Making Like a Muskrat

I was going to think through this whole Little House eating thing (help, please! I need a catchy title for my theme week!) a little longer, but had a chance to go shopping with a car today, so I quickly made a list of staples and "specials" I thought I would need. The perishability of some items means I'll be starting soon, maybe sometime tomorrow. (I meant to start tomorrow at breakfast, but realized I accidentally bought some avocados--they were looking good and weirdly cheap and I KNOW they come from Mexico, but, well. Powerless. Anyway, there's almost nothing further from something the Ingallses/Wilders would eat than avocados, so of course I have to eat them first.)

Here's what I laid in, to add to a few things I already had on hand (such as PLENTY of maple syrup): apples, heavy cream, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, molasses (I've never bought such a big bottle of molasses), buttermilk, whole milk, free range organic eggs, pea beans, oysters, oyster crackers, nutmeg, popcorn (I expect popcorn, popped in a kettle, to be one of my primary snacks; it'll be like Christmas every day. I mean, like an ordinary winter evening on the Wilder farm), buckwheat flour, dried corn, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, squash, pumpkin, turnips, lettuce (yes, I know there's no way they would have had THAT in winter, but I'm not going to carry accuracy that far), salt pork, bacon, cinnamon, and cloves. I still need to pick up some dried fruit, and I might get some fish. And I'm going to go ahead and eat my natural organic cheese occasionally (mostly because I forgot and opened some a few minutes ago); I don't figure it'll be that different from what they might have had.

Just realized I'm dooming myself to a week without hot cocoa. I'd better go make some now. It's interesting--I can't remember that chocolate appears in the Little House books at all (anyone?), yet twenty-five years later in the Betsy-Tacy books, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Mr. Ray wasn't kidding when he said that when HE was a boy, they managed to study without all the fudge.

I'm aware that I'm likely to be eating every day as if it were a feast, in Little House terms, but I know too that for me this will be an exercise in self-denial the likes of which would make Mary proud. Already I'm sort of gasping internally at the idea of the limited snacks, the lack of garlic, the single orange. (Hmm. I suppose I could have canned peaches, too, couldn't I?) But I'm also kind of surprised at the Plenty I have. And when the week ends and I can drink that cocoa, it'll be like the supply train has finally made it to DeSmet*.

*Except that's total hyperbole, because instead of starvation rations of brown bread, tea, and maybe some baked potato with salt for months, I'll be feasting on bird's nest pudding and baked beans and oyster stew for one week. But you get the idea. Hmm, I probably should have laid in some more heavy cream.

Almanzo ate four large helpings of apples 'n' onions fried together.

Stupidest idea I ever had? Eat like I'm living in Little House for a year. Secondary idea I had that I realized was actually practicable? Eat like I'm living in Little House for a week.

Armed with the Little House Cookbook and other resources, this will be coming soon. And I won't limit myself to heart-shaped cakes, fried potatoes, cambric tea, and other such "safe" foods, I promise. (Likely I will even eat some meat.) My first thought was just to create random menus from all foods available, but I could also feature one book each day (which would make it eight or nine days, of course), or just make sure that I did eventually eat from all of them, or something else. I doubt I will try to replicate any actual full meals, because I have different needs, but you never know.

If you have any suggestions or requests for specific foods, let me know. Or if you would like to join in a Virtual Dinner Party sometime. I did this once with Laurie and Kathleen, where we all made waffles for dinner one night, hundreds of miles apart. And once I sponsored a Meat Pie Monday with my Betsy-Tacy friends, where I donated a can of food to a food pantry for every person who agreed to make a meat pie on a particular night (it's a Thing from Betsy's Wedding). Several others matched my donations, and in the end, hundreds of cans were donated. Anyway, my point is that virtual dinner parties can be a lot of fun. So if you have a hankering for fried codfish balls, bean porridge, or corn dodgers, be in touch.

It's pumpkin! Ma made it of green pumpkin!

In my third year of trying, I finally managed to procure a green pumpkin to make green pumpkin pie with.

For those who need background: in The Long Winter, the Ingalls family is surprised by an early freeze, and most of their garden is ruined before much was harvested. But they save what they can--the potatoes are fine, some of the tomatoes are ripe, and Ma makes pickles out of the green ones. And there's a bushel of beans. (They think they have enough food to last through the winter, but they DON'T, and when you reread this you know, and it is all scary foreshadowing.)

A few of the pumpkins are ripe, but most are green. Ma's wheels must be turning, because as soon as Pa leaves to go hunting...

After he had gone, Ma said "Girls, I've thought of a surprise for Pa."
..."What?" they all asked her.
"Hurry and get the work done," Ma said. "And then, Laura, you go to the corn patch and bring me a green pumpkin. [wonder if Ma realizes that growing squash and corn together is an "Indian idea"?] I'm going to make a pie!"
"A pie! But how..." Mary said, and Laura said "A GREEN pumpkin pie? I never heard of such a thing, Ma."'
"Neither did I," said Ma. "But we wouldn't do much if we didn't do things that nobody ever heard of before."'
Laura and Carrie did the dishes properly but in a hurry. Then Laura ran through the cool, misty rain to the corn-patch and lugged back the biggest green pumpkin.


(I used only two pounds of this ten-pound pumpkin.)

"Now what do I do?" [Laura asked].
"You may cut the pumpkin in slices and peel them while I make the piecrust," said Ma. "Then we'll see what we'll see."


(I cut them a bit smaller than that in the end.)

Ma put the crust in the pie pan and covered the bottom with brown sugar and spices. Then she filled the crust with the thin slices of the green pumpkin. She poured half a cup of vinegar over them, put a small piece of butter on top, and laid the top crust over all.
"There," she said, when she had finished crimping the edges.
"I didn't know you could," Carrie breathed, wide-eyed, looking at the pie.
"Well, I don't know yet," Ma said...


(On the advice of the cookbook, since I didn't have any homemade vinegar around, I used hard cider instead--she says this is more similar to what Ma would have had. And I used a third cup, to allow for modern measurements. I couldn't taste any alcohol in the finished pie, and I have an extremely sensitive-to-alcohol palate.)

The pie was baking beautifully. When Ma... opened the oven, the rich smell of baking pie came out. [This was truly an amazing smell; I wish I could have taken a picture of it for all of you. It was richer and somehow more complex than that of either apple or pumpkin pie.] ...Ma turned the pie so that it would brown evenly.
"It's doing nicely," Ma said.
"Oh, won't Pa be surprised!" Carrie cried.
Just before dinner, Ma took the pie from the oven. It was a beautiful pie.


[They hoped to have it for dinner, but Pa doesn't come home, so it has to wait for supper. What a disappointment that must have been. (Mary probably thought it built character.)]

Laura set down the pie.
For an instant Pa did not see it. Then he said "Pie!"
His surprise was even greater than they had expected. Grace and Carrie and even Laura laughed out loud.
"Caroline, however did you manage to make a pie? What kind of pie is it?"
"Taste it and see!" said Ma. She cut a piece and put it on his plate.
Pa cut off the point with his fork and put it in his mouth. "Apple pie! Where in the world did you get apples?"
Carrie could keep still no longer. "It's pumpkin! Ma made it of green pumpkin!"
Pa took another small bite and tasted it carefully. "I'd never have guessed it," he said. "Ma always could beat the nation cooking."...


They ate slowly, taking small bites of that sweet spiciness to make it last as long as it could.
That was such a happy supper that Laura wanted it never to end.

The pie was tasty. I wouldn't say that it was as good as apple pie, but of course apples have never been scarce for me; and also, I was using an ordinary Halloween pumpkin, which I got for free from the patch because it would have been too scarred to sell. If I had used a pie pumpkin, I'm guessing it would have been more flavorful. The pumpkin pieces were a little bland and watery--they reminded me of the chayote squash I often had in soups in Guatemala. I was pretty skeptical about the cup of brown sugar the cookbook directed me to put in the bottom of the crust. It filled up about half the pan, and I sort of doubt that Ma would have been able to put that much sugar in. The flavor was good, but I think it would have been fine with less sugar. And as you can see, it was QUITE liquidy after being cut. I think that was probably from the pumpkin, and a tablespoon or two of flour might have improved that. I bet the extra liquid would be good on vanilla ice cream, though I think if you ate a scoop along with your pie, the ice cream would overwhelm its delicate flavors.

I discovered that the pie was even better the next day, so the Ingallses were probably better off having to wait to eat it at supper, anyway.

Vanity, Thy Name is Cake

Vanity cakes are not at all what I expected.

...Ma made vanity cakes. She made them with beaten eggs and white flour. She dropped them into a kettle of sizzling fat. Each one came up bobbing, and floated til it turned itself over, lifting up its honey-brown, puffy bottom. Then it swelled underneath till it was round, and Ma lifted it out with a fork. She put every one of those cakes in the cupboard. They were for the party.

--On the Banks of Plum Creek

So I had a childish idea of what vanity cakes would look like and taste like, and never really let go of it. I'll try to describe what I pictured: about the size of a baseball, but a little flatter, not a perfect sphere... there's a word for that shape, like a double lens? Completely hollow on the inside, truly like a bubble of pastry, with a very thin "skin", honey-brown but translucent--kind of like if you were able to make a bubble of phyllo dough.

I can SEE these vanity cakes sitting on the cupboard shelf (covered with starry paper) in the house on Plum Creek. I can feel them in my mouth: a big bite that turns out to be mostly air, with a few crackly bits in my mouth.

The trouble? They don't exist.


I don't know why I took it into my head to make vanity cakes yesterday, but I did. And I fully expected them to turn into the pastry balloons described above until they were dropped into the sizzling fat.


The funny thing is, they acted EXACTLY as Laura describes, step by step. It was delightful to watch them drop to the bottom, bob up to the top, and flip themselves over. It's just the end product that is not what I expected (and that, of course, is my own fault, not Laura's).


I sprinkled them with powdered sugar, as recommended in The Little House Cookbook, and ate them hot. They were fairly good (especially considering I don't have the best track record with this cookbook, usually because of similar unrealistic expectations), but perhaps a little tougher than they should be--the dough might have been too stiff. They were a lot like cream puffs--deep-fried cream puffs.

Overall, a successful experiment--though I'm not likely to repeat it, unless my nieces are interested in trying them sometime, or something. The Little House Cookbook scared me off deep-fat-frying for many years, and I don't want them to live with the same fear.