Home Economy in The Long Winter

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder is a book just full of home economy.

The book opens with Laura and Pa working to put up hay.  Pa decided to cut the Slough grass and put it up, too, even though he said it was not the best hay.  Early frosts came that year and on the first day of October a killing frost hit the prairie.  It finished off the garden the family had planted.  

Their harvest was small.  Pa dug five bushels of potatoes, then they pulled all the dead bean vines and Pa set those aside to finish drying out for more food.   He figured they'd get about a bushel of dry beans from the vines. Ma and Laura gathered the tomatoes, ripe and green.  There were enough ripe tomatoes to make a gallon of preserves. Then Ma made 2 quarts of green tomato pickles from the green tomatoes.  

Carrie was excited because they had turnip roots, but there was no exact account of how much they harvested of that.  Pa pulled and stacked 10 shocks of corn.  Then he brought six ripe pumpkins into the house.  He planned to save those seeds.  With the meat Pa would kill this was to feed their family through the winter months ahead.

A full account of what they gathered from the garden when that first killing frost hit: 10 shocks of corn, which usually consisted of 10-20 stalks.  Each stalk contained 10-20 ears...Or at least so say what limited information I could find on the corn shocks of yesterday.  

Any way we look at it, the harvest wasn't a big one by any means.  I don't know if Ma had already spent time putting up food during the summer months or not, or if they had only eaten fresh foods from the garden up until frost.

What is remarkable here is that they put aside what they had.  They had their eyes on the future needs of the household and as we know too well, every little bit counts.

When Pa declared the harvest fully in, he went out to hunt for geese and Ma decided to surprise him.  She asked Laura to go to the garden and bring in a green pumpkin.  She said she was going to make a pie.  The girls told her they had never heard of such a thing as a green pumpkin pie, Ma replied, "Neither did I.  But we wouldn't do much if we didn't do things that nobody had ever heard of before."

Ma instructed Laura to cut the pumpkin into slices and peel the rind from the slices.  Ma made a piecrust.  She put the crust in the pan, then covered the bottom with brown sugar and spices.  Then she filled the pie with thin slices of green pumpkin.  She poured a half cup of vinegar over the pumpkin slices, then topped the pie with pats of butter and another crust.

Pa was pleased to have pie after their supper that night.  When Ma brought it out, Pa was surprised. "What kind is it?"  "Try it and see if you can guess," Ma said.  Pa guessed it was an apple pie.  The girls were delighted to tell him that it was a green pumpkin pie.

I just loved reading this whole passage this past month.  It was such a good reminder that we should look at all the things at our disposal and figure out how we can make good use of them.  Ma used her experience as a cook to make that green pumpkin edible.  

I couldn't help but wonder if Ma might have preserved any of those green pumpkins, but Laura doesn't say she did.  

Winter came on very early that year and Pa felt uneasy about staying on the homestead.  Pa moved the family into town where they stayed in a building he'd built to rent out as a store building.  

Blizzard after blizzard pounded the town.  Sometimes, there was not even 12 hours between blizzards.  

In a day and age where there were no conveniences, even living in town came with its share of hardships. 

They melted snow for water.  Laura describes water in jugs and bowls being frozen in the morning and hoarfrost covering the nails in the walls of the store building.  To keep warm at night the girls wrapped hot irons and placed them under the covers of the beds.  In the very depth of the cold, Ma allowed the girls to hurry downstairs and dress by the fire while Pa was outside tending to his horses and milk cows.  

Keeping house was important to the family in so many ways.  On the rare clear days, they hurried to get the laundry washed and allowed it to freeze dry on the line outdoors.  Even during blizzards, Laura's task was to go upstairs after breakfast and make up the beds.  On a few days when it was so very cold, Ma told Laura to skip those chores.  They read and studied.  They sewed for the household.  Laura describes having to sew the seam up the middle of the cotton fabric that made up bedsheets.  Laura made lace.  Mary made rag rugs from old scraps.  

When Ma cooked beans, she served the broth as soup for their lunch and the beans themselves as rich baked beans that cooked in the stove until they were rich and dark for their evening meal.  With the cold, rabbits and deer, geese and such that they might have used for meat through a normal winter were nowhere to be found.  They ate salt pork as their protein, and beans and potatoes, turnips and bread. 

At one point, as their food stores grew smaller and smaller, and the cow stopped giving milk, Ma made the decision to have only two meals each day, instead of three.  Laura mentions the simplest of meals: fried potatoes and bread, potato soup, baked beans, bean broth, biscuits for breakfast.  

The stores in town were just as much at the mercy of the blizzards as the settlers.  When the train tracks were snowed under and they could no longer clear the tracks, they ran out of goods to sell to customers.  At no point does Laura mention that there wasn't enough money to re-stock the family supplies when food ran low.  Money is mentioned only in regard to the purchase of lumber.

They quickly ran out of their cut wood.  When the cost of lumber went too high Pa used that slough hay to keep the stove going for warmth when they ran out of their own cut wood.  They twisted bundles of the hay so that it made a nice tight 'log'.  I'm sure Pa was glad that he'd gone ahead and cut that hay, as it kept them warm.  

When kerosene ran low, Ma made 'button lamps' to give them a little light to see by in the evenings, but the family decided it was best to go to bed early.  It had the double advantage of not only helping them to keep warm but saving on the need for heating the house, which allowed them to reserve hay for necessary uses like cooking.

Laura mentions taking baths, but that was not a tub full of water.  It was a China basin, or an enameled tin basin of warm water and bathing was done thoroughly and quickly in that small amount of water.  She doesn't mention anything at all about going to the 'necessities", but experience tells me that when they could make it to the outhouse they did and when they couldn't they used what was politely called a 'pot', an enamel bucket or a China basin with a lid that kept things contained.  This would have to had been emptied at least once and possibly twice a day and I'm sure it would have been scoured clean with snow.

There's so much here to be learned about living without 'conveniences' such as we have now.  I wonder how many are truly prepared to make do for a week under such circumstances, much less the seven months that Laura and her family endured that long winter!

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