Frontier Food Ways in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books
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University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History History, Department of 12-2013 "Hunger is the Best Sauce": Frontier Food Ways in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books Erin E. Pedigo University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historydiss Part of the American Literature Commons, American Material Culture Commons, and the United States History Commons Pedigo, Erin E., ""Hunger is the Best Sauce": Frontier Food Ways in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books" (2013). Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History. 66. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historydiss/66 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. “HUNGER IS THE BEST SAUCE”: FRONTIER FOOD WAYS IN LAURA INGALLS WILDER’S LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS BY ERIN ELIZABETH PEDIGO A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Major: History Under the Supervision of Professor Kenneth Winkle Lincoln, Nebraska December, 2013 “HUNGER IS THE BEST SAUCE”: FRONTIER FOOD WAYS IN LAURA INGALLS WILDER’S LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS Erin Elizabeth Pedigo, M. A. University of Nebraska, 2013 Adviser: Kenneth Winkle This thesis examines Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House book series for the frontier food ways described in it. Studying the series for its food ways edifies a 19th century American frontier of subsistence/companionate families practicing both old and new ways of obtaining food. The character Laura in Wilder’s books is an engaging narrator who moves through childhood and adolescence, assuming the role of housewife. An overview of the century’s norms about food in America, the strength of domesticity as an ideal, food and race relations, and the frontier as a physical place round out this unexplored angle of Little House scholarship. © Erin Elizabeth Pedigo Acknowledgments Many people helped make this thesis possible, and I’d like to thank them here. My committee chairman, Dr. Kenneth Winkle in the History Department, first helped me form the core idea, analysis of food ways in Little House, that forms this thesis. It all started as a class paper, and over many months I let creativity and critical thinking roam wild before corralling it all back into a final form. Also in the History department, Dr. Katrina Jagodinksy, who provided input but did not take on the project, deserves thanks for her valuable critiques. She and Dr. Winkle both deserve thanks for their patient advice . for me to be patient. Never rush brilliant thoughts. Finally in History, Professor Timothy Mahoney was gracious enough to lend his time as a second reader for the committee after a lengthy sabbatical. Thank you. In the English department, Dr. Melissa Homestead was gracious with her time as my outside reader. Thank you as well. Outside of the various academic departments, I’d like to thank Laura Weakly and Kay Walter for providing me with four years of continuous employment as a graduate research assistant, during two master’s degrees, at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. I’ve learned so many skill sets and exercised so many that I already have. Working with both of you was a wonderful part of the graduate student experience. Outside of the University of Nebraska, thanks go to Dr. D. E. Mungello, whose friendly manner and sage advice on life and career have lasted me well beyond my undergraduate days. Thank you. Finally, the biggest thanks go to my family, for supporting me through four years of graduate school ups and downs. Our food ways and our love of books were the real foundations of this thesis. Thanks for instilling a love of reading. It started me on the Little House series as a second grader in Omaha. “I’ve read all the books in the book corner!” I told Mrs. Brinkman one day. She went across the hall to Mrs. Klein’s third grade room and brought back Little House in the Big Woods. That started it all, and over time at home we amassed most of the series. The good cooking we’ve always done has instilled a love of creating meals. Mom, I love our food adventures and digging into food histories. Dad, thanks for teaching me many fundamentals. I’ve learned to make delicious food from the best cooks. I love you. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: At the Table in Little House I. Food In 19th Century America II. Glittering Stars: The Ingalls Family’s Initial Settlement III. Domesticity In The Wild IV. Unwelcome Eaters: Native Americans In Little House V. Man Versus Nature VI. Little House On The Culture Hearth Conclusion: “Hunger Is The Best Sauce” 1 INTRODUCTION: AT THE TABLE IN LITTLE HOUSE The nine books comprising the Little House series are beloved classics among children. The first of the series, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1932. The books follow the fictionalized family of Laura Ingalls Wilder—Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace—across the Midwest in the last third of the 19th century. The family leaves backwoods Wisconsin for Indian Territory (unsettled Kansas), and then moves near a small town in Minnesota. Next, the family heads for Dakota Territory, and ends up settling at the De Smet town site in what is now South Dakota. The chronology is circa 1871-1889. The books are Little House in the Big Woods; Little House on the Prairie; Farmer Boy; On the Banks of Plum Creek; By the Shores of Silver Lake; Little Town on the Prairie; These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years. A brief interlude chronicles the late childhood (ages nine and ten) of Almanzo Wilder. The real boy grew up to be Laura Ingalls’ husband, but his story Farmer Boy is similarly fictionalized. This book takes place in upstate New York circa 1866. Finally, there is the posthumously-published The First Four Years, which is presented in its unedited form. It chronicles the first four years of Laura and Almanzo Wilder’s long and happy marriage. In this story they live on a South Dakota land claim from 1885-1889. “Many” of the scholars of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her work, purports Anita Clair Fellman, were “devoted fans” as children.1 This author is no exception. To paraphrase Fellman, though, “this work has two origins: one personal,” one 1 $ ' !$%" #!$2003($1& R gastronomic.2 Of the many aspects of the Little House series analyzed by Wilder scholars, a key one that has been curiously ignored is food. Many a page in each book fairly brims with food. Descriptions of food entail where it came from, how it was prepared, and whether it was consumed or preserved. Readers can imagine how the food must have smelled and tasted and what it looked like. These various foods, which range from apples to bear meat to hominy and more, were acquired in a few ways. They were gathered or hunted, raised or grown, bartered for or purchased. How all these foods must have tasted is what enthralled this author as a child, reading about boiling vats of maple sugar and syrup in Little House in the Big Woods, or the coarse plain bread chewed in cold silence during The Long Winter, or the stewed jackrabbit cooked over the open fire in the tall grass in Little House on the Prairie. That others have been obsessed by the lost gastronomic experience of the frontier, specifically as depicted by Wilder, is clear. There is a movement to reconstruct the food ways of the Little House series. The movement appears in blogs: “My conviction that I was going to enjoy some well prepared rabbit—I’d never had rabbit before—came straight from Mrs. Wilder.”3 It also appears in personal recollections: “I wanted dead rabbits brought home for supper. I wanted to go out into the backyard and just, I don’t know, grab stuff off trees, or uproot things from the ground, and bring it all inside in a basket and have my parents say, ‘My land! What a harvest!’”4 Those two specific R8Q@B 6 6 )4 ) 6 6C ) 8 ) @D S @4 ) QP8RPPU ) CA 5 B 8 8 4D )9EE666@ 7 @ ERPPUEPTE F F4@ T 74 $ % #" ! ! G6 95 8RPQQH8U@ manifestations—blog and memoir—are the most recent incarnations of the modern movement to reconstruct foods from the various “little houses.” An older incarnation is a published cookbook. In 1979, Barbara M. Walker wrote The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories. She “found herself” cooking “pancake men” from Little House in the Big Woods with her then-four year old child.5 The Cookbook’s recipes range from apple turnovers to salt pork, hasty pudding to roasted wild turkey. They all represent a bygone era of cooking in which there were “basic connections among the food on the table, the grain in the field, and the cow in the pasture. Between the food on the table and the sweat of someone’s brow.”6 Walker was aware of the recipes’ allure for a modern audience. Her Cookbook has been reprinted since the late ‘70s, and its steady popularity begs the question: why do some modern cooks feel compelled to recreate (sometimes in approximations) the frontier foods of Wilder’s childhood? This thesis attempts, for the first time, to analyze the food ways present in Wilder’s books in a historical framework.