Eleanor Apps as a young woman
As I think back to the years when I was growing up on a small dairy farm in central Wisconsin during the latter years of the Great Depression and World War II, I don’t know how my mother did it. Eleanor Apps did all of the baking and cooking for our family of five without electricity or running water, without a refrigerator, and using a wood-burning cookstove. And she did it well.
Those were challenging times. Farm income was meager during the 1930s, and during the war years that followed, rationing made Ma’s work in the kitchen even more difficult. Yet her ever-present recipe box gave her the ideas and information she needed for providing wonderful meals. I don’t remember ever going to bed hungry, although many children did during that time.
I remember so well when electricity came to our farm, in 1947, and a refrigerator replaced the icebox, a home freezer eliminated many jars of preserved food on the cellar shelves, and lightbulbs replaced kerosene lamps and lanterns. My mother added new recipes to her already long list, including such things as Jell-O and ice cream desserts that required refrigeration.
As I thought about those years, it occurred to me that people today might be interested in Ma’s recipes and the role that food played in our lives in those days—for its importance went well beyond providing sustenance. Yet I know next to nothing about cooking. I do it on occasion, but I seem to have inherited my father’s cooking skills, which my mother described with one phrase: “Your father can’t boil water without burning it.” I talked to my daughter, Susan, who is a teacher, an author, and a good cook, and she agreed to co-write this book with me, taking charge of the menus, recipes, and illustrations. My wife, Ruth, a professional home economist, agreed to “help out as needed.” She read everything Sue and I wrote, tested many of the recipes, and checked all of them to make sure they were accurate. She was of great help in providing directions that were often missing on my mother’s recipe cards.
In the days of my youth, preparing food from scratch was the way things were done, and people knew what was in their food and where it came from. Good food was at the center of our family and social affairs, especially those times when neighbors got together to help each other at threshing, sawing, silo-filling, and corn-shredding bees. For me, food will always be associated with those times of good eating, storytelling, laughter, and good-hearted fun.
—Jerry Apps
My grandma Eleanor Apps’s white wooden box, with a hinged lid that flips up, holds recipe cards. They are simple lined index cards, scraps of paper, or little pieces of cardboard. On the cards are recipes for cakes and cookies, salads and breads, written with blue ink in her cursive handwriting.
A closer look reveals a story. It’s a story of many hours of work, of time spent preparing meals for her family and others who ate at the kitchen or dining room tables. The cards are yellowed and covered with food spills, and often in the top right corner is the name of a sister, a friend, or a neighbor who shared something of themselves by sharing a recipe.
These cards are written in the language of food from that time: a pinch of this, season with salt and pepper to taste, bake for about an hour. Why is there no mention of an oven temperature? My grandma cooked on a woodstove and knew the kind and amount of wood to use to heat the oven for baking pies, a hotdish, or bread. Why is there no mention of a mixer or blender? Her early kitchen did not have electricity; she mixed, chopped, and stirred by hand.
Susie licking the beaters—her first “recipe” experience—in 1965
When I was young, I visited my grandparents’ farm often and stayed for a week in the summer to help during strawberry-picking season. By that time the kitchen had electricity and indoor plumbing. I remember Grandma’s homemade sweet rolls and doughnuts and the smell of date cookies in the oven. At breakfast we ate fried eggs with lots of pepper and piles of buttered toast. Her salads had fresh-picked peas and lettuce with chunks of ham and cheddar cheese. She showed me how to gather eggs out of the nests in the chicken house and insisted I watch her pluck feathers from a recently butchered chicken to prepare it for roasting. I never actually saw my grandma cook with a recipe card. Most of her cards have no directions at all, just lists of ingredients. I imagine she simply knew how to cook and used the cards to jog her memory.
Why would I attempt to cook the way she did when my father and his twin brothers were young? When I follow her recipes, I remember her; I connect with her way of life in the kitchen. For this cookbook, I rewrote her recipes for cooks in today’s kitchen, adding oven temperatures and pan sizes and clarifying, where I could, the language of the era. However, I put away my mixer and fancy gadgets and picked up my wooden spoons and potato masher. My mother and I got out our canning supplies to make grape and raspberry jam.
I have cooked or baked most of the recipes in this book. (I decided not to fry up a squirrel!) I did so to honor my grandma and all the women who worked in the kitchen for their families. Some folks say it was a simpler time. I don’t think so! I think these women worked very hard and were very smart to plan, prepare, and cook meals for their family and at times for large groups of men who helped the farm at harvesting time.
I use these recipe cards, I listen to my father’s stories, and I remember my grandma. I think about how these recipes connected them to their own heritage and how food connected a family as they sat around the kitchen table for breakfast after chores. I think about how they used food to celebrate a birthday, mourn the passing of a family member, greet a new neighbor, or have fun on a holiday.
Why do I care about a pile of old, yellowed, food-stained cards? When I use Grandma Apps’s recipes, she is with me in the kitchen. She is still here. I remember her through this white wooden box of recipes.
—Susan Apps-Bodilly