When I was growing up, food was central to our lives. If we weren’t growing and preparing food for our table, we were growing feed for our livestock. In many ways, my family was blessed. I don’t remember ever going to sleep hungry, even during the Depression years; that was not the case for some of our neighbors who did not have enough food.
From a young age I understood that eating was much more than simply consuming food in order to live. My earliest memories are of my father and mother and my twin brothers and me sitting down at our kitchen table for breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was around our old, well-worn wooden kitchen table where we shared what we were doing in school, where Pa told us about the work he had lined up for us in the coming days, and where Ma reported on how well the chickens were doing. We weren’t allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished eating, and we ate what was put on our plates, no matter if we thought we wouldn’t like it (for me this meant I would eat Ma’s homemade rhubarb sauce, which I hated; my brother Don had to face many a plate of loathsome peas).
Pa did not believe in eating in restaurants, unless you were out of town, and even then he usually stopped at a butcher shop and bought a ring of bologna and some saltine crackers for lunch. As a family, we never once ate in a restaurant in the sixteen years I lived at home. Pa would say, “We’ve got plenty to eat at home, why would we want to eat at a restaurant?” I believe he thought restaurant eating was for city people—country folk did things differently, especially when it came to food and eating. I ate my first restaurant meal when I was about ten years old and Ross Caves, our livestock trucker from Wild Rose, asked if I’d like to ride along with him in his cattle truck to the Milwaukee stockyards where he was delivering a load of hogs that Pa was selling. He often asked farm kids to accompany him to Milwaukee, to keep him company on the long trip and to show the kids a little of the big city.
We arrived in Milwaukee about noon, and after he had unloaded the hogs, Ross asked me if I was hungry. Of course I was. We headed for a little restaurant at the edge of the stockyards, found a table, and Ross said I could order anything I wanted—he was buying. It was the first time I had ever been in a restaurant, and the first time I’d seen a restaurant menu. I couldn’t believe all the choices. After a bit, Ross asked me if I’d figured out what I wanted. I said I guess I’d just like some meat and potatoes, a piece of bread, and a glass of milk.
Ross smiled, and when the waitress came to take our orders, Ross told her what I wanted. When my meal arrived, I saw three huge slabs of roast beef, a mound of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, a little pile of carrots and peas, and two slim slices of bread. I dug in. The beef was tender, the mashed potatoes close to what Ma prepared, the glass of milk cold, the carrots and peas passable, but the bread had no taste at all. Finally I understood how much Ma’s homemade bread outshone the commercially prepared kind. It was my first time comparing things I ate in a restaurant to my mother’s home cooking—something I have done in one way or another ever since.
The Apps family, circa 1946. Back row: Eleanor and Herman. Front row: Darrel, Jerold, and Donald.
By the time I was thirteen or fourteen and old enough to drive a team on a threshing crew, I was introduced to many new foods as the threshing machine moved from farm to farm in our neighborhood. At the time I didn’t appreciate how diverse our community was in terms of ethnic backgrounds: the Kolkas were Czechoslovakian, the Millers and Handrichs were German, the Alan and Griff Davis families were Welsh, the Nelsons were Norwegian, the Macijeskis and the Mushinskis were Polish, the Stuckolas were Russian, and the Jenks and DeWitt families were English. When we ate threshing or corn-shredding or wood-sawing meals at these farms, we always got a sampling of ethnic foods along with the standard meat-and-potatoes fare.
Food was always present at times of happiness in our community—weddings, anniversaries, and neighborhood dances. But it was also a way of helping a family cope in challenging times or grieve when they lost a loved one. When folks learned that my mother would be in the hospital in Fond du Lac for a week or longer after a goiter operation, everyone in the neighborhood brought food, along with offering to help in any way they could.
Food, essential for living, also contributed toward making a life. Its importance went well beyond mere sustenance to our rural community.