Against the north wall of our kitchen, next to the sink, stood the icebox. It was creamy white, scarred and scratched from years of use. But it was dependable. It had no moving parts and was simply an insulated piece of kitchen furniture with two purposes: to keep things cool in summer and, somewhat ironically, to keep things from freezing on cold winter nights.
A metal drainpipe thrust out from the bottom of the icebox and into a hole that Pa had drilled through the kitchen floor. The water from the melting ice drained to a mysterious area under the kitchen (the house’s cellar didn’t reach this far).
The icebox stood about five feet tall and had a door on the top that opened to a compartment where the ice was kept. A door in the front allowed access to a couple of shelves, where Ma kept the butter, milk, and other foods she didn’t want to spoil during the hot days of summer.
The iceman, a huge, burly man as I remember him, drove a truck filled with fifty-pound cakes of ice, which were covered with sawdust to keep them from melting. He wore a long canvas apron that covered him from just under his chin to below his knees. He came to our farm once a week in summer, backed his truck up to the kitchen porch, and knocked on the kitchen door. He was a friendly chap, always ready with a word about the weather or something he had seen on his trip from the icehouse on the shores of the Wild Rose Millpond to his bevy of customers scattered throughout the area.
“Got any ice left?” was his usual question.
“A little,” Ma usually answered. How much depended on how hot the previous week had been. The iceman removed the remnants of the ice he had delivered the week before—sometimes mere scrapings, sometimes a sizable hunk. He deposited the leftover ice in the kitchen sink, walked back to his truck, lifted the canvas covering, and with ice tongs pulled out a fifty-pound cake of ice. With a little broom, he whisked away the sawdust, and then, using the tongs and one hand, he carried the heavy hunk of slippery, dripping ice into the kitchen and eased it into the icebox’s top compartment. A trail of small puddles followed him.
HARVESTING ICE
Before electrical power came to homes and farms, ice was harvested from lakes and millponds and was delivered by the icemen who traveled the area filling iceboxes each week. The Wild Rose Millpond was our source for ice, and it was an excellent one, for the millpond had been formed by damming the clean and clear Pine River. An icehouse stood on the shore of the millpond, not far from the gristmill, and a second one was located on the other end of the millpond, just off Main Street.
The ice harvest usually began in late January or early February, after the ice had formed to a depth of twenty-four inches or more. The ideal air temperature for ice harvesting was about ten to fifteen degrees. The ice was cleared of snow with a team and a scraper, and then a team pulling a marker etched a half-inch groove in the ice, forming a checkerboard pattern of ice blocks to be cut. Men chopped a hole in the ice at the end of one of the etched lines and then sawed down the line using an ice saw (which looked like a logging saw but longer, about forty inches). Soon blocks of ice were floating in the cold water. The men lifted them out with ice tongs, a device with two hand-holds and sharp grippers that dug into ice. The blocks of freshly cut ice were then loaded onto a sled pulled by a team to an icehouse, where they were stacked with ample amounts of sawdust between them for insulation.
Every day during the warm months, the delivery man would stop at one of the icehouses, load his truck with blocks of ice, and make the rounds of the community. If a family wasn’t home, they left a sign in the window indicating how much ice they wanted: fifty pounds, twenty-five pounds, or no ice that day. No one locked their houses in those days, so the iceman would come in, deposit the hunk of ice, and be on his way.
If the leftover piece of ice was large enough, my brothers and I would appeal to Ma for some homemade ice cream. The entire family had long declared homemade ice cream far superior to the store-bought kind, which we nevertheless occasionally purchased with our nickel allowances on Saturday nights in town.
We rustled up the ice-cream maker from its storage place in the woodshed. It was the kind with a wooden tub into which a metal container was immersed and fastened to a hand-crank. We chipped the ice into little pieces with an ice pick, filling the wooden tub with the chips, and covered each layer with table salt to slow the melting. Ma poured the cooled ice cream mixture into the metal container.
My brothers and I took turns cranking until the crank became difficult to turn, a sign that the ice cream was ready. We removed the container, pulled out the wooden paddles covered in freshly frozen ice cream, and argued about who got to “lick the paddles.”
Soon we were enjoying bowls of homemade ice cream, topped with whatever berries were in season. It truly was tastier than any store-bought ice cream.
2 cups milk
¾ cup sugar
Pinch of salt
1 cup half-and-half
1 cup heavy cream
1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
½ cup mix-ins: chocolate chips, chopped nuts, or fruit (optional)
Scald the milk in a large pan or pot until bubbles form at the edge. Remove from heat. Add the sugar and salt and stir until they are dissolved. Stir in the half-and-half, heavy cream, and vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture at this point for 30 minutes to 1 hour until it is well chilled.
Start the ice-cream maker and pour mixture through the hole in the lid. Churn until ice cream is desired consistency, 20 to 40 minutes. If adding optional mix-ins, do so after the mixture begins to get thick and has started to freeze. Follow the freezing directions for your ice-cream maker. Makes about 2 quarts of ice cream.
TIPS FOR MAKING ICE CREAM WITH A HAND-CRANK ICE-CREAM MAKER:
1.Use the freshest ingredients available, especially fruits.
2.Have crushed ice and rock salt at the ready. The ideal proportion of ice to salt in your ice-cream maker is three to one.
3.Never fill the inside container, or can, of an ice-cream maker more than three-quarters full. If it gets too full, the ice cream can become grainy.
4.After pouring the ice-cream mixture into the can, nestle the can into a tub. Gradually alternate layers of ice and salt around the can and let it settle in. Finish with rock salt at the top.
5.Let everything sit for 5 minutes to chill before beginning to turn the crank.
6.While you are cranking your ice-cream mixture, add ice around the can as it melts away and layer with more rock salt. Don’t take any water out.
7.Continue turning the crank until the ice cream is solid, about 20 minutes.
8.Wipe the top of the can clean of ice and salt water before looking in to check it.
9.Some say that, if you can wait, the ice cream tastes better after it “ripens.” Remove the dasher and pack the ice cream down with a long wooden spoon. Put the cover back on tightly and place a cork in the hole where the dasher was. Put the can back in the tub; pack it with three parts ice and one part salt. Cover the ice cream with a thick covering or blanket and let it sit in the shade for two hours.
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup shortening
3 eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla
5 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
Salted nuts or raisins (optional)
Cream sugars and shortening in a large bowl. Add the beaten eggs and vanilla. Set aside. In another bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the flour mixture gradually to the sugar mixture and stir until blended into dough. Add nuts or raisins, or both, if desired. Divide dough into 4 portions and shape into rolls on a floured board with your hands. The rolls should be about 2 inches in diameter. Wrap in wax paper and refrigerate overnight.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Remove dough rolls from the refrigerator and slice them about ¼-inch thick. Bake on ungreased cookie sheets until lightly browned, 8 to 10 minutes.
1 package (3 ounces) raspberry Jell-O
1 package (3 ounces) lemon Jell-O
3 cups hot water
2 cups ground fresh cranberries
1 small orange, peeled and diced
1 small apple, peeled and diced
1 cup crushed pineapple with its liquid
1½ cups sugar
1 cup finely chopped celery
¼ cup chopped nuts
Mix both packages of Jell-O together in a large bowl. Pour hot water over the Jell-O and stir to dissolve. Add all the other ingredients. Pour into a serving bowl or mold and chill until set.
Not long after the Rural Electrification Act of 1935 was passed, in the depths of the Depression, electricity began arriving in rural communities. By 1944, our country school had electricity, which meant that now an electric motor pumped water and lightbulbs replaced the gas lanterns. But the school board never saw fit to put in central heating or indoor plumbing, so the woodstove and the outhouses remained.
By the time the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) began setting poles and running wires to farms in Waushara County, where we lived, World War II had begun, copper wire was in short supply, and labor had changed its focus to the war effort. The farmers in our neighborhood made do with kerosene lamps and lanterns all through the war. When the war ended in summer 1945, the REA once more began signing up and lighting up farmsteads, but we were not “hooked up” until the spring of 1947.
Preserving meat had always been a challenge; smoking worked well, and storing pork chops in lard preserved them, but fresh meat was what many of us missed. Locker plants, usually associated with a meat market, began appearing during the war, offering a place where those of us without electricity could freeze and store meat. Pa rented a frozen food locker at a meat market in Almond, a village about nine miles from our farm. So for a few years we enjoyed fresh, frozen meat, but we had to drive nine miles to get it.
In the fall of 1946, electricians wired our house and the outbuildings after Pa had negotiated with the electric company to bring electricity to our farm. But the ground froze that fall before the poles from the main line could be set, and we waited until the following spring for everything to be in place. When my brothers and I returned home from school one day in April, Pa had a big smile on his face—for the first time ever we had electric power on our farm.
The bright lights took some getting used to after years of quiet yellow light from lamps and lanterns, but no one complained. Pa wasted little time before purchasing an electric motor for our water pump, an electric motor-driven milking machine, and a refrigerator for Ma’s kitchen. We moved the icebox out to the woodshed and placed the shiny new refrigerator where the icebox had stood. Now we would have cold milk in summer (the icebox at best kept things cool but never cold). And Ma could finally make Jell-O in summer, which required cooling to set. In those days, when some farmers had electricity and some did not, you could tell who did by observing who brought Jell-O dishes to summer gatherings.
Pa also bought a chest freezer, and he closed out the frozen food locker we’d been renting in Almond. Food preservation changed dramatically at the Apps home. We still enjoyed smoked bacon and ham, but pork chops, pork roasts, and other pork cuts were now frozen and stored in the freezer. Rather than canning green beans, peas, sweet corn, strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, Ma froze them. She continued to can applesauce and make jams and jellies that she stored in jars, and sauerkraut preparation remained the same.
Without a doubt, electricity had transformed our lives in ways we could scarcely understand at the time. Now we on the farm had most of the same conveniences that our city relatives had. Ma could quit worrying about what city relatives thought when they visited and had to eat by the light of a kerosene lamp. But because we had an ample supply of free firewood, the wood-burning cookstove remained, as did the daily tasks of carrying in water, for indoor plumbing was still many years away.