, you will see a vast difference in the way the Wilders grew up compared to the Ingalls'. The Wilders were prosperous farmers. The Ingalls' struggled to make a living constantly. Take breakfast, for instance.

Almanzo opened his eyes again, and the candle was sputtering on the bureau. Royal was dressing. His breath froze white in the air. The candlelight was dim, as though the darkness were trying to put it out.

Suddenly, Royal was gone, the candle was not there, and Mother was calling from the foot of the stairs.

"Almanzo! What's the matter? Be you sick? It's five o'clock!"

He crawled out, shivering. He pulled on his trousers and waist, and ran downstairs to button up by the kitchen stove. Father and Royal had gone to the barns. Almanzo took the milk-pails and hurried out. The night seemed very large and still, and the stars sparkled like frost in the black sky.

When the chores were done and he came back with Father and Royal to the warm kitchen, breakfast was almost ready. How good it smelled! Mother was frying pancakes, and the big blue platter, keeping hot on the stove's hearth, was full of plump brown sausage cakes in their brown gravy.

Almanzo washed as quickly as he could, and combed his hair. As soon as Mother finished straining the milk, they all sat down and Father asked the blessing for breakfast.

There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar. There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat cakes, 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.
Taken from Farmer Boy in the chapter entitled Winter Night

What a meal! Can you imagine the nap you'd need after a breakfast like that? Why do you suppose they could eat so much at breakfast?

I think it had to do with the hard work they did. Earlier in the chapter, it's also mentioned that the temperature was 40 below zero. 40 below! They needed plenty of nutrition to keep them going with such cold temperatures and hard work. Father worked outdoors or in the barns much of the day, and Mother worked in the attic spinning wool, making candles, and doing other various chores. The children all walked to school. A breakfast like the one above would certainly sustain them!

I hope my children don't remember the part about apple pie at breakfast. I distinctly remember saying several times, "We don't have dessert at breakfast" after requests for candy, brownies, or ice cream in the morning. Almanzo was a lucky boy!

Fish for Every Meal!

Every day there was fish for breakfast and fish for dinner and fish for supper.
Taken from On the Banks of Plum Creek in the chapter entitled The Fish Trap

That is the last line in this particular chapter. I don't know about you, but I'd probably be complaining to High Heaven after about 1 and 1/2 days of that! But not the Ingalls family. Nope! You guessed it! They were grateful.

Let's back up:

The Ingalls family was living in a dugout near a creek (more on that in another post!) and, as always, living off of nature's bounty. Pa was always one step ahead of the needs of his family. So he set about building a fish trap.

"Now you see, Laura," said Pa. "The fish will come over the falls into the trap, and the little ones will go out through the cracks, but the big ones can't. They can't climb back up the falls. So they'll have to stay swimming in the box til I come and take them out."

At that very minute a big fish came slithering over the falls. Laura squealed and shouted, "Look Pa! Look!"

Pa's hands in the water grabbed the fish and lifted him out, flopping. Laura almost fell into the waterfall. They looked at the silvery fat fish and then Pa dropped him into the trap again.

He sat on his heels and Laura sat on hers and they waited. The creek poured and splashed, always the same and always changing. Glints of sunshine danced on it. Cool air came up from it and warm air lay on Laura's neck. The bushes held up thousands of little leaves against the sky. They smelled sweet in the sun.

Pa and Laura took the fish home to Ma, where Pa cleaned them and Ma fried them up for supper.

"You always think of something, Charles," said Ma. "Just when I'm wondering where our living is to come from, now it's spring." Pa could not hunt in the springtime, for then all the rabbits had little rabbits and the birds had little birds in their nests.

Every morning after that, before he went to work, Pa brought fish from the trap. He never took more than they needed to eat. The others he lifted out of the trap and let swim away.

He brought buffalo fish and pickerel, and catfish, and shiners, and bullheads with two black horns. He brought some whose names he did not know. Every day there was fish for breakfast and fish for dinner and fish for supper.

The End.

No complaint whatsoever of having the same ol' thing for every meal. This is a beautiful example of good old American ingenuity. It's truly pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and making do with what you have. It's what made the Pioneers a great generation, and helped them to successfully settle the western frontier.

This same book covers many hardships, like a plague of grasshoppers, blizzards, wheels of fire, drought, and debt. But the Ingalls family didn't flinch, and they didn't despair. They still sang songs at bedtime while Pa played his fiddle, they worshipped with their local church and even contributed to the shiny new church bell. And when things just wouldn't turn around, they cut their losses and found a new place to start again. After all, this was America and anything was possible.